Jamila Wilkinson
Pilings
After a drive past coves and through wooded hills, Connor reached a hidden entrance to a sandy lane. The car kicked up pebbles and dirt behind him. No house was visible from the road, but after a few turns, and another winding path, he saw a mailbox with the right number painted on its side, and after a minute, the house emerged into view on a high curve of hill. In the evening light, it looked like something from a jigsaw puzzle: neat cedar shingles, yard thick with blackberry bushes, and there, through a chink in the greenery, a salt pond glinting pink below the bluff. He sat for a few moments, the car idling, taking in the woods and their lush colors—an abundance that overwhelmed. He thought of his hometown, a day’s drive away, its neat high ranches of white and gray and beige. Did the earth beneath it contain pigments capable of this? He couldn’t envision it, not even after rain.
He turned the key in the ignition and shut off the engine. From the house, his girlfriend Sofia emerged, her parents and two younger brothers trailing closely behind, already opening their arms to greet him. They looked like her, he thought; the same dark hair and tanned, sturdy limbs, bodies which had been tailored, for generations, by summers spent on islands like this one. His car’s air conditioner had sputtered on the ride up, and he was aware that he smelled a little sour. When he stepped out onto the driveway, Sofia ran to hug him, and he kept his arms low, his elbows pinned to his waist.
That week they went for swims in the ocean, played card games, cooked elaborate dinners for her parents. He and Sofia shot foam pellets out of plastic guns with her little brothers in the yard, throwing themselves in convulsive agony across the grass when hit, eliciting peals of laughter from the boys. Connor had felt anxious about coming, but he found, once he was there, that nerves were not the prevailing feeling. Instead, he felt wracked with a hum of energy; a desire for adventure that was not altogether pleasant, but kept him eager for activities and popular with the siblings.
In the mornings, he went on long runs down the beach, astonished by the scale and grandeur of the homes beyond the dunes. At night, he drank wine and chatted with Sofia’s parents until they retired to their room, brain whirring as he devised opinions about politics and culture—his thoughts newly crystalline here, bravado masking leporine nerves. He was charming them, he could tell, and hoped they didn’t detect the effort incurred by doing so. As they asked about his family and college courses, he began to grasp what Sofia had tried to convey, but he’d never quite understood: the enlivening potency of their approval. In the glow of their interest, he felt capable of great things. He wondered if this was the real privilege of wealth—ease and access and leisure, yes, but assurance most of all.
“I’ve never heard you talk this much,” Sofia whispered to him at dinner one night.
“Oh,” he said, his mouth dry from tannins. “Sorry—”
“No,” she smiled. “You’re doing great.” And he relaxed back into the smooth wood of his chair. Twice he thought about calling his sister, who delighted in hearing about the customs of Sofia’s world, their tennis clubs and fundraisers. But the week passed by quickly, and in the end, he didn’t call, anxious about being overheard and worried that, by drawing Michaela in, he might cast out himself.
On their last night, snickering and a little stumbly, he and Sofia walked down to the salt pond, blind without their phone flashlights. When they plunged naked into the cool, dark water, it flared up in dazzling color around them, sparkling molecules of day-glo blue jolting into light as they paddled through it. Sofia wrapped herself around him as they expressed wonderment in simple, childlike terms. Ooh. Aah. The luminescence seemed so implausible, so otherworldly; Connor was drunk enough to think for a moment that he was hallucinating. He smoothed back a dark lock of hair from her forehead with his thumb and thought about articulating a sentence that had been rolling around his head all week, about the way the wealthy had monopolized access to beauty. But in the moment, it seemed unimportant, combative, and after all, he was right there, experiencing it. Instead, he said dumbly, “It’s like magic,” and she pressed her wet lips to his shoulder.
When Connor gets the call, he is staying at his father’s house outside of Philly and has been for some time. Occasionally, he mows the neighbors’ lawns. Often, he lies in bed until dehydration compels him to go downstairs. Over the phone, Michaela tells him she needs assistance; having been dispatched by their father to clean out their grandmother’s home, in a beachside town where they spent summers as children, she’d arrived to discover it was a two-man job. In a small office, in the back corner of the old yellow house, she’d uncovered careening towers of bank boxes, filled with bills, medical records, tickets, tax liens, birth certificates, thank-you notes, scratch-off games, report cards, and unpublished screeds that would qualify, in many states, as hate speech. Crucially, she found no last will and testament, which they need if they’re going to sell the place quickly. Connor doesn’t want to go and protests her entreaty weakly.
