Real Life

by Brandon Taylor

  They finish their ice cream and stand up, stiff and achy. Brigit hugs him firmly one last time, and he almost refuses to let her go.

  “Stay,” he says. “Please.”

  “Oh, Wally,” she says, and kisses his cheek. “You will be fine. Be safe, okay?” He walks her to the platform and waves good-bye to her. He watches her go, her white sweater moving away in the darkness. The other people are of little consequence to him. They do not matter. They do not matter. They do not matter.

  * * *

  • • •

  WALLACE IS COMING UP the street to his apartment, tired and slow-headed. The sun has left him feeling warm and drowsy. He would like to draw a bath and sit in it for a long time, just dozing. He suddenly wishes he could teleport, but the walk is mercifully short. He walks along the tree-lined street, in the light of the white globe lamps. This time last night, he was across town with Miller. Just twenty-four hours ago—one rotation of the world, one displacement across space and time.

  There is a theory that every moment of our lives is happening all the time, simultaneously. He thinks again of that line from To the Lighthouse: And all the lives we ever lived. Every moment. Both the night before, with Miller, and all those moments along the line of his life that have brought him to this moment; the man in the dark, his skeleton’s face coming toward Wallace, suspended there forever, and the sensation of being torn open, permanently, forever; that boy that Miller mauled, his blood gushing hot while Miller punched him again and again—all of it at the same time, coming down the line.

  The sheer weight of it makes him pause. He presses his hand to the brick of his building, and vomits in the alley. A couple of thick boys coming down the sidewalk stop and look at him.

  “Are you okay?” they ask in their flat Midwestern voices. “Buddy, you okay?”

  Wallace waves them off, and they, needing no excuse, go on with their evening. In the street, people call out for their friends. People stand in line at the bar down the street, some of them smoking. The air smells like rain and cigarettes, beer and piss. Wallace wipes the corner of his mouth. His eyes are hot.

  In his apartment, he slides back down into the tub again, like earlier. The water isn’t going to melt the skin off his bones this time, but it’s warm enough. He presses his head against the tile, lets the water level rise. His insides are on fire, churning. The tile is yellow, and the bright light has been blunted by a blue scarf he’s draped over the vanity at the risk of starting a fire, but he doesn’t plan on staying in the tub that long. What is Miller doing at this moment? He said he would call, but he hasn’t.

  He is probably at home with Yngve and Lukas, maybe Emma and Thom, or Cole and Vincent, maybe all of them together. Wallace splashes the water on his face, rubbing at his eyes, trying to get above this feeling of uncertainty. It might have gone differently had he stayed in Miller’s bed this morning, might have gone another way.

  But it’s pointless to think that now, to want things to be different from the way they are. When has that ever worked for him? When has that ever been his power, to shift the world based on his wants or needs? The world leaves him behind, streaks out ahead of him; he is not accustomed to being satisfied with the state of things. He rests his head against the side of the tub now, staring down at the brown rug and its bits of loose hair.

  After a while, Wallace gets out of the water and stands in front of the mirror. He touches his stomach, which hangs down toward his thighs, and he brushes the other hand across the nub of his flaccid penis. He grips himself and tries to imagine a sexual scenario while staring at his own body. He tries to will himself erect, tries to find some spark or ember of desire buried deep inside him, but nothing will come, nothing will move within him. Something necessary has died, or is unwilling to engage. He cannot bring himself off, cannot get himself hard enough to jerk off. It’s a fleeting desire, and it’s dead before too long. He wraps a towel around himself and goes into his bedroom, where it is dark and cool.

  The fan is going. He puts his head under the pillow and tries to sleep, tries to count backward from some enormous number, but he fails. Sleep will not meet him.

  He reaches for his phone, scrolls through it until he finds Miller’s number. It’s not too late, he thinks. He dials and waits. The tone goes on and on and on. No answer. Nothing. He waits. Dials again. Nothing. Wallace lies on his back and stretches his arms out. He dials again, watching his shadow on the opposite wall. No answer, just silence opening up on the other end after the voicemail. He hangs up. Dials again, this time pressing the button with more firmness, as if this will draw an answer from Miller. Nothing.

