Real Life

by Brandon Taylor

“You think that, if I hurt you sufficiently, you will feel sufficient guilt to get you through this. Because you feel like a monster. But I don’t owe that to you,” Wallace says. “I don’t owe you any more pain than I’ve already dealt you. It’s selfish of you.”

  “It’s not,” Miller says, but he stops himself. He lies flat on his back and puts his arm across his eyes. Wallace lies next to him, their shoulders touching. It’s this minor point of contact that Wallace focuses on as he drifts off to sleep, the world softening and receding until it feels as though he’s drifting on a sea made of soft leaves. The sound of Miller’s breathing comes in and out, in and out; to Wallace it seems oddly familiar, like wind moving through the kudzu.

  * * *

  • • •

  WHEN THEY WAKE UP, they are stiff and bruised and covered in dried blood. They climb from Wallace’s bed in the gray middle of the night, the part that turns irrevocably toward morning, and they get into Wallace’s shower together. Wallace leans against the far wall, and Miller fiddles with the faucet until he gets the temperature and pressure right. The water hits his chest, and then after some adjusting it gets all over both of them. The water is hot, turning to steam in the shower, and Wallace closes his eyes, letting it sluice down his body and his face. Miller slides around so that he is behind Wallace, being taller, and he braces his arms against the wall to keep himself upright. The shower is decently sized for one, but for two it’s complicated.

  The hot water feels good on Wallace’s face and shoulders. He collects it in his palms and splashes it over his eyes and mouth. The water in this city is hard, so it is treated aggressively with chemicals. It tastes alkaline and smells strongly of something like chlorine, though Wallace isn’t sure of the exact chemistry. Miller puts his arms around Wallace’s shoulders again, sinks against his back. Their wet skin sticks together a bit. The light from the vanity is gauzy yellow as it spills over the shower curtain. Wallace can feel, through the wall of water and steam, the press of Miller’s lips against his neck again, tracing the place where the bruises are growing as if he could push them back down forever with an act of tenderness.

  The alcohol is still in Miller, coming out of his skin, especially now that they’re sweating in the shower. Wallace turns to him. The water is soaking into his hair and striking Miller’s throat, turning it red on impact. Miller laughs and looks down at him. He has to bend his knees a little. He’s too tall.

  “This is not as easy as I thought it would be,” he says.

  “It never is.”

  “I guess that’s true,” Miller says. Wallace puts his fingers flat to Miller’s stomach. Miller shakes his head, and water flies everywhere, striking the curtain. They are as clean as they are going to get this way, so Wallace shuts off the water and they get out. There’s only one bath towel, so Wallace dries himself first and then hands it to Miller. Wallace sits on the counter watching Miller pass the towel over his long limbs, his body somehow more impressive now in this room that seems too small to contain him. Now that Miller has washed off the grime and blood, Wallace can more appreciate the dark purpling where his fist landed earlier, and also the gash that is already healing along Miller’s cheek where the guy at the bar must have punched him. He’s got a split and swollen lip. And there’s an oblong-shaped bruise along his spine. It’s ugly, Wallace thinks, and like the photo negative of something else, the imprint of the thing still unsaid between them. Miller is looking at him, wrapping the towel around his waist, and there’s something like a smile on his lips, but it loses its shape almost immediately, turning sadder, or at least more inward, darker.

  The bathroom is humid. Miller sets his weight against the counter, bracing his fingers on either side of the sink basin. His reflection is occluded by the mist on the mirror. Wallace lets his bare skin stick to the glass.

  It’s cold and wet, despite the warm air in the room.

  9

  At some slim dark hour, one of the last of night, Miller and Wallace wake in his bed again.

  “I’m hungry,” Miller says.

  “All right. Let’s feed the wolf,” Wallace says. Miller growls, though there’s no threat left in it.

