The Gauntlet

1

I was born twenty years ago, in Connecticut, to a healthy father and a sick mother. Because they found the tick late in my mother’s pregnancy, the doctors weren’t sure if I would be born with her disease. They ran dozens of tests, both before and after I was born, with laparoscopes and eight-inch needles. My father remained worried until I was two months old, after an intensive blood panel came back negative. He has always been a pessimist.

‘A perfectly healthy baby boy,’ the doctor said.

I’ve been lucky all my life. 

But when I was young, my mother was always sick. I don’t have many memories from this time, which is maybe a good thing. She would lie in bed all day, silent and sweating. Once a month, as a gesture, she would offer to cook dinner, and my father would let her, but she almost always returned to bed before the meal could be served, exhausted from her effort. My father would put me to bed and then he’d do the dishes. I remember the sounds of his work, the quiet clinking and splashing through the walls.

Because of the tick, my father raised me. To be able to say you raised someone, you have to be there for a small, specific window of their life. My dad was there during my window. My mother was not. I was in school then — kindergarten, probably, up until the third grade — but all I remember of it now is an earwaxy crayon smell and a carpet with the image of a town printed on it. Eventually my father showed me bigger maps, maps of the whole world. He told me all the continents used to be one big continent. Pangaea, it was called, though no one was there to call it that back then. At Pangaea’s center there was a desert, where the days were scorching and the nights were freezing cold. I thought the seven separate continents might be lonely. I wanted to bring them all together again.

One day my mother’s college friend came to our house. She had stayed in Philadelphia after graduating, and my mother hadn’t, and that was the last time they had seen each other. Her parents had just died; she’d bought a condo on Marco Island with the inheritance. She told my mother she should go and stay there and see if she didn’t feel better. As she spoke she broke a cookie into increasingly tiny halves. Her hands were very tan. She ate each half slowly. I doubled the pieces in my head. 2, 4, 8, 16…

When we visited Marco, my mom’s symptoms disappeared. It was the humidity, my dad said, not just the heat. He was delighted that she was ‘back to normal,’ but I hadn’t known her before she was sick. To me she was like a strange new relative. She swam in the Gulf of Mexico, she ate a large fried grouper sandwich in her bathing suit and smiled at me with tartar sauce on the corners of her mouth. I was so confused.

I was eight when we moved to Florida permanently. My parents bought a house in a sleepy beachside neighborhood on the mainland. Before I went to bed that first night, my father re-taped my world map onto my new bedroom wall. I remember struggling to fall asleep, and after a while I got up and looked at the map. Florida was yellow, and I suddenly understood that I was there, right at the bottom edge of the peninsula. I, my mother, and my dad were surrounded, on three sides, by water. Tears came to my eyes, but I wasn’t sad. The world seemed to wobble around me. It was like waking up from a dream.

The school was tiny and Christian. We all had to wear uniforms; scratchy polo shirts and khaki shorts or pants with black belts. Most days after recess someone would be sent home, crying and covered in ant bites. All the teachers pretended they didn’t see the teeming mounds that littered the playground.

The heat peaked in September. Then, at the start of every October, a massive storm would come, and the evenings would be cool again. The annual flood swept the ants away. We’d watch them from under the overhang as they emerged from their nests in the thousands, linked their coppery limbs together and formed a raft from their bodies. They’d set adrift and float away somewhere, not to return until spring.

One October afternoon, as we watched the ants clambering over one another, my classmate, a slouchy boy with a gap in his teeth, dared me to touch the raft that was forming at our feet. I refused and dared him back. I knew it was a bad idea, but some part of me wanted to see if he would do it. He shrugged and went out into the downpour. Our teacher warned, ‘Nicholas!’ He looked at me and reached his hand down toward the raft. In seconds the ants coated his arm in a twinkling metallic film. Strangely enough, they didn’t start biting until he freaked out and tried to drown them, dunking his arm in a large puddle.

My mother brought me to his house that evening to apologize. Nicholas’s house was farther inland, with a big backyard that looked out onto scrub forest. The inside looked like mine, but it smelled older. I recognized Mr. Orbison from school; he taught civics and coached the swim team. He got up from the couch and I shook his hand, and then he sat back down in front of the TV. The news was playing; a shiny and terrified-looking man was speaking in a loud voice about a bill to legalize prostitution in Oregon. Mrs. Orbison set down a dish and introduced herself to me and my mother before yelling for Nicholas. After three calls with no response, she spoke to me.

