Some Hell

by Patrick Nathan

  “Why do you think your mother wouldn’t care? After all you’ve been through? Your family? It’s just the two of you now—how could she do that?” He took another step and put his hand on Colin’s shoulder. If the power went out, Colin imagined, Victor eyes would light the entire block. He felt him give a squeeze, his finger finding a muscle Colin hadn’t even known was knotted.

  Victor wasn’t wearing gloves, and even over the gasoline Colin could smell the drop of cologne he wore on each wrist. When he closed his eyes, Victor tightened his grip, finding pain underneath pain. “You’re very tense,” he heard, closer than he expected, and opened his eyes to Victor. Nothing but Victor. He’d eclipsed the gas station, the stoplight’s bustle, every other car and driver. Colin knew what was coming, what Victor—who knew all the spells—was about to draw from the boy he loved. Colin saw it now, that love, and it saw him.

  “Colin. You break my heart.”

  With his first sob his chest and throat heaved together. He shut his eyes to pretend it wasn’t happening. But Victor was there. Victor knew and would know forever. He’d been through it all. Why hadn’t he listened until now? Only an hour ago he’d peered into restaurant and store windows hoping to impress some fictional Andy, and now he was crying in a parking lot a half mile from his house. The real kind of crying. But all the people who might see, all the kids who might spread rumors—what did they matter? This was his life and only one person was trying to save it. No matter how hopeless it was, how doomed he’d been from the beginning—as Heather had warned him—he would let Victor try. He wanted him to try. He let his shoulders go limp and Victor knew to gather him up. Colin let himself be held. “I know,” he heard, over and over, and he could’ve cried until they froze to death. He wished, right then, that he could feel Victor’s heartbeat through his coat, but he’d been out a long time and was starting to tremble. He let go.

  Victor lifted his chin so their eyes were again locked. “Colin,” his entire world seemed to say. “You need to get home.”

  Colin let Victor wipe the tears from his eyes. He even smiled when Victor brought his thumb to his mouth. “They taste like I remember,” Victor said with a private grin, as though their time in their respective dreams had been a first date or a honeymoon. “Are you going to be okay?”

  He wasn’t, and Victor knew it, but he swallowed the phlegm in his throat and blinked his eyes dry. His hand reached behind him, for the passenger door. Whatever Victor wanted, wherever he’d take him, Colin would comply.

  Victor sighed and walked back to the driver’s side. He dropped the gas pump back into place. He waited as it spit out his receipt, which he folded neatly and slipped into his wallet. “I’m sorry but I can’t drive you home,” he said, in his lowest voice. Colin could feel it, his voice, as it tolled through the car’s cold steel. “Suppose I drove up, nine o’clock at night, and let you out? Your mother would misunderstand.”

  Colin let go of the door handle. “Whatever,” he said, like there was nothing to care about, but his voice was uneven, hammered into bits. “I gotta jet then.” If he was going to throw up he wanted to do it far from Victor, far from the gas station or anyone who might pity him. “Later,” he said, the word wrinkled and wet. He cast his eyes on the concrete: one foot in front of the other, it wasn’t far, only a few blocks, at least it wasn’t January. His mother might not even notice the way he was trembling. She might not come to see. How’s Chelsea? she might ask from the living room, blue and wavy like an aquarium. He wouldn’t sleep that night—not with all the coffee, and not with the memory of Victor all over him. He’d stay up and read his father’s notebooks. He would think of his mother reading those same books, how she would soon finger the next page in his same absent way. Why would anything change? Why would you ever hope? He wondered what it felt like to freeze to death. He walked slower, evaluating the deeper ditches. Not far away there was a path to an undeveloped spot, a small pond in a circle of trees. He’d be dead by morning, without a chance. He mopped his tears with his coat sleeve before—if this was even possible—they could freeze as Victor had described.