  In the kitchen, they take familiar postures. Miller sits on one of the high chairs, his elbows on the counter. Wallace stands behind the counter, surveying the ingredients in his refrigerator. The food he rejected on Saturday now holds new potential, because he is not cooking for many people and does not have to chart the landscape of their preferences. It is late, so he has only the topology of hunger to consider, the abatement of emptiness. Miller was likely raised up on the same kinds of food as Wallace—meat and vegetables, starch, lots of oil and grease, the kind of food their friends look down upon because it lacks elegance or restraint. But here in the cool darkness of his kitchen, he can make whatever he wants for the two of them, does not have to consider how others’ palates might diverge. Wallace props his knuckles on his hip and taps his toes against the floor, thinking, looking into the cold, bright interior of his fridge.

  “You know, the other night,” he begins. “Friday, I mean, I thought about making dinner for you.”

  “You did? Why?” Miller asks, and though Wallace is not looking at him, he can tell that there is a smile growing.

  “Because you said you were hungry. And Yngve was giving you such a hard time. You looked so pitiful. I thought, I could make him something. But then I thought better of it.” Wallace takes some fish from the freezer. He takes eggs from the fridge and flour from the shelf in the cupboard. He crouches and removes from the low pantry some vegetable oil, its container slippery and filmy with grease.

  “Why didn’t you offer?” Miller asks, and Wallace shrugs as he rises from the floor and puts the oil next to the other ingredients on the counter.

  “I don’t know—I guess I was afraid of you finding out how much I liked you. It seemed kind of . . .” Wallace’s voice tapers into silence, and he takes a large, deep skillet from beneath the stove. He runs his finger around it, finding its surface dry and smooth, no trace of oil. Good. He did a good job cleaning it earlier. He nods to himself. What he was about to say was that such a display would have felt vulgar in a way, that to make so gross a statement about his feelings, or his attitude, seemed too direct, too intrusive. Affection always feels this way for him, like an undue burden, like putting weight and expectation onto someone else. As if affection were a kind of cruelty too.

  “But now you’re cooking for me.”

  “So I am,” Wallace says, pushing the carton of eggs and a blue mixing bowl over to Miller. “Please break three or four eggs into this. And beat them, not too hard, just mix them up good, please.”

  Miller nods, accepts the task. Wallace rinses his fingers in a quick spurt of water and opens the flour bag. He tilts it over so that a clump of flour dislodges itself from the bulk and tumbles into a wooden bowl with a soft splat. Flour shoots up into the air, curls as if slowly gesticulating. Wallace considers putting the fish fillets in warm water, though he knows you aren’t supposed to do this. You are supposed to warm meat up slowly in the fridge, letting the temperature rise gradually and evenly without the risk of bacterial contamination.

  Wallace considers the frozen slabs of tilapia in their individually wrapped, flash-frozen sleeves. He considers putting them in the microwave, zapping them quickly, and then throwing them into the batter and the grease. He considers the relative risk, considers the accumulation of bacteria, the chance of those bacteria colonizing the insides of their bodies, making them ill, making them vomit, making them shit.

  He dips the fish into the water. It will be fine. He lets them float to the surface in the large bowl. They will thaw quickly. They are thin, after all, and not like the fatty fish they caught in Alabama and gutted and cleaned. These fish have never seen a river or a pond in their lives. They have been grown to fat contentment in tanks, raised expressly to be eaten, like the people w
ho live in this city, their lives a series of narrowly constructed tubes filled with the nutrient-rich water they consume without even having to think about it. That’s all culture is, after all, the nutrients pervading the air we breathe, diffusing into and out of people, a passive process.

  Is it into this culture that he is to emerge? Into the narrow, dark water of real life? He remembers Simone, leaning in toward him, the world vast and blue beyond her window, the kindness in her face as she told him that he needed to think about what he wants from life. He remembers the gentleness of her voice, the awful horror of that gentleness. He could stay in her lab and in graduate school. He could live his life on the other side of the glass, watching real life pass him by. Staying would be so simple, requiring no effort at all except to put his head down as if in prayer and let the worst of it pass over him.