  Didn’t Wallace say earlier that he couldn’t bear the thought of a single moment repeating itself? And here he is, dialing over and over again, compulsively, like a crazy person, repeating himself so that Miller might come and repeat the morning with him, hoping that as each second knocks into the other, Miller will pick up and say, Yes, I will come over; I will come see you. But there is only silence, and more silence. Where is he? What could he be doing? A wild fluttering rises inside Wallace.

  He goes into the kitchen and makes coffee. In the living room, he lies on the floor and drinks, slow and steady, the hot black coffee. He is staring at his phone, its glow comforting in the dark. He is reading an article online by some obscure poet from Kansas about a new queer art, a new poetics of the body—and understanding very little of it—when the article vanishes and is replaced by a call screen. His phone vibrates. Yngve’s name comes up.

  “Hello?” he answers.

  “Hello,” Miller says. “Wallace, hi.”

  “Miller?” Wallace asks, and there is happiness in his voice, surprise. “Hey, how’s it going?”

  “It’s fine, hey, I dropped my phone in the lake. Sorry I didn’t call earlier. Are you at home?”

  “Sure, yes,” Wallace says. There is noise in the background, loud music, people talking, shouting.

  “Great, hey, I’ll be by in a little bit, okay?” he asks.

  “Okay,” Wallace says.

  “Perfect, okay, great, okay, see you then,” Miller says, and then his voice is gone, along with the noise. He is drunk, Wallace realizes. Drunk and out with the others, at some bar or the pier. Who knows? But he is coming, or he plans to come, and that is something to which Wallace can affix some hope. He rests the cup against his face and tries to breathe. He is not nervous to see Miller. Too much has happened between them for that to be the case. But there is something else now, not urgency exactly, but a kind of wildness.

  He sets the cup on the table and tries to find something to do with himself, with his hands. He’s sitting on the edge of his bed, waiting. Outside in the alley people are shouting again, as on Friday, the first time he was here with Miller. There is a knock on the door, and it takes everything in Wallace not to sprint from his bed. He opens the door and there is Miller, looking down at him drunkenly. He’s still in his clothes from this morning, the cropped gray shirt, the cardigan, smelling like beer and the lake, tanned all over from the sun. His cheeks are chapped and red.

  “Wallace,” he says in a voice that is raw and a little raspy. “How are you?”

  “Good,” Wallace says. They’ve shut the door now.

  “Wallace, Wallace,” Miller says, singing almost.

  “How are you?” Wallace asks.

  “Great, super, wonderful.” He drums his fingers on his stomach. “We went sailing. You should have come.”

  “I was busy.”

  “Oh, were you?” Miller asks, squinting. “Were you busy?”

  “I was,” Wallace says, nodding, needlessly earnest. Miller hums and then bites his thumbnail.

  “You know. You know. You know,” Miller begins. His eyes are bloodshot, his knuckles red, bruised. Wallace looks more closely, and what he took for windburn is actually something else, scrapes and scratches. His body is thrumming w
ith heat.

  “What happened to you?”

  Miller seems to think about it, smiles slowly. His lips too are cracked, slit, swollen.

  “Nothing,” he says, drawing the word out. “Nothing happened to me.”

  “Did you get into an accident?”

  “No. No. No,” Miller says, wagging his finger, and then biting his nails again. There is dried blood beneath them. “Not an accident.”

  “Well what happened?”

  Miller laughs, shakes his head. He reaches out and grips Wallace’s shoulder. Fear floods Wallace and he pulls away, but Miller will not let him go, will not unclench. His grasp is absolute. He digs his fingers into Wallace’s shoulder, and it hurts. Miller is still laughing, but this time his eyes are closed. He draws Wallace close to him. The heat is black and close. He puts his mouth on Wallace’s, and Wallace can taste the beer, the ash, the blood, the iron, too warm on his tongue. He tries to wrench loose, but Miller is stronger than he is. He turns Wallace around, loops an arm around his neck, not choking him, but close, holding him up flat to Miller’s chest and stomach.

