The Temptation of Adam

by Dave Connis

  “Yeah, sure. Is Mark coming?”

  “No, he said he had stuff to do.”

  No, he doesn’t have “stuff” to do. Well, except drugs, which is definitely the “stuff” he’s doing. I only know because “I’ve got stuff to do” is my code for “I’d rather look at porn.” I guess it’s not a very original.

  “Cool,” I say, “I’ll see you over there.”

  I stand and give my computer a confused stare. I feel like we’re breaking up or mad at each other, and it makes me feel uneasy. I sigh and then head downstairs, thinking about how pathetic it is that I feel like I’m cheating on an inanimate object.

  I poke my head into my dad’s office. He’s skimming through what he (and the rest of the literary agent world) calls the slush pile. He gets at least twenty emails a day written by aspiring/desperate authors who want to escape the suffocating loneliness of unpublished writing.

  “Anything good?” I ask.

  “You know, sometimes I have to respond to aspiring writers with ‘I’m sorry, your stuff just isn’t for me,’ but I wish I could tell the truth. For example, this guy’s dialogue sounds like two toddlers talking about tax fraud. The thing is, if that were actually the scenario, I might ask to see the full manuscript. I just wish people stepped back for a second to look at the shit they dress in flower costumes.”

  “That’s good stuff, Dad. Tell your potential clients, ‘I don’t represent shit in flower costumes, but some other agent might.’ Anyway, I’m going to hang out with Elliot and Trey at Pritchett’s. I’ll be back later.”

  He looks at me as though I just told him I’m going to go look at a house with my realtor.

  “What?” I ask.

  “Nothing,” he smiles. “Go. Leave me alone and bring me back an Irish cream and Heath shake.”

  I hop in Genevieve and NPR comes on. Before I can back out of the driveway, my phone rings.

  “Hello?”

  “Why are there no black lawn gnomes?”

  I suddenly feel stupid-bucket’ a’ bull-warm, and my hands stick to the steering wheel.

  “Hey, Dez.”

  “Are we that racist of a society to not have diverse gnomes?”

  “Maybe diverse people don’t care about garden gnomes?”

  “You can’t know that. You’re white.”

  “You know what? You’re right. I’m calling my lawyer.”

  “For real?”

  “Yeah, I totally have a lawyer.”

  “What an American you are,” she says.

  “Should I just save your number?”

  “You don’t have my number saved yet?”

  I feel like an ass for saying no.

  “Well, gosh, Adam, should I have picked another Knight of Vice?” She sounds genuinely hurt and angry.

  “Dez, my not saving your number isn’t a reflection on how I feel about you.”

  “Well, what is a reflection on how you feel about me?”

  Is this a trap question? It has to be. Navigate wisely, Adam.

  “I’m considering making you a black garden gnome when I get back to school.”

  “Don’t do that for me, Adam. Do that for the world, for society, but if you do do it, you can give it to me. Just make sure it’s for society, not me, but still give it to me.”

  “How’s … addiction going?” I ask.

  “As swimmingly as ever. Now that I’ve subjected my computer to waterboarding, I’m worried I’m going to pick something else up. Like this beer my dad left here. Like right now. Hold on.”

  “Dez? Should you be moving onto something else? Isn’t there an AA step for that or something?”

  I pull into Pritchett’s just as Elliot and Trey walk through the door.

  “What do you know, Porn Boy? You were sitting there judging everyone at Addiction Fighters the other day. I know the arched eyebrow of the ‘at least I’m not that bad’ face when I see it.”

  “Ouch, Dez. You were the one who called me, remember?”

  “Yeah, sorry. I’m just frustrated. I want to be fixed. My dad yelled at me for not being driven enough again tonight. It’s like a nightly thing, now. Aren’t I too young to be this broken?”

  The thing Mr. Crotcher said about the beginning years being the most chaotic pops into my head, and I get a little pissed at myself for thinking this hard. I don’t understand how I can avoid thinking for two whole years and then be washed away in it in a matter of days.

