by Caleb Crain
As Matthew stood at the edge of this dormitory, he noticed Leif sauntering toward him, shading his eyes in the sharp sun. Come here, Matthew silently summoned him. In Leif’s company Matthew wouldn’t feel so cut off from the people around him. What he was standing in the middle of was a kind of celebration, but until he spotted Leif, he hadn’t been aware of wishing so badly to be able to respond to the invitation to join it. What a dangerous wish.
“How old are you again?” Matthew asked.
“Twenty-four. But I never told you.”
They studied each other. It would have been less awkward if they had already gone to bed together, Matthew thought. There was a reservation in Leif’s manner, and it was probably the reservation usual with attractive men who think of themselves as serious—a hunch that Matthew wouldn’t be. In most cases, Matthew knew from experience, the reservation was little more than a pretext for shifting onto Matthew the responsibility for light-mindedness, a burden Matthew was happy to shoulder. But the attraction of Leif, perhaps, was something in him that was genuinely refractory to routine.
“For the record,” Leif said, “you’re fairly transparent to me right now.”
“We could go to my place.”
Leif took up one of Matthew’s hands in both of his, in a manner that suggested that Matthew’s assertion of lust was a gift that he found overwhelming and was therefore going to put off. He turned Matthew’s hand palm up, and Matthew opened it. “You have a long lifeline,” Leif said. “That’s how the reading always starts, isn’t it.”
“You would know.”
“I actually wouldn’t?”
Matthew tightened his hand around one of Leif’s.
“Ow,” Leif said without meaning it. A text arrived on his phone. “It’s time to go unpack the lunch of the revolutionaries. Do you want to come?”
Leif led Matthew across the park to three folding tables that had been lined up end to end. A black woman in a quilted sleeveless traffic-orange down jacket was spraying the tabletops and wiping them. When Leif greeted her, she merely paused, while still bent over the table, and craned her neck to exchange kisses with him until she noticed that he meant to introduce a friend, at which point she drew herself up to full height and pulled off a latex glove. “Diana,” she named herself, as they shook hands. She seemed to be Matthew’s age. Behind her, in a work space protected by a tarp strung between two trees, a heavyset woman with pronounced eyeglasses waved at Leif, twinkling her fingers.
“Where’s the dolly?” Leif asked Diana.
“It’s been a while since you’ve been here, hasn’t it.”
“I’m a bad boy.”
“No, no, no. Not unless you want to be. I just mean, you don’t know the latest. The police have stopped letting them in.”
“Dollies? Are you serious?”
“They say they’re vehicles. No bicycles, either.” She let Leif enjoy a few moments of outrage. “Exactly,” she said, of the faces he made.
“I should have brought my board,” said Leif.
“They’re vehicles, too, now.”
A hatless man with close-cropped hair and green eyes had approached them, and he now struck Leif on the shoulder. “I’ll carry one, you carry one,” he said.
“Uh, no?” Leif replied.
“What are we carrying?” Matthew asked.
There were two large insulated plastic tanks—a brown rectangular one for hot drinking water and a yellow barrel-shaped one for cold—that had to be filled up in the back kitchen of a diner with an indulgent owner a block and a half away.
“Chris is in our working group,” Leif said of the green-eyed man.
“The food group?” Matthew asked.
“The other one.”
But the man didn’t look like someone who would be interested in the interior of another person’s mind. He looked confident rather than sensitive, and so radiantly and abundantly straight that in an earlier era, Matthew imagined, his was the type who would have been happy to let you blow him so long as he had a chance to beat you up for it afterward. “You helping us out?” the man asked.
“With lunch?” Matthew asked in return. He had to hope that the man couldn’t in fact read minds. “Between you and me we could probably carry one of these,” he suggested to Leif.
In fact, the tanks when empty weighed little, and Matthew was easily able to carry one by himself while the green-eyed Chris carried the other. “Coming through,” Chris warned. The visibility of their task, Matthew felt as the three of them edged gently through the crowd, conferred a distinction. Pride in it wasn’t perhaps a very Occupy sentiment to be having, but considering that Matthew had been insisting to himself a moment ago that he never belonged to groups of any kind, it seemed forgivable to hold on for a minute or two to a pleasure not quite orthodox. There were several elements compounded in it. There was the glamour of usefulness—what a child feels when asked to fold cloth napkins into hats for a party that his parents are throwing. There was the clemency of an arranger of a picnic who forbears to lord it over the mere picnickers; they were performing their errand gladly and mildly. And then there was the simple tension of muscle. Matthew felt as male and as strong as Chris and as gay as Leif, identification between the three of them, however brief their acquaintance, having become unfussy through collaboration.
In the steel-and-white-tile kitchen of the diner, the cooks didn’t attempt English and only Chris attempted a few words of Spanish, but meaning was evident. The cooks were brusque, jolly, and magnanimous. The palm of one held the boys off while with practiced aim the grip of another deftly tipped a pot of boiling water into the square brown tank as it sat in a deep sink. Once the cook had poured the water, he clicked the lid shut with fasteners whose mechanism Matthew hadn’t yet had a chance to understand, and when Matthew and Leif bent to pick the tank up, he tapped on a brim just under the top to show them where it would be easier to get a handhold.
