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A House (in the Valley of the Absurd) Malcolm brushed wet grit and pebbles off the knees of his pants, standing up again and puffing on his cigarette. As he rubbed residual dirt from his fingers into his prickle-haired chin, his eyes shining in the dark, he must have looked, if all else faded to black, rather homeless and dropped there completely out of place. The wind breathed warm over the surface of the lake, occasionally licking it up and spraying it inland a few inches to where Malcolm was rubbing dirt on his face, puffing on that cigarette which he held between his thumb and forefinger, using his other three fingers as a torch shield. Because he was tallish and lean, his exhaled drags betrayed practiced lungs that were considerably larger than his body seemed capable of harboring. But with all else filling back in place – his miniature plumes of smoke rose and hung against the backdrop of the sky, speckle-laden and laid-back as a snow globe gently tossed and caught by oneself – of course no one is truly homeless. Rubbing dirt on himself was a small, private challenge, to overcome this expansive lakeside pebble sand patch and its deleterious effects on Malcolm’s comfort zone, somewhere in the pit of his stomach, a hole deep down even below the small intestines, some place inside of him where potentially catastrophic damage could be wrought by even the most incidental of accidents. The feeling in between his toes, of foot-fistfuls of shit, was something he forced himself to get used to. Underneath his nails, into the tender webs. Eventually he could force the grimace off his face. He had almost completely forgotten about the fire. Studebaker was using a poke to stir the fire’s coals in the belly of a sandpit as some of the others milled about, drinking or talking. Malcolm wasn’t drinking but was humming to himself beneath all of the crackling and the murmuring. Studebaker was poking the shit out of those coals, and the debris floated up into the glow from the flame, making everyone seem, from where Malcolm was standing, gritty and despeckled, faded, withdrawn, screened and flickering as if through an old hiccupping pinhole projector. The rock walls of the sand pit formed a semicircle around and blocked Malcolm’s view of the fire itself. Throwing his cigarette into the water, he realized as his own smoke vanished that the fire was considerably larger than when he had stepped away, and hotter. Everything, propagating towards him, rippled in a haze. Everyone was clumsy and relaxed, board shorted and buttoned down, wrapped up, blanketed in the sweet-and-sour dénouement of this party fire evening, dozing, swimming, making fireballs on the tiki torches by spitting out vodka and clapping. Studebaker jabbed the coals more tenderly now. Frank Studebaker loved making fires along this cove of a shore behind his somewhat clumsy-looking, but effective, wooden fortress. In a big enough gale, one of his fires might blow back towards the house and rake it down entirely. But Studebaker, perhaps even in fifteen years or in his impending middle age, would probably be young-spirited and surely strong enough to build it all over again with his own hands. And he’d ask Malcolm and Rick Stone, Boy Alex, and Jeremiah – everyone – to help him do it, and they would. Given such an event, Malcolm would hate it, and he’d no doubt have to smoke speed with Stoner in Stoner’s car just to endure the sweaty physicality of it all; Stoner would love the opportunity to smoke speed with that thoughtful pathologically depressed Malcolm (imagining Malcolm’s heightened architectural neuroticisms of precision and grace); Boy Alex would be more excited than anyone to build a house, not annoyingly but energetically so; Jeremiah wouldn’t speak to anyone the entire time but would instead disappear between his headphones and do a fine job of whatever task he was given; and it would be expected and roundly unargued against that Studebaker build a fire, and also bring beers. (This rebuilding would be financed and made possible by the profits from Studebaker’s to-be-determined multinational foundation to establish the spread of philanthropy and educational video games around the world, no doubt. Such things as building a house – things mentioned wildly, fantastically, in passing – in Studebaker’s presence suddenly became frighteningly amazing possibilities. Such things – Studebaker’s tendency, for example, towards one ideological bent or another in all aspects of his experiences – made it justly fascinating for him to play with fire.) “Don’t kill the damn thing, Baker,” Malcolm said to Studebaker as he approached the sandpit feeling a little lighter. Studebaker had from the corner of his eye spotted Malcolm out by the shore and was glad to have him coming back, back into the fold. “Stoner’s inside getting more coals,” was his unfettered reply, with a coy smile. Studebaker didn’t look up from the fire because he was deeply infatuated with it, clearly, and Malcolm smiled also while bending down to unfold the cuffs of his pants. He had wet sand crumpled into his pants now, and he forced a stoic, but sincere, half of a smile as he brushed it off. With the same hand he rubbed his prickled beard. Studebaker said, “You’re not driving back tonight, are you?” “Unlikely.” “Because I’ve saved a bed in a private room with your name on it since I know what a morning belle you are,” with a wink. “You spoil me, Baker.” Studebaker now nodded his head to point at Malcolm’s hands, dirt-smeared and rough, warming each other in the heat from the flame, and he said, “I know you’re not an outdoorsy man, but this is a nice place, isn’t it?” Malcolm nodded along, surmising that it was unlikely for Studebaker to have any personal understanding regarding certain small and private challenges so he found it best not to explain his. “I actually really like this place. It’s different from your