my fanfic

20 NOVEMBER — YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT, FUNDRAISER-EXHIBITION-FÊTE

GAUDEAMUS IGITUR

The Fundraising Exhibition-cum-Gala is still happening, only now it’s been denuded to just a gala, i.e. a dinner where adolescent males are compelled to modulate their native tendencies: no elbow-to-table transgressions, no food projectiles, and no casual talk about Xing. Though, everyone present (read: everyone) knows this is of course what is expected and not what actually happens when unmoored youth with their knees touching get to gather in suits and ties. The bus, as the entire academy learned through a loquacious whisper, had been snow-strangled, immobilized en route to Logan, and it became glaringly obvious that the M.I.T. Union did not in fact have enough courts to fit everyone. This logistical catastrophe produced in C.T. a momentary office-locking fugue state (precisely ten minutes, timed with the sort of obsessive precision that suggests either deep neurosis or some kind of performative administrative zen), before he re-emerged with the kind of resigned pragmatism that comes from knowing systemic disappointment is less a bug than a feature. 

Poutrincourt: absent. Contingency plans: evaporated. And but if C.T. had asked the Union on the premise of only E.T.A. playing they would have been more inclined to let the academy use it than say additional Canadian kids in the first place. Ergo: Nobody plays. Nobody practices. Unadulterated joy of unexpected respite sweeps through the ranks of the not-yet-completely-jaded. 

At 1830h. with little delay, 131 kids, thirteen assorted staff, and some 50 families of social significance storm the dining hall; the exalted few are admiring the massive ceiling fans engraved with the words BIG ASS FANS^[1] and are sharing half a table with the prorectors. The Warshavers, the Chins, the Middlebrooks, and the Buckmans scooch in next to Stott and Thode while the remaining Cartons, Peltasons, Princes, Gelbs, a Lowell, Hickles, Chawafs, Heavens, Reehagens, and Mrs. Warshaver by herself along with The Donagan brothers sit where the upperclassmen would usually sit next to the gas fireplace. All students, even the 16’s and below who wouldn’t have gotten the best table in the first place, glower obviously at the even-legged wood. For the first few minutes there’s nothing but a serious tension settled on the facility, though there’s a sweet scent in the air tonight—most likely the rare delectable saccharide-riddled treat. Half of the population’s heads slant akimbo, on the verge of passing out into their beet salads, while the other half’s heads are held up by bandaged fingers and bruised arms. There’s a noticeable lack of mirth at dinner time, always, but specifically for the fête an appropriate-level chatter propagates firstly from the prorectors’ table then down, convex up. A sound like someone’s just ran their shortly clipped nails against a plate’s non-existent grain rings out. 

'Can we talk about The Darkness?' Troeltsch asks, toying with a butter knife that glistens against the candescence, elbows indeed over the meridian of the table. He looks linearly from Pemulis to Axhandle to Schacht and coughs. 

Pemulis has opted for the cranberry juice over the milk, which he’s sure the donors have been told is for special occasions like this when it’s not, and lets his eyes seep into a diastolic state so he sees all the microdramas in the room at once though none of it in terrific focus. Two girls are waiting in line whispering about Possalthwaite, who is two ahead and digging into a chunk of noodle salad. Pemulis can’t determine if they’re giggling about his nose or the copious amount of low-gluten pasta piled onto his plate. Freer, who dons his striking calfskin vest again, has just consumed a banana whole in his peripheral. Mikey’s own noodle salad isn’t looking too appetizing in the blurred mess of his eyesight right now, a weird rye-yellow color that only comes back to fucking potatoes and low-budget Boston neighborhoods. A group of girls synchronously rise to throw their trash away.

'What’s there to say that hasn’t already been said?' Schacht replies. 

'The map on that guy. Jesus, the map. Do you believe in ghosts, really?'

'Jim, I’m going to have to stop you right there,' Pemulis interjects. He raises a hand in some cursed gesture of benediction. 'Firstly when pray tell was the last time you’ve seen the dead, except I can already answer that question and you never fucking have. Statistically—and I do mean statistically—the probability is zero. The particles in the air are not, like, buzzing with electricity. The cells in your body don’t undergo some quantum deceleration when nearby alleged zones of supernatural activity. You’re being chased by the Erlking, Troeltsch, and but in this case he’s actually The Darkness telling you fucking wraiths are real. We’re actively regressing into a what would you call it primordial stew of seamy enigmatic creatures who fight over waterholes.'

'Can you believe it’s stuck? The toilet paper is stuck to his face.’

‘Struck?’

Struck says ‘Shut up,’ from a ways away.

'So then what about the bed?' Axford pitches in. He’s been rolling the same cob of corn round on his plate for the past fifteen minutes to avoid mastication.

'So then what about the bed?' Mikey. 

