Audio: Ben Lerner reads.
They were drifting on her stepfather’s boat in the middle of an otherwise empty man-made lake encircled by large tract houses. It was early autumn and they were drinking Southern Comfort from the bottle. Adam was in the front of the boat watching a changeable blue light across the water that was probably a television seen through a window or a glass door. He heard the scrape of her lighter, then saw smoke float over him, unravel. For a long time he had been speaking.
When he turned to see what effect his speech had had, she was gone, jeans and sweater in a little pile with the pipe and lighter.
He said her name, suddenly aware of the surrounding quiet, and put his hand in the water, which was cold. Unthinkingly, he lifted her white sweater and smelled the woodsmoke from earlier that evening, the synthetic lavender of what he knew to be her shower gel. He said her name again, louder now, then looked around. A few birds skimmed the undisturbed surface of the lake; no, those were bats. When did she dive or step off the boat and how could she have made no splash and what if she was drowned? He yelled now; a dog responded in the distance. From spinning around in search of her, he felt dizzy and sat down. Then he stood again and looked along the edges of the boat; maybe she was just beside it, stifling her laughter, but she wasn’t.
He would have to pilot the boat back to the dock, where she must be waiting. (There was a dock for every two or three subdivisions.) He thought he saw a firefly signal slowly from the shore, but it was too late in the year for that. He felt a wave of anger rising and he welcomed it, wanted it to overwhelm his panic. He hoped Amber had dived into the water before his rambling confession of feeling. He’d said they would stay together after graduation, once he left Topeka for college, but now he knew they wouldn’t; he was eager to demonstrate his indifference as soon as he found her safe on land.
See the outboard motor gleaming in the moonlight. For any of his friends, managing the boat would be easy; all of them, even the other “Foundation kids”—the children of therapists who’d settled in Topeka to work at its prestigious psychiatric clinic—exhibited a basic Midwestern mechanical competence, could change their oil or clean a gun, whereas he couldn’t even drive stick. He located what he assumed was a starter rope, pulled it, nothing happened; he pushed what must have been the throttle to another position and tried again; nothing. He was beginning to wonder if he might have to swim—he wasn’t sure how well he swam—when he saw the key in the ignition; he turned it and the engine started up.
As slowly as possible he motored back to shore. When he approached the land, he turned the engine off but failed to bring the boat in parallel with the dock; there was a loud crack when the fibreglass hit the wood, which silenced the nearby bullfrogs; nothing seemed damaged, not that he really looked. He rushed to throw the lines gathered in the boat around the cleats nailed to the dock, quickly improvised some knots, then pulled himself out of the boat; he prayed that no one was watching him from a window. Without taking the keys or her clothes or pipe or bottle, he sprinted up the incline through the wet grass toward her house; if the boat drifted back out on the water, that would be her fault.
The large glass doors facing the lake were always unlocked; he slid one open quietly and went in. Only now did he feel the cold sweat. He could make out her brother’s shape on the couch, pillow over his head, sleeping in the glow of the large television; the news was on mute—Saddam Hussein reviewing a military parade, then a shot of a Tomahawk launch. The room was otherwise dark. He thought of waking him, but instead removed his Timberland boots, which he assumed were muddy, and crept across the room to the white carpeted stairs; he went up slowly.
He’d stayed over two or three times before when she’d told her parents he’d had too much to drink; they’d thought he’d slept in the guest room; they’d thought, correctly, that he’d called home. But the prospect of encountering anyone now—when he hadn’t even confirmed that she was present—horrified him. Her mom took sleeping pills; he’d seen the oversized prescription bottle, knew she mixed them nightly with her wine. Her stepdad had slept through a brawl at a recent party. They’ll never wake up, he reassured himself, just don’t knock anything over; he was glad to be in his socks.
He reached the first floor and surveyed the dark, expansive living room before he climbed the next flight of stairs to where the bedrooms were. He could almost make out the large generic hunting scene on the far wall: dogs flushing game from the woods beside a lake at sunset. He could see the red light blinking on the panel for the alarm system they thankfully never armed. And a little light collected around the silver edges of the framed family photographs on the mantel: teen-agers in sweaters posing on a leaf-strewn lawn, her brother holding a football. Something ticked and settled in the giant kitchen. He went upstairs.