  Why go out there to be like these fish, like the people at the pier, bloated and commercial and with so little desire in life except to see the next day, nothing except the pure biology of it all, the part of life that must, by necessity, resist death, linking day upon day upon day, time meaningless, like water?

  But to stay in graduate school, to stay where he is, means to accept the futility of his efforts to blend in seamlessly with those around him. It is a life spent swimming against the gradient, struggling up the channel of other people’s cruelty. It grates him to consider this, the shutting away of the part of him that now throbs and writhes like a new organ that senses so keenly the limitations of his life.

  Stay here and suffer, or exit and drown, he thinks.

  He dips the battered fish into the hot oil, and it spits and leaps and crackles. He burns the tip of his finger, but it’s numb. There are four pieces of fish in the oil now, all of them obscurely shaped and vaguely human, like dolls made of clay.

  Miller is still against the counter. He’s pulled one of Wallace’s oversize sweaters on, and he’s wearing shorts without underwear. Miller’s body makes Wallace’s clothes look childlike. The knobs of his spine are clear in the way he’s bent over with his arms folded under his chin. The boyishness in his face is back.

  Wallace fries the fish quickly, turning each piece just as it begins to brown so that it is crispy but not dry or burned. They eat the fish hot out of the grease over paper towels, biting into the white flesh, which steams the moment it touches the air. They ought to wait until it cools, Wallace suggests, but Miller, no longer neat, is eating voraciously, chewing and chomping. Grease slides down his fingers and his palms. And Wallace licks it clean, which makes Miller look at him firmly, his eyes glossy with want. They eat sitting next to each other on the counter, their thighs touching, eating because they don’t have to talk as long as their mouths are doing something else. And what would they talk about, anyway?

  This too could be his life, Wallace thinks. This thing with Miller, eating fish in the middle of the night, watching the gray air of the night sky over the roof next door. This could be their life together, each moment shared, passed back and forth between each other to alleviate the pressure, the awful pressure of having to hold on to time for oneself. This is perhaps why people get together in the first place. The sharing of time. The sharing of the responsibility of anchoring oneself in the world. Life is less terrible when you can just rest for a moment, put everything down and wait without having to worry about being washed away. People take each other’s hands and they hold on as tight as they can, they hold on to each other and to themselves, and when they let go, they can because they know that the other person will not.

  The fish tastes good—hot, buttery, smooth, salt and pepper and a little vinegar, which was his father’s secret. In those years they all lived together, his father did all the cooking, and his mother worked. In those years, his father cooked for him all manner of delicious foods. In those years, his father soothed him with food, with pink-dyed pickled eggs, or sliced strawberries, or mango, or papaya. His father introduced him to all sorts of furry sour fruits, as they sat together on the rickety porch in the summer sun, their skin turning the color of clay, eating off paper plates. How has Wallace forgotten this? The sticky sweetness of those mango slices, the sharp sourness of kiwi as his father taught him to choose the ripest ones, the ones that were firm but not too firm, and perfectly green, prickly in your palms at the grocery store.

  Miller offers Wallace the last piece of fish. Wallace clears his throat, shakes his head.

  “No, that’s okay,” he says. “You finish.” He hops down from the counter and washes his hands in the sink. Miller watches him. Wallace can feel his eyes sliding over him, checking for something, anything. Wallace smiles.

  “What are you thinking about? You’re a million miles away.”

  “I’m here,” Wallace says. “I’m here in the world.” Miller laughs at him, but Wallace can only think about how true this is, that he is in the world. He is both here in his body with Miller and elsewhere, beyond; that all the moments in his life are gathered up in this moment, that all of it has been for this. He is in the world, everywhere he has ever been and everywhere he will go, simultaneously. Yes, he thinks, yes.

  Miller gets down from the counter, too, and comes up behind him, wraps his arms around Wallace. His stomach presses against the middle of Wallace’s back. Wallace can feel him, all of him.

  “I’m in the world too,” Miller says.

  “Despite your best efforts,” Wallace says.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Nothing. Just something to say, I guess.”