A humongous symphony of barks comes from the prorectors’ table followed by an even louder exclamation of joy from the donors-only table. The younger kids swivel their heads around in alarmed stand-offishness while the 18’s merely grimace at the sound especially now that it’s been topped off by the tinkling of sterling flatware on glass but don’t turn around. Pemulis—in one of those moments of unexpected phenomenological drift—considers the Enfield Marine complex through the window, its architectural mass suddenly aesthetically noteworthy, something he'd never before permitted himself to contemplate. The sun’s already disappeared. Going down the hill at this time of the year is common what with Christmas lurking around the corner like an expectant relative and let’s not forget Turkey Day, but the impending blizzard means kids are more likely to crack their heads open on the iced sidewalks than get anything productive out of a dangerous accelerating drive down into town for a novelty snow globe or fruit candy cane. Mostly it’s been cartridge viewing with unspoken boyfriends or girlfriends and silent prayers directed at the scheduling gods of athletic practice. One of the Chins has risen to make a toast that none of the students acknowledge which is followed by a few more toasts and Pemulis even thinks he hears a ‘Hear ye, hear ye.’ This is confirmed when Schacht shoots a dubious look past Pemulis’ shoulder. It looks like Coyle is trying the same ankle joke on a different crowd as demonstrated by his miming of a calf slimming down to a vertex, but something about the shoot-me-now countenances of all within a five-foot radius of the kid tells Pemulis it’s not panning out well. Freer gets up for seconds. John Wayne makes no movement whatsoever despite the fact that Freer’s getting up has just bequeathed him a solid two feed of additional lateral real estate. Schacht is liberating uneaten steamed greens off of Axford’s plate and arranging them in a baroque fashion such that the white of the plate makes light among the mashed potato and bell peppers, something post-impressionistically reminiscent of Vermeer and Sargent’s love child.

'So then Coyle says it’s in the air.'

'Bolted.' 

'A mere theory.'

'And the moving shit,' Schact says.

'Is this your casus belli, Peemster? This nameless prankster culpable in lieu of the apparition,' Axford asks. 

'It very well may be. This is next level fuckery, you guys,' Pemulis responds.  

'And what about Hal?' Troeltsch remarks. 'I mean he really seemed kertwanged.'

‘The laughing.' Schacht.

'Yes with the fucking giggling and yes I said it: giggling. Like one second it’s brooding silence and the next it’s smiles when we’re talking Stice’s map, I’m saying.' 

'Did it seem like he was going to cry, in the locker room?'

'Why?' Pemulis.

'Don’t think so,' Troeltsch says, pointing his unsullied fork in Mike’s direction. 'This nascent specifically moody moping was not one of lip-bitten silence. When he grabbed Loach it was more like he was going to keep digging his fingers into the poor bastard’s shoulders until the sinew exploded.'

Pemulis responds with a grunt and pulls his bottom lip down. He’s currently attempting to stomp out his sybaritic need to zip down his pant zipper because E.T.A. dress code doesn’t permit chinos for an occasion such as this. All of his bottom teeth are showing. 'He’s not high.' 

'Just don’t want a Darkness pulled on me,' Axhandle shrugs. 

'Are we using The Darkness’ name as a verb, now? We’ve crossed the line of verbiage?' Schact asks with feigned incredulousness.

'Aye.' 

‘As in the Incster is going to rip your face off.’

Pemulis starts tapping his fingers on the table. He’s itching to open his fly. Freer drops a piece of pineapple, picks it up from off the floor, and eats it.

There are arising suspicions that Hal’s taken the DMZ, though Pemulis isn’t sure why or how Hal would or could do such a thing. He has theories for how it could or would occur, but the nature in which he’d found nothing, not even the old sneaker, as if someone jacked on Methylprednisolone^[2] had had the urge to climb to Heaven directly under the aluminum strut in subdorm B’s drop ceiling, leaves him flummoxed. The why remains unanswerable. And but then what about the land Mikey had so flawlessly sold? The blackmailing of Canada-U.S. relations, the axe on his credits. Thirteen 50-mg. artifacts of the B.S. 1970s simply vanquished. The thirty fucking days bought not for Pemulis but for Hal alone that Hal is hypothetically tossing out like breakfast’s leftovers feels worse than being de-mapped. 

‘But then we’d be saying don’t pull an Incandenza on me and not a Darkness,’ he says.

‘When it comes to one’s map being torn off I believe commemoration is in order, as in like a case so severe the victim is his own iconic iconography,’ Schacht retorts.

‘What’s pulling a Pemurama?’ Axhandle asks.

‘Traveling upstate to visit your mother,’ Pemulis says. ‘I have this innate ability to know when father isn’t home. Like let’s say this throbbing sense.’

‘Can we please talk about the milk? It’s powdered I’m telling you,’ Troeltsch circles back. 