  “I got into a fight,” Miller whispers. “I got into a fight at a bar. You know?”

  “Know what?”

  “You know—are you afraid of me now?”

  “No,” Wallace says, “I’m not.” Miller holds his arm tight to Wallace’s throat now, and air is harder to come by.

  He puts his face next to Wallace’s ear and laughs, that low, dark laugh, and he says, almost too quiet to hear, “Do you know that story about the wolf, Wallace?”

  8

  The heat of Miller’s breath against his skin makes Wallace uncomfortable in the dark of his apartment. So does the weight pressing against his throat, making him feel as if he’s suspended at a great height from thin, flexible cables. The hardened skin of Miller’s knuckles is tucked up under Wallace’s chin, where he’s clamped his wrist to keep Wallace in the choke hold. He isn’t choking Wallace exactly, just pressing, but because he is taller and stronger, even the casual tension in his arm carries intent. Wallace, unbalanced by the suddenness of the moment, shuts his eyes for just a second to regroup, to find his center. He lets his arms dangle, lets his body go still.

  “Do you remember it?” Miller asks. “The story, I mean, about the wolf and the pigs?”

  “Do you mean ‘The Three Little Pigs’?” Wallace asks. “Is that the one you mean?”

  “Yes,” Miller says, laughing. “That’s the one.”

  “What about it?” Wallace asks. “What about that story?”

  Miller presses his cheek to Wallace’s, more hitch and scrape, skin over skin. Whiskey or something else, booze on his breath. He’s holding Wallace against him, cradling his body almost. It would be tender if it weren’t also a choke hold. Wallace might let himself give in to such an embrace, if it didn’t also contain the threat of violence—not that Miller is threatening him exactly, but Wallace has been put in choke holds before, by people stronger and bigger than he, people who have meant him real harm.

  “You let me in,” Miller says. “I knocked on your door in the middle of the night and you let me in. I could be a wolf.”

  “Are you?” Wallace asks.

  “I don’t know. I could be.”

  “What happened to you, Miller? Why are you all bruised up like this?”

  “I got into a fight at a bar. And then I came here.”

  “What did you fight about?”

  Miller clucks his tongue. Wallace can feel Miller’s chin pressing down on the top of his head.

  “That isn’t an answer,” Wallace says, feeling himself relax because the gesture has shifted, transformed into something less threatening. But he’s still not free to move as he pleases, which he figures should concern him more than it does at the moment.

  “I didn’t give one,” Miller says.

  “Why not?”

  “Who cares?” Miller asks, sighing. “Who gives a damn? I’m here now.” He sounds so tired, so absurdly tired. Then why the question about the wolf, about the pigs? Why go through the trouble of it? Wallace puts his hands against Miller’s arms, rubs them slowly, tenderly.

  “I care,” Wallace says, knowing he sounds too earnest. “I’d like to know what happened to you—if you’re okay, I mean.”

  “Would you?”

  “Yes.”

  There is no answer. Wallace waits for something, anything, but there is only the quiet of their breathing.

  “You didn’t seem like you cared,” Miller says at last. “You didn’t seem like you gave a damn one way or the other.”

  “What does that even mean, Miller? What are you talking about?”

  “Earlier, after brunch. And last night I guess, too, when you left. I told you all that shit about me, and you left in the middle of the night. Even before that, before dinner, you told me you weren’t interested. I should have listened. Why didn’t I listen?”

  “What does that have to do with anything? Or the sorry shape you’re in now?”

  “What a question,” Miller says, soft shock in his voice. He laughs. “What a fucking question.” He drops his arms from Wallace’s shoulders, pushes gently at his back to make space between them. Wallace steps forward reluctantly and then turns. He is stung by this, a bruise darkening somewhere inside him. He feels in that moment that to even ask what Miller means by this is to prove some point about himself that he can’t comprehend yet. The light from the alley washes Miller in a dirty blue shade. His eyes are not discernible except by the glossiness of their whites. His features are distorted, by shadow or anger or both. He is frightening, though his teeth are gleaming.