Hers was the first open door on the right, and without turning on the light he could see from the doorway that Amber was in her bed, under the covers, breathing steadily. His shoulders relaxed; the relief was profound, and the relief made more room for anger; it also let him realize how badly he had to piss. He turned and crossed the hall into the bathroom and carefully shut the door and without turning on the light lifted the lid. On second thought, he lowered the seat and sat down. A car passed slowly outside, its headlights illuminating the bathroom through an open venetian blind.
It wasn’t her bathroom. The electric toothbrush and the hair dryer; these particular soaps—these were not her toiletries. For an instant he thought, desperately hoped, that they might belong to her mother, but there were too many other discrepancies: the shower door was different, its glass frosted; now he smelled the lemon-scented gel beads in a jar atop the toilet; alien dried flowers hung from a purple sachet on the wall. In a single shudder of retrospection his impressions of the house were changed: Where was the piano (that nobody played)? Wouldn’t he have seen the electric chandelier? The carpet on the stairs—wasn’t the pile too thick, too dark in the dark to have been truly white?
Along with the sheer terror of finding himself in the wrong house, with his recognition of its difference, was a sense, because of the houses’ sameness, that he was in all the houses around the lake at once; the sublime of identical layouts. In each house she or someone like her was in her bed, sleeping or pretending to sleep; legal guardians were farther down the hall, large men snoring; the faces and poses in the family photographs on the mantel might change, but would all belong to the same grammar of faces and poses; the elements of the painted scenes might vary, but not the level of familiarity and flatness; if you opened any of the giant stainless-steel refrigerators or surveyed the faux-marble islands, you would encounter matching, modular products in slightly different configurations.
He was in all the houses but, precisely because he was no longer bound to a discrete body, he could also float above them; it was like looking at the miniature train set that his dad’s friend Klaus—one of the Foundation’s older, émigré analysts—had given him as a child; he didn’t care about the trains, could barely make them run, but he loved the scenery, the green static flocking spread over the board, the tiny yet towering pines and hardwoods. When he looked at the impossibly detailed trees, he occupied two vantages at once: he pictured himself beneath their branches and also considered them from above; he was looking up at himself looking down. Then he could toggle rapidly between these perspectives, these scales, in a relay that unfixed him from his body. Now he was frozen in fear in this particular bathroom and in all the bathrooms simultaneously; he looked down from a hundred windows at the little boat on the placid man-made lake. (Touches of white paint atop the dried acrylic add a sense of motion and of moonlight to the surface.)
He swam back into himself. He felt like a timer had started somewhere, that he had minutes, maybe only seconds, to flee the house into which he’d unintentionally broken before someone emptied a shotgun into his face or the cops arrived to find him hovering outside the bedroom of a sleeping girl. Fear made it difficult to breathe, but he told himself that he would press rewind, quietly walk back out the way he’d come, disturbing no one. That was what he did, although now the little differences called out to him as he descended: there was a large L-shaped couch he hadn’t seen before; he could tell the coffee table here was glass and not dark wood like hers. At the bottom of the stairs, he hesitated: the front door was right there, beckoning; he’d be free, but his Timberlands were downstairs where he’d left them. To recover them he’d have to pass the sleeping stranger.
Despite his fear that he might at any moment be discovered, he decided he had to go after his boots, less because they were evidence and could be traced to him than because he felt that he’d be risking ridicule, humiliation, if he returned to Amber barefoot. He could intuit the shape of the story, could sense that it would spread—how she’d left him first to mishandle the boat and then to lose his fucking footwear in the midst of whatever misadventure. Hey, Adam, you got your shoes tied on? Got your slippers? A memory from middle school of Sean McCabe, coming home in socks, in tears, after he’d been jumped for his Air Jordans, flared up before him; Sean still got shit about it and Sean could now bench three hundred pounds.
The young man who had been her brother had turned his face toward the back of the couch; the pillow had fallen to the floor. The giant head of Bob Dole moved its lips on the screen as he crept past. He picked up his boots and slowly slid open the door; the rollers jammed a little; he had to apply some force, causing a loud squeak; the body on the couch stirred and started to sit up. (All over Lake Sherwood Housing Community, the bodies stirred and started to sit up.) Without closing the door, he bolted, boots in hand, over the wet grass—indifferent to uneven ground, to sticks and stones—at a speed he might never match again, his body grateful for something to do with its adrenaline. No one yelled after him; there was only his footfall, blood thundering in his ears; he triggered a few motion lights and so moved closer to the water; he ran at full force for a minute before he realized he wasn’t sure where he was going. He dropped to a knee, lungs burning, looked behind him to make sure he wasn’t being followed. He pulled his boots on as quickly as possible over his wet socks. Then he got up and sprinted between two houses until he reached the street.
