Chapter 40

Act III, Scene II

The lights rise on Thomas McGrew III, alone on the slide.  He sits motionless, bible open on his lap, staring left past the proscenium. His face is very thin, and his back is stooped unevenly. He is so still that the audience might think he is a statue.

Very slowly, so gradually that it is barely perceptible at first, the slide begin to buckle under him.  The spot where he is sitting sags low, then even lower under his weight. He continues to stare offstage, towards the spot where Thomas McGrew IV disappeared. After five minutes, there is a giant creak, then a snapping noise.  The slide cracks in two. An avalanche of rubble crashes downwards. The bible flies high into the air.  It lands on the right half of the slide, slides down a few feet, stops. Thomas McGrew, still on his stool, hovers in mid-air for a moment, then drops straight down into the abyss below. 

For five minutes, lights shine on the ragged halves of the broken slide, the abandoned bible. 

Then lights fade to black.  The show is over.

* * *

“These body fluids, this defilement, this shit are what life withstands, hardly and with difficulty, on the part of death. There, I am at the border of my condition as a living being. My body extricates itself, as being alive, from that border. Such wastes drop so that I might live, until, from loss to loss, nothing remains in me and my entire body falls beyond the limit.”

—Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror.

* * *

Really nice to see you.

Yes, sad circumstances.

Important that we can come together at times like this.

He would be so happy you’re here.

It felt weird for sure, being back in New Buffalo, in that giant room on the top floor where they held all the big English department events like job talks and yearly welcome receptions for new graduate students. But that’s how it was supposed to feel, right?  Weird, surreal, you know, given the circumstances. He hadn’t gotten around to visiting since he moved away three years ago, and now he really wished he had, at least once.  It was only an eleven-hour drive, or a two-hundred dollar flight, but he was really, really busy, and anyway, who was there to visit? 

Well, nobody now.  He should have come back sooner.  The email from Marjorie Mendelssohn showed up in his inbox last week.

I am truly sorry to report the passing of our colleague, Dr. Jeremy Frick.  The University of New Buffalo English department invites you to a memorial service celebrating his life and work .  We hope you are able to attend.

So that was that.  Couldn’t put it off any longer.  Time to get in the car and drive to Indiana.

The service was pretty nice, even though Marjorie led it. Lots of professors gushing and holding back tears and listing accomplishments. Of course every speaker started and/or ended with the requisite Funeral of Giants reference. We find ourselves at the funeral of a true giant in Irish literary studies, stuff like that.

There was a reception after, with wine and crackers and cheese and strawberries.  It felt kind of weird to have to eat, but he hadn’t had any lunch, and the department had actually sprung for some decent cheese for a change, not that rubbery brie from the supermarket.  He couldn’t really get a bite in though, with everyone hugging him and patting him on the back and talking about how sad it all was.  He steered to a quiet corner where he could gulp down his wine and shove a couple crackers in his mouth.  He felt better there, by himself.  

Someone touched his shoulder.  Marjorie Mendelssohn, in an olive green suit with flowy pants. Her arms were open, her hand on his elbow now.  He couldn’t figure out what she was doing at first, but then he realized she wanted a hug.

Okay.  He stuck his arms around her without really touching her, cup of wine in one hand, plate of cheese in the other, trying not to spill anything on her back.

“Oh Gavin.”  Her voice was watery.  “It’s so good to see you.”

It is?

“I’ve been meaning to get in touch.”  Her hand was still on his arm like they were old friends.  “To congratulate you on your article in New Irish Modernism Studies.  Your career really seems to be taking off.  We’d like to do a spread on your upcoming book in the next department newsletter, if you wouldn’t mind.  I was going to write and ask you, but then, you know, all this.” 

She waved towards the center of the room, at professors in brown outfits, hands crossed over their chests as they talked in little groups, graduate students drinking wine and looking all exhausted. Kat was there, tottering on black heels, being consoled by some guy from the history department. 

“You must be terribly upset,” Marjorie said.

Was he?  He wasn’t sure.  The situation was sad, definitely. Like, Jeremy Frick has finally officially dropped dead of a heart attack, how sad.  But he didn’t exactly feel sad.  The whole thing seemed weirdly redundant, like some dead part of his past had risen and re-died.

“I’ll be okay.”  He managed to get the last chunk of cheese—something blue, maybe Roquefort--off his plate and into his mouth without putting the cup of wine down.

“Of course you will.”  She squeezed his arm a little harder.  “You’re resilient.”

He smiled a little, sort of bravely, and headed back to the food table for more cheese.  Randy Ledbetter was there, filling up his plate with a couple of everything.

