“I’m bored,” Steve said. “Where are you going?”
Ellen went in the kitchen.
Steve stood and went in the kitchen.
“Cook me a seven-course meal,” Steve said.
“Or I’ll kill you.”
“Go away,” Ellen said. She walked into the living room.
Steve followed and pushed her from behind.
“You’re in my way,” Steve said.
Jan came out of the computer room holding the phone in front of her.
“It’s for you,” she said.
“Who?” Steve said.
“Both.”
Steve took the phone. “Hello?” he said.
Ellen turned around a little. She walked toward a plant and looked at it. A plant. She walked vaguely in some other direction.
“Steve,” Steve’s dad said on the phone.
“Hi,” Steve said.
“Your mother said you’re all coming to visit me,” Steve’s dad said. “All five.”
“You should visit us,” Steve said.
“No,” Jan said. “He won’t leave.”
“Yeah he will,” Steve said into the phone and at his mom. “You can make him leave.”
“Where is Ellen?” Steve’s dad said.
Ellen was lying on the sofa facing the back of it. Her nose, eyes, mouth, and forehead were smushed into the sofa. Steve quickly walked there and sat on her. “I’m sitting on her,” he said.
“Don’t sit on your sister,” Steve’s dad said.
“She likes it,” Steve said.
Ellen squirmed a little.
“She likes animals,” Jan said.
“She likes everything,” Steve said.
In middle school Andrew’s World Cultures teacher, who smoked marijuana and always talked about taking the class on a field trip to Costa Rica, which everyone knew would never happen, had a party at her house and Andrew stepped on a window and broke it, then climbed through the glassless window to the back porch, where he and a friend, who Andrew, years later, living in Florida in his parent’s house — working as a pizza delivery man and obsessed, in a half-hearted way, with a girl from two years ago — never saw or thought about anymore, took cans of soda and threw them over the backyard fence, into a retention pond, or something. It was very dark out. Then someone — maybe Andrew — thought it would be fun to throw the cans over the house itself, to the front yard, so Andrew did that and hit a girl named Patricia in the leg. Andrew went to the front yard. Patricia was crying. Girls began to crowd around her. The small crowd of girls went into an SUV and the SUV left like an ambulance.
When Andrew was seventeen Steve came over with other kids. They played video games and poker. Andrew’s parents were not home. Andrew and Steve played drums and guitar until morning then went to school. Andrew drove. Steve was on his cell phone. While making a right turn Andrew put his head out the window and screamed “Shit” at a person in a car parked at a red light. Steve laughed and said into his phone that Andrew just screamed “Shit” at someone.
In college Andrew spent a few years not really doing anything or having regular friends.
He had a girlfriend for about a year and a half.
He wrote a novel. He met Sara.
They went to the grocery store.
She went to Florida with Andrew.
After a while she stopped talking to Andrew.
Andrew lived in Jersey City for a year.
One Saturday night it was snowing.
He was walking home.
The snow made the street very bright.
It was very quiet and late and very bright and Andrew felt strange.
In his room he sat on the floor.
He went to a Parisian-style café. He bought mashed potatoes and ice cream. It was very expensive. Andrew gave a twenty-dollar bill and the person said, “Do you want change?” Andrew hesitated and said “No.” In his room he ate the food on the floor. There was an enjoyment to being alive, he felt, that because of an underlying meaninglessness — like how a person alone for too long cannot feel comfortable when with others; cannot neglect that underlying the feeling of belongingness is the certainty, really, of loneliness, and nothingness; and so experiences life in that hurried, worthless way one experiences a mistake (though probably the awareness itself, of nothingness, was the only mistake; some failure of optimism or illusion, to be corrected, somehow) — he could no longer get at. He felt very strange. It was late and there was nothing to do. He had no Internet and lived in New Jersey.
He went to the refrigerator and drank his housemate’s wine coolers.
He did not know the housemate.
She lived upstairs.
They met in the kitchen once and the housemate’s mother was there.
Andrew shook hands with the housemate’s mother.
One weekend Andrew read Chilly Scenes of Winter by Ann Beattie.
He read half Friday night and half Saturday afternoon and it made him happy.
At night he showered.
He brushed his teeth in the shower.
He sat on the carpet.
He didn’t have a chair.
Something fell on him.
He put his hand on his back and felt something.
Then saw a millipede running away very fast under the bed.
He looked at the ceiling and felt afraid and went to sleep.
One Friday he lay on his back on the carpet.
His computer was on the floor.
He listened to songs off his computer.
He listened to a song he had recorded one summer alone in his room in Florida.
He listened to it repeatedly then listened to other songs repeatedly.
In the morning he was standing in the bathroom.
He looked out his window.
A cat was staring at him.
The cat averted its eyes.
Andrew knew of Mark from a mutual acquaintance. They saw each other on campus one day and Andrew walked to Mark and they talked. They began to meet sometimes, to complain about life mostly. They usually met at night. Andrew told Mark that Fernando Pessoa was severely disillusioned but probably not always very depressed, because his thoughts were more exciting to him than anyone else’s; and he understood the smallness and uselessness of a human life, did not believe in such a thing as ‘sincerity,’ and knew the possibility of a maid breaking a cup as the cup using the maid to commit suicide. Andrew told Mark to read The Book of Disquiet. Andrew said he had read all of Pessoa. Mark said he probably shouldn’t read that book. They went to readings, including one where Andrew read poems he’d written about how he felt. (“It’s just how I feel,” he’d told his creative writing class, Freshman year, when asked what his poems — half-page things that looked legitimate from a distance; though what, from a distance, didn’t? — were about.) They saw the new Batman movie and a week later Mark e-mailed Andrew and said there was a free concert in Battery Park. Andrew said he’d go. Andrew went. Yo La Tengo was supposedly playing. On the way Andrew began to make jokes about Yo La Tengo. “I feel like they’re not from Mexico, but New Mexico,” Andrew said. “I feel like they’re forcing me to exploit migrant farmhands somehow.” He went on like that for three blocks. “I can’t listen to any band associated with The Flaming Lips or The Shins,” he said, and pointed at people across the street who were wearing strange costumes, and asked if that was The Flaming Lips. Mark stopped walking. His face became indecisive. “Maybe I should go to this alone,” he said. Andrew felt stupid. (“How do you have fun?”) He didn’t know what happened. He stopped making jokes and said he would walk there with Mark then leave — go to a bookstore.