“I’m more of a loner, generally speaking.”
“Try,” he said.
He bent down and kissed me then, gentle and unhurried, for a period of several minutes. I put up zero resistance. For some reason, the word “consent” rose over and over in the back of my mind, but I saw it as more substance than word: something liquid pouring over me, hot and wet, capillaries opened, skin flushed. Behind my eyelids the world turned red.
Afterwards, the group went on making their plans, although they apparently were keeping them vague in my presence. I was still curious but didn’t ask any questions. The sandwiches finished, Berto went into the kitchen and rinsed out the plastic bag, then hung it up to dry. Looking around, I counted the sleeping bags rolled against the walls — four, including the one on the cot — and realized they were all living here. Beyond the occasional backpack and Irina’s baby supplies, none of them had any belongings to speak of. It was bizarre and impressive at the same time. Most people know that we shouldn’t live as wastefully as we do, but could never change their lives as drastically as these guys had. Irina was right: they were living differently.
I cleared a space on the counter and listened. Berto continued to obsess over names and was repeatedly, uselessly shushed. Irina sang low-voiced songs to her baby and nodded in agreement, though rarely was it clear about what. In the dark room — most of the light came through the bedroom blinds I’d opened — time stretched itself out, slowly.
Stan and Angus were talking about water: the dearth of it around the globe, our reckless overindulgence in it as consumers, its diversion by financial interests. The government encouraged individual citizens to reduce their residential water use while giving tax breaks to corporations whose water use was massive in comparison. We were groundwater overdrafting, taking more out of our water account than we had. In China the water table was dropping by a meter a year. The Nile Valley was drying up. The Athabasca Glacier was receding. The Aral Sea was gone. The Ogallala Aquifer that extended through the West had been overpumped for decades. Half the world’s wetlands had been destroyed in the last century. The Yangtze, Ganges, and Colorado rivers rarely flowed all the way to the sea because of upstream withdrawals. Pollution was decimating freshwater fish species, twenty percent of which were endangered or extinct, and causing at least five million human deaths a year from disease. The world was rife with appalling scarcity, and people unwilling to face it.
These two had an array of statistics, and a familiarity with geography, that far exceeded mine, as well as a kind of fervor I’d seldom encountered after sophomore year of college. When Stan said that people were guilty of cynical and craven acts, he glanced at me, and I almost flinched; but then he looked back at Angus and went on to say that they planted desert shrubbery while insisting on hour-long showers every day. Soon everything would be ruined — most things already were ruined — and it was all our own fault.
“The world is going down the drain,” Angus said, and laughed. But as they talked on and on, Stan flexed his significant arm muscles as if he wanted to pummel some sense into each water delinquent, one at a time. He predicted there was going to be a war over water. He said there ought to be.
Who knows how long we sat there? The conversation was circular; Irina’s songs never ended; the dog whimpered and chased something in his sleep. Then my brother walked into the apartment — panting, flushed, bent beneath the weight of a massive backpack, carrying two six-packs of beer under each of his scrawny arms — and everybody fell quiet.
Without acknowledging anyone, Wylie set the beer down on the floor and slipped out of the backpack, which hit the floor with a clank of metal. Pine needles and other leaflike matter nested in his hair. He was wearing the same camp T-shirt he had on the night before, and smelled bad even from where I sat.
“I brought beer,” he said.
“Where’d you get all that, man?” Berto said.
“Stole it from some frat boys,” Wylie said, grinning, “then ran like hell.”
“Excellent!” Berto stood up to give him a high five, and the tension in the room visibly dissipated. Everybody started drinking, including Irina and me. After a terse hello, Wylie acted as if I weren’t there at all. Every once in a while Angus came over and put his arm around me or touched my shoulder, and I watched for my brother’s reaction, but there wasn’t one.
“Hey, Wylie, what do you think about this list of names I’ve got?” Berto asked, and they immediately plunged into a deep discussion of semantics and philosophical resonance and educational or promotional value. Irina and Stan disappeared and eventually came back with a bag of apples, a round of cheese, and several loaves of bread. The food wasn’t bagged, and I didn’t ask where it had come from.
As I was eating, Angus brought me another beer. “You’re biting your lip,” he said.
“He’s ignoring me.”
“Maybe you make him uncomfortable.”
“I haven’t said anything!”
“Maybe that’s the problem.”
“Why’s he so weird?” I said.
Angus laughed as if this was the funniest thing he’d ever heard.
“You’re not very patient,” he said. “I like that.”
I sighed. “I’m starting to think you’re not very discriminating.”
“Hey,” Wylie called from across the room. I expected him to be looking at me and Angus, but he wasn’t. “It’s time,” he said.
It was already dark. The group fanned out on foot. I saw Wylie and Stan turn the corner, heading south. Angus loped off down the street in the opposite direction without saying anything, and I found myself in step with Irina and Psyche.
“Where are we going?” I asked. In the lit windows of the houses we passed people were on display. A woman laughed drunkenly at a dinner party, the table crowded with candles, guests slumped in their chairs, the chaos of emptied plates. A cat peered angrily into the darkness from the back of a sofa. A young couple sat on a front-porch swing, smoking cigarettes and watching their sprinkler fan back and forth across the lawn. From most homes, falling over the sidewalks was the blue light of television.
“We’ll be there soon,” Irina said. “Stay by me and I will tell you what to do.”
We walked for half an hour through quiet residential streets, seeing no trace of the others. I suspected that Irina’s job was to divert me from whatever task was at hand. From within the sling Psyche gurgled softly to herself, as if forming opinions on the journey. Irina was humming — whether to herself or to her baby I couldn’t tell, or what she might be thinking about, if she thought at all. Maybe she just followed Angus wherever he went, enjoying her television-induced fantasy of the great American desert.
“Who’s Psyche’s father?” I said.
Irina answered with one of her sweet smiles, and I was annoyed. How many smiles and nonanswers could a person take in a single day? The baby gurgled again, louder and with an edge in her voice, as if sensing the approach of a sensitive subject.
“I mean it,” I said. “Who is it?”
“It is nobody who you know.”
“Do you have to be so coy?”
“I don’t know,” she said. She stopped and looked at me with what appeared to be real consternation. “What is ‘coy’?”
“It’s. . like lying.”
Psyche’s gurgle crescendoed to a pissed-off wail. She beat her tiny fist against Irina’s chest and her cheeks flushed and swelled with reproach, tears streaming down her face. People came to their windows to see who was crying. Irina hushed her, swaying her hips and whispering into her child’s tiny ears. Finally Psyche sniffled and buried her head against her mother’s neck.
“Don’t call me a liar,” Irina said into the sudden quiet, hoisting the sling higher on her hips. “It’s unkind.”