Weightless, Wallace feels unmoored, out of control, but he wills himself to float. Miller takes his wrists, wet and hard. He pulls Wallace close to him. He wraps his arms around Wallace and tells him to breathe, to feel himself getting lighter and lighter until he is nothing at all.
Wallace floats on his back. Occasionally, waves cover his mouth and nose and he panics, feels as though he’ll drown, but Miller holds him steady, his smile easy.
The water feels slimy, like they’re in the mouth of some enormous organism, its waves like a thousand teeth eating the shore.
“I used to pretend that I was in the whale that ate Jonah,” Miller says, floating next to Wallace. “I’d swim and pretend I was in the belly of a whale.”
“That’s kind of how it sounds,” Wallace says, the water echoing in his ears.
“It does,” Miller says. “When you’re in the belly of a whale, nothing else matters. The whole universe could explode, and you wouldn’t know. You’re already in a different universe, I guess.”
“I used to get scared when I thought about the Red Sea parting,” Wallace says. “I don’t know why, but when they told that story in church at Easter, I always got scared and sad. Something awful about so much water just hanging over your head.”
“I imagine so,” Miller says.
“And then it all comes down. Those soldiers who were chasing the Jews, they got drowned in the water.”
“They did.”
“When they tried to baptize me when I was little, I was so afraid of that—being drowned, like in Exodus—that I cried and cried and fought and eventually they just gave up.”
“You weren’t baptized?”
“No,” Wallace says. “Everyone but me.”
“Do you believe in God?”
“Me? No. Well. No, I guess not. Not anymore.”
“Science is kind of like God,” Miller says.
Wallace is silent on that score. Instead, he asks, “Why did you want to bring me out here?”
“Because I wanted to be inside something else, I think.”
“Other than my apartment, you mean?”
“Yes. It was getting suffocating in there. I guess I just needed to be in something bigger.”
“I go to the roof.”
“What do you mean?”
Wallace turns to him in the water, but loses his balance, plunges down beneath the surface. Below, the world is green and black. There are algae blooming all along the arms of the pier, and just under the water there is a rust-colored film. Miller pulls him up and Wallace breathes, his lungs filling with air.
“Oh,” he says.
“Be careful,” Miller says sternly. “Don’t die.”
“I’ll try not to,” Wallace says, wiping water from his eyes.
“What did you mean, before, about the roof?”
Wallace coughs up lake water and shakes his head to clear his ears.
“I meant, when I feel like everything is closing in, I go to the roof of my building.”
Miller nods thoughtfully, then asks quietly, “Will you take me there?”
“Okay,” Wallace says. “All right.”
* * *
• • •
IN SOGGY SHOES and dripping clothes, they make their way back across the street and into the building. They get into the elevator smelling strongly like the lake water and algae. The elevator smells like beer and grease. Miller’s eyes are red, from fatigue or the lake or both. They’re holding hands, dripping onto the dark carpet. Up they go, against gravity. They emerge into a world that is more silver than gray. Morning is brightening. The roof is metallic and gravelly, spiked with antennae. Wallace immediately feels the sense of inverted scope, so high above the world, where everything flattens and becomes smaller. So high up—birdlike—that Wallace feels as if he’s floating. He is, at all times, acutely aware of his distance from the ground. At this height he is a little dizzy, but he disguises his discomfort with a wan smile. Miller lets out a low whistle of appreciation.
“Holy fuck,” he says.
“Yep,” Wallace says, watching as the gravel on the top of the roof darkens beneath their dripping clothes. White pebbles, crushed stones, turn to powder under their feet. Someone has left deck chairs and a little table up here. There is a grill; this is the only place in the building where fire is permitted, which seems counterintuitive. Why would you want to start a fire at the highest point, the place most difficult to reach and extinguish? But there it is, black metal in the corner, near the side of the building that faces the city rather than the lake.
Behind them, the lake is full of luminous water. Miller bends over the edge of the building, its railing waist-high, and he peers down into the world.
Wallace sits on the ground next to him, knees against his chest. He usually comes here alone, to think and be by himself. He comes to feel the sense of the world around him, its forever shifting currents of air, their coldness on him like a comforting hand. He comes to get away. But here he is with Miller.
Miller crouches down next to Wallace, sits next to him. They sit that way for a long time, the stones sticking to their legs, at first painfully, and then numbly, like anything else. They watch the sun come up, its yellow light saturating everything and eventually burning away the mist of morning. They’re still sitting that way when the first sounds of cars fill the streets below, and the world turns over itself, to begin again.
10
It was an exceptionally hot day in July when Wallace arrived in the Midwest, having spent all of the preceding day cramped on a Greyhound coming up from Alabama. He had been asleep when they left Tennessee under the cloak of darkness, and entered that strange realm where the country suddenly flattens and smooths out into endless plains brooked by ice and jagged mountains. He had never been out of the South before, but had been trying for a long time to leave it; now, having finally done so, he felt only a sense of elation and freedom. Upon getting off the bus, though, he found the air just as heavy as he had left it down south. He had not known what to expect, and the stickiness in the air made him uneasy about his prospects. But that had been yesterday, and today he stood on the edge of the pier, looking around at all the people.
They seemed friendly enough, he thought, like people anywhere. They smiled at him, and he smiled at them. He was standing in the middle of the sidewalk, and they were polite as they excused themselves to get around him. Back home, he had stood on the edge of the ocean and marveled at the vast gray tumult of its surf. Here, he could see the horizon and the distant shore of the lake. There were lakes in Alabama, surely, but few of them, and all smaller than this one, which was rimmed with conifers, pine and cedar. Here, the scope of the lake was startling. This was no glorified pond, as he’d thought of lakes before. It made him nervous to stand on the slippery stone steps, uneasy, as if at any moment he might slip down and be swallowed.