“Gavin! You look good,” Randy said. Which was a lie. Since moving to Kansas, he had put on thirty pounds, grown one of those fat-guy necks that puffed out under his chin. The only gym was on campus, and he hated running into his students all sweaty and flushed.  And all the food wherever you went was cooked in butter. It was fine.  Once his book was out and he had a better job in a better place, he could focus on getting in shape.

“Sad news,” Randy said. He looked pretty much the same, round face, white beard. Short-sleeve button-down with a fleece vest over it.  He popped a giant strawberry into his mouth.

“Very sad,” Gavin said.

“Though hardly unexpected.”  Randy leaned in towards him but didn’t lower his voice.  “Of course, you knew he had a problem. All those pills.”

“Uh huh.” Gavin looked around to see if anyone could hear.  It’s not like he was Miss Manners or anything, but it seemed a little rude to be talking shit about a guy at his memorial.  The only other people at the food table were some grad students refilling their wine cups, and they looked too tired to notice. 

“It wasn’t Kat who found him,” Randy said. Gavin could see the wiry beard hairs poking out of his pores, the strawberry juice clinging to his lips. “It was some other girl, an undergrad. This girl just showed up in the afternoon, opened the door and found him all blue and cold.  No one knows what she was doing at his house.”  He shook his head, kind of smirked. “Poor guy.”

Gavin wasn’t sure what to say, so he took a tiny bite of his own strawberry.  It was big and juicy and red, like a strawberry was supposed to be, but it didn’t taste like much of anything.

“You in touch with Sinder?” Randy asked.

“A little.”  As in, they had chatted online a handful of times.  Last Gavin had heard, Sinder and Rona had broken up again.  Actually, that’s always when Sinder messaged him, right after a breakup with Rona.  Whether they were together or broken up, they still shared the same apartment in Brooklyn, along with four other roommates even though the lease said three-occupant maximum.  

Rona’s performance piece about the trees had just been staged for the first time.  Everyone fucking loves it, Sinder said.  He was working in a coffee shop. Gavin still had his philosophy dictionary.  He took it off the shelf once in a while, those days when he felt especially lost out on the prarie.  He would lie on his couch and thumb through entries on Descartes and Foucault, daydreaming about Sinder and porn and wandering through the forest.  

“Well, send him my regards,” Randy said. “I always thought it was too bad he left.  Talented guy.  He could have been one of us.”

“Okay, yeah,” Gavin said.  “I'll tell him you said hi.”

After that it didn’t seem like there was anyone else he needed to talk to. He took the stairs down, stopped at the third floor, graduate student offices.  The halls here were like a maze, a couple quick turns to get to his old office.  He turned the knob in case someone had forgotten to lock it, but no, it was locked.  He leaned his forehead against the window and stared in.  It was still pretty much empty, the same handful of dusty journals on the bookshelf.  Somebody had left a photocopied article on the desk with the computer, scrawled all over with blue pen. 

Remember.  What it felt like to be a student.  It washed over him, that fuzzy pleasure of uncertainty, of not being the expert yet, of being unfinished.  A child.  Sitting in that office, scrawling all over some article by Grover Maloney, dreaming of the day he'd be a real professor. He hadn’t expected that it would be so much like becoming an adult.  You didn't get wiser, just more responsible, heavier.  Deeper in.  More lonely.  More stuck. 

Finally, for the first time since he had learned about Frick’s death, he started to cry.  It erupted out of his mouth, unexpected, loud wailing sobs. He put his arm up over his head, cried into the cold glass of the window until it was foggy and smeared.

“I’m okay,” he said.  He stood up straight, wiped his face with his sleeve. He kind of laughed.  Funny to be standing alone in the English building on a Saturday, crying into the silence of the empty hallway.

Then he began to cry so hard he had to sit down, but there weren’t any chairs.  So he did what the undergrads did when they were waiting for office hours and sat on the stained carpet, his back against the wall.  He held his head in his hands and cried and cried, loud womanly wails like somebody had died.  Somebody besides Jeremy Frick. 

After probably twenty minutes, he was done.  He got up off the floor, went to the bathroom with the graffiti scratched into the mirror to rinse his face.  There it was: puffy, flushed, red-eyed.  His cheeks were fuller than the last time he had looked into this mirror, his jawline meaty in a way that made him think of his father, or Randy Ledbetter. Serious, responsible.   A man.  

“This is what you wanted,” he said.  And now you're here. No point complaining about it. He splashed some water over his forehead and eyes, dried off with a brown paper towel that smelled like elementary school.  Better.  A little blotchy still, but generally composed.