“You got it?” Chris asked. Matthew and Leif shuffled in order to be sure of the synchronization of their steps. Chris, meanwhile, having fist-bumped the cooks, held his tank by its strap with one hand, canting against its weight, which he arced his arm and his shoulders to distribute. “You got it?” he repeated. To watch the parade that the three of them were making, the patrons of the restaurant looked away from their conversations and up from their coffees. To watch the clowns, a.k.a. the heroes of the moment, go by. Chris and Leif sang out thanks.
Hurried by the strain of his burden, Chris soon left Leif and Matthew behind. Once he was safely out of earshot, and Matthew and Leif were tottering together alone, knocking the tank into the sides of each other’s knees with every third step, Leif asked Matthew where he grew up. Matthew described the suburb to the northwest of the city where his parents still lived and where little ever happened, apart from the coarsening successions typical in such places: a bank building converted into a drugstore, a church at the town’s old crossroads pulled down for the sake of a mall, and then the mall falling into neglect upon the advent of a second mall positioned, more strategically, next to the throughway.
“Your parents are still together?” Leif asked.
“Yeah.”
“It sounds nice,” said Leif. “Snug.”
The comment didn’t seem to be ironic. “What about you?” Matthew asked.
“Oh.” The weight of the tank wouldn’t let him shrug. “My mother lives in a little ranch house with vinyl siding in Vermont. It’s on top of a hill.” He seemed to glance at the landscape with his mind’s eye. “So we didn’t spook you last night?”
“You don’t seem to have,” Matthew said.
“Would you be willing to try it again?”
“Maybe.”
“Not here,” Leif said. “Almost everyone here has it a little. If you tuned in on all of that . . .”
“You make it sound dangerous,”
Matthew said.
The boy didn’t reply.
They set the tank down, to rest for a moment. Matthew realized that he was hoping that the implausible fantasy was something he could wait out. Matthew’s advantage, in being older, was that he was more familiar with waiting.
The boy combed his hair with his fingers.
“Is Chris really in your mind-reading group?” Matthew asked, as they picked the tank up again.
“He’s not any good, but he’s really into it.”
“He’s something.”
“Raleigh knows him from New Orleans,” Leif replied. “All us girls had a crush on him at first.” He glanced at Matthew. “You don’t like that, do you.”
“That you think he’s hot?”
“No,” said Leif. “‘Us girls.’ But you’re not allowed to be square about gender identity here. At the start of an assembly, when a person says their name, they also say their pronouns.”
“Which ones do you ask for?”
“I don’t usually get all Ursula K. Le Guin about it.” They set the tank down to take another break, and Leif shook a finger at Matthew: “It’s a matter of human dignity, you know.”
“In the Arcadia . . . ,” Matthew began. At this point he still hadn’t disclosed that he was a graduate student.
“In the Arcadia,” Leif prompted. “Go on.”
“After one of the heroes dresses as a woman, Sidney calls him by his new name from then on.”
“Her new name,” Leif corrected.
“Have you read it?”
“No, but.”
“It’s a little confusing. He’s so consistent about it. The least he could do is slip up.”
“Slipping up can be fun, too,” said Leif.
It was another of the boasts that Leif’s beauty allowed him to make, Matthew decided. Any quality that went so high would partake of both aspects.
By the time they returned to the Kitchen, as the serving area of the encampment was somewhat aspirationally called, Chris’s tank was in place and Chris himself had moved on. Matthew and Leif sat down with the women, and after rubbing their hands with sanitizer, flapping them dry, and slipping on latex gloves, they prepared lunch. It was the least impressive meal of the day, Leif explained. A local pizzeria usually delivered pizzas that strangers had donated by phone or online—the number ebbed and flowed with the mysterious tides of news coverage and of the internet generally—but the rest of the meal was often cold, unlike breakfast and dinner.
The health department required the volunteers to wear hats, and they had agreed among themselves—consensed, as they called it—to minimize, in their presentation of the food, the number of surfaces that were communally touched. Leif stood an array of small paper cups on the table in front of him and into each one placed a single baby carrot and a single cherry tomato. Matthew set about making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on grocery store bread, and with assembly-line efficiency, the glasses-wearing woman tucked these sandwiches into plastic baggies, which she sealed with red twist ties. There was a debate about a large bowl of popcorn, the kernels of which Leif saw as just so many fomites and lobbied for portioning into paper cups like the vegetables, but there wasn’t enough time and there didn’t seem to be enough paper cups; instead, one cup was deputized scoop. There was no time even to debate a carton of cheddar-flavored goldfish crackers, and at the very last minute, a woman in a bandanna ran up with an enormous plastic tub of what she identified as tuna salad with sauce gribiche, along with half a dozen loaves that she called peasant bread. The peasant bread had a thick, almost black crust. It was to go with the tuna gribiche, the woman said, in the voice of someone whose suggestions were customarily followed. The volunteers were able to find a ladle for the tuna, but no one had a bread knife. To the woman donating the tuna, the members of the Food Working Group were all smiles, but “I sometimes think the bane of my existence is unsliced bread,” was Diana’s mutter. A young man stepped up, fortunately, who was willing to have his hands sanitized and to hack away at the tough loaves with an unserrated, not very sharp knife, which was all they had, and he did hack away at them, just as the hungry were precipitating out of the crowd into a line behind him. The consequences were no worse than raggedy, distorted slices.