20 NOVEMBER Y.D.A.U. CONTINUED, 2119h. 

For the second time in the past 24 hours Pemulis was the only vertical thing in the room I found myself lying in. I heard the soft padding of socks against carpet first before a relatable, supine shadow grew past my body and stood there indefinitely. I couldn’t remember if I’d been napping for the past hour or if I’d been lying on my bed with my eyes closed but a distinct claret tone had filled my vision. Mario before then had asked was I coming down and I’d said yes and he’d left and I hadn’t come. I felt nothing for lying. At some point the Moms had poked her head in and asked if I was hungry and then it had disappeared. 

‘Not hungry?’

‘You’re not even the first person to ask me that.’

‘What’s wrong?’

‘That’s what I should be asking you, Pem.’ I could hear what could only be Mikey playing with a zipper. That distinct noise like someone was sucking in through their teeth and simultaneously jingling keys. 

‘I’m extending my RSVP deadline from yesterday so what say you and me roll down to Steak ‘N Sundae. On me, even.’

‘I don’t—‘

‘Please. I don’t say that often.’

I could actually hear the cogs in my head begin to whir, to rev up at the word ‘please.’ It was hard to tell if this was the moment I understood my lack of missed calls. I wondered what he was actually zipping.

‘It’s not funny,’ he said.

I felt that familiar tension in my jaw—the way I wanted to pull back, to resist, to stay exactly where everything was known even if it was all wrong, but it dawned on me that I was hungry.

‘Help me up.’ 

Michael Mathew [sic] Pemulis was both a brass-faced liar and my best friend. He was roughly 180 cm tall wearing tennis shoes and had a middle name identical to his brother’s first, a person he’d go aggressively blank-faced on if discussed. The father-situation remained unspoken. For about a month in February I’d gotten accustomed to the exact sensation of his post-A.M.-drills towel-snap, the way my dermis registered the sting post-run, the kind of precision that spoke to our monotonous routine bordering on obsessive. I pictured Pemulis in my Byzantinalia in one of those impossible poses obscuring everything yet suggesting everything, like his figure stretched out infinitely across a sea of carpet in minuscule, shattered bits. It was impossible to tell the time when you looked up at a ceiling in the dark. I found myself secretly disappointed that I remembered the exact day he began avoiding me. He drove girls around in a tow truck and described the whole enterprise as as easy as getting ready to take a shower after P.M. drills. I firstly was incredulous that he would call it ‘the enterprise’ as in like something so clinical and typical, but I secondly did not believe him. On certain days in Boston you could feel the ground shake from the foot traffic. I knew this because I’d partially followed Mikey, once, until he caught the Red Line and I’d stopped. I remembered thinking to myself Gee the foot traffic is heavy here, when I was left standing in the middle of town counting the cowlicks on Pemulis’ head. Himself had always called the racquet The Stick, as in you need to grip The Stick properly, like this. I think a part of him didn’t like the fact that we were an East-coast family. I think The Stick had something to do with that. A part of myself didn’t like that I was a reactionary, and as I thought all of this I was simultaneously incredibly aware that the actual flesh-and-blood Pemulis was probably looking down at me thinking I was doing some solipsistic navel-gazing bullshit meditation. Pemulis’ hand was even colder than mine when he dragged my full weight into the hall. 

‘I think you were right,’ I said in the truck.

‘About what?’

‘About dying inside or on the outside or whatever.’

‘I just say shit,’ Pemulis said, gently.

‘But you were right and you were right also that I can’t take it back. I’ve killed myself and it’s over.’

‘You’re sitting right here in the passenger seat, Incpuddle, yelling at me.’

‘I’m just trying to figure out what part of me I’ve killed. What part of me needed it.’

‘Hal?’

‘I’m questioning why I ever felt something akin to a sordid sort of proudness actually like well in my chest when my head cleared the liquor store counter down in Brighton for the first time.’

‘Hal.’

‘And why in God’s name do I have these dreams of splintering teeth.’

‘Hal.’

‘It’s officially no longer fun, this splintering business.’ 

‘Hal Incandenza.’

‘Mike.’ 

‘I’ve been thinking a lot lately and I was wrong and I’m not saying this to comfort you. You’re not it. The word. I think you’re just changing but not drowning so much as standing with your neck in the water and nobody’s asking if your feet can reach the bottom.’

‘I don’t think you know how hurt I am that I can’t tell if you’re lying or not.’ 

Pemulis laughed. ‘I don’t lie to you. Maybe a prevarication or two but never a lie.’  

‘So then what does this standing in the water entail?’

‘You gotta stop yelling, Inc.’

‘…’

‘It entails that the world scorn you I suppose.’ He sniffled and wiped his nose with his right hand while making an oblique, vehicular oval around a bend with his left.

‘When did you become so enlightened?’