His only goal now was to find his red ’89 Camry parked in her driveway and go home, to sleep for a few hours. He’d have to rise before dawn, put on the black suit he’d bought with his mom at West Ridge, tie one of his dad’s two ties, and head for a debate tournament—tomorrow’s was in the town of Russell—as he did most Saturdays, a fact he would never willingly mention around the kids he drank with. He thought of Joanna, his debate partner, who he imagined was fast asleep, who had probably spent the night preparing; the daughter of two Foundation neurologists, she compiled almost all of their research, having attended a “debate institute” at the University of Michigan over the summer to get a head start on the competition. Adam just skimmed The Economist during debate class. His strength was thinking on his feet, exposing fallacies; his cross-examinations were widely feared. This year’s topic was whether the federal government should establish new policies to reduce juvenile crime; as he searched for his car, Adam recited statistics about recidivism to himself.
He was still scared—at any moment he might hear sirens—but away from the water and the scene of his ridiculous trespass he felt the worst was over. He patted his pocket to confirm the presence of his keys and walked quickly along the curb—there were no sidewalks—but he did not run, so as to minimize suspicion on the off chance that he was seen. He walked and walked, ashamed to be on foot; he could not find his car, her house; he must have pointed the boat in exactly the wrong direction. After he’d searched for almost half an hour, had circled half the lake, he saw, was overjoyed to see, his car where he had parked some hours before. The sound of the doors unlocking was deeply reassuring. He got in, found his pack of Marlboro Reds on the passenger seat, and shook one loose; he turned the key to the on position but did not start the engine. He lowered his window and lit his cigarette with a yellow Bic he took from the cup holder and inhaled what felt like his first full breath since he’d discovered her absence on the boat.
He started the engine and turned the headlights on to discover that she was standing, had been standing, in the threshold of her front door wearing an oversized sweater. Her almost waist-length dark-blond hair was down. He cut the engine reflexively, turning off the lights. Barefoot, she walked to the car and opened the passenger door and got in. She helped herself to a cigarette, lit it, and said, as though he were a few minutes late for an appointment, Where have you been?
He was furious. He could not admit that he’d been scared, couldn’t say he’d been unequal to managing the boat, or that he’d almost confronted the wrong young woman in another house. He demanded an explanation: What the fuck is wrong with you? I wanted to swim, she said, and shrugged and smoked when he pressed, tobacco mixing with the smell of her conditioner. Absently, she began playing with his hair.
My stepdad used to give these like endless speeches at dinner. Now he barely talks, and anyway we don’t eat together. I think he’s depressed, like he should have a therapist, see your parents at the Foundation. It’s weird now that he’s quiet, because before he would make dinners into these long fucking discussions, except not really, because nobody discussed anything; he just talked in our direction. He’d ask my brother a question every once in a while, but it was always, like, pop quiz: What did I say made this a hard time for the aeronautics business? (You know he got rich off somebody else’s invention. Some kind of screw that doesn’t weigh anything.) And my brother would never have to answer, because my stepdad answered his own fucking questions. The answer was always China, basically. Then there was this one night last summer when my mom was letting me sneak white wine and my brother was out and I had to be the one at the table getting talked at and it was getting on my nerves for real. Maybe it was because I was a little fucked up or because I’m just older now and so like more aware of my mom. What she’s been through, starting with my dad. But, anyway, I did this stupid also kind of awesome thing. Really, really slowly I started lowering myself in my chair, like sliding down out of it, while he was eating his ravioli talking about whatever. My mom was already in the kitchen, loading the dishwasher; she never eats. It required a lot of core strength going down so slowly. All those crunches. All that crystal (joking). At dance they are always telling me to visualize a movement as I do it and I was visualizing myself as a liquid flowing down the chair. All the way down off my chair until I was literally under the table and my stepdad still hadn’t noticed anything, and my mom was in there cleaning, and I was trying not to laugh.
Or maybe cry? Adam asked, and she looked at him.