other places, obviously. I like the lake.” Then smiling, he said, “It must be nice owning so many places,” knowing that Studebaker was at least decent and conflicted enough about money that they could both laugh at it and agree. Then another member of the party, Sophie, walked to where the two of them were gazing absently around the place and put a beer bottle in Studebaker’s hand. “How’s it going over here, firemen?” she asked. “Firemen!” Studebaker was so pleased at the notion. “Ahem, it’s under control, you know, man stuff,” he said in an exaggeratedly deep voice. “How’s it over there with the firespitters?” She said, “Jeremiah’s face caught fire,” and then recovering with sly timing, “but he’s fine, we poured some beers on him.” Malcolm interjected here, casually: “What ever happened to stop, drop, and roll?” She looked at him with the same endearing expression of someone remembering something easy and unforgettable, and remembering it too slowly, ironically. Studebaker suddenly said, “Malcolm, have you met my sister Sophie?” He nodded and smiled at her, saying, “The elusive Studebaker twin. Of course. You introduced us earlier.” “Honestly,” Sophie said, lightly tapping Studebaker’s cheek with the hand of the arm she held around his shoulder. “Malcolm and I are good old friends by now.” “Did he really almost catch fire?” Studebaker resumed. He and Sophie were exactly the same height, lending an urgent intensity to something that came across, from where Sophie and Malcolm were watching him, as absurdly overdone. Sophie picked up on this and said, frankly, “Frank, he did catch fire. His face caught fire. You know those blue shallow flames that spread a lot but don’t really burn?” Malcolm interjected again with: “Isn’t blue flame hotter than red flame?” For a second time, she shrugged her shoulders at him agreeably. “It was fun to pour beers on him. Do you need a beer?” “Thank you, no, but I’m not drinking.” She twitched her eyebrow and said, “Peculiar,” with an ironic hmph, acknowledging him up and down. “How about juice? I don’t even know what a non-alcoholic would drink.” “Anything except coffee or milk, or soda.” “Non-alcoholics can’t drink those things?” “I just don’t like those things.” Another hmph. “Ice?” “You mean, can I drink ice?” “No, silly, do you like ice in the things you do drink?” “Oh. No, I don’t like ice. It gives me a cough.” Sophie turned to Studebaker playfully and said, “He’s a fussy one, this one.” Studebaker confirmed. Turning back to Malcolm, she asked, “Are you even thirsty?” “Not particularly.” She was a funny one, the Studebakers a funny pair, those twins together in front of him. She was so rarely talked about, usually, despite her being refreshing and unusual: she gave up trying to accommodate him, and she did it quietly with no condescending intentions so that none among them felt neglected or out of place. Studebaker piped in, resuming, “Well I don’t want anyone else catching fire at my house,” knowing that it could actually happen again, “and no skinny-dipping in the middle of the lake. Not at night, anyway. Well, not tonight, in any case.” Prodding the fire again, he said, “Goddamn Stoner is taking forever with the fucking coals.” Sophie asked, “Who?” “Stoner. Rick Stone, did I introduce you two?” “Oh, Rick.” Then: “Is he really a stoner?” “Yes.” “So you’re on a no-first-name basis with one of your best friends.” “Well in Stoner’s case, it happens to be descriptive. Literally: last name, first initial, Stone comma R, read: Stoner. But, I do call Malcolm ‘Malcolm.’” “And I,” said Malcolm, “call Frank ‘Baker.’” Sophie said, “It’s true that Studebaker is kind of a mouthful. Sophia Studebaker. I’ve stuttered on it a million times,” as if the name itself might actually be a defect of her heredity. “Well,” Malcolm felt prompted to explain, “we call him Baker because when he and Stoner played football in high school, anytime Coach called for Stone or Studebaker across the field, you know, the syllables would get lost on the way and it was pretty confusing.” Studebaker nodded along, and when Malcolm finished speaking, he told her that the choice had been more or less democratic amongst the teammates, excluding himself. Just then, Stoner showed up and plopped down a heavy bag of charcoal, black marks smeared from the bag onto his chest and from the backs of his sweaty hands across his forehead and nose. “I practically had to dig this shit up from your goddamn dungeon basement, Baker.” He was burly and so was fussy with his huffing, glad nevertheless, as always, to put his massive body to use. He jerked his head at Sophie as an exhausted hello. “Good job, Rick.” She was never condescending. “Okay then. Bye, firemen,” and she was gone. ** In mid fall, the wind begins to sound colder, because the sunburned leaves curl up and scratch against one another until the bare branches themselves become ice picks. It turned out not to be unpleasant for him to hear it as he slept, and it crashed around him almost silently against the windows, sinking cooler and cooler to the touch of his head against the glass. Malcolm had forced himself to sleep in his car, even to smoke cigarettes in there without so much as even a few miles an hour on the speedometer to air it out; he even sat in the passenger seat, which had more legroom and could recline all the way backwards. He was an isolationist occasionally, but only intentionally and at times when mornings, for example, would be encountered in the context of strange new places. He woke up twice during the night, once to piss; the other time, he saw – or thought he saw – a skunk sniffing along an edge of Studebaker’s property that skirted a small tree patch. It had that awkward characteristic waddle of skunks, with those stripe-accentuated hind quarters, that makes them look as if they are limping with all four legs. Malcolm had even had the thought that perhaps it was injured and that he should save it; or that he should