“The doctor said to avoid things that are triggering,” he says.
“Did she say that? I don’t think doctors actually say that.”
“She sort of said that.”
“I think she was talking about drugs.”
“If she knew our family, she would have meant them, too.”
“You’re staying with Dad?”
“That was your idea! Can you leave me be?” Connor pleads. “I’m good here. I’m excellent. I did one hundred push-ups yesterday.”
“That can’t be true.”
“That is true!”
“I don’t like the idea of you languishing beneath your childhood ceiling stickers.”
Connor is quiet. A month prior, he’d stayed up until four scraping each of them off, the stucco flecking chips of paint into his lashes—curls of yellowed, glowing spaceships left scattered like petals on his dresser. Yesterday, he Googled “normal amount of time to spend alone.”
“It would just be to get out of the house. Even for a week,” Michaela says. “I think it would be good.”
He knows what she’s doing. But beneath his defiance, there is lingering fear over what he might do when left to his own devices, when he runs out of grass to mow. If she wants to supervise him, maybe that’s okay. They could supervise each other, like when they were kids. A few days later, Connor takes a bus from Philly down the peninsula of the shore, trundling south until the sky lifts, the highway narrows to a single lane, and the land dissolves to marsh.
Connor’s memories of the seaside town are mostly unhappy ones—summers spent with extended family in uneasy, gendered alliances. Years ago, he’d sat on the porch with his teenage cousins, air thick with grill smoke, as they’d discuss the girls who passed by on their bikes. They were a bruising pack of boys; big chins and pale eyes—lines of milk-white skin exposed where their tank tops twisted sideways, lobbing morsels of sexual gossip Connor did not yet understand. Even as teens, they exhibited the police gene, the off-hand authoritarianism they had inherited from their grandfather. Connor recognized its calcified remains in his own father, who had, with effort, denied its transmission, sparing him.
Sometimes, intimidated by their bluster, he would retreat from the porch to find his parents and aunts and uncles sitting inside—silence and anger moving in like weather after a fight. His mother, manic-depressive even in Philly, had always hated the shore. After they split up, his father stopped bringing the kids down to visit, and eventually stopped going himself, which confirmed to Connor that the purpose of these vacations had been in some ways punitive. This trip is his first in six years.
The bus stops at the Wawa in town, and he steps off into brilliant, mid-day heat. The barrier island is so narrow and so flat you can see the dunes from the bay. After orienting himself for a moment, he walks east towards the ocean. When he arrives at the address, he swipes moisture from his lip and tastes salt. Next door, a new property has replaced the empty lot where he played as a boy, three stories high, layered with decks and bay windows, towels slung over railings in varying states of damp. The structure drenches his grandmother’s home in shadow, blotting out the sun like a giant palm laid across it. He walks up the steps to the porch and unlatches the door. The house, sagging on its support beams, seems to have absorbed the climate over time. It stands like a monument to saline corrosion—swollen wood panels and bleached carpets, ceilings dripping wet, and bathroom corners inked with mold. The stilts that are meant to hoist it from the water’s reach resemble a dog’s well-loved stick, gnawed on and slobbered over.
Michaela emerges from a bedroom and gathers him into a hug. Together, they move to the floral couch in the living room. As they sink, ancient deposits of sand rise from the crevices, gritty beneath their thighs. The ocean lies beyond the window behind them; the mesh screen is rusted, sandwiching dead flies.
“This place is a wreck,” says Connor. “It looks like it’s about to be dismembered by the sea.”
“Oh, it’s destined for ruin,” Michaela says brightly. “So, this work won’t just be hard—it’ll be pointless, too.”
The siblings get to work that afternoon, going through each room methodically, sorting through moth-bitten cardigans and rosaries and boogie boards. At first, they stack things neatly in boxes and set them down in the front hall, where they exhale dust on impact, churning up shafts of dancing particles in the bright summer light. Michaela even takes the time to label them: KITCHEN, BEACH STUFF, CLOTHES. A few days pass quickly like this. But as the clear-out continues, and their box count dwindles, they become stingy. They compress as much as they can within the cardboard—quilts and carcasses of electronics so heavy that, by the time they’re full, they have to be dragged through the house, corners snagging on loose tiles.