‘Oh fuck off. This has nothing to do with enlightenment, Inc. I’m the last person who would be enlightened if we’re being candid and horribly honest. Your Mums gave me a rude awakening to my reality ‘s all, in which vulnerability will have to soon be my norm, wherein I’ll rise every morning having to be totally honest with myself and with the world and go to bed with a thousand knives in my back. Then I’ll do it all over again.’

‘The Moms?’

‘It’s useless out there, Hal. Out here. The mordant backtalk. It may be perfectly true that you’re going crazy but shit if I’m not right there with you. Takes guts.’

‘What you’re saying is I’m losing my acerbic zenith.’

‘What I’m saying is that it never mattered; years wasted for what.’

‘Did the Moms do something?’

‘And now you’re crying.’

‘Pem?’

‘Do you need a tissue? Reach into the glovebox for me.’

‘Did the Moms do something?’

‘…’

‘Is this the prevarication? Have aspersions been cast?’

‘The Tenuate stash was my fault. Troeltsch and his pilfering, for Christ’s sake.’

‘Are you being sent back to Allston, Mike?’

‘What say we not talk about it.’ He smiled.

‘…’

‘Listen to this. The Pemulis Theory. Let the contempt the world has for you be x. Let your humanity be y. The Pemulis Theory postulates that these two variables are directly proportional.’

‘You haven’t even taken the Boards yet.’ 

‘I say theory because it can’t actually be proven. My theory is Freudian, Hal. Hey, do we need to pull over? You’re heaving so much it’s starting to worry me.’ 

‘What are you going to do?’ 

‘Lighten up, will you? Steak ‘N Sunday awaits.’ 

I stared at Pemulis. I could not find a single thing to make out on his face.

Steak ‘N Sundae was more than a few clicks down the road from E.T.A., but not so far as to trigger Comm.-Ad. anxiety re: off-campus peregrinations. The driveway was exit-only on one side but the arrows indicating so had eroded to near-total obscurity. Pemulis parked next to the dumpster. When it was cold my hair got staticky. 

‘Table for me and the missus,’ Pemulis said, stumbling over the entrance and letting a cold rush of air push us in. I’d sort of forgotten that annular heating was specific to E.T.A. and the lack of a hum as Pemulis and I stood in the doorway dripping snow onto the floor horrified me in a grotesque way. His cowlicks started to die. ‘This snow is impossible,’ he said. ‘Mind-boggling.’

The booth vinyl made this wet squeaking sound when we slid in, my feet numb from the cold, our menus laminated and looking like they’d been there since Y.W. suctioned to the freshly-wiped tables for people like Pemulis to come along and bend the clear tab of plastic in the corners while pretending they weren’t. He did that thing where he slowly let his eyes peak over the menu at me and it was only then I realized that I was doing the exact same thing right back. The tabletop had this adhesive film that your elbows stuck to if you leaned forward too much.

‘So many gastronomic possibilities,’ he remarked to the waitress when she came by in his typical specious inflection. I ordered an Eton mess sundae and he didn’t order anything, opting to beam at her and then me and then back at her. I felt my face to see if it had somehow tugged into a grin without my realizing it. She stood there like his beaming was indicative of his anticipating to order, but he never did, and she went away. 

‘The urgent news is that you’re getting fucking expelled,’ I said.

Our menus were gone. Pemulis closed his eyes. ‘I’m going to open my eyes and you’re asking me a better question.’

I shivered. He opened his eyes. It was maybe 2200h. and I was indulging in sundae on an empty stomach. Pemulis all of a sudden said, ‘What?’

‘What?’

‘You’ve got that expression on your face like you just remembered something funny someone did.’ 

‘…’

‘Let’s hear it.’

‘…’

‘Any time, now.’

‘Lyle once told me this story supposedly from old Eastern philosophy but in distinctly non-Eastern terms, about the fable of the Smart Old Bee and the Foolish Young Bee, and basically what happened was the young bee preferred flying around and enjoying the sights rather than working at the hive. And but so the Smart Old Bee prattled about apollonian motion v.s. dyonesian [sic] motion while the Foolish Young Bee kept terrorizing al fresco diners, until the Smart Old Bee finally decided to bust out this Blake quote, “You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough,” and he asked the Young Bee to spend a day in a flower while it bloomed, which was wasted on the Young Bee. All he had experienced inside the flower, he complained, was a gradual enlargement of the world outside until he forgot the flower altogether because he was now in the world, and so he flew away from the flower that had gradually let him go. The whole thing had this feeling of a children's story that’s actually about death or consciousness or something.’ 

Mikey stared at me. ‘It wasn’t that funny, Halster.’

‘I didn’t really think it was.’ 

‘Is this one of those laughing fits where telling the joke is funnier than the joke?’

‘Maybe that’s all jokes.’ 

