by Simon Jacobs
For a moment, I’m genuinely touched, until I realize it’s a line you stole from me.
You take her other hand, which means prying it off my arm. It feels strange to be standing there with just the one hand on top of her head, so I pat it, once, and take it away.
“We’re going to take care of you,” you say, your thumb on her thumb. “My name is Josephine.” The name is a step backward, something classed in the extra syllables.
I kneel down too, me and my terrible beard, caught up in it. “I’m Jonathan.”
Vivian looks at us both, knelt on the ground, declaring our loyalty as if subjects, promising her everything. Her eyes sparkle like something we could never afford.
*
On a summer night in late May a year ago, three weeks after your brother’s funeral, we sat on the steps outside Decker Hall on a campus that felt increasingly alien to us. We’d officially moved out of it almost a month before, but that night we’d been drawn from the apartment and walked back to the grounds, more or less abandoned for the summer but still lighted and available, as if to revisit the earlier spaces of our relationship, before we tied it to property. From here, I could see the bench where I’d watched Candace move across campus, where the ends of me were sharpened.
You were sharing a memory of you and your brother, of his dressing up in your father’s white temple garment and prancing around the house while your parents were elsewhere. He was much too old for it, for this kind of game—probably twelve to your eight—and you recognized it, that the underwear fit him maybe too well, almost like it would an adult, but it had been a revelation, too, a marginal breach in the unimpeachable figure that was your father at that age, that in this one way some aspect of his religion, his character could become laughable, that when the absurdity of it was presented in this way—visually, which was the universal comic format—it was okay to laugh at it. And so, while he was away with your mother and thus powerless to stop it, while your brother farted into his holy underwear, your father lost a fraction of his power, his aura, and maybe God died a little.
You magicked a cigarette out of the air and lit it. I’d seen the same smashed pack of American Spirits in various places around the apartment over the last two weeks, but had never seen you smoke one, and hadn’t noticed the cigarettes at all until we moved in together. I’d come to see the single, omnipresent pack as a totem, something you carried with you and felt in your pocket when you wanted to remind yourself of something else, of a habit you’d basically abandoned but didn’t want to totally relinquish, the same way you no longer actively wore spikes but kept the jackets. Its deployment here signaled a reversion, a physical activation of the past, and the smoke, heretofore an alien substance between us, lent the scene a veneer of unreality. It seemed like a cliché. As often as I revisit this conversation, it’s the cigarette that gives me pause, suggests that there is some crucial piece of information I haven’t picked up.
Your loss expanded. “Jesus, what happened to this place?” you said, exhaling a cloud, which seemed to imply a lot, Richmond as a whole. “I saw Casey yesterday. Him and Ian. It was like they didn’t even recognize me.”
“What were they up to?”
“Just biking around by the cemetery, fucking around. I kicked one of his tires and was like, GO TO SCHOOL. It’s exams this week. He almost crashed but he didn’t even turn around. He just sped off. No acknowledgment whatsoever.”
“Maybe he was just out of it. Maybe he was on something.”
“He’s going to be twenty by the time he graduates high school as it is. It’s falling apart.”
“What, like the scene?” I could hear myself putting it in quotes.
“Ha, the scene. What does that even mean. There are more faux-hawks than ever. It’s always been something you could do at the mall,” you said. “No, I mean my numbers are dwindling. Everyone’s gone to me now. First August, then Ryan. Now Casey, basically.”
The second name didn’t register. The world adjusted in the course of an instant, took me in and spit me out somewhere new. I felt my phone in my pocket, which, since we’d started dating, I’d begun carrying again. Within a year, Casey, too, would be dead. I said, “Who was August?”
“He was another friend who went away.” You arched your back and laced your fingers behind your head, like one would reminisce while looking up at the stars. The movement drew up the sleeve of your shirt over the bloody set of clawmarks you have tattooed on your shoulder, a design you described as “extremely teenager,” its existence an indication that at some point in our lives we were allowed to have been really, really stupid. You couldn’t hold the position long before you needed to address the cigarette again. “He had snakes. Did you know him at all? He used to come to everything.”