He walked the rest of the way down the stairs, out into the quad, the warm air of late spring in Indiana.  From here, he could see the University Marriott, where he was staying. It was right at the edge of campus, towering above the college’s mismatched architecture.

“Gavin.”

Crap. He really didn’t want to talk to anybody.  He patted his face to see if it felt puffy.  A little.  It’s okay to look upset, he reminded himself.  Memorial service. 

He turned around.  Kat.  Pretty much the last person he wanted to talk to.  But it’s not like you could be an asshole to a woman whose partner or whatever had just died. 

She couldn’t walk too fast with how high her heels were, so he stopped and let her catch up to him.

“I’m so glad you could come,” she said.  “It would mean a lot to Jeremy.”

“Yeah, I’m really sorry,” Gavin said.  “Um, for your loss.”

Her lips curved into a smile, deep red on pale cream. 

“I appreciate that.”  She walked a little closer to him, right next to him.  When he looked over, he could see the tops of her boobs jiggling with the rise and fall of her heels. Maybe that’s why women wear them, he thought.  

“I loved your article in Irish Modernism Studies,” she said.

“You read it?”

“Of course.”  She linked her arm into his, like they were lovers strolling down a boulevard in Paris. The black dress was made of something crêpey that crinkled gently over his skin. He shivered, but then relaxed into it.  Her partner’s memorial. She probably just wanted some comfort from an old friend. Right? 

“That whole point about Maddy’s baby was just amazing,” she said.

“Oh yeah, that.”  Of course it was that.  That was everyone’s favorite part of his argument.  Nobody seemed to notice the subtle analysis of abjection and time, how Stump’s use of silence conveyed the horror of death and the unknown.  It was always Maddy’s baby, Maddy’s baby.

They had reached the front of the hotel now.

“Well, this is where I’m staying.” He pulled his arm out of hers, crossed both arms over his chest, waited for her to leave.  But she wasn’t leaving.  

“It’s a nice hotel, isn’t it?” she said.  “I’ve never actually been inside.”

She was just standing there, hands behind her back, shoulders curved a little forward to make sure he could see down the front of her dress.  He could.  The there was burgundy lace on the top of her bra.

He uncrossed his arms, scratched his head, crossed them again. 

Wow. 

She must be distraught.  He was pretty sure this was the kind of thing distraught women did.   

He studied the roundness of her hips, her breasts swelling above the pin-up waist. Was she wearing a girdle? Whatever it was, she looked pretty decent, if you didn’t think too much about it. And let’s face it, because living in west Kansas it was the undeniable truth: there was no way he would encounter another moderately fuckable woman for the next six months at least.  Maybe a year.

“Want to come in?” His voice kind of croaked, probably from all that crying, but he cleared his throat and pulled it together. “For some coffee or whatever?”

She smiled, flushed and triumphant.

“I thought you’d never ask.” 

<Chapter 39

Epilogue>

Chapter 39

Act III, Scene I 

As the lights come up, Thomas McGrew III and IV have reversed positions on the slide. Thomas McGrew IV stands far to the left, a few feet from the proscenium. He is naked, hairless, covered in scabs, gaunt as a war prisoner. He stares offstage, down the slide. Thomas McGrew III sits to his right, on his stool, his cane at his feet.  He is reading a worn copy of the Douay-Rheims Bible. 

TMGIII: “And when this mortal hath put on immortality, then shall come to pass the saying that is written: Death is swallowed up in victory.” 

He looks down at the emaciated back of Thomas McGrew IV.  Thomas McGrew IV does not move or acknowledge him.

Thomas McGrew III leans his forehead on his hand, sighs.  He lifts his head, takes a deep breath, returns to his bible. 

TMGIII (flipping the pages, then stopping): “He said again to them: Fear not, neither be ye dismayed, take courage, and be strong: for so will the Lord do to all your enemies, against whom you fight.”  Do you hear that? 

He looks at Thomas McGrew IV, watches his back for a moment, looks down at the bible again. Thomas McGrew IV is starting to slide slowly forward, towards the proscenium.  He is not walking, rather gliding as though riding a conveyor belt. 

TMGIII: “For, amen I say to you, if you have faith as a grain of mustard seed, you shall say to this mountain: Remove from hence hither, and it shall remove: and nothing shall be impossible to you.”  So you see, it means, if you truly believe…

He looks up, sees Thomas McGrew IV sliding towards the edge of the stage.  

TMGIII (gasps): Son! 

He drops the bible to the ground and grabs his cane.  He tries to stand, trips over the bible, falls hard to the ground.  Kneeling, he reaches his cane down the slide towards Thomas McGrew IV. 