  “What did I do to you?”

  “You fucked with my head,” Miller says. “You got in my head and now I’m all fucked up about it. I never tell that stuff to anyone. I never let anyone know that part of me. But I told you. And you left.”

  “I’m sorry,” Wallace says. “I felt like something terrible was going to happen if I stayed.”

  “Something terrible,” Miller repeats, his voice leaping up in volume and pitch, sharpening, breaking. “You thought I was going to do something terrible to you? What the fuck was I going to do to you, Wallace?”

  “No, that’s not it,” Wallace says. “No, I just felt like something awful was coming our way. I don’t know. I’m sorry.”

  “You’re sorry,” Miller says. “You’re always sorry, aren’t you, Wallace? Other people have problems too, you know. Other people are afraid too.”

  “What are you afraid of?” Wallace asks before he can stop himself. The question slips out of him like a small, swift bird.

  Miller’s broad jaw is working over something that Wallace can’t see, grinding it up. The tendons flex and bend. There’s a hardness to his face.

  “The same shit everyone is afraid of, Wallace. Being left. Being tossed aside. Not being good enough. Being a fucking monster. Do you know how I felt when you left?”

  “No, tell me,” Wallace says.

  “I felt like the wolf in that story. I felt like I’d just killed someone. When I woke up and you were gone, I thought, Shit, Miller, you’re really something, man, you’re really fucking something, aren’t you?”

  “I didn’t mean for you to feel that way,” Wallace says.

  “No, you never mean it, do you? Like with Cole and Vincent, or that girl in your lab. You never mean it, but here you always are, somehow. Your feelings, your feelings. No one else’s. Not mine, anyway.” Miller sucks air through his teeth and shrugs. “Not my feelings.”

  “That’s not true,” Wallace says, though now he wonders if it might be. Miller folds his arms across his chest, gives Wallace a look somewhere between amused and annoyed.

  “So I go to a bar tonight,” Miller says. “I go to a bar and I’m drinking with Yngve and Lukas, and we get to talking. But I can�
��t pay attention to what they’re saying. I’m still thinking about this morning. I’m still thinking about what happened when I woke up and you were gone, and I’m thinking about how this guy I like, a fucking guy, no shit, how I like him and now all of a sudden I’m not good enough. I’m trash. He just used me and left. This guy I thought I knew. I told him things about myself that I don’t tell anyone, and he tells me things he doesn’t tell anyone, and I thought, stupidly, I thought it means something, but, well, you know the rest, don’t you?”

  Wallace does not say anything. He’s looking down into the space between them. He can’t make himself acknowledge Miller. When they parted earlier, things were tense but fine, certainly. He did not imagine, it’s true, that Miller might be harboring such frustration or anger toward him. He took their pleasant good-bye as a sign that things were fine, all right, between them. But as Miller said, he has been thinking of only himself, of his own feelings of inadequacy, of being damaged goods. He has not stopped to consider that Miller, having just revealed his history of violence, might be feeling vulnerable himself. He did not stop to think about how Miller might feel when he awoke in the morning and found himself alone, for the second time. It is true, Wallace thinks, that he is guilty of myopia, and the knowledge of that fact weighs him down.

  “But how did you get into this fight?” he asks. “Why did you get into a fight, Miller? That’s not my fault.”

  “You’re right,” Miller says, nodding. “You’re right, Wallace, it’s not. Some guy bumped into me, and I said, Watch it, and he called me a faggot. Can you believe that?” Another laugh, short and dark. “He called me a faggot, so I had to set him straight. Because I’m not a faggot, Wallace. I’m not.” Each time he says the word faggot, it’s like he’s spitting it, throwing a punch to Wallace’s gut. The word pushes down through him.