My Eton mess sundae arrived looking like someone had committed dessert homicide directly into the parfait glass. Pemulis flagged down the waitress for another spoon with this casual gesture that somehow still made it clear he wasn’t actually asking.

‘I can’t shake this torpor,’ I said as I dug around like my hands belonged to somebody else. ‘This feeling of nothingness. Like what even is the point.’ I let Pemulis take the first bite. ‘Even this sundae.’ 

I watched him lick my spoon. His tongue darted out at some whipped cream where his upper and bottom lip converged, that single dark spot like a concavity as I bore down on it mentally. The waitress came back with more silverware.

‘Hal, I’m going to ask you right now if you’re clean and if you say yes I’ll drop it. But know I’ll drop it because you’re my friend and I have trust in you and I hope that works both ways.’

‘…’

‘Hal, are you clean?’

‘Am I drooling or something?’

‘…’

‘Jesus, yes, I’m clean, Pem.’

‘Forget it,’ he said, smiling and licking his thumb. ‘Hal Incandenza is no longer relevant vis-à-vis this issue.’

The way he was looking at me made me realize I was holding my spoon wrong, like my hands really, truly, weren’t my own. That I was gripping it like The Stick. I consciously loosened my fingers around the metal and watched the sundae begin to pool into its divot.

‘Mario asked if you were mad at him the other day. If that’s why you weren’t coming down for mealtime.’

‘I’m not mad at Mario.’ 

‘Nobody’s mad at Mario. That’s not the point. He also asked if maybe you were mad at me, which I couldn’t answer.’ Pemulis took another bite of my sundae, this time with his own spoon. 

I watched a drop of condensation race two other droplets down the side of the glass. It began to snow harder behind Pemulis’ head. He sat back in the booth and the vinyl made that squeaking sound again, a specific kind of squeak that the Academy’s courts make when you’re really digging in for a serve that even non-tennis players are aware of, which reminded me of the way Himself used to sometimes walk around the grounds, every now and then making a sudden twist in the other direction and inducing that horrific squeak, which was happening at the same time the Moms went through her phase of attending a twice-weekly support group for parents of children with Attention Deficit Disorder even though none of us technically had ADD, or at least not the kind that required the prescription stimulants that kept showing up in our medicine cabinet, and occasionally he’d stop mid-pace to stare at one of our games, and I remember the one time he stopped for my game I tripped and lost. This was exactly the kind of thing Dr. Dolores Rusk would probably say indicated some kind of Inner Infant issue, but really what I was reminded of more than anything was the way that squeak happened like sweet clockwork every time Pemulis hit a deadly lob. 

‘You want to know what I remembered?’ I asked. ‘What was funny?’

‘Hit me.’ 

‘Nothing at all.’

20 NOVEMBER Y.D.A.U. CONTINUED, 0134h. 

By the time Pemulis and Hal are trudging back up the hill, shivering in the serrated, post-midnight drop in temperature, the E.T.A. campus looms like a settlement abandoned in haste, like the necrotic remains of an institution where one or more bodies might still roam, animated by decay and malignant intent. The wind’s picked up a subtle keening edge. Hal can’t shake the image of C.T.’s partially skeletonized hand clawing at the brittle, frozen air, clutching for stray souls to harvest and feed to Avril.

He in some unidentifiable disquiet begins to think about doing little brass one-hitters in the late afternoon, lazily enervated and exhaling slowly into the exhaust fan. The private ceremony of it; the way the act seemed almost architectural in its construction. He feels in an attack of Analysis-Paralysis that maybe if it was that easy to get addicted to palely breathing in sordid solitude, that maybe it’s even easier to get addicted to the pathetic familiarity of humanity, of Pemulis, who feels like someone Hal can bury his shame in, in Pemulis’ irreverence. Pemulis, who embodies some wordless agreement neither of them dares to acknowledge, articulate, or even attempt to feel. Maybe, he admits, he simply has an irrepressible desire to err. He pictures Avril shaking her head slowly, a turn of anguish, full of unspoken accusations, but can’t parse why he would want this, to hurt others, to inhale someone’s exhale. 

The snow is fluttering down as they step inside the dorm hallways in the twilit A.M., an uncanny vacuum of sound—the sort of silence that isn’t just an absence but an antithesis. Not even a hush or a whisper is made, just the rustling of Hal’s jacket and the zipping sound of Pemulis’ Hal doesn’t know what. Just the sound of faint footsteps’ echos, of Hal following delicately behind Pemulis as if unsure of what’s happening or what it means. He almost feels inclined to touch Pemulis as he eyes the cold hand from earlier, the slightest twitch of the pinky, feels the imaginary sting of his dermis again, the sting of telling Pemulis it’s not all over, he and Hal, the world, he and Hal and the world. 