  His mother was in the living room, the TV’s glow splashed all over the walls. “How’s Chelsea?” she called, and Colin called back. In his room he switched on all the lights, even the little red bulb that glowed in the penguin lamp’s chest. Before he undressed he peered outside and scanned the street for his own body, as though he hadn’t changed his mind and had died on the way home, his ghost now haunting his mother. Hadn’t his father convinced him, by now, that the reasons to die far outweighed the reasons to stay alive? He touched his knuckles to the glass, its chill welling up on his skin like water. Here he was, safe in his bedroom, watched over by his mother, tolerated by his entire school. Why couldn’t Victor have driven him home? Why couldn’t he have needed him? His eyes, once again, began to fill with tears, and it was in their blurry light that he caught sight of the black Toyota, shaded from all the streetlights. That he laughed right then, and that he cried, too; that his heart seemed to spin like the image of life his father had described, defective and malfunctioning and hurtling itself in all directions—how had his father missed it? How had he missed this exact reason, this part of life? Colin lay awake without reading, without crying, but the sun came up before he’d figured out a way to let Victor in. By then, he couldn’t figure out why it was ever a good idea, and the sight of Victor’s car, sparkling in the morning frost, gave him the chills. “You look terrible,” his mother said when he stepped into the hallway. She felt his forehead and his throat and frowned when he seemed okay. “You’re staying home anyway,” she said. “You need to sleep.”

  After she left, Colin watched the street from his bedroom window. When it was clear he wasn’t going to school, Victor’s car came to life and slipped slowly away from the curb. By ten o’clock Colin was asleep and he didn’t stir until noon, when the mail slot woke him with a creak. There was only one letter in the bin, a small note in a hand he’d be stupid not to recognize. Hope you’re okay, it read. Hope you get better. Think we’d better talk sometime soon. Not on the phone. The word not was underlined, a quick slash you could tell was important. Colin thought about saving it, Victor’s note, but tore it up instead. The envelope, too, he shredded, and it was only in pieces that he noticed it wasn’t postmarked.

  You’d think putting a gun to your head would indicate the end, but as Colin watched his mother for the signs—the drifting around the house, the long silences, the little sayings that sounded like riddles—he was shocked to conclude she was happy, not at all like his father when he’d begun to die. She was so glad about everything. “I’m so glad it’s spring again,” she told him in the car on their way into Minneapolis. It was mid-May and all traces of winter were gone. Even the wet, wilted trash that flowered every year under the snowmelt had been swept up and hauled away. “I’m so glad you’re spending time with your grandfather again,” she said when he didn’t respond. “I was worried you’d never want to see him again. I’m so grateful you can get to know each other like this. That you can learn from each other.”

  Learn from each other. His hand was already on the door handle, his backpack between his knees. They weren’t even off the freeway yet. I’m so glad you two fags can learn from each other. He wouldn’t look at her, and when she asked if anything was wrong he silenced her with a quick and curt “Shut up.” Only when she dropped him off and drove away did he feel cruel, as though he’d stomped on a freshly bloomed flower.

  His grandfather showed Colin everything he’d changed—new curtains in the dining room, a refinished mantel over the fireplace. He’d stripped the brick in one of the upstairs bedrooms, exposing what he called the chimney’s “character.” It was just a brick wall. “I don’t know what got into me this year,” he said while Colin fiddled with the straw in his glass of lemonade. When the tour was over it was time to make lunch. It was Colin’s job to fetch the ingredients from the fridge, as if it were some kind of test. He’d
had the whole afternoon planned out, Colin realized. There was an agenda, a way things were supposed to go. His grandfather suddenly seemed less than alive, a robot going about its tasks. Colin was wrong, he decided, to have expected wisdom or some lesson on life. He was wrong to suppose his grandfather could’ve taken away a fraction of his loneliness. His grandfather was useless.

  “Usually spring doesn’t affect me,” he was telling Colin, slicing thin circles of brie from a round he kept in a little wooden box. “But this year it’s rather different. I feel invigorated. That’s the best way to say it. Rejuvenated, perhaps. It’s what people are supposed to feel every spring. I usually feel it in the fall, when summer is finally over.”

  “Yeah,” Colin said.

  “I asked for thick-cut prosciutto. This is the kind of sandwich you eat with a knife and fork.”

