Broken People

by Sam Lansky

  “You know, I’ve never met anyone like you,” Charles said. He studied Sam for a moment. “You’re really intense, huh?”

  Sam felt himself blush. He’d been too unedited.

  But then Charles’s face softened. “I really like it,” he said. And then he squeezed Sam’s hand.

  Then, later, on the northwest corner of Eighty-Sixth Street, there was a little courtyard with some benches outside a bank, and it was there that, a few weeks after they had begun dating, Sam had sat with Charles and it had spilled out of him, some grandiose and sentimental confession: I know that we just met and it would be easy for this to feel like a lot and I know I’m always a little bit a lot but that’s just who I am and I just, I mean, I’ve never felt like this before, not with anyone, and it feels like this is something big, Charles, something real, the kind of thing that epic stories get told about—they write books about this sort of thing, don’t they? Don’t they?

  And Sam could see in Charles’s eyes that something had begun that neither of them could stop, that there would be no pumping the brakes now, that they were both in too deep.

  Sentimental, Sam thought. That was what it had been. You’re so fucking sentimental. And suddenly he was furious with himself for getting trapped in all these platitudes.

  But there was no original way to describe what it had felt like to be in love with Charles, no gimlet-eyed turn of phrase that could make it anything other than ordinary. It had felt so special at that time. Maybe it was. Or maybe it was just as pedestrian as Sam was, as trite as his best bit of imagery.

  You are the best thing that’s ever been mine. There was something there, in that lyric, but Sam couldn’t quite crack it—couldn’t remember what it was.

  Jacob was whistling now, and the sound of it threatened to pull Sam out of this memory, but he persisted through it, like he was traveling down a long hallway lined with doors, and as he flung open each door there was another new heartbreak inside.

  This—this was the last memory from that time before darkness fell. They had been seeing each other for five weeks. Sam remembered because they had joked about it, how it was their five-week anniversary—“We should just celebrate our anniversary every Sunday night,” Charles had said—and they had gone out to the Hamptons to stay with one of Charles’s friends.

  Her name was Eleanor, the one Charles had mentioned at their first dinner, and Sam had liked her instantly, the night he’d met her at the ’70s party. She had long curly blond hair and a prominent nose and a big, friendly laugh and they had talked for a moment outside over a cigarette, comparing notes about their coked-out prep school years—Eleanor had gotten sober young, too—and the best twelve-step meetings in the city, in which their paths had never crossed because Eleanor mostly went to meetings downtown but now, surely, they would have to go together—and when Charles had come outside, Eleanor had looked at him and pointed at Sam and said, “I like this one—he’s a keeper.”

  Her parents had a house in Sagaponack where Charles said he spent many weekends. “We have to go over Memorial Day,” Charles had said. “It’s the best.”

  And although it seemed premature, going away with this guy he’d just met and his friends—“You’re going away with him already?” Brett said incredulously—Sam couldn’t say no, and so he’d packed a bag and left the city with Charles on Friday afternoon, speeding down the Long Island Expressway in the Mercedes, Sam playing DJ and singing along to the bad radio pop he loved, the sunlight glinting off Charles’s sunglasses, the curl of his muscular arm peeking out of his polo, and it felt like a strange dream, that these were just things that Sam got to do now, a weekend in the Hamptons with a boy he loved.

  When they arrived at the house that evening, there were already people there, lithe young women in insouciant sundresses and rumple-haired boys in oversize linen shirts, and Eleanor screamed and threw her arms around Sam as if they were old friends—“You came!” They sat in the kitchen and talked into the night, the conversation drifting seamlessly into French from English and back again, someone ordering duck confit pizza from World Pie in Bridgehampton, and then everyone was sitting outside drinking wine in clouds of cigarette smoke, all these chic new friends talking about somebody’s parents’ garden party in Amagansett tomorrow that nobody wanted to go to, and Charles had his arm around Sam almost protectively, like he was worried that all this might be a bit too much for Sam, but instead Sam was charming and cracked a few jokes and leaned his head against Charles’s shoulder, inhaling the now-familiar smell of him and the salt of the ocean.