‘Mario’s at HmH,’ Hal whispers. He’s unsure of if he meant to say anything at all. 

‘You going?’

‘No.’

‘But then you’ll have A.M. drills.’

‘I know.’

‘At this hour I’d consider skipping A.M. drills, Inc.’

‘You—‘

Pemulis swings around rapidly and seizes Hal with such force that they bump into the wall with a medium-loud thud reverberating down the long hall. All that’s left is the breath Hal holds against Pemulis’ frigid palm. 

‘Incster,’ Pemulis whispers into Hal’s ear, ‘I really don’t think there’s any reason to scream in the hallway.’ 

Hal turns his head and blinks deliberately. ‘You also have A.M. drills.’

‘You’re back to normal, now? Is this a thing?’

‘I don’t know. Are we making a thing out of this?’

‘Out of what? Randomly crying and laughing and screaming? Yeah, maybe.’ There’s no heat in the sharpness of the tone. 

‘Help me,’ Hal whispers suddenly, grabbing desperately onto the hem of Pemulis’ jacket. ‘Help me shut up. I feel like I’m losing it. Myself.’ 

Pemulis doesn’t respond. He looks both ways down the hall to make sure it’s as desolate as it feels, and without a word they turn back and keep walking, slower now, steps less sure, shrugging against the wall. Hal considers not following and standing there in the hallway until someone finds him in the morning frozen to the ground, encased in carpet, unable to go out like Stice, but the sartorial tingle of his fingers beckons him. 

When Hal’s door swings open and Pemulis lingers in the hallway with his arm on the frame like he’s holding himself back from vanishing into the disconsolate maw of the dormitory’s pitch-black corridor, Hal quietly asks him not to go. Tells him he needs an analgesic. Turns on Tosca’s Act III “Amaro sol per te m'era il morire” and stands in front of Pemulis with nothing more to say if there ever was. He can feel his face contorting into some expression that he will never fully understand, whether it be crying or gagging or smiling or some unsightly, involuntary combination of all three. Pemulis, still half in the doorway, stares back with a look that suggests they’re both trying to figure out the same thing, the two of them locked in a silent feedback loop of mutual incomprehension. Hal remembers he still needs to finish reading the independent clause section of his SAT prep guide, dog-eared on his desk. So they sit Indian-style in the dark, little splotches of red and green glowing on the planes of Pemulis’ face from the synthesized music emitter and the clock and a weird shine in his left eye from the west window’s sliver of snow-filled light peeking out from behind the curtain. The whole space between them is steeped in a shade of blue, Pemulis’ fingers strumming against his knees and biting the terrific urge to pull his pant zipper, Hal sitting straight up, his spine aching and every muscle straining to keep him poised in that unnatural position, leaning into the slant of the world, fighting the ferocious urge to let himself spill sideways, recognizing on some subconscious level that slumping only gets easier and more pleasurable at the advantage of people who do not love him, that the mere act of Pemulis’ being in the same room as him, being witness to this excruciating nonpareil struggle, is an act of sado-masochism—that his punishment is Pemulis’ forgiveness and his personhood, that his reply is silence—this sort of volatile, exhausting, intoxicating silence in which to drown in. 

‘Regretting the Pukers ahead?’ Pemulis says, smiling. 

Hal shakes his head. The potential etiologies of his self-diagnosis cascade in front of him with each suggestion more wickedly plausible than the last. Drugged. Hallucinating. Insane. But the thing is that none of it matters. Not the tennis. Not the possible neural meltdown. Not even the increasingly byzantine interior investigations of his own cognitive state. Just the microscopic topography of industrial-grade carpet fibers pressing against his palm. The warmth radiating from Pemulis’ leg. The absolute and terrifying immediacy of physical presence.

‘This aria is headache-inducing.’ Pemulis’ statement exists somewhere between observational and existential. 

Hal stops making any noise entirely as he pulls himself with a magnetism that suggests less voluntary locomotion and more some kind of fundamental attraction, like two bodies whose interaction transcends mere physical contact.  

Pemulis is no longer smiling. He seems to quiver and writhe.