Connor is happy for something to do, happy for even the minimal exertion required by lifting furniture, after many weeks spent either horizontal or basking in the cool light of Wikipedia. He is aware, too, of Michaela’s eyes on him, the pressure test nested within each conversation, her concern so forensic it’s like being squished between glass microscope slides. So when the first week ends, and she asks him if he’d like to be dropped off at the bus station in Philly, or come over to her apartment for dinner, he finds himself saying, “What if I just stayed here?”
Michaela frowns. “I don’t know if that’s a good idea.”
“We’ll get through the house faster that way. You said yourself that you didn’t like me staying at Dad’s. It could be like a vacation, you said that.”
“I said for a week! And the point was for you to not spend so much time alone, not just to replace the setting of your isolation.”
“I’d like to be useful.”
Michaela gives him a doleful look.
“I don’t want to leave you in the mausoleum, Conn. You’ve had a tough year.”
When Connor and Sofia returned that fall for their senior year of college, Connor’s high feeling persisted. It was as though some internal motor had been switched on. He had not been particularly social during his first years of school, and dating Sofia had changed that only marginally. But now he felt willing, even eager, to stay at house parties until the early hours, to read until light seeped through his bedroom window, to run along the river until it poured into the bay. And he found this energy to be renewable; the more he used it, the more he had.
All the while, the question he’d been thinking about in the pond jostled in his head. Who was deserving of a beautiful life? Connor’s political education had been a laborious exercise, a slow struggle to light from darkness. At sixteen, he’d begun to bristle at his family’s small-mindedness, the petty bigotry and pinched conspiracies—thin, soft-boiled theories that circled real understanding like scum chasing water down a bathtub drain, notions of their own replacement and descension. Michaela had placed some distance between them and herself, finding work as a paralegal for vaguely liberal firms. But Connor wanted distance and something more. Slowly, he began to explore terrain increasingly afield from the creed in which he’d been raised, taking the aspects he liked (unions, the IRA), and discarding the ones he didn’t (Fox & Friends, the Catholic Church). He began to wonder why authority structures—governments, but families, too— should be allowed to persist without justification, without even consideration of the people lower in the hierarchy, or the environment, or the future, or society, or anything else.
He came to university in search of scaffolding. It arrived in the form of Sofia. They met in a sophomore seminar entitled “Issues in Democratic Theory,” in which Sofia spoke often and Connor spoke not at all, vaguely familiar with the political theory but unsure of how to pronounce the names of its practitioners. Sofia had the steady voice of a private school graduate, the conviction that it was the job of democracy to cultivate moral impulses in the people, and the job of the people to see them through. To Connor, her knowledge seemed vast, but ultimately, she understood politics very simply; she had experienced true comfort and pleasure and believed others deserved the same. She wanted a planet that would survive the century. She wanted everyone to eat well. For the two years they had dated, he’d felt buoyed by the clarity and goodness of this belief. But in the months following their vacation, following the start of yet another war, yet another presidential campaign, he began to feel needled by skepticism, a pressing suspicion that these politics were insufficient—not only underdeveloped, but lacking a sense of moral proportion.
It was becoming increasingly clear to him that they lived in a world of extreme violence against the innocent, that their government was not just inept, but willfully malicious, happy to spend money razing villages and bombing children abroad, as its own coastline was subsumed by the sea. He spent long hours on his phone, watching videos of toddlers pulled from rubble, tears tracking lines down their dusty faces, and his own complicity made him feel ill. He had remembered learning in high school about past wars and genocides and thinking, that couldn’t happen now because the victims would be able to broadcast to the world what was happening, and it would stop. But now they were broadcasting what was happening to them—hungry children and men sifting through piles of concrete for loved ones, directly from their phones to his, and he was doing nothing to change things.
Sofia listened to him when he went on these tangents, generally agreeing, but it seemed that even she didn’t grasp the urgency of the task. (“I hear you, but what are you going to do? Assassinate the secretary of state?”; “If that would help, I would, yeah!”; “Jesus Christ, Connor.”) He began to see his peer’s flimsy politics as a veneer, alternately tailored to elicit social approval or adult concern. And because the people in his life, to his bewilderment, seemed mostly unreceptive to these ideas, he turned instead to Discord servers and subreddits, where he had initially chatted with other young men about video games and coding, and where he now found a much more hospitable learning environment.
