“You and I always fight about the same things too,” Alicia said.
“We’re working on it though,” Aaron said. They were. They had even come up with a plan, that whenever one of them started to get angry, the other would let them know — show them how useless it was — and then they would hold each other. “We have the plan.” He laughed. Actually, he had come up with the plan; it had been his idea!
“What are you so happy about?” Alicia said.
“I’m not,” Aaron said. “I’m actually really, really, really worried.” He tickled Alicia until she fell off the bed, onto the carpet, from where she crawled to the bathroom. They were getting lazy. They weren’t trying anymore. Alicia shouldn’t be crawling like that, Aaron thought slowly, that’s strange and unhappy. He waited for her, but fell asleep.
For some time now Aaron had been writing every day. There were moments when he felt sudden blots of something — truth? serotonin? worse, cholesterol? — in his head, new and startling things, and he’d resolve them into words, and there would be some complicated, ulterior, and life-affirming, he suspected, pleasure in that; and he even felt, sometimes, the somewhat comforting beginnings, maybe, of something like a career. But he had certain disillusionments about writing that he felt he could not ignore. He didn’t like the subjectivity of it. He liked a thing to be perfect and meticulous and all-encompassing and, finally, unchangeable — unworryable. But there were, he knew, only momentary perfections, which were not perfections at all, but delusions. It worried him. Could one delude oneself through a life? Yes, he knew. Probably that was the only way.
But Aaron was not good at delusion. He had, in his life, he suspected, learned something, grasped some knowledge — in a once and random, adolescent way, like chicken pox, or else in a worked-at way, like a skill; probably somehow both — that prevented him from moving entirely into the delusion of a thing. And he had learned this something very early in his life, he knew, as he could not remember ever having really believed in anything. Not in religion, which made him restless, the cul-de-sac of it, how it turned you around a little, patted you on the head, held block parties in celebration of itself; not in society, with its earnest system of nonexistence, how it existed, really, in the unhappened future, in progress and realization; and not in himself, as what did it mean to believe in oneself — wasn’t that just a sneaky way of proclaiming yourself God? It was, and Aaron especially did not believe in anything as vague and clichéd — and with as many capitalization rules — as God.
Yet he nevertheless had always been able to play along, to live mostly contently, he guessed, and sanely — as he had a small talent for meaningfulness, for patching together cultural units and other people’s beliefs into his own makeshift sensibilities and short-term convictions. He could take a thing from the world and fold it over, like a handkerchief, make a little wad of it, and then pack it inside of his own heart, as a staunching thing, a temporary absorber of new blood, a thing to pump and pool into — honestly and without too much cynicism — and it was in this way that he was okay, he felt, at living; he was pretty good at it, probably as good as he would ever be.
In class they discussed Aaron’s story about his parents, which Aaron had given up on, leaving in, among other things that should’ve been cut, a non-sequitur about the mother’s son feeling fluttering and doomed as a hummingbird with a spinal disease and a description of the father’s head that was intended to imply worry but instead implied, if anything, Aaron knew, cold-slice bologna—his pocked and boyish eyes stuck like salt-washed olives in the peppered meat of his face. It was called “Eddy,” which was the name of the son in the story. Aaron had wanted to avoid in the title irony, cleverness, smugness, frivolousness, profundity, melodrama, condescension; and had ended up not with sincerity, he felt, but a woozy, resounding sort of tonelessness and maybe a little — or possibly a lot of — irony.
“This is a serious story,” Aaron said. It was. Or at least he had wanted it to be. Or rather, he didn’t want the class to assume it was parody, which they would otherwise do. If anything, it was satire. Though truthfully, Aaron knew, it was probably less a story than twenty pages of failed sentences, a few of which worked, if precariously, as jokes.
“Serious,” said the teacher. “What do you mean?”
“I don’t know. When I wrote it … I had this mean look on my face. I had a piece of paper taped on the computer screen that had all the synonyms for ‘existence’ written on it.” He didn’t want to talk about his story anymore. He wanted to talk about existence. What was it? What was to be done about it?
“I looked up existence the other day,” someone said. “A synonym for it — the internet said — was the word ‘something.’ I didn’t get that.”
“ ‘Something’ can be a synonym for everything,” Alicia said. “Anything.”
“Good insight,” the teacher said. He smiled a bit wildly at Alicia.
“Good job, Alicia,” someone said, and began to clap. Other people clapped. Some people stood, and soon everyone was standing and applauding, Aaron the loudest. His story felt puny now; felt, in a distanced and forgiven way, sort of perfected — it was but a moment in all the others, a single squishy, lopsided beating of some imperfect but trying heart; a happened and unfixable thing.
After the standing ovation, someone said something about D.H. Lawrence and clams and everyone laughed. There was a long and pleasant silence, everyone smiling, and then someone asked Aaron if he had read Antonya Nelson; she wrote about families too. Someone else said something about Nelson Mandela, and then talked about his own life — his crazy life! — for quite some time, which could sometimes happen, usually near the end of a class, and was looked upon by classmates not with contempt, but with sympathy and understanding; sometimes you just needed to talk about yourself for five or ten minutes straight.
Alicia’s story was workshopped a few weeks later, around Thanksgiving.
She was a strict autobiographical writer, not even changing names. It made the class alert and, at first, preachy — they could critique her actual life, her flawed and disgusting life! — but then hesitant and depressed, as who in the class knew how to live their own life? Who could say what was better for Alicia, what was wrong and how to change?
“Why does Aaron stay with Alicia if he doesn’t love her really,” Aaron said. They had become very open with one another recently, had both admitted, among other things that made them nervous, having wished sudden and accidental deaths onto their parents, as they were both fearful and unwanting of what would otherwise happen — their parents would still die, of course, eventually, but what before that? Fifteen years of Alzheimer’s? Dementia? Cancer? Aaron and Alicia felt they would not be able to deal with any of those. It had brought them closer, Aaron felt. In the farness of their worrying — the tedious escape of it, how it shuttled you slowly away from real life, into a sort of deep space — they had come, truly, closer to each other, in an echoed, gaping-expanse-between-them way. Or not. Probably not.
“He isn’t really staying with her, I think. He’s more just not leaving her,” someone said. “There was that thing about a two-year lease. They signed a two-year lease.”
“What do people think about Alicia,” Alicia said. “Should she move home?” Before leaving for college, she had helped her sister take care of their brother, who, Aaron learned — with vague recognition — from the story, was a bit abnormal due to sleeping pills he was given as an infant. Alicia felt poisoned and covered in nets, like in a fishing net with poisonous starfish and things in it, said the story. She was not a good writer. Though, actually, Aaron really liked that line. It had an alien, adolescent charm to it.