‘Very nice to meet you. Yes, we’ve heard so many good things!’ she said. ‘Nicholas explained to us, yes, that it was no fault of yours, just a case of’ — she searched for the words — ‘playground mischief.’ She nodded vigorously as she spoke. ‘Yes, I think you and Nick would really hit it off! Why don’t you go and see what he’s up to?’

Nicholas’s room was a mess. Clothes covered the floor, leaving only a few small stepping stones of bare carpet. The walls were yellow. A bottle of calamine lotion lay open on its side, oozing pink, opaque fluid onto a beige knit sweater. The ceiling fan ticked as it went. Nicholas stood slightly slouched and a bit off from the room’s center, looking down at the chaos like he was plotting how to clean it up.

I knelt and capped the bottle of lotion, and Nicholas turned and looked at me when he heard the sound. Just then I noticed two things about him: one, he had freckles; two, he looked more exhausted than anyone I had ever seen. The perpetual strained expression I’d initially chalked up to a mere sensitivity to the merciless Florida sun, I now realized, was instead the product of a sort of chronic weariness. It abated a little bit when he recognized me; he grinned through it.

‘Did you think it was funny?’ I smiled and said yes. He grinned. ‘Well it hurt.’

‘I’m sorry for daring you,’ I said, with a slowness and depth that I associated with sincerity.

‘It’s okay,’ Nick said. He spread his arms. ‘Now I got all this venom in me I can do what I want with.’

He taught me a video game. You were a gunman on an abandoned aircraft carrier out at sea. The carrier was teeming with enemies. You had to kill them all, and when you did a loud, triumphant sound played. He tried to teach me, but each button did an impossible number of things. Eventually I handed the controller back to him and just watched. He won, and the sound played. He pumped his fist. His arm was scabbed and slathered pink.

After some time Mr. Orbison appeared at the door, and Nicholas quickly switched off the console. ‘7:30,’ he said. ‘Time to swim.’ Nicholas rolled his eyes.

That, I think, was the start of our friendship.

I started training regularly with Nicholas and his dad. We’d attend afternoon practice at the school pool, then we’d get in Nicholas’s dad’s car and drive to his house, where our training would continue until my mother picked me up at eight. I’d usually fall asleep on the ride home.

Mr. Orbison taught me how to dive properly, to flip-turn, to swim backstroke in a straight line. My favorite stroke was butterfly; my legs pushing me upward, my arms pulling me forward, pulling my chest open, pulling air into my lungs. Mr. Orbison was an angry man, but a good coach. When I or Nicholas botched a turn, making poor contact with the wall, he would walk away from the water’s edge, breathing deeply with his fingers laced on top of his head. The pool was not screened in; if you stood outside in the evening you’d get eaten alive by mosquitoes. It was only safe in the water.

On two occasions, endangered gopher tortoises drowned in the pool. Mr. Orbison fished them out with a flimsy, sky-blue skimmer. Their shells were soft. Their eyes were chlorine-eaten, the color and texture of wet chalk.

With Mr. Orbison’s private coaching, on top of the hours I spent practicing with the school team, I improved tremendously, my split times surpassing Nicholas’s, surpassing even Mr. Orbison’s old high school records from the ‘80s. After some time I started noticing changes in my body. My chest and shoulders began to widen and harden; my lungs seemed to expand. Riding my bike to school in the mornings, I breathed as deep as I could. It was a powerful feeling. I felt like, if I wanted to, I could suck all the air out of the sky.

Once, on a drive back to his house, Mr. Orbison asked if I’d ever considered swimming competitively. Florida was great for it, apparently; he’d done it and knew several private coaches in the area who would likely be willing to take me on. He said an athlete like me should be looking ahead, strategizing which high school to attend to have the best chance in the college recruiting cycles. ‘They’re allowed to talk to you as early as sophomore year,’ he said, glancing at me in the rearview mirror. ‘You could be committed by age sixteen.

‘You too, Nick,’ he added.

After some hesitation I mentioned Mr. Orbison’s recommendation to my parents over dinner, and they told me it was a great idea. ‘If you want something,’ my dad said, ‘we think you should go for it.’ I was partially grateful for their support, but on a deeper level I felt that they didn’t really care whether I succeeded or not. Throughout their lives they’d both stuck to a script: my mother had stayed at home like her mother and her mother’s mother had; my father had taken over the family business, a neighborhood grocery store, when his father died. My parents were not people who had needed to create themselves. They wouldn’t push me, wouldn’t mold me into something truly great like Mr. Orbison or the private coaches would. I remember leaving the dinner table sulking, irked by their passivity. I did fifty push-ups and thirty pull-ups in my room. What did they care about, I wondered? If you want something, they had said. But what did they want?