It was not hard, it turned out, to travel between these two spheres of the Internet. In a chat room dedicated to “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare,” he began asking other gamers how they felt about Iraq, which was not just a backdrop to the game, after all, but a real place, one which had faced relentless devastation for their entire lives and in their names. Mostly, he was met with thumbs down reactions and laughing emojis, and a few requests from users that moderators remove the femboy. But after trying this in a few channels, he was one night sent a DM from the user @freedomclublives, which included an invite link to a new server. There, he was presented with a series of verification questions he had to answer before being let in: What was his age? Ethnicity? Ideology or lack thereof? What were his thoughts on the socialist project of Thomas Sankara?
He spent some time thinking about his responses, even drafting them in his notes app before inputting them into the chat. He reviewed other users’ replies and then simplified his own, after realizing that the other users were mostly sixteen. He waited a day, then a week, jumping at every buzz from his phone, eager to get beyond the gates. Finally, after two weeks and three DMs to the user who invited him, he heard his phone ping as he was in the shower. Leaning out from the stream, he refreshed his feed with wet fingertips and discovered it was now populated with dozens of new channels. When he dried off, he put down his phone and pulled out his laptop, a device better suited to capturing the sprawl of this new world.
At first, there was too much to even sift through. Many of the users were teenagers, amoebas with insurrectionary instincts and regressive views on women, but if you scrolled for long enough, you could find channels humming with the intellectual energy he had sought out in college and never truly found, a global community of people, sickened like him, with bold notions of change and how to achieve it. Here was finally a repository for his inexhaustible energy, his wheeling thoughts—always new people to talk to, always new texts to read, an Escher staircase of ideas and systems, Third Worldism, anarcho-syndicalism, Ba’athism, all more legible to him than the cruelty of the current one.
It began to strike him as odd that America had not experienced more political violence, given the access to weapons, the prevailing paranoia and rampant inequality, the population’s astonishing capacity for metabolizing brutality and death elsewhere. Was that not the language best understood by elites? If they could enact their views with such pitilessness, why couldn’t ordinary people, too? He felt himself on the precipice of something, some new understanding or aptitude. All those nights spent sleepless in his small town, suspecting he held in reserve an untapped bounty of courage and hoping for the moment to arrive in which he could prove it; maybe this is what they were building towards.
After a month on these channels, he found a doctor online to renew his long-dormant Adderall prescription, and soon, he stopped sleeping entirely. As the days dropped into nights, and the nights dropped into days, he could feel his cognition racing as his speech dragged, his tongue unable to keep pace, the mass of hours straining against the back of his eyes with an actual physical pressure. Sofia would awaken next to him each morning, and his open laptop would confirm that he had not yet gone to bed. She would gently shut it and coax him into lying down. He would ease into the pillow, place his face in the warm plane of her palm. Then he would walk to the kitchen to make coffee, practically feeling her eyes bore into his back.
He began to find it impossible to focus in class and was frequently lathered to anger by the futility of their discussions, by the fact that the carnage and destruction they debated was happening in real time, funded by their own tax dollars—wealth they’d siphoned off from the rest of the world. On other days, he arrived to seminars so overtired that the soporific heat of the classroom lulled him quickly to sleep, and he would have to be tapped awake by a classmate. His attendance dropped slowly, until he finally stopped attending altogether. Instead, he focused on his own writing, diatribes comprised of long, breathless sentences and little punctuation, in which he articulated his feelings on the American devaluation of life, its relentless commitment to war and terror and the burning of fossil fuels, the means through which this might change, what actions might need to be taken to do so. When he was particularly proud of an essay—when he felt the sentences were sharp enough to draw blood—he sent them over email to his sister and closest friends.
By then it was April. On the first evening that smelled of spring, he unlatched the door to his off-campus apartment, and saw Sofia standing there, phone pressed to her cheek, radiant in the living room lamp light. He kicked off his shoes, and went to her, and as he turned, he saw that there was someone else in the apartment, and that it was his sister. When he went to greet her, he realized that on Michaela’s face—on both their faces, actually—was an expression he’d never seen before, and before he could ask them what was wrong, his brain supplied the answer, which was that they both looked genuinely, truly afraid.