At how fucking sad this dude is maybe. Or, yeah, like for my mom who is married to him. Like he doesn’t realize the audience has gone home while he’s just going on and on. And then I seal-crawl so slowly under the table across the carpet holding my breath into the kitchen. My mom has stopped cleaning and now she’s on the other side of the island and doesn’t see me and I stand up really quietly. She’s holding her pink wine looking out the window at the lake or more at her reflection in the glass, because it’s night. I get the bottle from the fridge door and pour most of it into a plastic cup and come up to her with my like Big Gulp and she’s coming back from Mars and about to say something to me but I shush her with a finger on my lips and whisper, Listen. We can hear my stepdad in the dining room telling nobody about Ross Perot. (He was obsessed with Ross Perot. Ross Perot and China.) And my mom maybe doesn’t understand what’s going on yet but we tiptoe over to the doorway and stand there looking into the dining room while he talks to the air like AM radio and wine is almost coming out of my nose. We stand there forever before he looks up, like we caught him beating off. He looks at my chair, then back at us, and now my mom and I start really cracking up. Then he gets this fucked-up smile that’s pure rage. Like, how dare you cunts laugh at me. But I give him the stepdaughter smile back and hold it, hold it. We basically have a staring contest and my mom’s laughter gets all nervous until finally his face relaxes and it’s all a big joke.
It would take Adam twenty years to grasp the analogy between her slipping from the chair and from the boat. He asked her some questions about her biological father and she answered them. He considered telling her about entering the wrong house—maybe he could bring out the poetry of it—but he did not tell her, didn’t want to risk it. To protect himself (from what, he wasn’t sure), he imagined that he was looking back on the present from a vaguely imagined East Coast city where his experiences in Topeka could be recounted only with great irony.
But he was back in his body when they kissed goodbye and her damp hair was in his face and her tongue was in his mouth, running over his teeth, tobacco and mint, Crest toothpaste. The kiss deepened and as he moved his hands under her sweatshirt he saw against the black back of his eyelids little illuminated patterns flaring up. Phosphenes, tiny fading Rorschachs formed by the inherent electrical charges the retina produces while at rest, an experience of light in the absence of light. He knew these shapes from a concussion he’d had as a child and from his migraines and more recently from this kind of contact; he knew them from when he was little trying to fall asleep, watching gray circles migrate across the darkness; if he pressed his closed eyes near the temples, the forms would brighten. He’d wondered if these patterns were unique to him, evidence of some specialness or damage, or if they were universal, if everyone saw them. But they were so faint and difficult to describe that he was never able to figure out if his parents or friends shared this experience just above the threshold of perception; the patterns dissipated under the weight of language, remained irreducibly private. He’d hear people talk about “seeing stars” when they hit their head, but he saw no stars; he saw rings of red or yellow light or tessellated feather shapes that started to shake if he attended to them or dull gold spirals that spun across his field of vision—or whatever you call your field of vision when your eyes are shut. Instead of moving a hand toward the inside of her thigh, as was expected, he moved both hands now toward her face; he held her head and ran his thumbs across her closed eyelids, carefully applying distinct but intermittent pressure; did she also see a few red sparks, a network of faint lines?
She pulled back a little, laughing: What are you doing? He told her the word for it, which he’d learned from Klaus, who said that phosphenes might be triggers of psychotic hallucinations. That some people have tried to draw them and the drawings look strangely like those cave paintings, the oldest art. He hoped she liked the poetry he made out of it, how he wanted her to see what he saw, and to imagine seeing with or as her; the world’s subtlest fireworks announcing the problem of other minds. Soon they were kissing again and he didn’t know if they would fuck. But that night in Topeka’s premier housing community conveniently located near West Ridge Mall she separated from him gently, decisively; maybe she was on her period. Maybe she didn’t really care about him. She climbed out of the passenger side with one of his cigarettes and the lighter; she walked around the front of the car and returned the lighter to him through the window. Where’s the boat? He said he’d driven around the lake drinking for a while, wasn’t sure where he’d parked it; he was tense again, worried he’d have to admit his various navigational failures, but she was unconcerned.
Win me a medal tomorrow, she said, smiling, when he started the engine again. Soon he was speeding away from the McMansions, cool air thundering through the sunroof that he’d opened. State prisons are operating between fifteen and twenty-four per cent above capacity. When he hit Twenty-first he stopped at a flashing red light. Our opponent’s plan will result in disastrous overcrowding. He flicked his cigarette butt out of the window, watched the embers scatter on the asphalt. He pushed “All Eyez on Me” into the tape deck and turned it up very loud. Then he drove on. ♦
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