Hal realizes—no, understands in a way that defies the kind of understanding that involves thought—that solidarity was never the point of getting high, not really, not when the heat of his neck seeps out from Pemulis’ fingers, a strange osmosis where warmth becomes a language in and of itself, but he can only silently plead for this warmth now that it’s slipping out of his grasp. He thinks about all of the un-moments. The times he’d let their language get away. Solitary is impossible when it feels like their bodies were made for holding one another’s faces and cusping one another’s ribs and gripping at one another’s arms, but it also feels like this is the one and only time they’ll do this. They weren’t fated to be there so much as they’d persecuted and abused one another to spectacularly fail and land there. The way they’re looking at each other in the moment is the same way they always have in the dining hall and the Viewing Rooms. A million of these subtle un-moments: Pemulis’ smirks, designed with a precision suggesting knowing without ever actually knowing, just for Hal. Winks. Sticking tongues out of mouths. The performances of seventeen-year-old pseudo-intellectuals pretending. Inc. Inculator. Hallation. Shoe pushing and seat saving and snickering under breaths. The kind of trust that’s really just a more sophisticated form of betrayal. The term best friend being kind of a joke. The times Hal had cried years ago and the times Pemulis had been there to sit in the sort of lonely company Hal feels now. The choking feeling when they stopped at red lights in the tow truck. Missed calls. Half-second pickups. The letter m humming on Hal’s lips ready for a hello. Second and third and fourth chances existing only in the negative, bloated space of their interactions. Workbook marginalia: nonsense that neither of them ever completely understood. False confessions and silent prayers. The steady breath of running. Hal has a strange feeling of being both out of place and perfectly aligned, like he’s meant to be in that spot exactly, burdening Pemulis, knowing he has no real evidence for thinking that Pemulis’ faith is as true as he believes it to be but knowing that he believes it anyway. They’ve reached a point where the derivative is zero. 

It’s like Pemulis is already gone^[3] and Hal’s harboring a stranger in his dorm room. He takes a sick, guilty sort of self-hating pleasure in that. 

‘Stop,’ Pemulis says. 

‘Stop what?’

‘This isn’t perfectly natural. This is very bad.’ Pushing Hal’s body. More industrial-grade carpet. Receding into a corner. 

Hal rolls his eyes. ‘Perfectly normal.’

‘Natural.’ 

They’re both on all fours, Pemulis in an awkward crab pose and Hal with his knees touching the ground. ‘Natural.’ 

‘Why are you laughing?’

‘Like white wrists and brown arms are natural. Ford Sedans and Wild Turkey.’

‘Don’t laugh.’

‘Natural as in a natural lifespan. As in our lives are natural and we are not meant to be doing this because it’s not natural.’

‘Christ.’

‘We’re anticonfluential, you’re saying.’

‘I’m saying I’m not laughing.’

‘Please?’

So they ease into it. Hal can feel the two of them shaking against one another; the way Pemulis’ lips on his skin is chaste.^[4] He takes a deep breath in when hands run along his sides and Puccini’s soliloquy hovers overhead faintly. Accomplice! comes to mind. 

It’s not right—never will exactly be right—but it’s happening. For the first time in a long time loneliness is not at its limit and there is no echo inside of his soul: what Pemulis hears is him. Sighs and gasps and all. 

Pemulis smells like something sweet, maybe even a little bitter, like after it rains, and his breath catches in such a way that suggests more terror than desire. The delicacy of it all seems accidental. His entire body is stiff and athletic.

‘Hal,’ he whispers, both drenched in endearment and hatred. 

Hal can feel the impossibility of their bodies trying to construct something out of nothing, something that resembles genuine connection out of fragility. Pemulis pulls back not dramatically but with the sort of recoil that’s really just a subtle recalibration of movement. The room is a demilitarized zone where everything that doesn’t make sense can coexist without immediately consequence. 

‘This didn’t happen,’ he says. Hal gets the sense that what Mikey is meaning to say is this can’t happen, but it’s happening, isn’t it. It’s not a statement or even a request. More like a mathematical proof to be immediately forgotten. 

Hal nods. Or doesn’t. Pemulis repeats his name again, this time more of a beg. 

The building breathes. Somewhere somebody coughs and something bumps and a radiator clicks. Hal understands that this moment will become another un-moment, so crucial and yet completely immaterial; he wants to be emaciated. 

They’re twisted in this imperfectly perfect way that Hal indulges in fully as he comes forward and kisses Pemulis’ face, his lips, realizes what Pemulis has been zipping and feels the usual loathing dissipate. Running hands through hair. Inhaling exhales. Pressing every inch of skin together for impossible amounts of time. What a waste indeed, Hal agrees, to make yourself feel nothing so as to not feel anything. 

The image isn’t very erotic. They lie over each other, motionless mostly, eyelids fluttery but also unblinking, both reclined. A variation of configurations of limbs, a lazy bit of passion throwing clandestine precautions to the wind. Clothes wrinkled and sloppy and unbuttoned. Hal’s jacket on the floor. Red and green alternating and making Rembrandt patches on their faces. Pemulis asks if Hal is okay several times in a non-questioning way, things like ‘Tissues at three o’clock if one is unstable.’ By the time 0500h. hits it’s motionless, the snow still falling, half of Pemulis’ body off of Hal’s bed while Hal sleeps on the floor. When Hal’s alarm clangs out at 0515h. he wakes up still in his punctured gestalt of apathy, not caring if he misses the entirety of morning drills or the day as a whole. He has an ague he suspects is from the sundae. Pemulis rises slowly, too.