  “Do you think I want to die?”

  “No, I don’t. Well, maybe you do. But I don’t think it.”

  “Then why would you say that?”

  Wallace thinks about this. He’s running the hot water over his fingers, its temperature rising steeply, burning his palms. Miller presses him forward so that Wallace can feel the edge of the sink bite into him.

  “Why would you say that?” he asks again, his voice lowering, settling deep in his chest. He’s got his fingers hard around Wallace’s shoulders, has him wrapped up again. Fear, molten, slow, climbs inch by inch in Wallace like rising water. His hands are burning now, stinging, raw.

  “I don’t know,” Wallace says, and Miller puts more pressure on his throat. “I don’t know.”

  “I don’t like that very much,” Miller says, and the hard stubble on his jaw rasps against Wallace’s neck.

  “I’m sorry,” Wallace says.

  “I try to be in the world,” Miller says. “I try to be. I am trying to be. It’s not fair for you to say that.”

  “It’s not,” Wallace agrees. He turns off the water. His hands are pulsing and damp. His palms have gone completely red. Miller puts more weight on Wallace’s back, digs hard with his chin into the space between Wallace’s shoulders, a tender place that gives in easily. Wallace lets out a startled yelp of pain.

  “Tomorrow is Monday,” Miller says.

  “Today is Monday,” Wallace says, swimming around beneath his skin. “It’s Monday already.”

  “So it is,” Miller says, and he lets go of Wallace, who feels he can breathe again. “Do you want to come with me somewhere?”

  “Where?” Wallace asks, drying his fingers, breathing slowly, deeply.

  “To the lake.”

  “It’s the middle of the night. It’ll be morning soon.”

  “If you don’t want to go, then say so.”

  “It’s fine, I’ll go.”

  “You don’t have to.”

  “It’s fine,” Wallace says.

  * * *

  • • •

  THEY PUT ON their shoes and go out into the cool, humid night. There is a ridge of gray light along the horizon, like a second world emerging from the first. The air hangs close. Wallace has on a sweater and shorts and floppy, soft shoes. Miller is wearing his thick boots and shorts, miles of leg flashing wit
h each step. They plod along the street, then head along the houses that sit huddled near the shore, until they reach the stone steps.

  “Come on,” Miller says when Wallace lingers at the top of the concrete. He’s on the first step, looking up at Wallace. “Come on.”

  “What are we going to do in the lake?” Wallace asks. “I can’t swim.”

  “You can’t swim?” Miller asks. “You’re from the Gulf Coast. You’re from a state with real beaches.”

  “I can’t swim,” Wallace repeats. His mother never let him try. There was a neighborhood pool near his preschool that offered free lessons to every child under the age of seven. He begged her to let him go, to let him try. She told him not to beg, that begging made a person ugly.

  A memory dislodges from some dark inner continent and rises to the surface of his thoughts: Miller sitting on the edge of the pier in blue swimming shorts. His skin a little burned. His muscular back, long torso. His hair dark, his mouth wide and red. A sly smile. Rub it in. The scent of aloe, wet and clear. The sunscreen cool in his palm. The lapping lake, the laughter of other people ascending, climbing into the air. Clouds on the horizon, white and fluffy, the peninsula green and lush in the distance. Miller, turning toward him, a drop of water caught in the hollow of this throat. That smile broadening. Rub it in.

  “I’ll teach you,” Miller says, grabbing Wallace’s fingers. “Come on, I’ll teach you to swim.”

  Wallace looks out over the gray shifting water and at the undulating darkness below its surface. The peninsula is in the distance, and he can see just around its bend, the water already gleaming. The row of dark hedges that comprise its body flutter as if they were a murmuration of birds, a mass action cascading.

  “All right,” Wallace says, Miller’s fingers rough around his. Miller pulls on him, and they go down the smooth, slick concrete stairs. The lake rises up the length of Wallace’s body as he marches down the steps and eventually into open water. Miller has an easy stroke, pulls them evenly, smoothly along. His limbs slice through the water.