  Sam wanted to get past this, the smooth veneer of his nostalgic self-regard, the way time had let him sand down the rough edges of the truth until everything was rosy and airbrushed as a movie still. He searched his memory for the flinty edges of anxiety that must have been there—they must have—the newness of these people, the foreignness of the environment. Somebody passing a joint around outside, Charles inhaling, looking over at Sam with concern, Sam smiling to show Charles that he didn’t mind, that Sam wasn’t that kind of sober, tightly wound and self-protective, but that he was chill. Anything but the truth, which was that he had fought and scraped to continue using through so many stints in rehab and failed attempts at sobriety, that even though he’d gotten clean at nineteen, he felt he’d done so on borrowed time, well past his expiration date, and that the aroma of cannabis, innocuous as it was, cracked open in him some deep sense memory, some longing to be both a part of and apart from in that blissfully benumbed way. It had been years now since he’d felt that, since he’d been able to disappear. Charles reached over him, passing the joint to the girl sitting next to Sam, and Sam inhaled that smell, the earthy perfume of it.

  But Sam didn’t want to remember that. It didn’t fit the narrative he had chosen—the story about how everything had been perfect in the beginning. He wanted everything that came later to come as a surprise; he didn’t want to scour the past for the red flags he’d missed, those auguries of pain to come. He could excavate the deep and the dark later. He wasn’t ready yet.

  Maybe then it was morning and they were sitting on the lawn, drinking coffee, and there was Eleanor, pulling out of the driveway in her baby blue convertible, her long blond hair blowing in the wind, her eyes shielded behind Yoko Ono sunglasses. “You boys wanna come to SoulCycle?” she yelled.

  Charles and Sam looked at each other and shook their heads no.

  “Your loss!” she shouted and sped away, and then, with the house to themselves, they crept up to the bedroom to fool around.

  Maybe it was that afternoon that they were dancing at Surf Lodge in Montauk, their feet in the sand, and Sam was swaying and feeling the beat in his body, and Charles’s hands were on his waist. It wasn’t about the specifics—it was about the tenor of it, that rapturous young freedom and desire, this weekend and its honeyed beams of potential, of that luminous thought—maybe it will just be like this forever, a tangerine blur of dumbstruck euphoria, that vertiginous buzz as good as any drug.

  And then, suddenly, it was Sunday afternoon and the weekend was over. Soon they would be sitting in traffic on the Van Wyck, the great dark skyline of the city approaching on the horizon. Charles was folding his clothes and putting them away in his duffel bag, a big black Louis Vuitton checkered canvas thing that Sam would have thought was tacky on anyone else but on Charles seemed somehow just right, and Sam was lying in bed gazing out the window at the lawn when a terrible thought cut through him like razor wire.

  What was it? Sam squinted. He couldn’t remember. He had just felt it.

  “Are you all right?” Charles said, looking over at him. Sam nodded. Charles came over and sat down on the bed next to him, rubbing Sam’s shoulders gently. Something malignant formed in his stomach.

  “I’m just stressed about the workweek,” Sam said. “Sunday scaries.”

  Charles looked out the window and in the golden hour, the light cau
ght him just right.

  “I know,” he said breezily. “I love it out here. I never want to leave.”

  Stay, Sam thought. Then stay.

  But it was already too late, and soon Charles and the memory were very far away, like Sam was reaching through time and space so he might grab ahold of Charles by the collar of his shirt, to twist that fabric in his fingers, to feel Charles’s skin, the smooth expanse of it—and yet he couldn’t. It was all too remote now.

  All Sam could hear was Jacob’s whistling, that high and eerie note, until it wasn’t Jacob whistling anymore. It was the sound of the wind in the desert, an open window, driving fast on the freeway, the dry heat on red rock mountains. Now Sam was sitting in the passenger seat of a car. He looked over expecting to see Charles there, but it wasn’t Charles in the driver’s seat.

  It was Noah, in a hoodie and baseball cap. He looked over at Sam and smiled guiltily, like he knew what they were doing was wrong.

  It hadn’t been wrong, had it?