TMGIII: Grab it, son! Turn around and grab it! Turn away from the end! 

Thomas McGrew IV finally seems to hear.  He turns his head, looks over his shoulder at Thomas McGrew III on his knees, cane extended.  Their eyes connect for a moment.  A hint of apology passes over Thomas McGrew IV’s face. 

TMGIII: Son. 

Thomas McGrew IV turns towards the proscenium again, continuing his slow descent. Thomas McGrew III crawls his hands forward, reaching the cane farther and farther out in front of him. 

TMGIII: It’s not too late! Son!  Turn away from the end.  Turn away. 

He has stretched himself so far that his belly is flat against the slide.  Thomas McGrew IV glides slowly to the edge of the proscenium, passes it, and disappears. 

TMGIII (sobbing): Turn away.  Turn away.  (His voice becomes a whisper) Son. 

He lies on the floor, bible at his feet, cane in front of him, staring down the slide. His face is crumpled in pain. He shakes, mostly silent, occasionally emitting long, hollow retching noises.  He never drops his head. 

After five minutes, the lights fall. 

* * *

Gavin ran his fingers over the leather seat of the couch, crossed his legs one way, then the other way, tried to remember what it was that he usually did with his legs when he sat.  

Jeremy Frick was on the other side of the office, making espressos with a little machine on his desk.

“I’m supposed to cut down on caffeine,” Frick said, carrying two tiny black mugs on tiny saucers over to the coffee table.  He set them down on either side of a wrapped present that was already on the table. “I got you something. To celebrate you finishing your dissertation.”

The paper was scarlet with perfectly folded corners.  A book, probably, and probably wrapped by Kat.  It was the last thing Gavin wanted, a gift, something to make him feel guilty and indebted.  What he really wanted from Jeremy Frick wouldn’t fit in a box. 

He wanted Frick to convince him to move to New York. That’s why he’d come here.  He would present the evidence, the pros and cons, remaining cool and disinterested.  And Frick—the maverick, the hip professor who swore and took recreational Adderall and dated his students and talked nonstop shit about the department—Frick would tell him to run, go, follow your heart! 

“Should I open it?” Gavin asked.

“Business first.”  Frick sat in the chair across from Gavin and crossed his arms over his lap. He was looking a little extra tired, not in the attractive way anymore, just plain old tired, with watery eyes and cheeks that sagged a little over his jawline. “So. Kansas.”

“Yeah,” Gavin said.  “Kansas.”

“Have you accepted yet?”  Frick took a sip of his espresso, pointed at the little mug in front of Gavin.  “Drink.”

He picked it up, tasted it. The flavor was dark and direct, like it could cut through pleasantries and bullshit and get right to the heart of things.  He put the cup back down on its little saucer, click. “That’s what I need to talk to you about.”

“You should accept. No point dragging it out.”

“The thing is.”

Frick waved his hand in the air, dismissing whatever Gavin was about to say.

“You don’t want to move to Kansas. I know, it fucking sucks.  But you'll only be there three years. Five max.”

“Right, but.”  He breathed deep, took another sip of espresso.  Swished it in his mouth, glanced up at the picture of Frick at the MLA convention, glowing with the confidence of new celebrity.  He looked away, quick, swallowed the espresso.  Here we go.  “Kansas is kind of a mess.”

Frick leaned back in his chair, pinching the tiny handle of the tiny mug between his finger and thumb.

“I mean the school is a mess,” Gavin said. “The chair basically told me not to work there.  They don't even have any English majors. The department is in a trailer.”

“You really don’t want to refuse a job offer,” Frick said.  “Not in this economy. If you stay here, we might not even be able to offer you a teaching position next year.”

“Well. I was thinking about moving to New York.” 

New York.  Gavin watched Frick’s face, waiting for the smile, the nod, the acknowledgment: what kind of idiot would choose Kansas over New York?  Go, my son, fly from this sad way of life, be free. 

But no, no smile.  A worried twist of the thin lips, a furrowing of the eyebrows.

“Do you have something you’d be doing there?” Frick asked.  “A job?”

“No. I mean not yet.  A couple of my friends are moving there.”

Frick sipped espresso in his mouth and held it for a second, his cheeks sucked in. More espresso, more cheek-sucking. He tipped the cup upwards to drain the end of it into his mouth, and set it down on the table with a decisive clink. 

“Is this about a girl?” he asked.

“Maybe. Sort of.” 

Gavin finished his own espresso, that bitter sludge at the bottom, and studied Frick’s face.  Doubt, concern, much more the disapproving father than the cool older brother.  He doesn’t get it. That was okay.  Gavin just wasn’t explaining right.  Time to start over.