I looked at the map on my wall, let my eyes drift lazily over the colorful continents. Florida was so close to Cuba. A woman had once swum that stretch of sea. She’d emerged sunburnt, her arms striped with jellyfish stings. The salt water had seeped into her skin, swelling her limbs to twice their normal size. That was real striving, I thought. Throwing yourself so deeply into something that it, in turn, enters and changes you.

By the time high school began I was competing every weekend, riding in my parents’ car to meets in Cape Coral, Ocala, Hialeah, St. Augustine. I saw most of the state that way. I wasn’t seeing much of Mr. Orbison anymore. On his recommendation, my parents had hired a new coach, Coach Tremolo, a compact Italian man with robust eyebrows and a round but solid potbelly. He booked lanes for me at the public pool and convinced my parents to buy me a waterproof watch and a heart rate monitor that strapped to my chest. He printed charts mapping my caloric exertion alongside what and how much I should be eating to replenish what I’d burned, and told me to tape them to my bedroom wall. I put them next to my map. I felt like a lab rat, but my splits were dropping fast, which meant that Tremolo was doing his job, and well. At a meet in Daytona in August of my sophomore year, I won a state title in the 100-meter fly. This qualified me for nationals, which took place the following month in Orlando. I placed third in my event, and afterward my parents and Coach Tremolo took me out to a bar & grill to celebrate. I had my first sip of alcohol that night. When the meal was over it was late, and all the adults were considerably drunk. Coach Tremolo asked me to call us a taxi back to our hotel. I stepped outside with my father’s phone, as the restaurant was still loud despite the advanced hour. A chilly wind disturbed the sawlike leaves of the palms as I told the driver where I was. The winter setting in.

When I hung up someone tapped me on the shoulder. It was a frizzy-haired woman with prominent cheekbones and a yellowish complexion. Beneath her eyes, which sat sunk deep into the sockets, she sported an archipelago of cystic acne. She wore flip-flops, tiny, tattered jean shorts and what looked like a necktie knotted around her bare chest. The skin on her neck was sunscarred and taut, revealing a perverse network of tendons straining against it. Her eyes were unbelievably bright. ‘You poor little thing,’ she said, grinning toothlessly up at me. I stood there, looking at her. ‘I won’t make you pay,’ she added.

The day I committed to college, my father suffered a heart attack. It was a Thursday; I got the call from the hospital while I was in school. My mother began with a preemptive assurance. ‘It’s bad news, but everything’s okay,’ she said. He had been making coffee in the kitchen just after they dropped me off at school from our celebratory breakfast with Coach Tremolo, where I’d accepted an offer to swim for a prestigious private university in California. My mother had heard the mug shatter from the living room.

Three hours later, everything and nothing had changed. In one sense my father seemed totally normal; in another his heart had weakened, barring him from strenuous exercise for the foreseeable future. I felt immobilized, almost angry at my inability to respond to this information. ‘What should I do?’ I asked, after a long silence.

My mother had arranged for me to stay with the Orbisons until my father was discharged. They needed to run a few more tests, and would likely keep him on bedrest until the following afternoon.

Mrs. Orbison drove me and Nicholas home from school that day. I don’t remember anything she said on the drive, but she spoke a lot, and at certain points she seemed close to tears. I think she thought that by being visibly sad in this way she was permitting me to be sad too. In fact I wasn’t sad at all, I just felt confused and paranoid. It felt wrong that my father’s body was breaking down right at this moment, at the peak of my own physical promise. I felt that somehow I had stolen from him, sapped his lifeforce.

Dinner was quiet until Nick launched into a random monologue about what we’d been learning in our environmental science class. I guessed he was initiating a sort of pivot, in his parent’s perception, from athletic to academic excellence. His father was half-listening. His mother nodded but did not look him in the eye. Saltwater from the Gulf, he was saying, is invading our aquifers, which is having a delirious effect on public health and agriculture.

‘Deleterious,’ Mr. Orbison said sharply, dropping his fork and knife and looking Nick in the eye.

Mrs. Orbison said, ‘I’m so sorry about your father.’

I’d started to suspect that Nicholas felt insulted by my success as a swimmer. I hadn’t meant to humiliate him, but I still worried that he felt shown up or replaced. I guessed it made it worse that my swim coach had been his father, who had probably wanted my achievements for his own son. 

