There is a tuft of carpet between my fingers. I force my eyes open and groan as I roll over. There's no pillow beneath my head, and the ceiling seems an impossibly far distance away. Stretching, I recognize the contours of the sleeping bag--but how? I glance over and see Dylan isn't in my bed--where I should be--and that sunlight is now pouring into the room from the uncovered window. I pull myself from the warm confines of flannel and walk into the foyer.
It must be at least nine, because both Mother and Father are nowhere to be found. Jeffrey and Dylan are sitting at the table in silence; both look up when I walk in.
"Well hey there sleeping beauty," Dylan smiles and nods at me before looking back down intently.
Something is wrong with today and last night. There's been a disconnect, a hang-up. I can almost feel the snowy static between the intervals.
I ignore him and look at Jeffrey, whose eyes are red-ringed and tired. "Good to see you," I tell him as I get down a box of cereal from the pantry.
"Thanks," he says without looking up.
I roll my eyes and pour milk into the cereal bowl. "So what happened to you last night? Did you come home?" I get a spoon and join them at the table. Dylan, who is also still in pajamas, is reading a novel and pretending to be uninterested in us.
"No," he says groggily. "I had a date...thing, and things just got kind of crazy."
I nod and notice the holes in his arm, probably from an IV. I've tried to discourage him from this before but he just blows me off, and Mother and Father feed his megalomania by refusing to deal with the fact that they failed so much as parents their thirteen year old kid is probably a drug addict. They say he's just expressing himself, a free-spirit. I try to act like it doesn't bother me. "So you went on a date? With whom?"
"Some girl." He looks like he's about to pass out.
Dylan finally looks over at me. "Are you seeing anyone?"
I shrug.
"No," Jeffrey says for me. "The last date he went on was with Carbon."
"Yeah," I laugh. "And you look like shit--is that the new style?"
"Fuck you," Jeffrey says, enunciating the 'f' so that I know he means it.
'Boys," Dylan says severely.
Jeffrey shakes his head and positions himself to make a quick exit, stage left.
I quietly consume my cereal as the tension builds amongst us. Unfortunately, my family's ability to tolerate adversity is roughly equivalent to New Orleans' levies' ability to sustain a tropical depression, and Jeffrey almost immediately excuses himself and goes upstairs. Somehow, in his sudden absence, the tension worsens, as if the tension between Dylan and me were so covalent it needlessly rested upon Jeffrey's shoulders. Now, though, I wonder if the tension is simply on my end, if it would rip me limb from limb in the absence of everything.
"Really no girlfriends?" Dylan looks at me questioningly. He might be sincerely interested, but he could just be trying to make small talk, and in either case, I hate him.
"So what'd you do last night?" I ask, totally moving past his question, "Pick me up and tuck me in?"
He looks around as if someone else might be participating in this conversation. "Um...no?"
I furrow my brow. "You don't know?"
"I don't know what you're talking about," he says. "Or why you're glaring at me."
"Last night, I--" I realize I should stop speaking, that saying anymore risks exposure and analysis, but it's too late to totally cut the conversation without looking like a psycho, so I simply shrug. "I woke up on the floor this morning."
"Yeah..." his voice trails off and his eyes are searching my face. "Are you asking if I put you in the sleeping bag?"
This is another high-risk situation. Saying no definitively keeps me from analysis, but saying yes might warrant an explanation, and thus clarification. I put the spoon to my lips and eat before responding. I finally pause and shrug, "Yeah."
He nods and looks back down at his book before answering. "No," he says quietly. "You got here last night and fell asleep almost immediately. Your parents were worried and did this weird chant in case you were ill."
"Ugh," I moan. "They're such freaks."
He grins. "I like them."
"You don't live with them."
"No," he says, "but living with someone isn't a requisite part of liking them."
I choose not to react.
"So...did you think you went to sleep in the bed?"
This was the risk. The threshold has been breached, the point-of-no-return passed by. I shrug in an attempt to signify its insignificance. "Just dreamed it."
"Yeah," he laughs. "But you dreamed you slept in your bed with me?"
Again, silence seems to be a better answer here.
His eager expression slowly becomes coy. "I don't mind if you did, but it's kind of interesting, isn't it? That's probably why you were saying my na--"
"No," i say, standing up, "it's not interesting."
He gets it, finally, and returns to his book.
I dump the bowl and spoon into the sink. "Did mom or dad say Grandma was coming this weekend?"
He stares at me hard, trying to pick me apart. He seems to enjoy doing this to me, which I don't think he does to other people. Something about the way I talk, or hold myself, or look at people, draws out the analyst in everybody. It's truly a despicable trait. "I'll tell you," he offers, "if you tell me what your dream was about."