“I took this DMT.” 

Was that an okay thing to say? He looked at Frick. A slight eyebrow raise, a hmm noise.

“You did.”

“And I had this, um, vision.”

Frick stood up, plucked the two little cups from their saucers, carried them back over to the desk.  He scooped coffee grounds into the top of the machine, pushed a few buttons, and more espresso started pouring out of two spouts at the bottom.  

“You can see some amazing things when you're on drugs.” He moved a stack of books so he could lean on the desk and look at Gavin.  “I mean it.  Really amazing things. But you need to remember: they’re not real.  They’re just effects of your mind being messed up.  They’re interesting and everything, but you can’t put too much stake in them.”

He brought the second round of espressos over.  He didn’t set them back on their saucers, just handed one to Gavin and sat down in his chair holding the other. More espresso was the last thing Gavin needed—he’d already had two and a half cups of coffee at home, just to work up the guts to come to this meeting.  But he took a sip anyway. It didn’t taste as good as the first one, thinner with a layer of oil floating at the top.

Frick leaned forward in his chair, elbows on knees, cup right below his face. “You know what my advisor told me when I was in graduate school? Academia is a test of resilience. The people who make it to the top aren’t the ones with the best ideas.  They’re the ones who can see past all the indignities of the present moment to the greater goal ahead.”

The light from the lamp overhead hit his face, showing a web of tiny red veins covering his cheeks and nose.  His eyes were lined with red, too.  A queasy burst of fear hit Gavin in the stomach. He had never thought to worry about Frick, the pills, the heart attacks that were just one of his many quirks.

“You’re at an intersection,” Frick was saying. “The road is bumpy, and you think a different path might be smoother.  Here’s my advice. It’s just advice, you can take it or leave it.  But for what it’s worth.  Stay on the path you’re already on. The path you committed to. The people who succeed are simply the ones who never got tempted off of the path.”

He leaned back, shrugged, speech over, and pointed at the present on the table.

“Why don’t you open it.”

Gavin knew for sure that it was a book as soon as he picked it up.  A hardcover.  His hands shook a little—all that caffeine—as he tore through the wrapping paper.  The book’s forest-green cover was faded with age, but the binding felt solid.  Gold lettering announced the title. 

Time Slide. 

“First edition,” Frick said, his pale cheeks stretching into a smile.  “Look inside.”

Gavin opened to the title page.  The elongated, loopy signature of Liam Stump.

“This must have been expensive,” Gavin said.

“Read the card.”

It was tucked between pages.  Not really a card, more of a note, written in black pen on a folded piece of creamy stationary.  

My Dear Gavin,

Congratulations on the completion of a truly stellar dissertation. Your explication of Stump cuts right to the heart of his meaning; no analysis of his work has rung more true. You speak for Stump in a way that he could never speak for himself.  I look forward to watching your career blossom, as it surely will, and will take no small measure of pride in claiming you as a student and friend when your scholarship reaches its full level of acclaim.

All the best,

Jeremy Frick 

Gavin held the note between his hands, read it, read it again.  No analysis of his work has rung more true.   

“I mean it,” Frick said.  “Every word.  Look.”  He leaned in towards Gavin, resting his pointy elbows on his knees.  It took his face out from under the light, and he looked a little better, a little more handsome-sickly instead of sick-sickly.  “Soon enough this time of uncertainty will be forgotten.  You’ll have your career as a professor and everything will be settled.  You’ll look back and you’ll almost miss this time of youthful confusion, when everything was so scary and new and you didn’t know how it would all turn out.  But not really, because you’ll have a job, the kind of job you always wanted, and the respect and admiration of your colleagues.  And if it’s girls you’re after, you’ll have plenty of those, too.”

He kind of laughed and Gavin kind of laughed, like it was a joke, but neither of them actually smiled. Nothing about this felt like a joke, not even a little.

“I’m never getting out of here,” Frick said.  “I'm stuck. I’ve been working on the new book, but it’s not going much of anywhere.  I’ve lost the drive.  But you.” 

He slid a little closer, reached towards Gavin’s lap, put his hand on the copy of Time Slide.

“You're going to be a rock star.”

He stood, picked up the empty cups and saucers, carried them over to the cabinet behind the desk where he kept his never-ending supply of glasswear.  Gavin watched his narrow shoulders, the stoop of his back, as he opened the small door to the bottom shelves. 

"Of course it's your decision.”  Gavin could only see his back, bent over in front of the cabinet, rearranging things as he spoke. “Part of being an adult is making hard decisions, decisions that will alter the course of our lives.”  Clink clink, glasses being moved around.  Something fell, clunk, but no shattering. A relieved sigh.