I allowed a few seconds in which I didn’t breathe, where the smoke—which I was obsessed with now—was siphoned in and out by purely your side. He had snakes. This piece of him like a myth. I answered tangentially, “When was this?”
“I mean, I knew him for years before you came along. October or November was the last time I saw him.”
Before I came along. “What happened to him?”
If one were to dial back through this conversation, it would be here, in those last two extraneous words—“to him”—where they would find my agency in this. As these stories were all, ultimately, about agency.
You shrugged. “What happens to anyone in Richmond? I knew him for a long time, since high school, and then one day he just left, without a word. I have my suspicions.”
The implications spidered out before me in the dark, memories rearranging themselves around the new facts now laying claim to my past, people and objects inscribed with new meanings, new possessions. I pictured the crowds, August at the back of some basement, and beside him—as if an illustrated transparency had been slid over the image—your face resolved into view, altered beneath a different haircut but suddenly unmistakable. The lapse in my perception felt enormous, treacherously basic—was I really so single-minded as that? Candace was thrown into your proximity, and her existence seemed to reconfigure, too, to shift one way, so that I saw you in places I hadn’t before, places you’d always been—as if, once Candace had been removed as the active focus of my attention, I’d neatly found a replacement. You weren’t there until she was gone. I remembered scanning the crowd. I remembered the night I met you, shooting firecrackers at Casey with the rest of that awful fake-Southern band, I wondered how I might have interpreted this scene in isolation, if I’d known nothing, if I’d been watching you, which pairs I would have drawn together. I wondered if you’d known her well. In the moment, I considered the consequences, what you’d say if I got his name wrong right now, if August became Arthur or Ollie. I replied associatively, sublimating his person, burying him, beckoning toward the future; I slid myself in as neatly as August had been X-ed out: “Well, you still have me. And besides, it’s only one more year until you’re out of here for good. We can leave just as easy.”
You nodded without looking at me. It was amazing how much we believed in this endpoint, believed it would offer us something we could use. The cigarette smoldered away, casting its spells everywhere. Why hadn’t we left then, at that moment? What were we waiting for? You said: “What about you?”
“What about me?”
“Have you lost anybody?”
The question seemed ridiculously huge. My past felt puddle-deep. I struggled for the names of the two kids killed by the train. There were stones with their names on campus now. I looked to my bench. “Did you ever know Candace? Candace Eriksson?”
I didn’t know what I was doing; I had no idea why I’d suddenly claimed her as my own, brought her back to the surface to clash with your associations. Maybe it was because I’d racked my brain for concrete losses and come up empty and uncomplicated—as one could never answer a question like that with “nobody,” “no one”—and had nothing else to offer, maybe because I desperately wanted to draw our circ
les even closer together, to create the kind of shared history that might cement us further, prove that we existed before we did, or justify to myself that Candace was important enough to have, for a time, overwritten you. Maybe I pictured your stock of ablated and fading humans and I envied it, I wanted the absence for myself, the same kind of impulse that would try to keep someone from a funeral, from that closure. I knew that the lie would lead to others, but for a second I didn’t see it as a lie, rather a redirection of weight, of energies and emphasis, a casting of light; still, as soon as her name left my mouth I wanted to rescind it, invent someone else.
“Candace?” you said with spite. “Candace was a liar.” You exhaled smoke through your teeth. I felt briefly weightless, waiting for the ground to come up and meet me, for my consequences. I pictured August’s hand on her back, his mouth open in laughter; it became a betrayal. “Which version did she tell you?” you said. “The one where a maniac with a gun bursts in on her and August but she’s had too much ‘cop trauma’ to let him go to the police, she doesn’t even see this guy’s face? Or the one where she has some Richmond dude buy a gun on her behalf because she feels ‘threatened’ by August? Or was it the cancerous father?”