7:30 came around, and as always Nicholas swam. I excused myself from training, aware that this was a privilege afforded me only because of the success I’d managed to find outside the Orbisons’ four walls. Nicholas was still stuck here, until somehow he proved himself. I wondered how long it would take, either for Nicholas to satisfy his father or for Mr. Orbison to give up the ghost. Both events seemed unlikely, but especially the latter, as the whole charade seemed essential to Mr. Orbison’s idea of himself as a parent. Outside of swim practice, I realized, he concerned himself very little with Nicholas.

Watching Nicholas swim in that pool, I was reminded of an orca I had once seen with my parents at SeaWorld. I saw it once from above, where the tininess of its tank was most evident. Then I saw it in greater detail through a pane of glass in the side of the tank. I pressed my face up against the pane, taking in the bold, declarative swaths of black and white on the powerful body. The flaccid dorsal fin, collapsed for lack of a strong current against which to right itself. The huge black expanse of the face hiding the dark, myopic eyes. I started feeling sad, so I stopped watching Nick and went wandering around the Orbisons’ backyard as a purplish dusk bloomed behind the cypress trees. I listened to the grasshoppers and the giant, invasive toads, the yipping of a far-off pack of coyotes. Nicholas’s distant gasps and splashes.

When I came back inside something had changed. I looked around to figure out what it was. A lamp was on that usually wasn’t, but that wasn’t it; it was the air; it seemed to hang differently in the close, stuffy rooms of that old house. I passed through the living room toward Nicholas’s bedroom. Everything felt strange, unfamiliar. But Nicholas’s room was the same as it always was; clothes strewn all over the floor, a faint and slightly sour sweat-smell. Nick patted the rug next to him without looking away from his game.

When he died, he turned to me and smirked.

‘I’ve got something.’

He went to his closet and brought out a Ziploc baggie holding two pre-rolled blunts.

‘Whose are those?’

‘My sister’s. She left them when she came for Christmas.’ Nick grinned.

‘I didn’t know you had a sister,’ I said. It was true; he had never said anything about her.

Nick nodded. ‘She’s in college. We don’t really talk.’

‘That’s crazy,’ I said. I was stalling. I had never smoked weed before.

‘It’s not that crazy. You don’t have to talk to your family. Like no one’s forcing you.’

‘No, I just meant it’s crazy that you don’t ever talk about her.’

‘You don’t have to talk about them either,’ he said.

We smoked in a park on the edge of the neighborhood, on a grassy mound where a transformer that provided energy to several of the area’s homes, including Nicholas’s, had been buried. When I put my ear to it, the ground hummed. The smoke made me cough until I retched, but then there was a pleasant, puffy feeling, where everything was flowing. I barely felt the mosquitoes that bit my bare thighs; still, we slapped them off of one another with increasing force, cackling uncontrollably, until we were full-on slap boxing. Each slap was a firework of pleasant pain, each moment of impact a piece of my body named and described by Nicholas’s whipping hand. We stopped when I cuffed Nicholas on his ear and he spun away, wincing. I came to him then, apologizing frantically, reaching my arms out toward him, and then he whirled around with a grin and socked me in the stomach. For a while I couldn’t breathe; it was like the insides of my lungs were stuck to one another. My throat and mouth were dry. I lay down on the berm and Nick lay next to me, apologizing just as I had, and then the pain receded and everything was fair.

And the hum of the transformer came louder now, closer to our ears which still throbbed from the force of our fists, and again I brought my ear to the ground to listen. From this site came light, flooding rooms and front yards, flowing from here outward in an abundant network. This subterranean box powered televisions, laptops, cell phones — it held up the very world we depended on, it kept it spinning. I felt unreasonably happy, happier maybe than I had ever felt, while listening to that incessant hum and thinking about energy, life-energy, emerging from the Earth in inconceivable excess. Then I noticed that neither of us had spoken in a while, so I opened my eyes, still listening to the hum, and Nicholas’s face was there, huge, unblinking, like the orca’s, right in front of me, and he kissed me, and I touched his neck and I kissed him—he smelled of chlorine, and I wrapped my arms around him. And the hum reverberated through us, echoing in our bodies until it seemed that we were the transformer, that we powered the fridge and the TV and all the lights inside and outside the houses. The light of all the neighborhood shone through us, and we were bathed in it; I could even see it through my eyelids, one massive bulb of energy, which then split in two, and then I heard the hum of a different motor, and I opened my eyes, and Mr. Orbison stepped down from the truck and onto the pavement before us.