help it find whatever morsel or chip it might need; or that he was dreaming it, actually, and was chasing it through log-bridges and shrub thorns until it turned around a hidden corner, scattering off to wherever its home was. Malcolm had fallen back asleep even as his eyes followed it liltingly into the brush. “Hey,” tap-tap, “can I get a ciggie?” It was Stoner on the other side of the car door, his voice muffled but still too loud for morning, his earnest face still too large. He was patient, though, and took a couple of steps back to give Malcolm time to realize that he was awake now, that Stoner’s knocking was in fact not the thunderstorm he had been dreaming about. The pack of cigarettes was on top of his sweater crumpled in a heap on the driver’s seat, and Malcolm wordlessly, mechanically, fumbled with his sleepy swollen fingers to extract only one, but he got two instead. Five extinguished butts were jammed into the ashtray where the lighter was. Stepping out of the car was a literal stretch. He and Stoner smoked in the gravel area where the cars parked. It was also a wordless exchange between them, the hello, the thank-you, the nice-morning-isn’t-it, those cramped vehicular discomforts which, as if punishment, can only be walked off; the pleasant early day nothing-really-to-say-yet; specifically, the not-going-to-ask. Stoner was hung-over, no doubt, and open to being a bit wrinkled, as he looked, and while he was not exactly not put together, he was clearly not put together enough that Malcolm would take their silence to be something like uncomfortable or frustrating. Stoner could sit in one spot for hours, wrinkled up and quiet. Malcolm took the lead and laid flat on his back, arms out to his sides. Stoner did the same a few feet away. The sky was such that they had to squint their eyes. “I think,” said Stoner after some time, “that I can see more sky from Baker’s house here than from any other place I’ve ever been. What do you think?” Malcolm wondered what he meant, more sky. “It’s the same sky, isn’t it?” “I saw so many stars last night.” “True, actually.” He recalled a vague understanding of why. “There’s virtually no ambient light around here. I suppose on account of our being in the middle of fucking nowhere.” “It’s a pretty big sky.” Stoner drifted away from the thought quickly and said, “The Bakers probably like it out here for a reason.” “The Studebakers, you mean?” “Yeah. I mean the Studebakers. Have you ever actually met any of the others besides Baker and Sophie?” “No,” a delayed response even for Malcolm. “Do you think they exist?” “Of course they exist. Just because you’ve never seen them doesn’t mean they don’t exist.” Stoner belched a laugh. “Ha, that’s like Santa Claus and his reindeer. Man, my old man,” he faded off into pleasant nostalgia, “such a bastard, he never even let me believe in Santa from the start, from when I was tiny.” Stoner was always saying stuff like that, old man. And it was hard to imagine a tiny Stoner. “My old man, old man…” Then: “What do you think his old man is like? Do you think Baker has parents?” “Stoner. Of course he has parents, everybody’s got parents.” “Maybe they’re dead.” “Jesus. I hope not.” “Just throwing it out there.” Stoner played briefly with his hands. “Baker never talks about them. But he sure loves living in all their houses. Loves it! I mean, we built a fucking fire last night, man!” After a moment of reflection, he said, “I can’t imagine what his old man would be like, though, or his mom. I bet his mom was pretty attractive, as these things go.” He was swaying his head from side to side, as if “these things” were floating all around them. “What things?” “Like Reptoids and shit.” Stoner’s manner in conversations was that of a stealth bomber, typically. Malcolm was used to it. “What the fuck are you talking about?” “The Reptoids, man.” Stoner laughed a little. He communicated generally like an invisible target, calling out coordinates for several different battleships all at once, igniting bombs among the unsuspecting, Stoner being so impossible to detect. His was a thoughtfully frustrating game, although less about actual winning and losing than about mystical riddling and rhyming. Eventually, he began to explain. It wasn’t the first of his stories to begin with theoretical disclaimers and references to Marxism. Had Malcolm ever heard of the reptilian shape-shifting alien species from the lower-fourth dimension, he asked. “What the fuck.” It is true that there is a part of the human brain, not in the cortex but in the subcortex, inside all the junky matter, where a circular membrane called the hippocampus connects to a small button of clumpy cells called the amygdala. This is where human beings process emotions, in the amygdala, in the subcortex, the brain’s limbic area, incidentally the one area of the brain that human beings share with reptiles. Did he know that? “Really?” “Truly. And Reptoids can camouflage and essentially shape-shift to conceal their true ancestral identities because, as you know, reptiles have been on the earth for fucking ever, dude.” Stoner’s conspiracy theories and questions of origins were, like all theories, impossible to falsify or disclaim, and Malcolm had no choice but to nod his head in curious agreement. “So,” a pause. “You think the Studebakers are Reptoids.” “Not necessarily Reptoids, but it’s a mystery, you know?” He was quiet for a while. “Where do these fuckers come from? How huge, exactly, is this house? What did his dad invent that made them all so goddamn rich? Ah, Bakerbakerbaker,” and his whole rant elided into these engagingly theoretical rhetorics. Malcolm was still thinking about Reptoids. “So,” and another pause, this one for a more clinical, ironic effect. “You believe in this shit but you don’t believe in Santa?” He laughed a bit at Stoner, who was laughing a bit at himself. (Laughing, because fringe theories were, naturally, inherently absurd, abounding