  Colin could tell he was supposed to be impressed. “Wow,” he said, carrying out his same old task of removing the wrinkly, slimy leaves from the rest of the greens. Why couldn’t food be ready to eat, or simply compressed into a pill, like in movies? He smiled, thinking how much his grandfather would hate the idea, how he’d swear that society had lost its appreciation for life. Why be alive at all? he’d say, because he’d said it before. “Grandma usually just makes a protein shake for lunch,” Colin said.

  Quentin tossed the knife into the sink. “I never understood that. She’s such a brilliant woman, but how can she do that to herself? One of the few pleasures in life you can control is good food. Why be alive at all?”

  Colin laughed and finished picking through the leaves. His grandfather was smiling as if he’d said something clever when it was only a stupid trick, pulling a string in a doll’s back.

  Over lunch his grandfather went on about their perfect spring, how the weather couldn’t be improved, how it was easier to get through the day without a nap, and how even literature (he could never just say books), which he’d read all his life, had come to mean more than it ever had. Colin made a point of yawning—six times, seven times—until there was nothing left for his grandfather to say, nothing left to care about. “Well, that was good,” Quentin said to the remnants on his plate. As usual, it was too late for Colin to be sorry.

  “It really was good,” he said. “And I had fun making it.” He put his plate by the sink, on top of his grandfather’s, and noticed two wineglasses pushed back against the tile. Colin knew he washed dishes every day, and he knew, because you couldn’t find a more predictable old man, that his grandfather only drank one glass every night. He looked at them for what felt like too long, the glasses, as though he could read the unique set of lip prints just below each rim.

  The image of them—his grandfather and the man he must love—felt more domestic than even his own parents, whose “date nights” were like a bad play they’d put on for their children. Was he young? Colin wanted to know. Was he attractive? Did he lisp or could he pass for straight? Was he dressed like a teenager or like a businessman going to work? Did they drink the entire bottle? And what about after? More importantly, had Colin—with his hateful little act, with his derision and his display of contempt—ruined what could have been a perfect night in his grandfather’s memory?

  He turned on the tap and began filling the sink.

  “I can get those later,” his grandfather said, rearranging the dishes because there was nothing else to clean. “We can head into the library, if you brought something to read.”

  Colin shook his head. “I mean I did. Bring something I mean. But we can do the dishes now. It doesn’t really bother me.”

  “I suppose if you insist,” Quentin said. He went over to the oven and grabbed the dishtowel from the door handle. “I’ll dry.”

  Nobody had to love you. Loving wasn’t a law that’d been passed through the ages, and certainly no one could enforce it. To love was to hurt, Colin was learning, and you never chose to hurt more than you could stand.

  Over time, Colin had learned something from his father’s notebooks, and not just facts, dates, and stories most people had forgotten. He’d learned, more than anything, to observe people. To interpret. When Chelsea fought with her parents, Colin pretended not to listen, slouched in a chair while she fished for permission to go to the mall. She called her parents stupid and retarded. Once, she called her mother a bitch. Colin knew they loved her, their only child. Chelsea knew it too, and she used it to her advantage. But how long could that work? How far could you push it? Only five months away from fifteen, Colin felt like a strange, miniature adult. If there was any legacy his father left behind it was proof—thousands of pages of it—that everyone has his limit. Watching Chelsea fight with her parents revealed love for what it was: finite, limited, and fragile. Something nobody else in his family had figured out.

  Nobody left alive, anyway.

  “My mom said she’s glad I come over here,” he said, scouring a pan with a ball of steel wool. “She said she’s happy we can do this. She said…she said it’s good for us to know each other. That I can learn stuff, I guess.” He coughed into his shoulder and let out a laugh—from where he didn’t know—that made his voice jump an octave. “That sounds really stupid,” he squeaked, and he cleared his throat back to normal. “Dumb voice.”

  When it was ready, his grandfather took the rinsed pan and held it close to his chest. He stepped away from the sink and stood by the far window, looking out at the shelf of herbs he’d built along the fence. There were more dishes to dry but he moved slowly, buffing until the pan shined. Colin went back to washing, stacking the wet plates next to the sink. Finally his grandfather let out a small click—something in his throat that’d come loose. “She said that?”