I consider the offer even though I wasn't exactly bargaining. "How do you know I won't lie?"
He shrugs. "I suppose the same way you know I won't."
Fair enough. "I don't really know what parts were a dream and which weren't," I begin, "but what I remember is getting home, twat-embedded glass dildoes, talking to Jennifer, then going to sleep in my bed."
He nods. "That's it?"
"Yeah," I shrug. "So, what'd they say?"
"You moaned a lot." He grins, "There must have been something good."
"I did not." I act impatient. "What'd they say?"
"So what was I doing in the dream?"
I cross my arms over my chest and stare him down. He doesn't flinch.
"Okay...maybe the question should be who I was doing?"
"You weren't doing anyone," I say quickly.
"So I was in your dream!"
"No!" This is aggravating.
"But I was doing something...." He strokes his chin in mock contemplation, a grin pulling at his cheeks.
"Why do you care so much?"
"Me? I don't care at all." He looks incredulous. "You're the one who brought it up."
Why won't he just drop it? "Fine. If you don't want to tell me you could have just said so."
He stands up and surveys me again. I hate that look people get in their eyes when they first really meet you. The first time someone meets you they just observe you like you're some specimen trapped in a petri dish; when they really meet you, though, they double-take and you can almost see the hesitation in their face. "Your dad said your grandma's gonna be here this weekend."
Frustrated, I swallow and nod. "Thanks." This comes out slightly more bitter than I'd intended, but I don't try to mend it, either.
There's a moment between us--his body movement first towards me, hesitant and unsure, and then decidedly away from me, retreating into the living room--and then it's gone. I walk back to my closet and get dressed. It's a weird thing looking at my bed: the pillows are arranged slightly differently, sheets tucked in in a different way--not bad, necessarily, but also not me. I start walking out of the room before reconsidering and returning to the bed. I sit down, run my hands over the soft fabric.
I try to figure out why he kept asking about the dream, kept insisting on his part in it. Surely he doesn't think I desire him, and that my dreams are some kind of Freudian wish-fulfillment. If that were the case for any of us, no one would ever wake up. But topologically, dreams are weird things. Connectedness seems not to be an issue for them--to reality, to each other, to events within the same dream. They are, of course, by definition, piece-wise, like a wall with gaps that separates reality from fiction.
I lie down and close my eyes for a moment, try to glue together the remnants of the dream. I know certain things have fled the scene of the crime, but I can't recall anything vaguely sexual about the situation--not that I'd know it if it struck me in the face, anyway.
The light from the window temporarily blinds me as I force myself to sit back up and look around. How do things feel so real when they can't exist? What holds it all together? I know the answer; sometimes I just don't want to think about it too much.
The axiom of regularity in mathematics says that the only thing in common between members and their collection is an empty set, emptiness itself. In that way, there's no overarching collection of all things; there's no such thing as a grand cosmos, a whole Nature, a Being of God. There's no One, no foundational identity to build things off of, and no matter how many Christians try to deny it, that's just how it is. Maybe dreams are just life's cruel way of showing that we're all schizophrenic: one identity by day, another by night. Neither of which can generally be sustained for any serious amount of time.
Finally, looking down at the pathetic sleeping bag against the wall, I get up and go out into the foyer.
"Hey," Dylan calls from the couch, book almost concealing his eyes. "I'm going to go see a movie tonight--wanna come with?"
"Please." I put on sandals and walk to the door. "Get over yourself."
The rest of the week passes us by without incident. Mother and Father found a way out of the weekend with Grandma, as expected, by way of a convenient convention.
"Boys," Mother had said at dinner one night. I doubt anybody looked up at her. I wasn't even sure I knew the name of what was rolling around on my plate, and while I think I have an appropriate culinary sensibility, I'm also fine with McDonald's and Taco Bell from time to time. "Your father and I are going to be gone this weekend."
"Really?" I asked, faking surprise. "Where are you going?"
"A convention." Father's eyes warned against pushing through the rest of this conversation.
"So when do you have to leave?" Dylan asked, eyes searching everyone for some explanation.
"Saturday morning."
I dropped my fork in mock surprise, letting it clink against the plate. "But mom," I pleaded, "are you going to make your pancakes?"
Mother gave me an I-know-better-but-will-pretend-to-be-flattered look and smiled, "I'm afraid not. Our plane leaves far too early for me to prepare a meal."
"That's too bad," Jeffrey grinned at his plate.