He came back with a little prescription bottle, balanced it on top of the book on Gavin’s lap.

“Xanax, for anxiety,” he said.  He squeezed Gavin’s shoulder, right where muscle connected to bone. “You look really stressed out.

 <Chapter 38 
Chapter 40a> 

Chapter 38

Gavin spent the next morning at the kitchen table, eating microwave popcorn and making  pro/con lists.  

NEW YORK—PRO

Interesting.

Freedom.

It’s not Kansas.

He shoved a handful of greasy corn into his mouth and stared down at the paper.  It was one of those yellow notepads they always gave you at academic conferences, as though every single person there wasn’t carrying at least two computers in their bag.

What else? It didn’t make sense to move to a place if you couldn’t list more than three good things about it.

He listened to the punk music blasting out of Sinder’s room, tried to make sense of the lyrics—something about oy oy oy you’re bloody trash. Or I’m bloody trashed?  In the spaces between songs, there was shuffling, crashing, banging.  Sinder was packing for his move, already, just like that.  Rona asks you to go to New York—fine, let’s go. 

Sinder, Gavin wrote at the bottom of the pro list.  And then, Rona. He felt presumptuous writing her name down, like she belonged to him, but it seemed like it had to be there. 

Cons were easier.  Rash decision. Throwing away my career.  Letting everybody down.  Parents will be pissed.  On and on, reason after reason why he shouldn’t just drop everything he’d been working on for his entire adult life.  He ended up with twelve of them.  But still, when he looked at the measly five reasons in favor of New York, he liked them better.

He went to Sinder’s room for a break, stood in the doorway watching him drop stacks of philosophy books into brown grocery bags.  There were four of them overflowing already, and that was only half of the first bookshelf.

Gavin had to yell over the music. “How are you going to take those on the train?”

Sinder turned down the volume on the little desk speakers that plugged into his laptop.  He was wearing serious work clothes: khaki pants, a t-shirt that was more holes than fabric, an actual bandanna knotted around his hairline.

“On the what?” he said.  

“The train.”

“I’m not.”

Sinder had cleared all the clothes out of his closet, all the posters off his walls.  The bed was covered with overfilled garbage bags, looking ready to burst.  A whole life gathered stripped and stuffed away, all in a matter of a couple hours.  This was the most industrious Gavin had ever seen him.

“You’re gonna ship them or something?”

“I’m giving them away.  Can you give me a ride to Goodwill later?”

Giving them away?  Gavin looked at the empty shelves, breaks in the dust marking out where the books used to be. Okay, drop out of school, move to New York, fine.  But your books.  Gavin couldn’t imagine it.  It took years of coursework and exams and research papers to amass a collection like that.  You’d never recreate it, never remember the fucking names of all those books you bought for some course on fascist aesthetics or autobiography as self-creation, much less be able to find them again.

“All of them?”

Sinder nodded and dropped another stack into the bag, like he was clearing dead leaves from his backyard. “Let me know if there’s anything you want.”

Gavin pointed at the giant dictionary of philosophy on Sinder’s desk, next to the laptop.

“You’re taking that one, right.”

“Nope.” He reached over, grabbed it, tossed it to Gavin in the doorway. “It’s yours.”  

Gavin raised his hands, but not quite fast enough, so it hit him hard in the chest right as he caught it.  He looked down at the cover, creased and coffee-stained, spine weakened from being propped open so often. It kind of hurt to hold it, to think that it wasn’t Sinder’s anymore, that it was his now.  He took it into his room, put it on his own bookshelf next to the Dictionary of Terms for Literary Criticism. Someday Sinder would want it back, would want to reclaim this lost part of his life.  Gavin would keep it safe for him.

He went back to the living room, ate a couple pieces of cold popcorn and stared at his lists. The pro side looked pathetic next to all those cons. Add something.  Something good about moving to New York.  Like what? He had gone to conferences there a couple times, just quick trips where he had mostly stayed in the conference hotel, not much to draw on.  And one trip with his parents, the summer after tenth grade. What had they done?

Museums, plays, he wrote. Shopping. What else?  Um, Statue of Liberty. Did that count as a pro?

Of course, those things all cost money.  Would he have a job?  Maybe teaching. He added that to the cons list: high school.

Sinder came in, all sweaty, holding his laptop.  His hair was covered with dust where it stuck up from the bandana.  Gavin flipped the notepad to an empty page and pretended to be writing on it.

Sinder set the laptop down on the table. “You got any food?”

Gavin shook the bag of popcorn.  It rattled lightly, like maybe there were eight kernels left.