  This was from a different time. After Charles, and after what happened in New York, and after Sam had come to California. Not long after Sam and Noah had started seeing each other, but before reality had set in, the buzzkill that came to dampen the high of the early days. They had still been magic to each other then, the erotic surprise of feeling unexpectedly connected to someone new, all that heady want. I don’t want to, Sam thought, but the memory kept playing.

  “Let’s take a little holiday,” Noah had said simply, a quiet command, and Sam had said, “Okay,” because he wanted Noah and that made him want to do whatever Noah wanted to do.

  “The desert,” Noah had said, and Sam had nodded.

  What am I doing here? Sam asked. It didn’t make sense. This story wasn’t about Noah. This was supposed to be about Charles, and what happened in New York. That was the big wound—the big thing he needed to see. Right? Why am I remembering this? he asked, but there was no answer.

  He tried to conjure Charles again but in his mind’s eye he couldn’t even make out his face now—it was just Noah. Fuck it, he thought, and he settled into the memory, into the desert.

  Into Noah, who had a friend with a house in Palm Springs, and so they had fled Los Angeles on a sunny fall morning, taking the 10 east out of West Hollywood, feeling the heat rise as they passed through Riverside County, drinking iced coffees and finding out more about one another than they already knew.

  Noah told Sam about the project he was working on, and all about his family back in England, in Manchester, where he’d grown up. “You’ll love them,” he said easily. It sounded like a promise.

  “I’m sure I will,” Sam said.

  Noah was affectionate, but there was an edge to him, something dangerous, the residual addict that lives inside people in recovery long after they get clean. Sam liked it. He liked the rush of it even as it made him nervous.

  And it was good to be there, in the desert. Sam loved the desert, loved the way the ruddy brown-red of the mountains contrasted against the artificial bright green of the grass like a shock, loved the luxurious kitsch of the midcentury modern houses, white-haired men in golf shirts and voluminous khaki pants and their younger, surgeried wives, the eerie calm of it. The bedroom was clean. White walls, salvage wood, a Navajo quilt, crisp white sheets.

  As soon as they set down their bags, their hands were all over each other. It was primal. Noah fucked him twice. Sam gripped the blanket in his sweat-slick hands, feeling the scratchy woolen fibers in his fingers, tasting Noah’s spit in his mouth, inhaling the metallic smell of his sweat. Even with the blinds drawn, the sun was so bright, slicing through the room in bars. Noah’s five o’clock shadow. The hair on his chest. Noah’s hands around Sam’s neck. As soon as Noah was finished, Sam wanted more. He could be such a glutton. Such a pig.

  Then they were hiking up a mountainside. There was nobody else around, nobody for miles. The air was cold and still. Dust and rocks. It was strange the way it could be so hot in the light of the sun and so cold once that same sun dipped behind the clouds. Sam followed Noah up the side of a cliff, kicking up dirt behind their sneakers. He was a man. Sam could see him now, in his black T-shirt and faded black jeans, all the pieces of him that didn’t care. Sam was always pretending not to care. What would it be like, he wondered, to actually be at ease in the way that Noah seemed to be—to not obsess over every little thing?

  And then the sun went down and they were splashing around in the pool and Noah put his arms under Sam’s shoulders, lifting him up by his armpits, and for an instant Sam felt like he was weightless, just this feathery thing that could float away in the tide. It was so different from how Sam felt on land—heavy, dowdy, flat-footed. And when Noah kissed him hard, Sam thought maybe this was something more than just lust—something real. Sam had always thought of himself as a hopeless romantic, but what if instead they got to be hopeful romantics—blue sky people, the saxophone riff on “Run Away With Me,” freeways cleared of traffic and bone-dry desert nights?

  But lying in bed that night, after Noah had dozed off, Sam couldn’t sleep. His thoughts raced. Noah looked so contented in his slumber. Sam wondered what it would be like to be Noah instead of himself, to have that loose, fluid comfort. Sam wished that he could make a home in Noah’s body, to live in him like a parasite, to see through his eyes.

  The great curse of being a person in the world—you only ever get to be yourself.

  Sam went outside to smoke a cigarette. The desert was freezing. All the heat had gone away. He shivered.

