Aaron went and held Alicia’s hand. There was a helicopter somewhere, and they listened to it; some chopping, flapping noise that maybe was a bird, or a bug — a dragonfly or moth, flying close.
“I’m staying here,” Alicia said. “I’m moving home. I just decided, I’m not going back to school or Florida.”
Aaron thought about their two-year lease. He thought about moving back home, with his own parents. “I like it here,” he said, and waited for Alicia to say something else, but she didn’t. He thought about their plans for spring break, for right now — hadn’t they made plans?
They went back to her house and ate fruit. They watched TV.
“My brother doesn’t even know who I am anymore,” Alicia said in bed. She was crying. “My sister’s said things to him. They hate me. I deserve it. I’m so selfish. Why did I leave? I shouldn’t have majored in English. My sister could have gone to college too. She would’ve double majored in useful things. I wasn’t thinking, ever! What was I even doing? I didn’t think one thing in four years.” She laughed a little, but it was mostly just crying, and she kept talking, and while she talked she moved — she shook a little; her chest, in fits — and Aaron, holding her, felt that moving, the turning of things inside, the loosening of it all, the press and shape of the bones in her back, all of which he was just faintly aware of, as he was thinking hard, thinking of something for both of them, something not to absolve what they were doing, but to absolve what the world was doing, what it was. And in this thinking, then — this incommunicable, impossible thinking; why are there things? — he began to feel a leaving, a vagueness and gravitylessness of self. And from some faraway place, now, from some else and momentary place, he became aware of a strange and bodiless squirming in his arms, a warm and pulsing thing, shifting against him in revisions — in increments and illusions — as he held, carefully, on, and began to fold and pack at himself, so that he might enter, finally, the experience of this thing, and staunch it, at its free and anonymous source, its phantom, nowhere heart that surely must be there; hidden, maybe, but real, and findable — if one wanted enough, and tried hard — as, if not, then where was one to go with all their white and toneless feelings? Where was one to take all their changed and used-up feelings of youth?
Love is the Indifferent God of the Religion in which Universe is Church
Sean had been spending his nights leisurely, with much intuition and very little actual engagement with the real world — the real world outside that was really happening. He was twenty-one. He lived with his older brother, Chris, in Manhattan, and dreamt mostly of love. These were terrible, cloying dreams. They involved prolonged moments of passion, vague and painted colors, and people sitting around in a sort of curtained and euphoric gloom, which was what love, in Sean’s dreams, seemed to be. He slept in the daytime, on the sofa, and would wake, sometimes, with such an awful, spongy feeling of love — the soggy cake of it pressed against his heart like another heart — that he would then move through the apartment, the one long room of it, like a hallway gone wrong, in an unenlightened sort of searching (where was the beloved?), not touching anything, but just moving, between things (piles of clothes, the TV, the low white raft of his brother’s bed), feeling husked and ancient and — sitting, then, back on the sofa — thankless, as what was there, in this cheap and witless world, to be thankful for? Not much, Sean knew. He didn’t like the world, and the world had perhaps grown weary of him.
The world was weary of him!
Though probably it was not even love that Sean dreamed of, but some sleight of love, some trick of crush or inwardly thwarted desire, like a chemical seed; or else some boldly fraudulent expectation — an expectation that leads a fantasy out into the real world, gets it an apartment and, illegally, a job — as Sean had probably never been in love. He’d once told a girlfriend that he loved her, but had then felt suddenly vanquished, as if in swift and arrow-y battle, on some nighttime field; as if the world, in that moment, had thought of him, and mastered him; memorized and set him aside, like a learned thing. The world was maybe finished with Sean. And yet — he remained. Alive, doing things (eating, writing a novel, moving to Manhattan), as there was still, and always, the feeling — the suspicion — that the world knew him, and loved him, that the world was trying hard to convey this, was forming itself a language, progressing gradually, thoughtwardly, and slowly, along. Which was, perhaps, the sensation of being alive — the reason why Sean existed, kept going — the waiting of that, the faith in it, that there was a big thing of love out there, a mansion of it, and that the world, however incompetent, was trying every day to get Sean there, was thinking of where he should go, and how.
Sean woke up to Annie talking. “I’ve been having the suicide-note dream,” Annie was saying. “I struggle with sentence structure, voice — is this me? is this my true voice? — I line edit, move the adverb around. I die finally of natural causes, which I deserve.” Annie was sitting on the bed, facing Sean, who lay on the sofa, under blankets. Chris lay beside Annie, on his back. He had the New Yorker, which he held above him in an excruciating way.
“Oh,” Annie said. “And sometimes I feel like my life’s out there, in outer space — a spacecraft or moon — and any moment it’s going to move down and smush me, all slow-motion-like.” Annie kept very still for a few seconds. She’s become jaded with herself, Sean thought tolerantly. “God,” she said, “my head aches. It aches with both a love and a longing for the present, changing moment. I can feel it changing.” She slapped a hand down behind her; it hit Chris’s thigh. Annie was Chris’s girlfriend.
“Massage me,” Chris said. He tossed the New Yorker onto a pile of clothes on the floor. He rolled onto his side, toward the window, which overlooked 29th street. There were faraway siren sounds, the rush and voice of city noise, much like a beach shore — a beach shore, though, with cabs instead of waves, buildings instead of gulls. It was late evening, and summertime.
Annie was chopping at Chris’s side. “Okay,” Chris said. “Stop.”
Sean closed his eyes to go back to sleep. He had been dreaming before, something watery and baffling. I want to learn, Sean thought. Swimming, he thought. Time swished and pocked inside of him, like a bowl of water with a fish in it that was also him. He wondered tentatively if he was asleep. He felt something on his legs. Annie had come over and sat on him. “I’ve got a sister,” she said. “Want to meet her?”
Something inside of Sean’s body, something small and squishy, shifted a little — a lymph node, perhaps.
“She’s Maryanne,” Annie said.
“Maryanne,” Sean said. He felt the long bones of Annie’s legs piling against his own.
“Annie,” Chris said. He lay wrapped in his blanket on the floor, which was wood. Annie went to him. “Let’s go to my place,” she said. “To have incredible sex.” Chris unwrapped himself and stood. “There’s no such thing as incredible sex,” he said. Annie beamed at him. She laughed. They went to Annie’s place. Sean fell asleep. When he woke, he drank orange juice. He sat on the sofa in the dark. He was thinking about showering — the hard-tiled attack of it, the soap always slipping away like an unrequited, mocking love. The water would be never-ending. Unstoppable. To take a shower, it seemed a risky, harrowing thing. To build a fire, Sean thought. To build an enormous bonfire. Sean stood up. He lay on his brother’s bed. Love, he thought. Maryanne, he was thinking. He felt wild and agitated. He didn’t like this feeling — it was something of the past, twisting forward and back in knots — as he had recently, and for some time now, been a calmer person, someone with an unsentimental acceptance of things, a discerning and philosophic nature, no teenage angst, no vague desperation; because waking at night, Sean knew, was a changing thing. Each time, you craved less, you forgot a little of the shiny-loud world, the exploding appliance of faces in daytime — the dancing, thrashing equipment of things in the sun. You woke at night and something serene and foliaged gathered behind your eyes — a pale cache of forest — and, waking up, moving out from your mind, a part of you stayed there. In that dimmed place, some fragile, once-hurt part of you said, “What’s this. This is nice. Okay then. Stay here then.”