He was here for orientation. Or, rather, to meet some of his fellow students. They would begin orientation on Monday. Before that, though, someone had suggested that they all go out to the peninsula, to sit on its silty shores and make a bonfire. He had never been on a peninsula before. He had never been on a boat before. He stood near the yellow-bellied boats, running his hand over them while they rested on their hooks like sleeping animals. They were smooth but tacky, and his fingers stuck on them. The whole area smelled like rust and lake water and something like rotting plants.
There were tall, attractive people with shining skin and tank tops walking all around him, talking to each other as if they belonged to a world beyond his grasp. It reminded him of his favorite story, about the woman who goes to Madrid in order to force the nature of her character to emerge by virtue of not fitting in, only to discover that her ability to blend in with the Spanish renders her efforts futile. He had considered himself a Midwesterner at heart, that being in the South and being gay were inco
mpatible, that no two parts of a person could be more incompatible. But standing there, among the boats, shyly waiting to discover the people to whom he felt he would belong, he sensed the foolishness in that.
They finally appeared, his fated friends, four or five people, coming toward him along the sidewalk. At first they had not seemed like a group at all, but eventually the rhythm of their footfalls told him that they were coming toward him en masse. Two of them were tremendously tall, another was very short, and there was a woman with a skinny man’s arm thrown around her. The skinny man had a silly mustache, but seemed very serious.
“Are you Wallace?” the sandy-haired one asked, sticking out his hand. “Yngve. Pleasure.”
“Pleasure,” Wallace said, smiling because he couldn’t stop himself. These were to be his friends here, the people who looked after him. He had seen them only via the internet, their little portraits and bits of their lives transmitted across Wallace’s uncle’s shaky wireless.
“I’m Lukas, with a k,” the red-haired one said. And then, the tallest one nodded from the back of the group.
“Miller,” he said somewhat morosely. He was very good-looking, but there was something about him that withdrew even as it advanced. Wallace nodded back.
“I’m Emma—and this is Thom, my fiancé,” the girl with the curly hair said. “Happy to meet you finally.”
“Happy to meet you,” Wallace said, as if he could only repeat what other people said. His eyes were wet, he realized with horror. “Oh, god. I’m going to cry.” He laughed and blotted the tears with his hand. “I’ve been very tired lately.”
“I know the feeling,” Emma said, stepping forward to hug him. “You’re with friends now.”
“Hello,” someone called from the other direction, and they all turned. Another boy, tallish and fair, came loping up to them. “I’m Cole, hi.”
“Hello, Cole,” said everyone.
They ended up getting one of the small boats, so it would take several trips to get everyone. Wallace volunteered to go last, both because he was nervous and because he wanted to make it easy on everyone. In the end, it was him and Yngve and Miller, just as the sun was setting. The boat rocked as Miller piloted them out to the tip of the peninsula, where it was sandy and gray and covered with pine needles.
They walked along the shore after tying up the boat, and then scaled an embankment so that they were among the trees. Voices reached out to them in the dark; now and then they saw a flicker of flame as they passed other little gatherings. Yngve was walking very quickly out ahead of them, carrying a satchel with food and other supplies. Wallace and Miller walked apace with each other, quietly, not saying anything.
Wallace glanced up at him—his face was forbidding. Wallace was giddy, almost sick with excitement, to be in this place, among these people—it was the accomplishment of a long-held wish, a dream come true. The trees groaned overhead, swaying. He felt at home among them too; trees had always been his companions.
They arrived at their designated fire pit. The fire was going, and the others were already roasting food. Yngve had brought plates and utensils. Wallace sat next to Cole on a stump and discovered that he loved tennis too. They talked excitedly about that, the fire splashing orange and gold all over their faces.
Someone wanted to make a toast. They popped a bottle of mid-priced champagne. They looked at each other. They smiled. Lukas cleared his throat. “You know, guys, this is it. This is it. Our life. It starts now.”
“Hell yeah it does,” Yngve said, putting his hand on Lukas’s back. “Hell yeah.”
“To life,” Emma said, raising her plastic cup. The firelight danced through it. Wallace watched it undulate, writhe in the liquid. Golden bubbles rippled up to the champagne’s surface. He lifted his cup too.
“To life,” they all said, quietly and in their own ways, and then louder, until they were chanting it again and again. To life, they said, imbuing those words with all their hope and all their desires for the future. Their laughter rang through the night and through the trees, and on the shore they had left behind, people were eating dinner and laughing and crying and going about things as they always had and always would.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thank you, in no particular order, to Meredith Kaffel Simonoff, Cal Morgan, Antonio Byrd, Derrick Austin, Natalie Eilbert, Sarah Fuchs, Emily Shelter, Pam Zhang, Philip Wallén, Noah Ballard, Hux Michaels, Justin Torres, Jeanne Thornton, Monet Thomas, Esmé Weijun Wang, Judith Kimble, Sarah Crittenden, Peggy Kroll-Conner, Kim Haupt, Heaji Shin, Erika Sorrensen-Kamakian, Hannah Seidel, Sarah Robinson, Aaron Kershner, Elena Sorokin, Scott Aoki, Abbey Thompson, and my whole IPiB cohort.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Brandon Taylor is the senior editor of Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading and a staff writer at Lit Hub. He holds graduate degrees from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and the University of Iowa, where he was an Iowa Arts Fellow at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in fiction.
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