He did not grasp what was happening as they sat him on the couch, did not grasp it still as their voices raised in distress. He agreed to get into Michaela’s car only because it seemed it would appease the women he loved, quell their panic. Understanding did not dawn as they careened down the darkening highway, not when they took the exit to their father’s house. Only when he lay sleepless in his childhood bed, and looked around the room, struck by its smallness, did comprehension begin to set in. He who, as a child, had been so meticulously attuned to his mother’s highs and lows, had missed the symptoms in himself.
Connor had harbored since he was young a quiet faith in his own exceptionalism—his family’s dissolution; the realization of his intellect; his brief and jolting puberty, which, at sixteen, spat him out tall, graceful, in possession of a face that recalibrated people’s attention. All this instilled in him a dangerous, heady belief in his life’s capacity for sudden and profound transformation. It was this blind confidence that catapulted him to college, the same temerity that won him Sofia. That it might now send him thudding back to the place he’d been so desperate to leave was a crushing thing to grasp. Lying in bed, he could feel only anguish at the lack of beauty in his life, the loss of meaning; his inability to move on from these stark facts, which left him alone even as they failed to distinguish him.
After the months-long blur of activity, he had helped no one, changed nothing—maybe he never would. He ignored Sofia’s calls and blocked her number, unable to face her. For three days, he sprawled atop his comforter, as the voice of his sister making psychiatrist appointments floated through the floorboards—his father having already relinquished responsibility for the matter. For a few weeks, he wished himself dead. When the shadow receded, and he felt reacquainted with his mind, he peeled off the ceiling stickers.
Michaela agrees to leave him at the shore for the week on the condition that he get in touch with Dan, a childhood friend who still lives nearby, his family among the last year-round residents. If, when Michaela returns on Saturday, Connor appears to have maintained his fragile equilibrium, he can stay until the end of the month. It’s humiliating, to be monitored like this, but what Connor won’t admit to Michaela is that he, too, is afraid to be alone, afraid of feeling his thoughts quicken, afraid of the whirring taking hold again.
He structures his days to avoid idle time, works quickly, and fastidiously. He texts Dan and sends Michaela a screenshot of his reply, an invitation to get drinks at a nearby bar. He is scrupulous about his morning push-ups and diligent about his Divalproex, ignoring the suspicion that the pills blanch something vital in him. He eats through the food in the pantry, stiff, gray tuna packed in water, and sleeves of dry crackers. He spreads peanut butter onto soft white bread that sticks like cotton to the roof of his mouth. He unplugs the empty fridge, unsure who is paying the electric bill, and unsettled at night by its hum.
Sometimes when he works through a room, he comes across a box that engages his interest, and he lays out the objects within like exhibits of a trial. There is the glass his mother threw once in anger, the greasy pillow his father used when banished to the couch. Might any of it explain how he ended up back here? But coherence eludes him, and he’s left to make sense alone of his mother’s absence and his father’s wordless grief, to erect a narrative of effect without cause.
Some nights, he awakes on the floral couch in a small pool of sweat. He gropes on the floor for his glass of water and swallows in gulps, steadying his breathing, counting to twenty, retrieving his sense of time and place. He pinches between his eyes and slowly adjusts to the dark. Memories arrive unbidden, with greater force and little warning. If he exhausts himself before bed with a long evening swim, he can sometimes slip under unscathed. But often they resurface in a dream—lying on the grass behind a hedge of hydrangea, Sofia’s hair hot with sunlight, the slow rise and fall of her ribcage—and he flinches awake from the searing clarity of the recollection, the humiliation of how much the images affect him.
The first time they spoke outside of class, Sofia had, within minutes, identified a nervous tic—scratching underneath his eye, swiping at something that wasn’t there—which unsettled him; her perception, his visibility. But she just made a kind joke about it being a spy signal between them, and for the rest of the party, even when she was across the room engaged in other conversations, she would see him doing it and slyly do it back. Later, he offered to walk her home and found himself telling her things he had never told anyone—not because he trusted her, though he must have, but because he wanted the intimacy between them accelerated. He wanted her to know him quickly, so that she might love him sooner.