For a while the line seemed to bring almost as much food as it took away: apples in an orchard’s white-and-green paper sack, a family pack of individual-size bags of corn chips, a bowl of pink-shelled, hard-boiled eggs. Matthew and Leif made plates for themselves and seceded a little, finding a few feet of empty ledge.
Matthew felt the cold of the stone through the seat of his jeans while, on his face, he felt the touch of the sun as its light fell through the tracery of a tree’s bare branches. When one thinks about how far away the sun is and realizes that one is feeling its touch nonetheless . . . He took off his wool hat and tucked it under his butt. “Have you slept out here?”
Leif nodded. “I learned that water-resistant isn’t actually the same thing as waterproof.”
Matthew imagined the boy on his side in the dark, twisting in a sleeping bag wet with the plaza’s runoff. The Leif who sat presently beside him, meanwhile, sprinkled goldfish on his tuna salad and fastidiously matched exactly one goldfish to each forkful of tuna. “It means something to you here,” Matthew hazarded.
The boy coughed and then pounded his own chest to clear it.
The place was another test for Matthew. Was he passing? Did he need to believe in it any more than in Leif’s psychology experiments? He had felt uncomfortable when, for a few moments, Leif had spoken of unfastening his gender identity, but he knew that in any environment where such an unfastening was imaginable, they were safe. They were protected here by the only bulwark that homosexuals ever really believe in: a temporary rebellion of pleasure against order. And there was something else here, too, the scent of which Matthew recognized from having hunted for ideas about kingship in seventeenth-century pamphlets and transcripts. The scent of new governance, it might be called. People here felt that they were getting in at the beginning. Everything was going to be rebuilt from scratch; there was so much to be done. Acts had to be fresh and arbitrary, like a gardener’s with seedlings, tender at one moment and cruel the next. Free of history and also pregnant with it. In this sunlight it seemed like it could all be done without money. Without the Democratic Party. Without proper names, even. It was so early that one recognized that there was no place for personal ambition, yet one felt the excitement nonetheless of one’s almost personal recruitment by the new power. The growing power. Whether one was an idealist or an opportunist—and maybe one was still too young to know which career one was looking forward to—being here might make all the difference.
A great menace to the writing of dissertations.
“This place makes me feel like I’m not wrong to think that it’s all coming together,” Leif said.
Matthew set aside his plate. He leaned back on his arms to catch a little more of the sun as it came through the tree and to show himself off a little.
“It’s one thing,” Leif continued, “to keep it to yourself that you’re aware what other people are thinking and feeling. It’s another to hold in upon yourself that the world is ending.”
It was pleasant to hear the end mentioned so matter-of-factly, as if they were dispensing with preliminary arguments that most people never found their way to the other side of.
“I don’t necessarily mean a meteor hitting the earth or anything,” Leif went on. “It might just be ending the way it ended in 1914 or 1939. But I think it’s because the world is ending that what’s different about people like Elspeth and me has become so hard for us to ignore.” He had a musical voice, and despite the banter and cachinnation near them, and the drumming and chanting in the distance, his words took up an unassuming but distinct order in the air, as if they were sparrows assembling in the empty branches of the
tree that Matthew had been looking up into.
“I don’t get it,” Matthew said. “What does knowing how people feel have to do with knowing that the world is ending?”
“It’s ending in them,” said Leif. “They have feelings about it.”
“Why don’t they know, then?”
“They do know, in a way, just not a way they can talk about.”
“You’re going to talk about their feelings for them,” Matthew said.
“We’re going to talk about our feelings, which have a relation to theirs.”
“How do you get politics out of that?”
“You don’t, maybe? I just want to understand it a little. To help people understand it. I get worried that it becomes overwhelming for some people. For someone like you, for instance.”
He was honest about not knowing, Matthew saw. And the power that Matthew was curious about must exist, even if, as Matthew had to believe, Leif himself misunderstood the nature of it. Matthew could feel its real force as it acted on his own person; he was being seduced by it. Into antres vast and deserts idle. Matthew had wanted to go to bed with the boy, and he was being led to a plane even more tenuous than utopia.
It was a strange gift. Matthew was meeting Leif just as Leif was in the process of discovering what it was. He was still trying it out. How it would develop, what he would do with it, what it really was, and what he would come to think that it was—those were in the future. At present Leif’s gift was as fluid as the congregation in the park around them. A potential rather than a quantity. It was hard to give a name to, but Matthew suspected that it would be even less nameable later, once Leif had finished talking his way out of the framework of expectations that he had been born into. At the moment it was still early but not too early. Maybe Matthew was even in time to save Leif from it.