by Caleb Crain
She was cracking eggs into a Pyrex by the time Matthew’s father came downstairs. “How did you sleep, dear?” she asked.
“Great,” he answered. He wasn’t going to say otherwise in front of someone he didn’t yet know very well.
“I’m making eggs. Is that all right?”
“Is there a vegetable?”
“A vegetable! How about toast?”
“Toast, then. We’re not turning this on?”
“I think it’s nice not having it on, for a change,” said Matthew’s mother.
“Don’t not turn it on for us,” said Leif.
“Whatever you want, Dad,” said Matthew.
“It’ll be all nonsense today, anyway,” his father replied. He poured himself a coffee. As an afterthought, he added, “I mean, because of the holiday.”
“Do you usually watch the parade?” Leif asked.
“Would you like to see it?” Matthew’s mother asked.
“No, I just wondered if it was a tradition.”
“Would you say it’s a tradition with us, Jack?”
“No. Did I hear you ask Sam to save us a paper?”
“I did ask him to.”
“Do I have time to go get it?”
“Well, the eggs will be ready in a minute.”
He sank into his chair. “Oh, all right.”
“Can I do anything?” Leif offered.
Matthew’s mother put Leif in charge of making the toast, and she and Matthew’s father were soon lecturing him about the toaster’s idiosyncrasies. Matthew, for his part, poured glasses of water and set the table.
“Is there room for you there?” Matthew’s father asked Leif, when at last they were ready to sit down.
They had to move the kitchen table farther away from the wall before there was enough room for Leif to get into the seat on the fourth side.
“Matthew, when you say that you go online,” his mother asked, “does that mean you have your laptop back?”
“My downstairs neighbor is letting me borrow her old one.”
“Is she the one with the rabbit? But wasn’t your thesis on the laptop they took?”
“I had emailed my adviser the chapters I’d finished, and he emailed them back to me.”
“So you haven’t lost anything. How lucky.”
“The eggs are very good, Mom.” His father and Leif also complimented her on them.
“Thank you, dear.”
In fact, he had lost a dozen pages of chapter three, as well as his outline for the dissertation as a whole. The lost pages had been about the stanzas of Samuel Daniel’s Civil Wars that Coleridge disliked, the ones that interrupt the old plainsong chronicle with of all things a theory of history. A theory about the alteration that printing and gunpowder made in the fifteenth century to the pattern of life. Tongues became able to speak unlicensed; cowards became able to kill from afar. Matthew had hinted in the lost pages that what the internet and drone warfare today further, printing and gunpowder had begun. It was maybe because Daniel was aware that literature had become subject to modernity—had become prey to the marketplace, among other things—that he was so defensive and depressive, in some of his shorter poems, about the chance that a new work of true literature would be recognized and survive. Daniel had been between two worlds. He had looked back a little more than he had looked forward.
It occurred to Matthew that he should write that down, the part about Daniel as a depressive, because he hadn’t thought of it quite that way before. There was a pad on the refrigerator door for grocery lists, and there would be ballpoint pens in the drawer next to the refrigerator, the drawer where his father kept batteries and his mother stuffed spare plastic bags for Fosco’s walks. He had withdrawn his attention when his mind turned to his dissertation, but now that he was coming back to himself—now that, having made his note, he folded it and slipped it into his wallet—he noticed that his parents and Leif were chatting amiably. Everyone was making an effort, of course, but it seemed as if maybe his parents and Leif actually did like each other.
The landline rang just as Matthew’s father was explaining that in the late fall, he put the snowblower into the same corner of the garage where in the summer he kept the lawn mower.
“If every year I kept track of the date I make the swap, you could track climate change,” his father said, hurried into his punchline by the ringing.
“I’ll get it,” Matthew volunteered, rising before his father could. He had expected a reprieve from reporters. But maybe it was his brother?
“I’m sorry,” Leif said. He, too, thought it was a reporter.
“What are you apologizing for?” said Matthew’s mother, lightly gripping and shaking Leif’s forearm, which slightly startled Leif.
“Fisher residence,” Matthew said into the phone.
“This is Elaine Saunderson,” said a woman’s thin voice. “I hope it’s all right to call now. My son gave me this number, and I’m going to be stepping out in a minute.”
“Oh, hi, Mrs. Saunderson. This is Matthew.”
“Oh, I thought you were your father. Good to meet you! Or, talk to you, I guess. I’ve heard so much about you.”
“I’ve heard so much about you,” he replied, which wasn’t quite true.
“You’ve really been there for Leif,” she said abruptly.
“It’s a crazy time.”
“I’ll say,” she agreed. “And your parents are so kind. Is your mother there? I want to thank your mother.”
“Do you want to take this in Jack’s study?” his mother was asking Leif.
“She’d like to talk to you, Mom,” Matthew told his mother.
“To me?” His mother rose, with one hand gathering her kimono together at the neck and the other accepting the receiver. “This is Sharon Fisher,” she said, in the professional manner that she spoke in when handling real estate. Her manner with peers.