Dylan was simply quiet. He and I had not yet found a way around the inevitable though negligible gravitation that occurs between people who coexist. Not that we would miss each other in the event of one's departure, but we had grown familiar to the other's habits: the way he made sure to be doing something else when I was on the phone or the internet and not focus on me; the way I quietly left the room when he would smoke; the way both of us were quite content to inquire only minimally into the day's going-ons of the other. All of this intimacy--however fragmented and marginal--spawned because, let's face it, it's much easier to hate a happy person than one who harbors equal resentment. Friends are largely those who openly share their anger, their distaste, and it's that fundamental level of violence that maintains the status of a friend; enemies, to the contrary, are those who turn out the lights at night and, though only separated by a ghost's breath, know almost nothing about the other's desire.
Tonight, Father mentions that he is leaving Dylan in charge.
"What?" I ask hesitantly.
"Yes," Father nods, grinning at Dylan's unassuming shrug. "I think it'll be good for you to have a different father figure in your life for a few days." With his fork, he practically kicks a bean off the plate and onto the table. "Then you two can see how easy you have it."
Before either Jeffrey or I can protest, Dylan winks at me and nods. "Of course," he contributes pathetically.
"Just because he has a degree he gets to be in charge?" Jeffrey sulks.
"Yes."
"That's fucked."
"Jeffrey!."
"What? Well, it is. He shouldn't be in charge just because he wasted his life in a classroom."
Mother throws an alarmingly high-pitched laugh as if to squelch Jeffrey's protests, then remarks quietly, pointedly: "There are worse things than wasting away in a classroom."
Jeffrey, who we are all now watching with a keen interest if from a distance, chooses not to respond, though his thoughts are almost visible in the way he tenses his body. Dylan glances to me in hopes I might offer some consolation; I don't.
Father speaks too late to bridge any gaps already forged, "Exactly. All of my mistakes were made outside the classroom."
"Well," Mother corrects, giggling, "almost all of them." She looks at me briefly before she realizes we've made eye contact and then frowns, turns away.
Dinner finishes, and we all quickly disperse to our domains of the house. Online, Jennifer says she's going to be in the area next weekend.
"Sure," I type. "Let's get together."
"Great. My parents are having a party Saturday night and they've invited a shitload of people who don't like them." She laughs. "Nobody likes them. Fuck, they don't even like themselves."
I smile. "I thought that's what parties were for."
"Narcissistic self-indulgence?" She shrugs. "Probably."
Dylan touches my shoulder as I blink, and in the half-second my eyes are closed, I feel everything shut down: post-synaptic inhibition of the motor neurons in the pons leads to decreased flow of melatonin and then there's no nerve depolarization, and now I can't move. His finger slowly traces along my collar bone and stops at the base of my neck as his other hand turns me towards him. He's looking down at me, eyes big and almost carefully examining my face for signs of anger. As much as I want to pull away, say no, hit him--I can't. I can't move at all. It's worse than a dream. "I'm sorry," he mouths, and his hand starts strumming my chest and stomach like guitar chords: soft but sharp, precise, calculated. I don't sing or make music, but that doesn't stop him--the fact that I'm not moving seems not to matter to him. I shouldn't be surprised, though; my inertia doesn't matter to anyone. The warmth of blood in his hand as it reaches the divide between my shirt and my jeans makes me feel even more uncomfortable than before, and if I could do anything, right now I would be squirming. He bends down over me until our faces are a few inches from each other, and I can tell he's about to kiss me. "Nick," he whispers, moving impossibly closer until I blink.
Dylan is sitting on my bed, propped up on the pillow and watching me. "Nick?" he asks again. "Are you okay?"
I realize I'm not breathing. "Yeah," I say slowly. Jennifer has sent me a barrage of news that I can't even focus on enough to read.
"Well?"
From the corner of my eye I can see the box, orange, flashing on the screen as if ephemeral: tempting me to return as though what is being said is fleeting, and who is doing the saying could be gone at any second. Our eyes meet for a moment before, not knowing what else to do, I turn my back to him as though he has said nothing. I can hear him rolling his eyes and sighing as he opens some book he's been reading all week. Jennifer is explaining how her parents have been fighting, throwing things. Her mom, who I always thought was petite, apparently shoved a couch across the room and smashed her dad's legs. On a more interesting note, according to Jennifer, a Highlander marathon is about to start, and so she takes her leave. I close out of the window and glance through the list. There are people from the past--people I used to enjoy being around. Somehow, though, over the years, as our contact has become virtual and increasingly rarer, I suspect I don't even know them anymore, and that's really why I don't say hi anymore: they're different. I'm still the same; I've always been this way, and, I suppose, I always will be. But they're different: they've lived, adapted. Talking is like showing off a dead dog in the Eukanuba competition.