  “I don’t think so,” I say. “We’re all born into chaos, and I don’t think it ever goes away. We just get better at learning how to find beauty in it.” I say this, but I haven’t tried finding beauty in anything but women, especially the naked variety.

  “Where’s the beauty in a girl who cycles through life-threatening addictions because her parents expected her to be a banking expert by age fifteen? Whatever. Just save my number.”

  Click.

  “Dez?”

  Silence.

  I add Dez Coulter to my contacts, hop out of Genevieve, and wander into Pritchett’s. My typical sitting place is unoccupied. Seeing it empty and knowing I won’t sit there makes me sad. I scan the place for Trey and Elliot and see them waving at me from the back of the diner. I wave back and then weave through the sea of green diner booths, making my way toward the bathroom. While I put toil back in toilet, I ignore a strange tug in my chest that I don’t recognize. I just know it has nothing to do with my bowels. I also ignore the voices saying, “You’re addicted to porn, Adam. Feeding the addiction isn’t a good thing” and make a playlist. I decide I’m particularly excited about a video called Four Les Clover.

  A LITTLE LESS LIKE A PIT OF DISPAIR

  “My family’s from El Salvador, but that doesn’t mean I watch Dora the Explorer,” Trey says.

  Elliot shrugs. “I just figured.”

  “White people always ‘just figure,’ and it needs to stop.” Trey smiles. “But really.”

  I laugh again. I’ve been laughing all night, which is kind of awesome. I’d gone to the bathroom as soon as I walked into the diner because I wanted to put off an awkward meeting-Mark rerun. I didn’t expect to actually have fun with these guys.

  “I agree, Trey,” I say. “That’s why I’ve always tried not to think. It’s safer that way. No drama, no racism, no constant worrying if you’re doing the right thing.”

  “Listen to this guy,” Trey says with dramatic hand gestures. “No, wait. Don’t listen to this guy. That’s horrible.”

  We share a laugh, but Elliot looks at me like he’s got me figured out. “You actually think that, don’t you?”

  I pick up my milkshake. “Is it a problem if I do?”

  Trey lets out a breath of air, like my statement is the heaviest thing in the world. “Well, I think so. Yeah, actually. It isn’t going to get you anywhere. That’s for sure.”

  I don’t know if it’s the giddiness I feel from a sudden Dez-filled life, or if Pritchett spiked the shakes tonight, but I don’t stop talking. It’s the point of the conversation where I shouldn’t be talking any more.

  Talking = thinking.

  Relationships = thinking.

  Everything I’m doing right now = thinking.

  “I guess maybe I used to think that? Well … maybe I still do. I don’t know.”

  “Addiction Fighters really got to you, huh?” Trey asks with a victorious smirk.

  “Kind of. I guess. I don’t know. A lot is getting to me.”

  On a completely different topic: porn.

  I can’t stop thinking about it. It feels like my junk has a strange non-physical itch for it.

  “This is important, A, but hold on,” Elliot says. “Mr. Cratcher’s calling.”

  I point at Elliot’s phone. “Mr. Crotcher calls you? How adorable.”

  Trey lets out a manufactured laugh, the laugh people use when they don’t like what you said, but they don’t want to make you feel bad. It reminds me that I really need to stop talking. These guys aren’t going to understand
me, and they can’t do anything for me I can’t do myself.

  Master speaks truth. I sees it coming, I does. They will hurts you. Gollum!

  I’m about to get up and leave when Elliot’s face turns paler than Moby Dick.

  “Yeah,” he says, and a few seconds pass before he speaks again. “Yeah, I’m with them. We’ll be over in a minute.”

  We hear Mr. Crotcher hang up, but Elliot doesn’t take the phone from his ear. He just sits with a look of terror on his face, staring at the space between our heads.

  “Elliot, what’s wrong?” Trey asks.

  “It’s Mark,” he says. “He’s dead.”

  —

  Mark + drugs + too many = Mark’s dead.

  Mark’s death + me = questioning everything + only being able to think in formulas.

  Mark + addiction = death.

  Me + addiction = death.

  Mark = death.

  Mark = me.

  Me = death.