Sinder wrinkled his nose and went over to the freezer.  “I meant real food.” He reached his arm in, rearranged some things, and came out with a box of pizza bites.  He got them set up on a plate in the microwave and then sat down next to Gavin.

“Okay, check this out.”

It was a video on the laptop. A girl returns to her teacher’s office, busts in without knocking, catches him jerking off at his computer.  Nothing too remarkable, but Gavin remembered it right away.  It was the first porn they’d ever watched together, the one that had sent them on their epic journey into the darkest recesses of the internet.

They had been sitting on the couch, new roommates then, and they didn’t know each other super well, so to break the ice they were making jokes about fucking their students.  Sinder did a quick internet search: “student-teacher porn.”   This was the first video that came up.  It was about this nerdy-looking college girl who was secretly a porn star.  When she walks in on the teacher, he’s sitting at his desk with his dick in his hand, watching a video on his computer.

There was this really funny moment where he looks at the screen, looks at her, looks back at the screen and back at her, all wide-eyed and open-mouthed to show he was shocked.   Because she was so nerdy and plain, he never would have given her a second look, and suddenly she’s this hot girl he’s just been beating off to.   And it was kind of funny, kind of awesome really to think that any girl in your class, even the most normal, un-sexy girl, could be secretly so fuckable. 

And then of course, she was all like, Please don’t tell! That pretty much sealed the deal.

“We need to collect all of these,” Sinder had said. 

Gavin nodded, like, Yeah, totally, but he didn’t think it was a serious actual plan.  That showed how he didn’t really know Sinder back then.  If he had, it would have been obvious: of course there would be an exhaustive collection, a classification process, a database.  Sinder didn’t joke about shit like that.

The porn lasted fourteen minutes and fifty-two seconds. They ate all the pizza bites, burned their tongues on boiling cheese, split the one beer in the fridge. It was sweet, watching it together, the girl bouncing on her teacher, her own video still playing behind them, this foundational text of Gavin and Sinder’s relationship.  Their first porn, and now, whatever happened, probably their last.

“Any decisions?” Sinder asked.  Gavin could see the dust in his eyebrows, his arms glistening with sweaty grime.  Through all that dirt, his dark skin looked polished, healthy, like the dust was actually some kind of fancy spa-mud.  He looked how pregnant women looked when people said they were glowing.

“Not sure yet,” Gavin said.  

It was tempting, all that determination and aliveness, like really tempting.  Go, be free, do what the main character in a movie would do.  Make Sinder happy.  And Rona. Do what Rona would want him to do. What she had flat-out asked him to do.

“I mean, I really want to go with you guys," he said. "It’s just.”

What?  He could feel it, but he couldn’t say it.  It was something scary, something that you’d fall off the edge of, and there would be no bottom.  You would just fall forever, down, down, down, an eternity of that falling-feeling in your stomach, the tingling in your feet, falling with nothing to catch you, with no hope, never stopping.

The abyss. 

“It’s cool,” Sinder said.  He pulled the bandana off, re-twisted it, tied it back around his dusty head.  “At least you know you have a choice.  That’s what scared me most.  When I didn’t think there was a choice.” 

<Chapter 37

Chapter 39>

Chapter 37

“What do you see?”

Rona’s face.  A swirl of patterns, playing across the ceiling, the purple cloth, Rona’s cheeks and nose and lips, bumping along in time to the music.  That same song from before, but he understood it better now—beating patterns, uneven in places, broken, then reuniting into perfectly matched symmetry.

“What day is it?” he asked.

The patterns spilled on to her teeth, the tip of her tongue.  She was laughing.

 “Still Saturday.  You’ve only been away for like.”  She turned to the open laptop on the far side of the mattress, pressed a button to wake it up.  “Fifteen minutes maybe?” Her voice was hushed, impressed, like he was a very important painting in a museum. “What was going on?”

“You were there.”

She shook her head, disturbing the patterns across her face.  He watched them scatter and regroup, forming their own hands and faces and eyes, watching him as he watched them. They weren’t hallucinations, he could tell, just systems of energy and light that his eyes were newly sensitive to.

“No, I wish I was.”  Her eyes big, eager.  Then she frowned.  “Well, maybe not.  You looked pretty stressed out.  I was trying to wake you up but it took a while. What was happening?”

What was happening.  How would he even describe it?  What happened.  What happened was.

He felt the vibrations of the music through his body, bump ba-bump bump, stirring his blood, pulsing the shapes above him.  They were fainter now, fading. The whole thing was fading.  All he could hold on to was a feeling, something between his ribs.  A lightness above his heart.

“I feel relieved,” he said.