When he walks into town, he sometimes thinks about that week at Sofia’s family’s place and the sterile, tranquil anarchy of a wealthy beach town—cutting through neighboring yards to get to the water, houses and cars left unlocked, the baffling presumption of needlessness. It was a version of his country he had never seen, hadn’t known existed. He remembers as a child, wandering this neighborhood after a hurricane, trees draped over power lines, lawns littered with debris, homes boarded up with plywood. Across the playground, where a wooden swing set lay in a splintered heap, a sign read: “U LOOT, WE SHOOT.”
The first week passes quickly, and with the weekend comes Michaela who helps him haul boxes into her car, which she drops off at a nearby Goodwill. They eat vinegary hoagies on the beach, and he listens to her workplace gossip.
“You sure you don’t want to take a break?” she says, as they gather their sandwich papers and bags to leave. “You could stay with me for the weekend, and I could drive you back Monday.”
Connor shakes his head. “I’m making good progress. I might still uncover a family fortune.”
“Ha. But I mean it. Like, for a second, just be honest with me. Are you good? We haven’t even really talked about the spring. And I know it’s not our family’s style—”
“I don’t want to.”
Michaela gives him a desperate look. “I think it would be a good idea.”
Where to begin? Much of the last year is hard for Connor to remember now. When he thinks of April, shame rises from his chest, descends like heat behind his eyes. But worse than the shame is the doubt—his awareness of a new self prowling behind his old one; one more volatile, more vulnerable. Or was it the other way around? An older, truer self interred beneath one now revealed to be false, held at bay all those years by the thinnest of membranes. The question maddens him. Nine months in which he felt the levees in his mind unlock, information flowing in a wondrous rush: was none of it real? The truths he’d been so sure of, nothing but chemical surplus. What did it mean if that version of himself was the first one he’d ever really liked?
Instead he says, “I’m good. Really. It’s not gonna happen like that again.”
He can tell Michaela wants to press more, but he also knows she won’t. That evening, she heads back to Philly, though not before buying him groceries, turning the fridge back on, plastering a note on it that reads “Take your meds <3.”
With the house empty, he gets to cleaning, scouring the place down to its linoleum. He spends his days on his hands and knees, getting at grout between tiles with a cloth-wrapped thumb, fishing pelts of dust from beneath heavy furniture, peeling yellowed lichen in strips from the wooden porch. He finds a bucket under the stairs and fills it with water from the electric kettle. He slicks the kitchen tiles with hot, lemon-scented liquid until they’ve been wicked of stickiness, and what remains in the basin is gray and opaque, until all that was once white is restored to a pearlized gleam. He works each day until he is dizzy from heat and bleach, then he steps outside on the porch, blinking in the sun like a mole.
After two weeks, when his mind begins to feel wobbly, he finally responds to Dan. They agree on a bar on the bayside of town, one Dan frequents with his buddies. When Connor arrives, they hug, and he feels the firm planes of the other boy’s chest beneath his shirt, the slight bulge of his stomach. He pulls back and registers tattoos, scanning them for symbols of extremism or stupidity. When he says hello, his voice is hoarse from disuse. It’s late, dark, and rain has made the road gleam like a river.
When they step inside, Dan’s friends are already there. The group moves with an easy camaraderie—hands grasping arms, sliding new drinks down the table knowing from routine which drink belongs to whom. The boys are brown and toned from working outside, pink at the nape of their necks. A small cityscape of green glass bottles has accumulated between them, a carpet of peeled labels.
It’s been many years since they were close, but there’s a residue of childhood tenderness between Connor and Dan, who now angles his body to include Connor in the conversation, providing annotations of names he doesn’t know. At one point, Dan wordlessly plucks a wisp of lint from Connor’s hair before it can be noticed by someone else. The others, though less familiar, are warm with him. They’re gentle like, how one knows, even as a young child, to treat an odd cousin: with instinctual, condescending sympathy. When they sense an opportunity in the conversation, they sometimes turn to him: What about you, Connor? Anyone like that back home?
Connor does his best to engage, supplying biographical details about a Slovenian point guard, feigning interest in a new first-person shooter game, excusing himself to buy more rounds with frayed bills found in his grandmother’s kitchen drawer—generosity sufficing for geniality. The other boys don’t press him. Instead, they talk about construction projects they are working on around town, which kids from past summer vacations have returned with their own families.