  —

  Cure for not thinking about porn? Have a friend—or whatever Mark was—die while thinking about it. It’s four in the morning and, instead of staring at the computer, I’m staring at the ceiling. Helpless.

  My dad won’t wake me up this morning. He stayed up until three last night waiting for me to come home because I stayed with Elliot and Trey as long as I could. Mark had been in the Knights of Vice for six months. I was/am a mess, and I’d only known him a week. The other two took his death really hard, like uncontrollable sobbing hard.

  I think about waking Addy, but she stayed up with my dad and she gets really crabby when she doesn’t sleep. I pick up my phone and scroll down to my newest contact.

  I call her. Each unanswered ring makes me very aware that I’m on the uncharted seas of Adam Hawthorne’s emotion.

  “Hi, this is Dez. There are 1440 minutes in a day. Pick another one and try again.”

  I hang up before I have to leave a message. She’s probably sleeping, and I don’t want to talk to a machine right now. I throw the phone onto the bed, and suddenly everything in me feels like it’s swallowed by the black space of Deception Pass.

  The phone rings.

  I gasp in relief.

  “Hello?”

  “To what does my REM sleep owe the pleasure of this call?”

  “Mark’s death.”

  A beat of silence reigns.

  “Shit.”

  “The only thing I can think about is that I’m Mark,” I say. “I know that’s weird. He was addicted to drugs. I’m not addicted to drugs, but I’m—I’ve figured out I can’t stop thinking about porn. Watching it. Needing it. Even if I wanted to, I don’t think I could stop. I don’t have control over it.”

  “How’d he die? OD’d?”

  “Yeah. His vice killed him, but at the same time, I feel like his vice hurt me, too. It’s like … we’re all volcanoes and we wander around engulfing each other in our disaster.”

  “We’re all natural disasters,” she says.

  “Yeah, or maybe we’re all unnatural disasters hoping to figure out how to be natural.”

  “How are the other Knights of Vice?”

  “Sucky, but I guess everyone’s sucky.”

  “I’m typically not an optimist, but maybe consider some people somewhere in the world are happy? It might make you feel less like a pile of crap. Just a suspicion.”

  I rub my eyes and look at the soon-to-spawn portal to hell on my nightstand. It’s 4:45.

  “Dez, I have to go.”

  “Are you okay? Wait … that’s an incredibly unintelligent question. Are you miserable?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That means you’re normal.”

  I don’t want to hang up. I want to be with Dez Coulter’s voice for the rest of the day.

  “I’ll talk to you tonight,” she says, and though I can’t make myself smile, my insides seem a little less like a pit of despair.

  EVERY SINGLE CATEGORY

  I knock on Mr. Cratcher’s door. “Hello?”

  He answers right away.

  “Adam, come in.”

  I walk inside, and instead of going straight to work, Mr. Crotcher sits down at his computer and clicks on something. Music pipes through his studio monitors, so I sit down and listen, assuming a one-liner filled rant will follow.

  The song finishes a few minutes later, and I remain still. It was a good song, but I’m mostly just curious as to what Mr. Crotcher’s going to say about it. His eyes are closed, but his mouth’s open like he’s about to speak.

  He shifts in his seat. “‘There’s a blaze of light in every word, it doesn’t matter which you’ve heard, the holy or the broken hallelujah.’”

  I don’t say anything.

  “Mr. Leonard Cohen, the author of the song, is saying something to you, Adam. There’s a blaze of light in every word, both the holy and the broken.” He turns his gaze to me. “Have you thought about my question?”

  The guy asks me eighty questions every morning. I can’t remember which one he’s talking about.

  “What are you?” he asks, registering the forgetfulness on my face. “If you are not a fixed outcome, or a result, what are you? What is Mark?”

  “Dead?” I ask honestly.

  “Keep thinking about it. Think about it in terms of Mr. Cohen’s song and mathematics. Now, it’s time to start recording. We will do it in memory of Mark.”

  I set up a vocal mic, and Mr. Cratcher clips a mesh screen to the front of it. I’m about to sit and start the DAW when he grabs the mic in his palm, clutching it like he’s in pain. He looks out the window again, and before I can ask him if he’s okay, he says, “I’ve changed my mind. Let’s record the last song and work toward the beginning of the album.”