in sufficient enough hoardings of paranoia and grandeur to justify the propagation of themselves; the egoist’s fallacy: if one builds a house in the valley of the absurd and there’s no one who can see it, whose fallacy is better, and whose is worse?) It was a funny question to ask. “I’ve got to wash my hands, Stoner,” Malcolm said as abruptly as the thought had come to him, and he was on his feet. “It’s been too long and I’m becoming slightly repulsed by myself.” He left Stoner out there dozing, stoned no doubt, recovering himself with the bitter nicotine toxins. Inside the house, in the kitchen, the remaining guests, specifically Sophie and Boy Alex, were sitting at the table while Studebaker boiled some oats. He liked them thick like yogurt with fruit at the bottom, but not lumpy, a bit runny, and he was so absorbed in the boiling of his oats that he didn’t take note of anything else. Sophie was saying to Boy Alex, “So why do they call you Boy Alex?” “Our other friend Alex is a girl.” “And she’s Girl Alex?” “Exactly.” She was piecing them all together in her head now, those affectionately childlike terms and introductions she didn’t know but was learning, but she was not yet at all, perhaps never to be, inclined to call Frank, or herself for that matter, “Baker.” Sophia Studebaker was nondeductible and disciplined in her acquisitions. She looked up and said, “Good morning, Malcolm! We thought you had disappeared from your bed, rather mysteriously since your car was still here. But then we saw that you were in your car, which looked terribly uncomfortable.” There were ironic hmphs built all into her manners. Studebaker now turned around and said with ersatz respect, “Malcolm, I offer you a private palace and you refuse? Ballsy. Impressive.” Malcolm went along with it kindly all the way to the sink, where he washed his hands. He washed them twice. Sitting next to him once he came to the table, Sophie watched him dry his hands in his beard. It was legitimately a beard now and could thus begin to start serving multiple utility functions; in mid fall, perhaps just as well. “Are you growing it out?” Sophie asked him, referring to his beard. He nodded, and added, “You ask a lot of questions.” It was a friendly tone. He felt more settled-in and familiar than he had the previous evening. “You think so?” Malcolm was wiggling his fingers to air-dry the dampness, and when he stopped doing that, she regarded his hands with awkward curiosity. “Let me see your hands,” she said. Then she took them and turned them palms up, saying, “The grooves in your hands are abnormally deep.” He pulled his hands back and regarded them for himself, bemusedly self-conscious as he did it, and he said, “They’re not abnormal.” “Well, they’re deep.” “Is that right. Deeper than normal?” “Well, I could notice them from here.” She flexed her own hands open and closed to see how the creases of her skin folded into her grooves but hers were invisible. “Does that provide better traction for you, a firmer grip?” And at this, Malcolm laughed with unexpected humor. “I don’t really have anything to compare them to. I don’t know if it’s an evolutionary advantage, although I’d imagine probably not.” He looked at his hands again. “I saw a palm reader once and she appreciated the deepness of my grooves, thank you very much.” Sophie said, “I’m not saying I don’t appreciate them, because heaven knows that I do. But,” and she tapped her hands demonstrably on the table, “I do want to talk about the palm reader now.” “Okay.” “What did she look like?” “She was fat, a little. Very fat, in fact. But also very nice. She had smooth hands. She looked maybe fifty.” Sophie nodded, creating the vision for herself. “So what did she say?” “Some shit.” Malcolm wasn’t sure that he wanted to talk about it. “She said I’d live for a long time, which does somewhat damper my desire to die while I’m still young and mobile.” “Don’t say that,” she said, and she was stern about it. Then: “What else did she say?” “She said I’ll have a comfortable life and a comfortable home and that I’m a good and honest person.” “Is that true?” “I think so. I think a lot about goodness and honesty. And also,” he said, catching an annoying ambiguity in this statement, “I think very much of them. And also,” he said, remembering, “she said Wednesdays are my good days so I should delay all major decisions until Wednesdays.” “And what’s your bad day?” “Monday.” “So are you going to be rich someday, did she tell you?” “She said not super-rich, but very comfortable.” “How does that make you feel?” He was mockingly, and then actually, taken aback. “I don’t know. I suppose I don’t care as long as I’m comfortable.” Sophie looked up at Studebaker who was finished with his oats now, then at Boy Alex who was deeply engaged in these psychic propositions, and then back at Malcolm, saying over her breath, “A creature of habitual comforts, I see.” Malcolm was getting better at accepting these unintentional compliments. She said, “So do you believe in all that shit?” “You mean palm reading? I don’t know, it was my first palm reading ever. A friend of mine – Girl Alex, actually – has this sort of ritual in which she hunts down a good palm reader in every interesting place she goes to, so I think thinking about that is what gave me the idea in the first place. And even then, it just happened to be a right-time, right-place kind of thing.” “Where were you?” “New Hope, Pennsylvania.” “Never heard of it.” “It’s this quirky little town about half-an-hour from Philly.” “What do you mean, quirky?” “Quirky in the sense that, the first person who told me about New Hope described it to me by saying, ‘In New Hope, being straight is the alternative lifestyle.’” One chuckle. “That’s funny. So is New Hope particularly interesting?” “More interesting than where I’m from.” She was squinting her eyes trying to recollect. “New Jersey,” he supplied. “That’s right. So you’re driving all the way back to