  In the morning, the house felt different to Sam, like he no longer belonged in it: conspicuously stylish, with a rich gay aesthetic, modern and colorful, dotted with stacks of Taschen books and Jonathan Adler sculptures, an oversize Marilyn in the living room, everything as crisp as could be.

  “I’m going to swim again,” Noah said, and he walked out to the surface of the pool, dipping his toe in the water. He stripped down to his underwear, then pulled those off, too. Naked, he plunged under the surface, flicking back his hair. Sam sat in the shade, watching him, wanting him, wanting to be him. There was a piece of Sam that wished he could join, but he didn’t know how. He was too self-conscious about his body to ever let go, now, in the clear light of day. This body that Noah worshiped. This body that Noah wanted to fuck all the time. Not even his desire was enough to make Sam feel at home in it.

  What is it? Sam knew, but he still wasn’t deep enough. There were places he could not face yet. Words he was not ready to say. Things he refused to investigate for fear of what he might find there, the way a child might turn over a rock in a garden to see what was underneath and discover so many bugs crawling in the earth, squirming and wriggling, some revulsion at all the things that lived but were so rarely seen.

  Sam had done that, once, when he was young, but there were a lot of things he had done when he was young that felt far away now.

  * * *

  “Are you still experiencing effects?”

  It was Jacob. His voice snapped Sam out of darkness. Sam pointed his toes and made circles with his wrists, returning back into his body fully. He opened his eyes. The blinking light had stopped. The room was dark again.

  “No,” he said.

  “Neither am I,” Buck said. He was only two feet away from Sam, but somehow Sam had completely forgotten he was even there. Sam reached for Buck’s hand and he squeezed it. “Hey, buddy,” he said quietly, like it was a secret.

  “Shall we close for the evening?” Jacob said. Sam pulled himself up into a seated position, reorienting himself to the space, and rested his hands on his knees, palms upturned toward the sky. He took a deep breath.

  “What did you experience?” Jacob asked.

  “I didn’t feel much,” Sam said. “Memories. Thinking about the past. But that’s not new for me. The light got sort of weird, I guess.”

  “I didn’t feel anythi
ng,” Buck said, sounding a little indignant.

  “That’s not surprising,” Jacob said, a smile in his voice. “I gave you so little, it’s not likely that you would have had a powerful experience.”

  “Right,” Sam said. “Gotta ease us into it.” He still didn’t fully understand the logic of the whole journey, but he wanted to seem compliant, trusting.

  “But, man, there was a lot of debris out there,” Jacob said. Sam could feel Buck tense slightly.

  “Yeah?” Buck said.

  “Where?” Sam said.

  “In the other dimension,” Jacob said. “Yeah, it was really—there was a lot of energy to clear. You might not have been able to feel it, but I definitely did.”

  “Huh,” Buck said. “What kind of energy?”

  “Just clutter,” Jacob said. “I have to make sure there’s a clear path for her to enter.”

  “The spirit,” Sam said.

  “Yes,” Jacob said, as though this should be obvious by now.

  Suddenly it all seemed colossally silly again, the spell of the ceremony broken now, these three grown men sitting on the floor of a house in the Hills with all their mystical knickknacks, praying for—what? Salvation? Sam wasn’t quite sure anymore.

  “You’ll probably have much more of an experience tomorrow,” Jacob said, as though he could feel Sam’s uncertainty. “The second night is usually the night where things really happen.”

  “I’m looking forward to it,” Sam said.

  “Should we have something to eat?” Jacob said. Slowly and deliberately, they made their way to their feet and padded out to the kitchen. Buck switched on an overhead light, and Sam winced. It seemed too bright, more so than his eyes could handle.

  He steadied himself against a wall, feeling a wave of faint dizziness. He scanned the kitchen. The appliances, which had looked ordinary a few hours earlier, suddenly seemed foreign, like they had been sent from the future, and the light reflecting off the window was eerie. It was curious. Sam wasn’t altered but he felt weird, in a nonspecific way, like things were subtly different, like the objects in his line of sight had been rearranged while he was midblink.