‘I should vamoose,’ he says. ‘Pull a Troeltsch.’ 

Hal watches from the floor as Pemulis stands up and makes his way to the door past the piles of clothes and diskettes and books and gear and AminoPal® energy-bars. No attempts to create a remarkable escape. Just a look back at Hal, a smile, or maybe a grimace, and a soft click.

The sliver in the window has grown since the early hours of the morning, creating a confusing trapezoid in the middle of the room over Hal’s torso. He lies there for a while longer, feeling the chill, trying to imagine himself like a victim of lingchi with a lack of non-extremities. He has indigestion. Unbeknownst to him Pemulis has just sneezed. Hal gets the sense that Pemulis will never stop being a constant in his life, can’t not be in the same way they couldn’t do what they had done, and that some time in the future he’ll look back and see that same familiar irreverence look to him as the snow falls perfectly, the whole thing—the enterprise, he supposes—soft and muddy and washed.  

The door opens with a slow creak some time later and there Mario’s large head is.

‘You’re here? Are you sleeping?’ he asks.

‘They is them, Booboo. Not sleep talking.’

‘Oh.’ He enters the room and the door closes again with a long creak. The snow’s stopped. ‘Hey Hal?’

‘Yes?’

‘The Moms was worried about you. She wanted to act like she wasn’t but she kept asking me if you were sad and if that’s why I was asking all those questions, earlier, about you being sad. I didn’t tell her anything you wouldn’t have wanted me to say.’ 

‘You’re a nice surprise.’

‘All evening it was is Hal okay, you can tell me in this pressure-free situation. She made scenarios where you were down eating with everyone and pretended like they were real even though it was past dining hours.’

‘Shouldn’t you be sleeping in HmH right now? Or are you getting ready to wave to stragglers with Schtitt?’

Mario falls back onto his bed to take off his backpack’s straps. ‘Boy, Schtitt sounds fun but there’s no drills this morning. He tried to fly out on the old BMW cycle but slipped.^[5] Too cold even for torture.’ He laughs.

‘…’

‘Something wrong?’

‘It’s twenty minutes before drills and I’m on the floor, Boo, in wrinkled pants and a shirt, feeling sick. Wouldn’t have gone.’ 

Mario’s taking the straps off his shoes, now. ‘I’m here to check on you.’

‘I’m not sad. Just sick.’

‘I was going to say before I talked about the Moms that I thought you looked less sad, right now. Generally. I believe you and I love you in every way, Hal.’

‘I don’t know what I did to get such a good older brother. You even woke up early at the risk of petulance. It’s like your Orin’s replacement.’

Mario finally lies in bed. ‘Hey Hal?’

‘I didn’t mean that. Like he could even attempt to replicate the goodness that is you, Boo. Don’t know why I said it.’

‘Why are you on the floor?’

‘Everything is perfectly right on the floor.’

‘Perfectly right?’

‘Perfectly natural.’

‘But then if I’m not on the floor am I unnatural?’

‘I’m not even going to dignify that with a response, Boo.’

‘Are you glad you get to sleep in?’

‘Glad doesn’t begin to describe it. I’m cock-a-hoop.’

‘Hal?’

‘The truth is I woke up on the floor and that’s the only reason I’m here. Let’s say I get up and we both go to sleep. I think that’s in order.’

‘Hal?’

‘Look, I’m getting up. The world is still perfectly natural, you included.’

‘Hal?’

‘Yes?’

‘Can I tell the Moms that you’re okay?’

‘You can tell the Moms whatever you want.’ Hal collapses into his bed and feels the sheets frigid against his face. There’s a lingering sweet scent on the pillow. ‘I think I’m okay.’

‘You’re crying.’

‘…’

‘You’re crying, but I still somehow get the sense that overall you’re okay, Hal, which is strange because I’ve never seen that before. It’s usually the opposite.’

‘And lo.’

❍

NOTES AND ERRATA

1. World’s largest manufacturer of HVLS fans under the Delta T. Corporation, 1999; reincorporated as Big Ass Fans, LLC.^{[return to text]}

2. A corticosteroid^a that decreases inflammation, slows down overactive immune systems, or replaces cortisol normally made in the body — ®Lilly Pharmaceuticals.^{[return to text]}

^{a. Cortisone-like medicine or steroids.}

3. This assessment is technically not wrong seeing as Pemulis has already gotten the academic boot, so to speak.^{[return to text]}

4. Although ‘chaste’ is derived from Latin castus meaning ‘morally pure,’ Hal likes the definition ‘severely simple, unadorned,’ from 1753 in reference to artistic or literary style.^{[return to text]}

5. Schtitt cancels practice because he can’t effectively use his pea-shooter on suspecting victims while on such slippery grounds, not because he slipped.^{[return to text]}