New Jersey today?” “That’s right.” “How long does that take?” “The only decent way to do the trip is at eighty miles an hour the entire way south, and that will take hopefully around four hours. Maybe less. Depends who’s on patrol.” After nearly two thoughts, she said, “Do you want to drive me to New York?” “Hm?” “I was going to take a bus down to our place in New York tomorrow anyway, but we should take a road trip together. I can’t stand this place anymore.” She said this ardently, in a Judy Garland kind of way that she felt suddenly swept up in. “Let’s go today.” “Ah, I like the New York place.” The Studebakers’ apartment in New York City had mirrors covering the full expanse of about eighty percent of the walls, cloyingly. But so immaculate were the moldings with the mahogany-exposed spines that Malcolm had felt instantly assured that here, he could fashion a favorable, or at least coolly livable, home. And since there were no obvious or reasonable points on which he could deny her, and since he was encouraged by her spontaneity, he said, “Sure.” “Yes?” “Sure, yes.” Studebaker and Boy Alex were disengaged from the conversation now, rinsing things out in the sink and settling slowly into whatever day it was. They weren’t going anywhere, except maybe to smoke some hookah out on the patio in a few unspecified units of time – hours, days, perhaps…since among the wealthy unemployeds there exist no specifically immediate or actionable units of time. “Yes?” Sophie asked Malcolm again. He got what she was getting at. “Yes.” “Do you want to go for a swim in the lake before we go?” Malcolm bowed his head and drew a tight sheepish grin. “I can’t swim.” He had said this often enough in his life that the shame was no longer deeply felt, just endearingly played after. “Are you serious?” Sophie caught herself sounding obnoxious and then immediately offered a sincere repentance: “Do you want me to teach you how?” That was a kind gesture which Malcolm noted and tucked away, promising, first, to deny people less often and, second, to accept their disbeliefs generously, as a sort of accidental fascination. These two promises he tucked away, but he nevertheless said no kindly enough that she dropped the whole thing immediately and took herself off to get a splash in the water. She was standing in the doorway leading out to the patio when she took a pause. Boy Alex and Studebaker had already slipped out through the open sliding glass and onto the patio, seated absently and unattended at a table scattered with playing cards and poker chips, ash-tray Corona bottles, a hand towel, coals for a hookah that was nowhere in sight, some shisha tobacco, some tumblers empty except for ice, some other things. She engaged the two yobs – “boys gone backwards,” someone had once said of some other similarly wisdom-contented young men – and she recalled out loud the way she loved playing cards and the way it was refreshing to have an interaction with a group of people without having to advance any sort of plot amongst them. Then she said to Malcolm over her shoulder as she looked past the patio down to the lake, “Well at least wade in it a little while I go for a swim.” “I’ll wade in it, okay.” “Then we’ll leave these gentlemen —” she was gesturing at Studebaker and Boy Alex, and she probably intended Stoner as well, presumably, who was lying spread-eagle in the car park indeterminately, “— to their man business.” Malcolm elided silently over her suggestion that he would be uninterested in it. When they got outside, Malcolm rolled his pants legs, still dewy and browned, back up again, and they rolled up easily into their wrinkles as though they were pleated there and hemmed, and then ripped out, and then re-pleated. ** It was incomprehensible to her that at seventy miles an hour, when she focused her eyes on a single distant point and tracked it closer and closer in space until Malcolm’s car hurtled by it, time would appear to slow down and that single point would then stretch into a blurry dreamscape that was like a camera flash, it was suddenly so fast again. This was something Sophie chose not to ask him about, fairly certain that the science of it was infinitely less interesting than the phenomenon itself. (After all, most of these cortical phenomena, she was sufficiently and fairly certain, were tricks of the mind in any case, cracks that revealed the altogether unsturdy mechanisms of the brain’s co-opted household appliances. Déjà vu was one of her mind’s meaner tricks, when unexpected single points would, again like camera flashes, linger long enough to become memories before she’d processed them even for a first time, or yet again.) Malcolm pushed up to seventy-five, and then eighty, and then a couple more ticks until he felt the wheels gliding slightly from out beneath him, and then he set the controls to cruise. Sophie asked, “How long does it take to get to New Hope from New Jersey?” “From where I live, about two hours,” he said, settling into his chair. All of the cruise controls were on the steering wheel and dashboard, so that no one except for the driver could see the ‘on’ and ‘off’ buttons on one side of the wheel, and on the other, the ones for ‘set’ and ‘resume.’ A lit icon indicating the settings for the controls next to the speedometer was, thoughtfully, located just below the trim on the dashboard. When Malcolm looked in Sophie’s direction, she was looking out of her window, one eye squinted shut and one thumb held out in front of her gauging the distance from here to there to there to there. “What’s it like living in New Jersey?” “It’s like living in a house that’s surrounded by New Jersey,” he said. “What’s it like living in New York?” “People think it’s amazing and I hate it. Our apartment is the only thing good about it.” Distractedly, she mused, “I like it much more than this place we were just at, and more than San Diego, and definitely more than Denver.” She caught herself in an aimless recollection. “I don’t think there’s specifically one that I would call ‘home,’ though,” she said. She wondered if that was true. Gazing out the window, she forgot to keep wondering. On that late Saturday afternoon, the sky was an indiscriminate color such as the ones which pilots in airplanes sometimes, tragically, confuse for the ocean when the horizon reflects endlessly, from any point chosen at random and then stretched straight across the view, and the clouds become waves and the fish become birds so that the pilot must absolutely trust the digital controls, trusting counter-intuition. But on a turnpike, at least, Malcolm had canopies of trees with branches twisted like webs and a few leaves hanging on to guide him regarding which way was up; but he could also, as a game, twist his mind to envision the forest, in various stages of undress, ravaged and torn up, like the banks of a neglected stream – himself, floating high and upside-down above it. Sophie was looking detachedly at her hands now. There were scars on the backs and on two of her more protrusive knuckles that nevertheless didn’t turn against her femininity. Still, they were mannish in that her fingernails were bitten down and her cuticles were swollen, some of them, because she ground her fingertips between her teeth when she was thinking. Since her manner was loosely curled and gentle, so were her hands, which she had never minded at all until now. “Would you consider driving me to New Hope right now?” she asked. “Nope.” And that was all they said for a while. Sophie had no pressing determinations to visit a palm reader, she knew that herself, and she curled up further against the door and covered half of herself with a sweater, but her eyes were open and she had in them the vague fixation of a mind thinking nothing in particular, but thinking nevertheless. Quickly, she had grown exhausted of the turnpike’s tree-hemmed boredom and was looking forward now to being able to see an actual goddamn forest, a whole mile-stretch northwards of manicured trees and grass in fact, from thirty-two stories up in the Studebakers’ city apartment. She was looking forward to a stiff drink from her own bar. And suddenly, she asked Malcolm, “Would it be annoying for me to ask you more questions?” He said, “Not at all. I find them refreshing.” “Really?” “Of course. Nobody asks anybody straightforward questions anymore.” “They don’t put you on edge or anything? Because I’m about to ask you why you didn’t drink any alcohol last night – but I’ll get to that. They don’t put you on edge, questions, do they?” “No, they don’t put me on edge.” He laughed a bit while saying, “Usually, though, I don’t know what the questions are going to be. But I feel prepared now. I feel very comfortable.” He was reassuring her playfully. “So why weren’t you drinking at all last night? Is this an AA sort of situation, should I be more sensitive?” Even this kind of brashness was not specifically insensitive, but detached enough to lift the gravity off them, it seemed. “Luckily,” Malcolm said, and he only engaged her with the corner of his right eye and he moved his right eyebrow or his neck in slight accordance at various points as he spoke, “this is not an AA situation.” He smiled. “I am currently taking a medication that interferes with my drinking, as it were.” “What kind of medication?” “Antidepressants?” This statement came out like a question, similar to the way hors d’oeuvres are offered politely, with the built-in option of refusal. “Ah, antidepressants. In high school, we called them happy pills. So what kind of antidepressant are you taking?” “Specifically?” “Yeah, more or less.” “Well,” and he put his teacher voice on, “I am taking a kind of antidepressant medication that falls into the category of so-called selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors.” “Oh, I’m familiar.” (Another trick, but this one on the mind.) But she didn’t want to diminish his diagnosis, so she offered thoughtfully: “Are they helping?” Sophie’s question hung in the air between them as Malcolm soberly gave it consideration. He wondered how to internalize that, helping. “Well.” He wondered how to judge it. “They do cut out most of my highs and lows, so there’s less of a mood swing I have to control.” He was making demonstrative swooping motions with his hand. “But anyway.” “How long have you been taking them?” He puffed out his cheeks, counting. “Seven months?” There was nothing really to be said about it beyond this by either one of them. But Malcolm felt compelled to share, “It’s funny you ask, though,” after a neglected pause, “because I actually didn’t take them today.” He turned his head fully to see her, and now she was getting sleepy and only formulating inquisitive facial expressions instead of more questions, so he said in response: “I left them at home.” She smiled and closed her eyes slowly as if dozing for a blink. “Figures.” Then: “It’s probably better that way.” “How do you figure?” He was just curious. She made an I-don’t-know expression with her eyes and mouth. “Misery loves company. Medications belong at home.” For nearly one hundred miles, alongside the railroad shit-towns and the unexpectedly open highway, they traded stories of addictions gone wrong. Among them, between them: money, sex, alcohol; cocaine, sleeping pills, snuff, weed; narcotic painkillers; and caffeine, naturally, which didn’t count and wasn’t impressive to either one of them. Most of the addictions were habits more than addictions and had been relinquished and reclaimed as often as necessary in recursive fashion, until with luck all mental voids and vacancies had become otherwise occupied with something like health. (Medications belong in the home above all because these requisite relapses should be conducted in comfort and privacy.) Somewhere along the highway south of Middletown, they smelled it before they could see it: there, along the shoulder of the