2

Where before I’d been discomfited by the gulf of difference between me and Nicholas caused by my athletic success, afterwards I leaned into it as an excuse not to have to ask the questions that I have now asked and settled for myself. I didn’t think much about that night right after it happened, although I remember it perfectly; I don’t know whether Nick did or does. The following months passed with little to note. I took care to keep my grades up so as not to lose my scholarship, practiced in the afternoons with the team. I continued training with Coach Tremolo, although, frustratingly, my progress began to plateau. At the public pool I hit the same splits three times, for three consecutive weeks. I was still leagues ahead of my competitors, but I found I could no longer compete with myself. I passed my finals, I graduated.

Time passed. At home that summer, I read aloud to my dad, who lay on the couch in the living room following orders to exert himself as little as possible. He’d gotten some college kids to run the store while he was recovering. He was bored of looking at words, he said; now he wanted to hear them spoken aloud. We finished some dense war biographies, and then he told me he was sick of listening, too. He wanted to look, he wanted pictures. I found an atlas in a closet and brought it to him. But the book was too massive for him to hold on his own. ‘Whatever,’ he said. ‘Tell me the names of all the places,’ he croaked, ‘I will never get to see.’

I punched him on the shoulder. ‘You’re not dying, you asshole.’

Still, I read them aloud. His favorites were the names of bodies of water.

‘Lake Baikal,’ I read. ‘Gulf of Venezuela. Caspian Sea. Sea of Marmara.’

‘No. That’s a fake one. You’ve added it.’

‘Swear to God.’

I continued after a brief pause. ‘Brahmaputra, Andaman Sea, Celebes Sea.’ The names blended together; they sounded to me like poetry written in an alien language. ‘The Spree, The Rhine. Pinghai Bay. Lake Victoria. Tanganyika. Lac Leman.’ I kept reading for a long while, even after he’d fallen asleep.

The campus is unrelentingly sunny and lined with Mediterranean palms, their trunks thicker and more ornate than the bare, spindly ones in Florida. There are bikes and scooters everywhere; everything is paved. I live in the swim team’s off-campus house with most of my teammates. I am nowhere near the fastest swimmer on my team. I wish this did not bother me at all, but sometimes it does.

A few mornings ago an old man overdosed on the sidewalk in front of our house. I had seen him a few times before, walking up and down our street at night. Usually he wore a hot pink kids’ t-shirt and jeans with massive holes worn into the thighs. Convenient for shooting up. One of the juniors found him unresponsive and poured water on him and called the cops. I only woke up when I heard the sirens. I watched from my bedroom window as they gave him nasal spray and did chest compressions. After a surprisingly short amount of time, they called it, and I went back to sleep.

I’m meeting lots of people, through swim and in my classes. The swim house throws parties, and these are fun. I did coke for the first time at one of these parties, and it made me feel happy, and then lonely and horribly desperate. It’s a drug I’ve decided I might do again with a bit more caution. That first time I did too much; it made me feel that there was a hole inside me, an absence I’d been unaware of or subconsciously ignoring. In order to fill it I needed someone, or I needed the sort of peaceful stasis that having someone allows you to assume that you have. After all, there wouldn’t always be parties; I wouldn’t always be young. I had exchanged glances with a redheaded boy, but he moved away from me before I could start a conversation.

At the end of the night, I kissed one of my teammates, Eugene, who I really like. He’s from Georgia, very handsome, with straight black hair and pretty dark eyes. A faster swimmer than I am but an inch shorter. We’ve been seeing each other now for four months.

I came out to my parents a week before I left for college. They were bewildered but responded encouragingly, just as they had when I told them that Mr. Orbison had recommended they hire Coach Tremolo. I don’t make much of my sexuality nowadays. I hate how often it’s talked about as some odd cipher, something to constantly “work through” and figure out. That sort of thinking is so circular and narcissistic; it doesn’t at all interest me. We’re a quarter of the way through the twenty-first century. No one is going to tar-and-feather me for holding hands with a guy in downtown Palo Alto.

Eugene invited me to his parents’ beach home in the Outer Banks for spring break. The house is on stilts, so the first floor is in a way also the second. Eugene’s parents are both retired wealth management advisors; they spend their afternoons and evenings on their massive leather sectional, watching Wheel of Fortune and Deal or No Deal. In the mornings we eat fresh fruits that Eugene’s mother buys from the farmer’s market. We drink coffee and go on long beach walks, collecting shells and sea glass and turning over beached horseshoe crabs to mess with their legs. 