“Oh, no.  That it’s over?”

“No, not that it’s over.”  He put his hand on his chest.  Yes, that was definitely the feeling.  “Relieved in general.”

She smiled, a tired, worried smile like she had just been through something. He loved when she looked like that, post-ordeal Rona, complex and deepened by experience. He wanted to kiss her, not in a sex kind of way, just because she was amazing.

“What did you see?” he asked.  

“Oh me?”  She yawned, rubbed her eyes.  “I had some pretty crazy visuals, but I didn’t, like, go anywhere.  You were the only one who really broke through.”

That’s right.  The only one. Where did everyone else go?

“They’re in the living room I think,” she said.  “Can you get up yet?”

He was pretty sure he could, but he didn’t want to.  This room had Rona, patterns, ivy.  It was one of those ecosystems, perfectly balanced to sustain the life within it. Even the didgeridoo was perfect. Dark, polished wood, a deep reflective chocolate brown, carved and painted by hand somewhere in the Outback where they didn’t have machines. How could anyone hate a didgeridoo?

“Come on.”  Rona was pulling on his elbow.  She was right.  This room was really nice, but they couldn’t stay here forever.  Time to move, grow, continue.

Walking felt like floating, like he might step wrong and hit the ceiling.  He dragged his fingers along the wall for balance as he followed the back of Rona’s head into the living room.  

Sinder and Dean were lying on the couch, their legs crossed over each other like girls at a slumber party, smoking a purple bong.

“Want some?”  Dean held the bong out towards Rona.  She climbed next to them on the couch, wrapped her right hand around the shaft, just above the rounded bottom, took the lighter in her left hand, pressed her lips to the opening.  She handed the bong back to Dean, held smoke in her puffed-out cheeks.  She leaned the side of her face into the bulge of his uncovered biceps, opened her mouth, released a cloud of twirling smoke that curled into tiny fingers and breasts and penises. 

“Bong hit?” Dean asked Gavin. 

Gavin shook his head.

“Yeah, you don’t need any,” Dean said.  “You were pretty far gone.”

Pretty far gone. Gavin wondered what he’d looked like, if he should be embarrassed. Probably. Of course he would be the only one who couldn’t handle his DMT.

“Gavin’s just more magic than us,” Rona murmured. She was falling asleep now, cuddled against Dean’s arm, eyes closed, and Gavin didn’t even care. His chest was filled up like a thousand smiles.

More magic.

Of course it wasn’t true. There was no way he was more magic than Rona Gomez.

“I’m gonna crash in a sec.” Dean put the bong down on the floor, pointed towards his bedroom.  “I have to get up early and study.  Big accounting exam.  You guys are welcome to stay.”

“Nah,” said Sinder.  “We’re only a few blocks away.”

They left Rona there, falling asleep next to Dean on the couch.  Gavin was pretty sure he should feel upset about the thought of Rona and him, snuggled like kittens together, doing whatever else they were going to do or had already done.  But he couldn’t. Relief was all he felt. He felt like a ten thousand pound weight had been pried from between his ribs. It was so much relief it was almost scary, like he might float up into the black, pulsating sky and dissolve.

“So I guess maybe she’s with Dean now,” Sinder said. The streets around them were dark, darker than usual it seemed like.  The patterns were gone now, but Gavin could still see shadows of them shifting and moving behind the darkness.

“Yeah, maybe.” If she was, it seemed okay.  Actually it kind of seemed like a good thing if anybody was having sex with Rona.  Like the universe and its inhabitants could only benefit from something like that.

“But she didn’t ask Dean to move to New York,” Sinder said.  “She asked us.”

Something rustled and jumped in the bushes next to the sidewalk. Gavin gasped, almost tripped, caught himself.  Sinder had grabbed his hand and was holding it.  Loosely, casual.  Gavin couldn’t remember holding a guy’s hand before, not since he was a little kid, maybe, but it felt okay.  Felt kind of nice, actually, like he had a partner in the darkness, an anchor to keep him from getting lost in the thoughts and energy and relief.

“What do you think?”  Sinder asked.  “About moving to New York with me and Rona.”

That was it.  That’s what he was relieved about.  Something had just happened, and now he knew, felt pretty sure at least, that everything would be okay.  That Liam Stump would survive without him. That if he left this whole academia thing and never became a professor, that he wouldn’t be letting anybody down.  Not his advisors, not Liam Stump, not himself.  That he could do anything he wanted to do, anything his imagination could conceive of. That he was free.

“I think,” he said, squeezing Sinder’s skinny hand.  “It might be okay.” 

<Chapter 36

Chapter 38>