Your voice changed on cop trauma, on threatened. I’d never heard any of it; the rumors had never found me. I felt my role shift again, from that of a person into some kind of force, something that lacked its own form but instigated environmental circumstances, like biting wind or heat. It was like I was coming to this story new—I was in no one’s reading. The smoke blossomed in a cloud around your neck. It hovered around your eyes. A great density seemed to fill the air between us, a substance so thick that it was difficult for either of us to see the other, to gauge the impact our words were having. I said, “The first one.”
You looked at me through this haze and smartly expelled more into it, a humorless, single-beat laugh. “Yeah. Did you believe her?”
“I don’t know.”
A wisp of smoke curled around your ear. “Well, I’m sorry she left you,” you said. I flushed with the misunderstanding, or with my misunderstanding of the words, which I didn’t correct. The implication was that I’d been played. “You know,” you continued, “there’s a version of that story where she and August disappear to the same place, in the same car.”
“With a gun in the backseat.”
“Exactly.”
The night pushed on. It was easier to think of August and Candace as two waning symbols moving gradually into the sunset than as characters whose effect we’d ever let drip into our lives. I experienced, there on the steps, the distinct sensation of something fateful opening up inside of me, a vacuum in which my actions—storming August’s house, the appearance of the gun, that night in November, Candace herself—lost all meaning except that which would, in the end, draw us together, your disappearance at my hands. I thrilled to you like never before.
It occurred to me then in a vague way (in the sense that, in the karmic ebb and flow of life, things will occasionally turn out better for one person than another, that sometimes we profit from someone else’s misfortune in ways that we don’t always explicitly recognize at the time), but now it comes to me ceaselessly, the steady development of circumstances that seem both impossible and yet difficult to deny: that the world in its present state has somehow been catered entirely to us, this other vanishing pair, a synthesis of everything I’ve ever made disappear, riddled with the consequences of a utopia that was everything we asked for, or ever imagined wanting.
*
The house, disturbingly clean, seems to exist one day fresher than its last inhabitants. I imagine, after it was vacated, the caretaker returning the next morning none the wiser, crunching up the driveway in their Jeep to clean the house one more time, to unknowingly scrub away the last traces of human occupation—you could tell just by looking at the soap, sitting neat and untouched in its tray by the tub. Only Vivian persisted beyond, moving without touching, her tragedy human and manageable, and when you pull her to your chest, wrap your arm around her back and say it again, “We are going to take such good care of you,” it seems almost tenable, like something we could hold in our hands.
You ask Vivian—in the same quiet, sweet tone, a hint of magical intention—if she wants to get “cleaned up.” She nods, and at once I feel a separation occurring, a collapse of suspicion about her origins, the opening of a new set of vulnerabilities. Within a few developmental seconds, I know that I will never be able to ask where she came from and how she got here and disbelieve her answer, that we are lost to this tenderness.
You march her by the shoulders out of the bedroom and down the hallway to the bathroom by the painting. With your every step away from me our journey down this path feels further determined, fated, the world outside the mansion gets miles wider while we remain stranded in its middle. I feel us fixing in place, the mud sucking at our shoes. The door closes. I sit in the same chair for a thousand nights, until it warps to my body. The water comes on hard. It runs, uninterrupted, on full-blast, for the rest of my life.
Abandoned in the hallway, I pace uselessly up and down the second-floor corridor examining the identical marble busts, as if I’ll find some disparity between them that will reveal their true nature, their hidden significance. The chins tilt up in vague, uniform defiance, pupils blank. I press my ear against the bathroom door, but all I hear is rushing water pouring from faucet to drain. The stream is concentrated and undiluted, a domestic comfort turned hostile; deeply, I think I hear more than one source of water, as if you’ve turned on both the sink and the tub, a calculated maneuver to drown me out, to keep me from overhearing. I knot my slick hands and cross the balcony above the foyer back and forth until steam trickles out from under the bathroom door, seeping into the painting, weathering it.