Eugene is always looking for new places to have sex. We’ve done it in the laundry room, in the mudroom, on the sectional while his parents are in bed, in his parents’ bed while they watch their game shows. One morning, when I ask Eugene why he wants to fuck in every room of the house, he gets defensive; he says it’s just fun, he doesn’t know. I drop the subject. We are walking on a trail next to the beach, which is so wide (or the tide is so low) that we see each wave crash a full second before we hear it. 

We stop and sit together on a bench facing the ocean. ‘Have I told you about my year abroad?’ I shake my head. I don’t know all of Eugene’s expressions yet, but I recognize this one; this one means he is deep in memory. He wears a slight frown, tilts his head slightly to the left as he remembers. His eyes go far out to sea. ‘I was in Kyoto; there was this scholarship that they offered at my high school. My host parents had me share a room with their daughter, with just a rice-paper divider separating her space from mine. Nearly every night, her boyfriend would sneak in, and I could hear everything they did. As it went on and neither of us said anything about it, I came to know their noises, with a little thinking I could match them to their movements; eventually it was almost like I could see them going at it. I slept terribly that whole year, and seriously considered going home because I felt so awful — not because I despised their actions, on the contrary I was so jealous of what they got to do, I desperately wanted someone, anyone, but I was too afraid and too lonely to act.

‘I think one thing I learned that year was that you can’t ever see yourself as a victim. The second you start thinking about it, that’s when you make it true. You allow your fear to make your life impossible. That’s the death sentence.’

I spot a spout of whalebreath on the horizon while he speaks.

When we get back to the house, Eugene’s parents tell us that the municipality has issued a 24-hour boil water notice. I turn on the TV, switch to local news from the game show channel. A tropical storm to the south, near the mainland, has breached the aquifer, compromising the area’s drinking water. The storm is headed in our direction. Eugene’s mother is zipping about in search of unopened water bottles. ‘Danger of bacterial infection,’ reads the ticker at the bottom of the screen.

And that evening, I get a call from my mother. ‘This is bad news,’ she says, and I am silent until she speaks again.

She tells me that Nicholas has died in a shooting. Not much is known about the motive, but the police have detained the gunman, and they suspect an unsettled financial score. ‘Something drug-related, I think,’ she says. ‘They found oxycodone in his system. I had heard rumors about him getting involved in these kinds of things, but it was nothing I felt I should be talking about or confirming.’ She pauses for a while. ‘He was such a good kid. I’m so sad, and I’m so sorry.’

For the next few hours I could not think at all. I only saw colors, mainly yellow and green, behind my closed eyes, and felt a heaviness in my chest. Eugene held me for a while, then he fell asleep with his arms around me and I encouraged him to go to bed, which he did after some protest. Now night has fallen, and thinking comes a little easier. I am sitting alone on the sectional, Eugene’s parents having finished their shows and gone to bed. Outside the house, the wind is picking up. 

Things come back to me in flashes; the sting of the Orbison’s overchlorinated pool water, those tortoises it drowned and blinded. Earlier on, the ants that Nick wore like a gauntlet, his shrieks as the pain and the realization set in. It could just as well have been me, I realize now — only I’d had encouraging parents where Nick hadn’t; I’d swum a bit faster and was a bit stronger and so I’d been expected to succeed where he was not. Was that really what it came down to, a faster split, a quicker stroke to save my life? I’d yielded to the encouragement of my parents, of Mr. Orbison and Coach Tremolo; I’d allowed their advice to structure my life up to now. What choice had Nick had? What dark, winding road had led him so low? And was the road his own?

Again I lose the ability to think. It’s as if a great chasm has opened behind me, and I am about to be swept off balance, to be knocked back into it.

Just then a sheet of rain pounds the roof of the house, and I jump. Through the window I see the sconces on the front stoop illuminating the thick, driving drops in cone shapes. Water batters the windows of the central room on all four sides, and the wind spits viciously, growling against the house’s siding, weaving among the stilts holding us up above the ground. The whole house seems to sway. The clock on the microwave resets to 12:00 and starts blinking — we have lost power. Here is the storm that the weatherman promised. That his word was good is a small but present comfort. 

I sit there on the sectional, listening curiously, until the squall passes and it’s simply raining.

My hands against his body, his body, inert on the forest floor. Ticks crawling curiously through the forest of his hair. The sound of rain.

The generator turns on, and a low hum fills the room.