  Colin nodded. “I know, right? I was like, Who are you? but she didn’t want it to be a joke or whatever. She was serious, I guess.”

  The pan was long dry and Quentin held it at his side. He looked out the window until, as if a clock had struck and it was time for something new, he laughed—just a small laugh, but something Colin hadn’t yet heard. “I wonder what changed her mind.” He shrugged and walked back toward the sink, pausing halfway to hang the pot on the rack above the island.

  “She thinks you’re a good role model, I guess.” Colin reached for the first of the wineglasses and rinsed loose the dried flecks, like river silt. “You never have two of these,” he said, and he waited for his grandfather to understand.

  Colin felt delicate, like a trinket you couldn’t set too carelessly back on its shelf. He wanted this man who’d lived so long a life to make it easier, to say the magic words all doomed boys like him needed to hear, whatever they were. Instead he felt a hand on his shoulder. It felt limp, like a leaf blown in place by the breeze. Then he took it away. Colin washed both glasses and handed them over. Quentin dried them and set them on the counter. They were done. The kitchen was again perfect, as if no one lived there. “All clean,” he said, and without warning began to shake, all over like a train was barreling through the house. In a half second Colin’s arms were wrapped tight around his grandfather. Colin thought back to the funeral—the only other time they had hugged. He felt a hand on his back, tracing a circle as he sobbed. How much longer could he have made it through life if had he kept all this grief to himself?

  Quentin patted his hand against Colin’s back. “I don’t know what to say,” he whispered, his chin resting in Colin’s hair. “At least you know. At least you’re brave.” At the word brave Colin cried harder. “It’s not an easy life. I’m not going to lie to you because you’re smarter than that. You’re brighter than that. You deserve more than that. It’s a goddamn hard life, if you want to know the truth.” The clock in the dining room chimed two and they waited while it cycled through its song. “But it’s the only life. There’s no other.”

  Colin nodded and pushed away. He dried his eyes with the collar of his shirt. “I don’t want you to treat me different or whatever, now that you know.”

  He tried to suppress it, you could tell, but hi
s grandfather’s mouth cracked upward in a smile. He hid it behind his hand. “Now that I know? Colin, I’ve known since the funeral.”

  Colin knew he looked angry but he was more shocked than anything. Why didn’t you warn me? he wanted to know. Why didn’t you stop me? Why didn’t you help me?

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “You can’t do a thing like that. You can never do a thing like that. Besides. Think back. Would you have believed me?”

  In his head, the funeral was a collage. His own reflection in the polished wood of his father’s coffin. His mother’s breakdown by the front door. The smell of burnt coffee. A feeling like everyone, no matter where he hid, could see his guilt and pity his future. Not in a thousand years—if someone had placed a hand on his shoulder and told him not to fight something as unchallengeable as desire—would he have nodded, would he have considered this person sane. “I’m not a fag,” he would’ve said, as he’d said all his life.

  “You can hide it if you need to,” his grandfather was saying. “Kids your age—boys especially, I’m sad to say—are vicious. They’re monsters. Hide it if you think it’s better for you, but don’t fight it. Don’t believe the lies you’ll want to tell yourself.” He returned his hand to Colin’s shoulder, this time with a grip, and gave him the most open, vulnerable smile he’d seen in his short, endless life.

  You can’t divide yourself among others infinitely, Diane had read recently. She was only one person, only one soul. She tried to act the part her therapist had cast. “You sound so hopeful these days,” her mother told her over the phone. Tim suggested she list small accomplishments. I swept the driveway today, she called to say, and On Tuesday we bought a new valance for the kitchen. Each she tried to sell as a struggle against victimhood.

  “This’ll be the year I fall back in love with gardening,” she told Shannon. At the grocery store she asked whatever happened to them—their coffee and girl talk—and that Sunday they picked up where they left off. Shannon had given up coffee for tea—to calm her stomach, she said—and brought a small thermos that she clicked open and closed with each sip. “You’ll see,” Diane was saying. She waved at the window behind her, opaque with nightfall. “There’s still flowers out there for me.”