road, was an abandoned-looking van engulfed entirely in flames. Anything that might have been inside of it was no longer worth accounting for, or worth anything. Fire shot out of the windows and from under the hood of the van and also from underneath the van itself, and as Malcolm and Sophie slowed down with the traffic which passed it by, awestruck, they heard the galloping pop of the tires. Still just the flames. Then when they were further down the road and the van was just of ball of hot light in the rear-view mirror, there was a bigger, final, pop; and then car horns and brakes. “Jesus.” “We should take a break.” There was a tangible comfort in knowing that they would be leaving the highway at the next exit no matter what. “Where the hell are we, even?” Southington was, presumably, the town tucked into the valley among some green hills next to the city-line sign. Malcolm took the circular exit ramp both too fast and too early, the way rustled out-of-towners do. “Jesus, did you see that van?” he said dumbly at the stop sign. “I hope no one was in it.” It was the kind of conversation people usually have only in their heads. Malcolm turned left at the stop sign, somewhat instinctively driving towards whatever he had the best view of. In the dusk-time darkness, headlights had no particularly direct effect. One of the lights inside the car suggested to him that they find a gasoline station; not urgent, but prudent nevertheless. Sophie uncurled her body fully for the first time in three hours and sat upright, suddenly alert. “I need to pee.” “Hold it for a minute.” Less than a mile down this off-road, this twinkle-tended main street, was a gas station of modest proportions, presumably to accommodate this village’s modest consumptions. It looked, somewhat like everything else, abandoned and left to rust. Malcolm’s car wasn’t recently washed but was glowing in comparison. It was only when he drove up onto the shallow curb of the station that he spotted a figure inside a booth who walking out, wiping his hands on his chest and thighs, not looking at the car or at anything in particular. He was greasy and oily and probably stronger than he looked. He looked like a lifer, more or less, grown completely from the roots of this place, Southington, boring, but coping, neither happy nor sad to be growing old and accustomed there. At the pump, Sophie hopped out of the car, bouncily asked the man for the restroom, and then disappeared around the corner. Malcolm stayed with the car. He, too, emerged from his door, and there was a momentary face-off between him and the other man when it was unclear which of them would pump the gas. In New Jersey, all the pumps are full-service. The other man, walking slowly around the back, still wiping himself and checking out the car, looked at the license plates and walked over to the pump. So Malcolm stood outside his car door dumbly, and stretched. Eventually, he sat on the hood of the car, gazing around studiously but casually, and he spotted a bucket and squeegee next to a garbage can. He had begun walking towards it when he heard Sophie coming back around the corner sooner than he would have given her credit for. “Malcolm!” she was shouting breathlessly as she ran towards him. Instinctively, he became scared: “What is it?” “You have to see this.” She grabbed his arm and tried leading him away. Malcolm looked around for the other man, who was now distracted amongst some clip-boarded receipts in his booth. He tugged back against Sophie, cautiously reluctant to become too whirled up in her mania. “I have to see what?” “I can’t tell you. You just have to see it.” “Well where is it?” “It’s in the bathroom. Come,” she pulled him with her whole body now, “come with me. It’s not dangerous.” “It’s not vomit, is it? Because I’m afraid of vomit.” He was leaning back and taking quick little steps, bracing himself against her full momentum. With his arm under hers, she was pulling him along. When his little steps became bigger and slower, she reeled him in by the wrists so that it actually hurt him to disobey. “It’s not vomit, Malcolm. Honestly, get over yourself.” Another tug. “Let’s go.” The restrooms were around the corner of the station’s shitty run-down building. Malcolm wondered how anyone could go – really, go – here; he would no doubt clench and recoil involuntarily with disgust. He was surprised to see two separate locked doors, one for men and one for women as indicated by the figures; the key to the doors was the same, though, and it was looped with a single ring and hung on a hook in between them. Sophie removed the key, as she had no doubt done just moments before, and forced it into the rusted lock of the ladies’ room door. She was still holding Malcolm’s arm. Inside the restroom, the light was already on and had the kind of flicker that made him itch with invisible gnats. Typically, the whole place was run to shit. None of the appliances were actually whole: there was a broken gap in the toilet seat and the mirror above the sink had long been displaced and perhaps moved somewhere hidden long ago. He didn’t dare look into the sink. “Look in the toilet,” Sophie said. “No! I am not looking in the toilet.” “Look in the toilet,” and she had a stern look on her face that he vaguely recognized but understood immediately. She was still holding his wrists, but his back and head were turned towards the door and he hadn’t seen anything yet that might give him nightmares later. “Would I bring you in here to look at something disgusting?” she asked. “This whole place is kind of disgusting,” he said, and he finally turned slowly towards her. “It’s not vomit in there, is it?” he asked one more time, this time more pleadingly. “No.” “And it’s not a tampon or anything like that?” And she broke into a chuckle. She shook her head and pointed to the toilet. She wouldn’t say anything else until he looked for himself. The only way to do it was to shoot his eyes inside