There’s one more place I want to look, Frank said. After that, if I don’t find him, I’ll call the police. You’re at home?
Yes, I said, glancing left and right. I’m at home.
Diane is leaving me voice mails, he said. Call her and tell her what I told you. Tell her not to call the cops.
Okay, I said. I ended the call. Then I dialed 911. I wasn’t coherent but they listened.
I couldn’t have said clearly what I was starting to think. Frank would row out, I guessed. A motor might be heard. He would slide Gavin into the water, and call the police after rowing back to shore. The book Frank would write — Gavin lost forever, just as his doctor’s theories had begun to help him — would be devastating, with details no one could deny about moments in Frank’s office. Throughout the book there would be difficult moments, like the scene I’d witnessed, and the therapist would bravely confront his own limitations. It would end with a sad chapter about the psychologist’s fruitless search, his new understanding — as days passed and the boy was not found: not in the park, not in the surrounding city, nowhere — that life for kids like Gavin is even harder and more unpredictable than he had imagined. A much more exciting book than one about Gavin’s resistance and Frank’s anger.
I hurried toward the park entrance. The rain was heavier now, and I was soaked through, freezing — but I wished I were even more uncomfortable, so as to have something simple to think about, something that could be remedied. The police car came quickly, but it felt as if I waited for a long time. I pointed the way down the gravel drive toward the water.
Spring Break
by John Crowley
Yale University
So the last proj I did junior year at Spectrum Cumulus College was with my bud Seymour Chin, who was in Singapore — I was in Podunk, OH. It was a proj in Equality Engineering, required, tough but not so. We picked Toiletry and had scads fun and then did the CGIs, and we thought if the world had these johns and janes it would be equal more, definitely. Remembering now the probs we thought up. “Transgen women can’t go in the women’s jane, hey,” Seymour said. “They’re men actually, they might abuse.”
“Nah,” I said. “They got no interest, yah? What you got to do is keep the lesbians out. They could abuse. They got an interest.”
“Obvi.”
“Ident,” I said. “Run a kit. Ten thousand self-ID’d lesbians amalgamed in half-length pix. Surveillance cams can scan and match in.9 seconds. Match, they get sent to the john.”
“Harsh.”
“Gentle it. Just a few words.” I flashed him words: Please use the adjoining facility.
“I see a problem.”
“Yah?”
“Yah. No one in the john knows you’re a les.”
I pondered. “So if they go in the john men could abuse.”
“Yah.”
So all that was actually utter dumb and from old, but I was on propranolol and Seymour was drooping, four a.m. Singapore, which is five p.m. mytime the day before. Next meet we switched the thinking to unigender, made progress. Can’t remember how we scaled it, but we got PASS on it and that’s what counts.
Then: Spring Break! My first Spring Break, because costs. Fam decided this time to go in on it for me, because PASS. Max lucks!
All over the world, Spring Break time.
Received welcome package in gmail, unzipped it. Nice oldtime fonts. Heyjoe! Great year, yah? Now’s for rest-n-rec, yah? As a fulltime student of Spectrum Cumulus you hereby receive a special invitation to Spring Break at our Grandparent College, “Yale”!
Went on a bit about Yale, this place, the oldness, the motto — Luxe y Vanitas, same as ours — and the many years that SCU.edu/sg and Yale had worked together, and-cetera. Pix and vids, leafy, stony, grassy. This was to be so fun.
Then Seymour Chin checked in. Seymour hates-hates to type like words, so what I got back was a string of emojoes to express. I got the meaning right away.
“Heyjoe, we not on?” I flash.
Seymour has affluenza — nose running, coughing, sick like a dog. (Do dogs get specially sick? Don’t know. Never had one.) Not going to make it, not on day one anyway.
I’m on my own at Yale.
So it used to be I guess that Spring Break was in the you know spring, like March. Everybody left Campus and went to crazy-hot places to party — not like now. But who wants to go to New Haven in March? If not snow, rain, ice, and-cetera. So they do it in June, which was when back then a student would get their diploma. And since there’s nothing else going on there then these days, good time. But they still call it “Spring” Break. Know what? You can actually get a train ride (take a train, they say) from New York up to New Haven, get off. There’s a Shuffle that meets this train and takes you to Campus. Town is wastrel, but then you drive through this stone portal — like in a fantasy RPG — and there you like are.
Wow. The place is old. The buildings look like castles. Old corroding I guess granite. Pointy windows. Pointy tops. Pointy everything. And what happened just as we drove in and down this avenue? Bells started ringing. They were playing songs, but with bells, somewhere up in a tower. Ancient songs I remember from as a kid. I sort of teared up a little it was so amazing.
We were led through another portal into this big square of lawn, a quad it was called — four sides, get it? — where there were long tables and these young guys and women were waiting to hand us stuff, all of them waving and saying Welcome and Hi and Get in Any Line. The spring-breakers were some of them zonkered with sleeplessness, come from around the world like Seymour Chin did or actually didn’t, others up for it and giving high fives and whatnot. The woman I came up to checked my name/pic on their pad, and started piling things in front of me, calling out the names as they did it. Sheets and stuff! Orientation materials! One six-pack beer! One swechirt (with huge white Y on it)! Goodie bag! Hat!
It was a blue flat cap — blue for Yale, Old Blue — and it had a number on the front, 2017. “What’s that?” I asked them.
“What’s what?” they said.
“The number.”
“Heyjoe, that’s your class!” They took it and put it on my head and tugged it down, laughing, really white teeth. “Class of twenty-seventeen!” they said, and shook my hand. “Welcome to Yale, Yalie!”
So the hat and the number were for the old-time scenics too. I laughed with them — they were sort of actually quite hot. “2017!” I told them. “That’s like my dad’s year!”
“Yeah!” they said.
Actually my dad didn’t go. Because army. But if he had.
I loaded all this stuff up plus my kit and started off. A whole bunch were headed for the dorm we were assigned, only it wasn’t called a dorm, it was called a college, which they said in this special way, a College. Why a college in a college? Who knew. My orientation pack explained, probs. And it was a castle too. It had a fucking coat of arms over the archway. All of us pouring in through the iron gate yelling, like overthrowing peasants, minus torches.
I have seen actually a lot of dorms, the boys and women in their little rooms, bunk beds, the stuff that happens. Squeeing and flaming on, the micro cutoffs and docked Ts, pizza boxes, selfies. Actually, now I think of, a lot of that was in porn. Vintage porn, but it gave you the scenics. The room I actually got was not like a dorm room. It was more fantasy RPG. The monk’s lair or hmmever. A marble fireplace. Like wood walls made of oak. Dropped my stuff and sat down on a futon couch and felt a little — you know — I don’t know.