“I don’t even recognize them these days,” says Dan. “Because it’s not the same Main Line kids. It’s people richer than that. That place next to your grandma’s, Connor—Liam did the electrical job—those guys bought it for ten million. Ten fucking million dollars.”
The rest of the men make noises of disgust or begrudging assent. A few concede that they would live there, too, if they could, that money from the construction jobs is what pays for the beers they’re drinking. Connor sits between their broad shoulders and listens as the conversation drifts away from him. Slowly, he gets drunker, palming the tacky wood and thinking about existence here—hemmed in as it is by ocean and marsh and ambition—and about what it would mean to stay, to abandon whatever greatness or turmoil might await him elsewhere. He considers that maybe this world is the real one: men who work with their hands and aspire to own McMansions, who try only to manage a very small slice of suffering, their own, or their families, if that. Maybe these men have tried reflecting on the state of the world and realized it’s not worth it, that things stay the same no matter what you do. He tries these formulations on his conscience, but even stretching them, he can’t quite hush the feeling that life is not happening here, in this bar, but somewhere very far away—in chat rooms he won’t let himself visit, in cities populated by people he can no longer bring himself to see.
A few hours later, he sways into the bathroom. Connor grips the sink and looks at himself in the mirror, concentrating on the feeling of the cool enamel against his skin. Did he take his meds today? He’s too drunk to remember now. Cupping lukewarm, chlorine-scented water from the faucet, he splashes his face. He looks at himself in the mirror and knows he has expended his capacity to socialize. Back at the table, he tells the others that it was nice to meet them, thanks Dan for the invitation, and says his goodbyes. When he exits to the street, the rain has stopped. Ten blocks away, his grandmother’s house is as bare as a cell. Tomorrow, there will be nothing left to clean. He sets off down Main Street, passing clumps of summer revelers enjoying last nights. When he reaches the edge of the neighborhood, human noise cedes to the distant crash of waves.
He thumbs through his phone, refreshing apps, swiping between home screens, willing a notification to materialize. When none does, he keeps going, surveying the houses he passes. One is particularly conspicuous—gold accents and fake Grecian columns, walled-off from the street by a fence marked by gleaming chrome posts, each wide enough to be a mirror. He walks up and down, watching the metal reflect his warped form, creating the illusion of a twin, or a stalker.
When he grows bored of his shadow, he moves on. He turns down the block, walks to his grandmother’s house and then passes it, stopping when he lands in front of the neighbor’s mansion, the old lot. He notes where he first landed a kickflip, where he once kissed Jenny Hannon, where he tried and failed to smoke weed from an apple. He appraises the home now superimposed on his past. He analyzes its turrets, pilasters, and columns, its Palladian window above; a set of sweeping stairs that meet at the door in the shape of a bell. The driveway is empty, lights off. Lining the sidewalk are stones the size of pomelos. Connor picks one up. It is heavier than he expects, still slick from the rain. He bounces it experimentally between his palms.
He’s aware of the throw’s impotence even before the rock leaves his hand, launched from his shoulder like a shot put, sailing through the air in one smooth arc. When it hits the window to the ocean side of the door, it makes a sound like ice splitting and then clatters to the ground. Connor waits for counteraction. When none comes, he walks up the front steps to inspect the glass, running his fingers over the web of fissures. The cracks are as thin as insect legs, like someone etched them with a needle. He applies more pressure, but the window doesn’t yield. He remembers, dimly, a guy from the bar telling him that new builds are all meant to be hurricane-proof.
As he is turning to leave, he hears a noise, like a tape rewinding, and sees, in his periphery, a small flash of blue. Flush to the entrance way is a home security camera, micro-adjusting to capture his movement. Connor laughs. He hikes up the hood of his sweatshirt and makes his way back down the stairs. When he gets to the sidewalk, he peers in the direction of home, then opts to walk along the beach, swinging his legs over the low wooden gate, picking his way over the dunes. As he zigzags between empty lifeguard stations, a peculiar lightness visits him. The ocean is black, indistinguishable from sky. He toes off his shoes and socks, feeling the sand leach heat from the soles of his feet. As the sweat on his body cools, he begins to shiver. His misery dries up and vacates. Good luck, he thinks. I look like everybody else.