the bowl too quickly for him to take in anything other than rudimentary features – colors, shapes, anything blurrily idiosyncratic – before deciding to take a closer look. He shot his eyes in and then out, down at the tile grouting colored by mildew. The instinct to do a double-take was there, but he paused, almost wanting to guess if he had seen something or had simply made it up. He shot his eyes in again and then let them linger there, disbelieving. A goldfish belongs in a fish bowl, or in a sound, but not in a toilet bowl, or swimming in piss. Malcolm looked at Sophie wildly. “This was just in here?” She nodded. This goldfish was fat in very strange places, he thought. It was rounded at the mouth and gills, of course, but then awkwardly bulbous near its tail fin. Miraculously, it was moving, but only incrementally. “Hm,” Malcolm said. “Well that’s interesting.” She nodded, she was only nodding now. Something about this amused her contently and Malcolm didn’t know what it was at all. “Well.” He cleared his throat. “I can understand why you wouldn’t want to piss on a goldfish. Maybe you want to use the gents’? Although I’m sure it’s more fucked up than this place right here.” He looked back into the toilet. At this, Sophie’s posture became more aggressive. “We cannot leave him in there.” “Him?” “The fish.” “Oh, the fish. So, what, you want us to take the fish?” “Of course we’re taking the fish. Honestly,” and she began fussing with the plastic trash liner which, ironically, was the only clean and untouched thing around. She pulled it out of the trash can completely and from the bottom end of it tore off a corner. “You’re going to have to reach in there and grab him, are you ready?” She was smiling at him broadly now. “You want me to reach in there? No.” There had to be a better way. “Why don’t you give me that —” he was pointing at the little plastic baggie she had fashioned, “— and I’ll scoop it up. Him. I’ll scoop him up.” “Do you really want him swimming around in toilet water?” “He’s swimming around in toilet water right now.” “Malcolm.” Sophie’s intentions were often calming, even cooling and this time controlling. “We are trying to enhance his condition.” His eyes were unblinking. “Okay? This is for the benefit of our fellow animal kingdom. And besides, I’m growing tired of your cowardice.” She fumbled with the faucets since one of them worked and the other didn’t. She filled her little plastic bag with water from the sink at the same time as saying, “We’re not leaving here until you reach your hand in there and cup him in it and pull him out and drop him to safety right here in this little plastic bag.” (If this were his own bathroom in his own home, Malcolm would have relieved his heady nausea by filling the sink with tap water and putting his face in there, eyes open; if, and only if.) Malcolm stepped towards the toilet bowl again and realized that he’d have to lift up the seat to do this effectively. So he did this with his fingers gingerly; too gingerly, in fact, so that it slid from his grip and he had to start lifting it all over again. This time he just wrapped his fists around it and gave in to the slippery grip of the dank grime. “This is disgusting,” he said, and as he moved his hand towards the water, he stopped to examine the fish. “Not the fish. The fish is actually quite beautiful.” Sophie stood close behind him with the bag of water in her hands. She was like a spoutless fountain. Malcolm dipped his fingertips into the diuretic-piss-water and noticed how they seemed suddenly detached from his body. He recalled a vague understanding of why, something about the refractive properties of light that made it difficult to gauge depths and distances under water. The goldfish swam lazily around his fingers, and it seemed to have fins everywhere that scraped against him somewhat sharply. He worked his hand into a cup underneath it, so as not to displace it and take it by surprise although it might have already been too late for that, and he saw underneath the water that the grooves of his palm were in fact exceptionally deeper than he’d realized. He wiggled his fingers, fascinated by the reluctant way they dragged through the water, stopping to imagine briefly that his palms were like treads hydroplaning underneath. And when he finally lifted his cupped palm just above the surface of the water, the goldfish automatically keeled onto its side and flapped its tail and other fins so vigorously that it smacked its way off the surface of Malcolm’s hand and its fins became wings and it went up instead of down, as these things normally go, and it suddenly dived splashlessly back into the bowl as Sophie squealed with delight. It was graceful in its movements, and more alive now. It swam upside-down and downwards and then arced up again, no doubt pleased with itself. Now Malcolm had to use both hands. Again, when he lifted up above the bubbly meniscus, the fins flapped in soggy waves that tickled slightly. Sophie swept in quickly with the bag, and he dropped it in. Malcolm suddenly realized that he was short of breath and hadn’t been breathing for the duration. “Very good, Malcolm!” she said as she tied up the bag. “Now we have a little friend here to accompany us home.” She held the bag up near her face and the fish, from where Malcolm was standing, appeared exaggeratedly fat in very strange places, and then exaggeratedly thin, and then curved, and then flat, swimming around in its bag. “He needs a name.” Malcolm said, “He looks like a Marcus Aurelius.” This had come out of nowhere. Then: “His condition does look somewhat enhanced,” Malcolm said to Sophie as he leaned in to it. The goldfish, scales rippling like armor in the refractive light of the invisible gnats, swam nose-first right up to the inside surface of the bag. Sophie said, “He’s giving you a kiss.” Malcolm leaned just further forward and then kissed it.
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