On my twelfth lap of the balcony a possibility grabs hold of me. I bolt down the staircase, pound across the foyer, and throw open the front door to the terrace beyond. The air outside is denser than it is within. The forest stands before me in the distance like a dark entity against the late afternoon light, an impassable wall. I race around the front of the house, trying to find the easiest route to wind my way to the back, a means of egress I hadn’t considered, each window an escape hatch. I plow through the flawless, dimming gardens around the corner in a wide arc, looking by turns ahead of me and up at the windows for movement. I emerge behind the house after what seems like an absurd length of time. Narrow pools and a brick avenue beneath an archway stretch to the vanishing point, tinged with gold. The property goes on forever. I stand very still on the lawn, poised for interference, a sudden start. The air swarms with heat like a grainy photograph, nearly audible. Sweat crawls down my face. Thirty feet away, a line of manicured hedges wraps around the back half of the mansion at waist-height, as if to disguise the seam at its base. I scan the windows of the second floor and spot it immediately—two windows are cracked open, and below the bathroom window hangs a deep red sheet, knotted into a rope. It reaches down about six feet from the window, ending fifteen feet off the ground, a lustrous color deployed on randy nights in the mirror bedroom.
I actually shout it out and point, I’m so pleased to have caught this deception: “Aha!” I look from the trailing edge of the sheet to the base of the house and, sure enough, the bushes directly beneath look disheveled, as if they’ve sustained a human-sized impact. I whirl around, thrilled—the grass at my feet rustles eerily, like stiff plastic—and scream “VIVIAN!” across the lawn, frantic with non-movement. I don’t know why I call her name first.
My voice carries on without interruption down the landscaped corridor. I advance on the bushes, hoping they’ll offer some clue as to where you’ve gone, how you made the decision so quickly without me. Beneath the window, the branches are sunken down and snapped, and as I approach, mounding above it, I see, unmistakably, the curved form of a human hip.
My stomach leaps into my throat—no one, really, comes to expect surprises li
ke this—and I pause before taking a few more steps forward, as a rotting stench meets the suffocating air and filters into my nose, a radius around this bush, a pocket of stifling death.
It’s the body of a woman, twisted among the leaves, wedged between the hedge and the house. She’s bent at the waist, turned on her right side, angled toward the lawn but almost face-down, one arm twisted behind her back and the other thrown over her head. Her hair—fair red to gray—is pulled into a ponytail. She wears olive-colored pants and a faded hoodie, the color washing out of both. Her skin—the hands and face, the strip between the hoodie and the jeans—all has the same pallor, like bleached earth. Tiny ruptures dot the fabric of her clothes, minute threads curling out from the pricks of the thorny branches, barely blood, as if to add insult to injury, to mock what actually killed her.
I picture this woman scaling out of the window in a desperate escape attempt—having dragged the sheet into the bathroom or found it there, unable to use the front door for fear of being discovered, for fear of something—and then missing a knot, slipping to land awkwardly, embarrassingly, cripplingly alone in the gap between the bushes and the house. And then, unable to drag herself out, over a period of days, of weeks, left to die in the back long after the rest had fled out the front. Or: she’d made it to the ground intact, but someone had been waiting for her.
I imagine you and Vivian, your new pair escaping out the other side of the house, leaving me alone with this beastly place.
I forsake the body. I sprint as fast as my legs will take me back to the front of the house, trampling the same gardens. It seems to take even longer to cross the distance; I envision catching you on the great stone steps, imagine how I’d move my body to throw you off the railing and take Vivian by the hand, changing one partner for another, a choice I can’t explain but that shouts THE FUTURE! THE FUTURE! with boundless ferocity. I reel around the corner in anticipation of combat, of having to act quickly, again lost in the emotion of my mistake, and as I climb the empty steps, something deep and generative yawns open within me.