  I scratch my head. “Doesn’t that mean we have to decide if we want the album to be crazy at the beginning and simple at the end, or vice versa?”

  Mr. Crotcher smiles his all-knowing old man smile. “I’m not sure if that will be my decision.”

  What on earth does that mean?

  “It’s your album, Mr. Cratcher. Why wouldn’t you make that decision?”

  “Many choices come down to life and death,” he says, “and everyone has to choose it for themselves.”

  I throw my fingers over my eyes and let out a low growl.

  Mr. Crotcher + words = mind coma.

  “A: I don’t know what that means, and B: that doesn’t answer my question.”

  “How can you know it doesn’t answer your question if you don’t know what it means?”

  “Gah, okay, can we just … record or something?”

  “Yes, let’s do a few tests to make sure our setup is right.”

  My phone rings. It’s Addy.

  I pick it up and walk to the other side of the studio. “Hey, Addy.”

  “Hey, are you doing okay?”

  “I guess. I’m just … confused.”

  “I’m sorry. Listen. I have to run back to Portland to turn in some paperwork I forgot I had to the main office. Do you want to come with me? Get your mind off things? You can bring Dez, or your new dude friends. Maybe Trey will want to come?”

  “Elliot and Dez are in school and Trey is working. Do I have to see The Woman?”

  “Nope, we don’t even have to go to her house.”

  “Alright, can we go after I’m done with my morning internship of torture?”

  “Sure thing.”

  —

  Addy sings along with Amelia Hunt as we drive down the highway, and I do my best to keep from thinking about all the times I came home from school to hear The Woman playing this album in the living room.

  “So,” I say, trying to keep my brain busy. “How’s Brennan. Wait, Brad? Bread?”

  “Brent,” she says. “He gone. No more Brent.”

  “Aw, I’m sorry. Why?”

  “Because he needed to die.”

  I reach for the volume knob to turn it down. “For real, Addy, who broke up with who?”

&nbs
p; “It’s whom. Do we have to get into this now?”

  “Aha! See? It isn’t fun, is it?”

  “I broke up with him.”

  “Was it messy?”

  She nods dramatically. “Totally. No, it wasn’t at all. We just weren’t into each other. Different personalities, I guess.”

  “Is that what you told him? Or is that what you’re telling me?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You get along with everyone, Addy. Personalities don’t exist for you. Why did you break up with him?”

  She flicks me in the forehead. “Gosh, you’re an annoying little twerp. Because I was scared. He started talking about marriage, and making babies, and mortgages, and I just … flipped out.”

  “Because of the divorce.”

  She rolls her eyes. “Yes, because of the divorce, but that doesn’t mean you’re off the hook. You can’t just, I don’t know, do what you’ve been doing. Me being affected by the divorce isn’t an excuse.”

  “I know.”

  “Do ya?”

  Something I haven’t ever said to anyone settles on my tongue. It brings along boatloads of feelings I’ve been ignoring in hopes they’ll go away. I hoped that if I didn’t pay attention to them, they’d stop mattering. I try to continue making them not matter, but the feelings push the words off my tongue before I can stop them, which is probably what Addy wants.

  “The Woman didn’t even say good-bye to me, Addy.”

  She isn’t surprised by this. She just sighs like she’s been waiting for it. “I know, Adam. I know.”

  “She left. No explanation. No, ‘I’m sorry.’ Nothing. She was supposed to be one of the few people who loved me so hard I could trust her with everything, but she just disappeared.”

  The next thing I’m about to say, I’ve thought about since Addy literally left me on the curb. I know she wanted the best for everyone. That it wasn’t just a normal abandoning, but intention wasn’t enough.

  “And you—” My throat closes up. The dark of Deception Pass reminds me that I’m alone. That Addy is gone. My Gollum brain is screaming. “You followed her.”

  As soon as I say it, I feel a giant gate lift in my chest. “You left me with a dad who only cared about getting her back. You left me, too. Everyone left me for The Woman.”