Dylan watches me from his book as I get up and leave the room. I get a glass of orange juice from the kitchen and stand in the dark foyer. My stomach and shoulders still tremble from the--what? dream? hallucination? or maybe it really did happen?--earlier. I don't know why, but I'm still tense from the experience. When I hear Mother's giggling, I flee the dark open space in favor of the confines of my room. Dylan peers at me from the top of his book as I take off my shirt and sit down on the sleeping bag. It ruffles beneath my feet, and I'm afraid the sound of that ruffle will keep me awake all night. I'm not particularly tired, but this seems like the appropriate thing to do.
"I'm sorry," Dylan says quietly.
I glance over too fast, as though he has just revealed an earth-shattering fact, and to compensate for my originally overzealous response, I give a less than enthusiastic reply: "Whatever." But I don't look away. I need to know what he's apologizing for, if we're both thinking the same thing, and that's the danger in apologizing: problems aren't continuous beings. Approached from different sides, what needs retribution changes. Do you apologize for the cause or the effect?
"I'm sure they didn't mean that," he says.
Who? "Yeah," I mumble, getting into the sleeping bag.
He swallows and then clarifies. "Your parents. I'm sure they didn't mean what they said."
I blink, trying to figure out what he's talking about. There weren't any bizarre sexual comments that I remember, nor any horrifying revelations about their past. "What...um, what do you mean?"
"That you were a mistake." He sits up and looks down at me. "I'm sure you weren't a mistake."
Oh. That. I shrug. "Everybody's a mistake."
His silence beckons me to continue.
"Existence is just one accident after the other. What's the probability that all of these atoms would come together and form me? Form you? Form us here in this room, in this space, at this time? It's just an accident that happens and somewhere down the line somebody pays the price."
“Who?”
“I don’t know.” I shrug. Apparently Social Security.”
"So you don't believe in destiny, God?"
"I don't know." I close my eyes. "I don't believe in God."
He lays back against the bed. "What do you believe in?"
"I..." I stop talking. I don't know what I believe in, if I believe in anything.
"Yourself? Chaos?"
"There are..." I'm trying to find the words, which seem more than ever to be escaping my vocabulary. "There are things I just take for granted: myself being one of them. I mean, I don't believe in myself--I don't know what I'd be believing in. My abilities?"
He shrugs. "I guess the thought that you can do something."
"I don't think that's something to believe in. How fucking sad is it to believe that you can do something? All last year all I heard were all these stupid kids in highschool whining about how they want to go to Harvard or MIT and how they believe they can do it." I scoff. "Fuck that shit."
"You don't want to go to Yale or an Ivy League?"
"Well, no." I shake my head. "Not that--I mean, I don't care--but they're all going to kill themselves if they don't get in. I mean, for fuck's sake, I want to be known for who I am, not the college I went to. Everybody knows the colleges; they don't need to be reintroduced."
"Fair enough." He turns off my night lamp. "So you don't believe in that kind of thing?"
I sit up. "I don't know what 'that kind of thing' is. Myself? No. Like I said, I don't even know what that would mean...believing in myself." I laugh bitterly. "All my life, all these great teachers and shit have told me to believe in myself. I never asked them what they meant."
I can feel Dylan's eyes studying me in the dark. Somehow, it feels more violating than when he touched me, but I don't flinch. Not because I can't, but because I refuse to. "So what about the here and now? This accident of existence--do you believe in it?"
"Yeah," I nod, "I do." I slip back down into the bag and curl up, suddenly ready to go to sleep. "When there are accidents, it means something's working right."
"Is that a fact?" Dylan asks, interested. "I was always under the impression that when things were working right it meant there weren't any accidents."
I consider not responding, but eventually I give in. "Yeah, sometimes. But how do you know something is working right if nothing ever goes wrong?" I roll over and face the wall. "If you've never seen a car start, and then you get in a car and try to start it but nothing happens, you'd think that was the right thing because nothing had ever gone wrong."
"So things can only go wrong if they were already going right." Dylan collapses against my pillow. "So if I'm an accident, was your life before I showed up going right?"
I can feel sleep tugging my eyelids closed, but I fight to stay awake. "No. I guess not." What was a blink is now a four-second doze. "Everything's an accident..." I'm probably slurring my speech.
"You know," he laughs from across the room. "I think this is the longest we've ever talked to each other."
This reality does not warrant a response from me.
"It's nice," he says.
He doesn't ever crack the window at night. In part, I did it to hear a world I don't care about, because that's really the only way to know who you are. The other part was the hope that something I'm horribly allergic to--like a wasp--would fly in and sting me. For a few seconds: anaphylactic shock, suffocation. Dylan does not seem to share these desires; or at least not consciously or enough to leave the window open, and I don't bother to ask him to do so. He seems comfortable in his skin--a quality I've never understood and generally found detestable in other people. Insecurity, shame, guilt--that's who we are. We aren't happy and full and complete, and what better a metaphor for that than an open window in an air-conditioned house?