Stock-still, she listened to Leif’s mother.
“Well, we’re so glad to have him here with us,” she burst out, a moment later, back in her family manner again.
They don’t tell you when you come out as gay, Matthew thought to himself, that someday you’ll be riveted by even the most banal interaction between your in-laws and your own parents.
“We’re happy that we’re able to, and I will let you know, I promise,” Matthew’s mother said. She put a hand over the mouthpiece. “There’s a phone in Jack’s office,” she told Leif. “At the top of the stairs on the right. You’ll have a little more privacy there.”
Matthew and his parents waited in silence as Leif mounted the stairs. When they heard him say the words “Hi, Mom,” half muted by the distance and the plaster shield of the ceiling, Matthew’s mother replaced the receiver.
“She’s very grateful, Jack,” his mother told his father.
His father nodded.
“She said her house isn’t hers or she would do more herself.”
“Whose is it?” his father asked.
“I think she rents,” Matthew said.
“She shouldn’t have felt obliged to tell me that,” his mother said.
His father grunted.
“Is she from Vermont?” his mother asked.
“I think she’s from Virginia, originally,” Matthew answered.
“See, I didn’t think she sounded quite like a New Englander. She seems very nice. Very outgoing. And so is Leif. I think I was afraid he was going to be a little, I don’t know, mysterious.”
“Everyone’s a little mysterious,” Matthew’s father said.
“You know what I mean. But he’s right there when you’re talking to him. He’s very present.” She liked it when people weren’t locked away from her, as her younger son sometimes was.
“I appreciate that you’re helping with the lawyer,” Matthew said.
“You’re welcome, dear,” his mother said.
His mother and father exchanged a look.
“Is it all right?” he asked.
“We’re helping you,” his father said, “because you told us that this is very important to you. But you know, this is going to be a fair amount of money, and your mother and I have been talking about it, and we think it wouldn’t be fair to Brian unless we make an adjustment to what you’ll receive in terms of your share of the value of the house, after we go.”
Matthew felt a flush rising into his face. “That’s okay,” he said.
“I didn’t mean to tell you until later,” his father said. “I wasn’t going to tell you on the holiday.”
“It’s okay. That makes sense.” Matthew listened for Leif, who still seemed to be on the phone. “Well, while we’re on the subject.”
“What?” his father asked.
“Gauden already charged the credit card of one of Leif’s friends, and she’s a graduate student and can’t really afford it.”
“How much?” asked his father.
“Twenty-eight hundred.”
“Your mother and I will take care of that, too, but it’ll be a few weeks before we have the cash.”
“I told them,” his mother said, “that I have someone who can do an appraisal for me in twenty-four hours, but the bank always wants to use their own person.”
“Sharon,” his father admonished her.
“I don’t think there should be any secrets, Jack.”
“The bank?” Matthew wondered aloud.
“A mortgage is just the easiest way to arrange it,” his father said. “That’s all it is. It’s just easier than messing around with the retirement accounts. It’s the same thing, really. Taking it out of X instead of Y. It’s just math.”
“Are you taking out a second mortgage for this?” Matthew asked.
“We paid off our first first mortgage two years ago,” his mother said. “So this is another first mortgage, technically. A second first mortgage.”
“Should you be doing this?”
“Oh, the rates are really good right now, dear. I work with this sort of thing all the time.”
“You can keep track of the numbers, too,” his father said, “if you want to try to pay us back. If you want to do it that way instead of as an adjustment to the estate. If it’ll make you feel better.”
At the sound of Leif’s footfalls on the stairs, Fosco staggered to her feet and waddled toward the door, grinning.
“My mother wishes happy Thanksgiving to all of you,” Leif said.
“And we wish her the same,” Matthew’s mother firmly replied. “How is she going to be celebrating?”
“She’s having dinner with a couple of girlfriends. I mean, friends of hers who are girls. Who are women.”
“I understand,” said Matthew’s mother.
* * *
—
After the great meal, after loading the dishwasher for Matthew’s mother and scrubbing and toweling dry her pots and pans, Leif and Matthew lay down in Matthew’s bedroom for a nap, Matthew falling asleep almost as soon as his head was cradled by the pillow. When he awoke, it felt as if a week had gone by. Sleep at his parents’ house was so much deeper than in the city. He saw that he was alone in the room, which was shadowy, Leif having removed himself and dusk having fallen while his soul had been away. Outside, a soft, blanched glare lay on the lawns and the pavement, resembling in its flatness the glare on snow. He looked at his watch on the bedside table. It would be time to eat now, he saw, if they hadn’t just finished eating an hour and a half ago. Next to his watch, in a V, was a folded sheet of paper, striped with dark lines because it came from the pad for grocery lists on the refrigerator door. He had written a note about Samuel Daniel, he remembered. But what if there wasn’t anything special about Samuel Daniel? What if he was interested in Daniel and touched by Daniel’s devotion to his vocation only because he himself, in choosing to write literary criticism, was making a mistake like Daniel’s—giving his life to a kind of writing that was about to pass out of the world? To a modern equivalent of Daniel’s poeticized, aestheticized history?
He picked up the forked paper, to read over the note, but the handwriting wasn’t his.
“You can read it,” said Leif, appearing at the door.
“I thought it was mine.”
“It’s the devil,” Leif said. “It’s one of his voices.”
“I don’t need to read it.”
“Oh, it doesn’t matter. I can’t use any of these ideas unless I want to sound like I’m writing a ‘cry for help.’”
That made Matthew think that Leif did want him to read it. It was in the form of a letter, though there was no salutation or valediction:
There have always been people like you, whatever you are. And so there have never really been any secrets, not from your kind. And there aren’t any now. It’s no secret, for example, that the world is being poisoned and cooked, and that there’s only a generation or two left before chaos. What’s changed now isn’t changed because of you. It’s changed because of the amount of sideways communication that’s now possible. We’re doing what we can to quarantine you. Do you think it’s an accident that the social media companies are working so hard to hold everyone’s attention? Do you think the government isn’t watching, in case these and other corporations fail to establish—to reestablish, really—sufficient control? It looks, fortunately, as if they’ll be able to capture enough of you. Enough of the souls of enough of you. And by soul I mean voice. The voice will be our handle. Our grip. We can’t any longer prevent everyone from knowing, not because there are more of you than in the past or because you are any smarter or more numerous or better than your kind has ever been, but because it’s become easier for you to tell others. And so what we have to do is draw a new line, not between knowing and not knowing but between knowing and being able to say that you know. That’s the future. That’s what order will consist of—not of keeping people in the dark but of keeping them from talking about the light. The voice is what we will darken, from now on. It’ll be a little awkward, at first, to live this way, but you’ll get used to it.
“It’s just a voice,” Leif said, when he saw that Matthew had finished. “One voice in a poem.”
“What poem?”
“The one I can’t write. The dark poem.”
“Does the devil have a name?”
“It’s not that kind of devil.”
“Come here,” Matthew said, from the bed.
“What?” Leif asked sulkily, without approaching.
Matthew watched him roll the back of his head against the jamb of the doorway.
“Why would even the devil care about enslaving people if the world is going to end in a few years?” Matthew asked.
“You’d have to ask the devil that.”
“Are you all right?”
“What do you mean?” Leif asked.
“I mean, you’re writing about the voice of the devil.”
“What do you think poetry is?”
“No, you’re right,” Matthew agreed.
“If you mean, Is it alarming to sometimes hear these voices talking almost as if they were talking to one personally, then the answer is yes. But do I think these voices are real, no.”
He was standing on only one foot, stepping on it with the other, and to keep his balance flexing his long spine against the jamb.
“I want to show you the attic,” Matthew said.
“I saw the attic.”
“But I want to show it to you.”
In the hallway, he could hear the television going downstairs in the den, where his parents must still be sitting. He opened the closet-like door to the attic and flicked on the Charlie-Brown’s-shirt-yellow light in the alcove where the stairs turned to g
o up.
It was a finished attic—hardwood floors under an upside-down origami flower of white-painted walls. It was crammed with things his parents hadn’t yet been able to bring themselves to part with: a rocking chair, an ice cream maker, a foosball table, a superseded printer, Brian’s bed, and his and Brian’s board games and childhood books.
“You had an encyclopedia?” Leif asked.
“They still had them then.”
“You are old.”
“We bought it used,” Matthew said, as if that were a mitigation. “At a garage sale the Peloskis had after their twins went to college.”
Leif touched a ceramic kachina wind chime that Matthew had bought one summer when the family took a trip to New Mexico. It had a funny cowlike snout. It gave a resonant and musical little clonk.
“It’s so funny to have you here,” Matthew said.
“It must be. Your gay lover.”
“Can you tell that this is where I grew up?”
“What do you mean?” Leif asked.
“The way you can tell things.”
Heavily, methodically came the thumping footfalls of Fosco as she climbed the narrow staircase to join them.
“Come here,” Matthew said again.
“What?” Leif replied again, but this time he came over to Matthew.
“So you have the devil in you,” Matthew said.
“Evidently I’m not the only one.”
“Take it out.”
“And play foosball with it?”
“Take it out. I want to see it.”
Fosco settled butt-first onto a braided rug and sighed stagily.
“Were you unhappy here?” Leif asked.
“I had to hide,” Matthew said. “It wasn’t that long ago, but it was different then and you had to hide.”
“I hid, too, for a while.”
“For a few weeks,” Matthew kidded him.
“You’re not that much older than me,” Leif said.
“I thought I was.”
Leif unzipped his fly without unbuttoning and with his finger and thumb unlooped his cock and took it out for Matthew. The clapper in his wind chime. A yearning monk in a plump cowl.