SL Huang - Up and Coming - Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

15. It was not until 9:30 that night, after Jared had gone to bed and he and Chloe rested on the couch, both too tired to climb the stairs to bed, that he noticed anything different. What he noticed was not something, but the absence of something, namely the compulsion to retire to his office and begin torrenting.

16. For Aaron-H, Aaron Burch’s true self, was a bit of a porn addict.

17. Strictly speaking that is not true. Aaron Burch’s porn addiction was merely the sublimated form taken by an assemblage of Aaron-H’s desires and fetishes that could not be acted upon directly in any manner compatible with the constructed front that was Aaron-T. In Aaron-H, these desires and fetishes were now unleashed.

18. So Aaron-T and Chloe briefly watched a re-run of Top Chef , then assisted one another in heaving their exhausted carcasses up to bed, as Aaron-H, having wearied of his meticulous exploration of the strange world under the toolshed, began wandering the town of North Glamis to satisfy his fetish: The musky smell of a young boy’s anus.

19. Of course Aaron Burch had smelled his own son’s anus many times, at diaper changes, bath times and bed times, but never could he acknowledge to himself that this was the smell he found so deeply satisfying. To do so might have called too starkly to mind a detailed recollection of his first Cub Scout camping trip. Instead, he would rustle Jared’s hair and put his nose to the back of his neck, reassuring himself that all he felt was simple paternal affection for his beloved child. This night Aaron-T had not even done that, simply pecking his son on the cheek.

20. For years Jared Burch had felt mostly safe but increasingly ill-at-ease with his father’s rituals. Twenty years later, after several more-or-less abusive relationships with older men, he would in a particularly searing session of psychotherapy recall this night and date it as the moment that his father had begun to pull away, depriving him of what he believed love to be and continued to seek thereafter.

21. Aaron-H, however, did not venture into the Burch house: What he desired, he believed, would hurt his son, and he did not ever want to do that. Detachment was a gift: At last, he could flee, and spare his child any pain.

22. It is only fair to assume that all parents who flee their responsibilities experience similar thoughts, sincerely believing that in fleeing they are sparing the child or children they love the agony of realizing what monsters the world had set over them as caregivers.

23. For Aaron-H, at least, this belief was more true than self-serving.

24. That a detached honne can be spectral in nature does not mean that at all times it must be. If a true self’s desire requires physicality for its attainment then it may assume a form corresponding to its self-image. Thus a detached honne in physical form usually looks much like the body from which it came, though often a bit younger, perhaps thinner, and with less definite facial features. So at various times over the next thirteen months, the residents of North Glamis homes in which there lived boys aged four through eleven would hear doors latching or unlatching, century-old wooden floors creaking, rustling in hampers full of dirty underwear, and occasionally, at night, the fearful cries of a child. As they searched the house for the intruder—often with a shotgun at the ready, for this is Maine—they might catch a glimpse of someone in the mirror, only to have him vanish before they could turn and aim.

25. Later on, these townspeople would meet Aaron-T at an elementary school art show, a firehouse bean supper or the village store, notice his dirty blonde hair, scraggly beard, and the husky physique of a high school running back gone a bit sedentary, and think, I’ve seen this fella before, don’t know where, but I don’t like the looks of him.

26. Aaron-T complained to Chloe that people in this town didn’t seem so friendly. Having grown up in Midcoast Maine, she knew what to expect, or thought she did, and told him it must be his Southern accent, the fact that he was so obviously “from away.” “Give ‘em time and space,” she urged. “They’ll warm up to ya.”

27. In fact, she had already found her peer group of stay-at-home-moms, and worried about her husband’s apparent inability to make friends in town. She was especially perplexed by the reluctance of Jared’s friends’ parents to send their kids over for playdates. Aaron, ordinarily jovial, became gloomy whenever he came home. Increasingly he found reasons to work late hours at the University, attend functions on campus, or go away on conference or research travel. His constructed front had bifurcated: Engaged and well-liked among his peers, resigned to domestic isolation at home, and preferring the former to the latter.

28. “Gotta make tenure,” was all he said to her by way of an excuse. He still torrented from time to time—his research was on comparative graphic literature of the 20th and 21st centuries—but now it was in service to the exigent demands of scholarly productivity, not an inner compulsion.

29. One balmy evening in mid-September, a housewife whose name has been withheld by the authorities but who everyone knows was Emma Farnsworth over on Pine Drive came home to find Aaron-H in her son Jeffrey’s first floor bedroom next to an open window, knee deep in Iron Man underpants.

30. He got out of there right away—in fact he vanished, though everyone assumed he jumped out the window and ran—but Emma got a good look at him. Since Jeffrey and Jared were in the same kindergarten class, best friends really, she recognized the figure as Jared’s father Aaron. A bit wavy, perhaps, in the lines of his face, but definitely him, she concluded, after about five minutes of failing to convince herself that there was no way it could possibly be. Of course she called the Sheriff’s Department.

31. When Sheriff Dunleavy showed up on the Burch’s doorstep asking where Aaron was but being cagey as to why, Chloe assured him that, whatever this was all about, there’s no way Aaron could have been involved. “He’s been down in Boston the last three days,” she said. “At a conference. He’ll be back tomorrow morning, so you can ask him yourself.”

32. Unfortunately for the Burch family, there was no such conference. Aaron-T was at a B&B in Bar Harbor, balls deep in Su-Min Young, the new tenure-track hire in his department and a first-generation Korean-American by way of Flushing, Queens, who found his accent and his encyclopedic knowledge of manhwa irresistibly charming.

33. If he had been able to acknowledge this to Sheriff Dunleavy and his wife, he might not have been arrested the next morning for breaking and entering. Dunleavy would have loved to throw the book at him, but he could not find underwear sniffing anywhere in the Maine Criminal Code. The rumors all over town that he had done worse things to other little boys were just that, rumors, nothing that could hold up in a court of law: All those kids swore it was just a bad dream, a bogeyman, if you could get them to talk at all. As a mere tatemae , Aaron-T had bound himself into an insoluble contradiction, between his on-campus front as a friendly lothario and his North Glamis front as a devoted though antisocial husband and father. For more than a year he had lived without a true self to arbitrate his actions, and that honne had dragged him into a situation he found inconceivable.

34. Aaron-T spent the night in jail. Chloe bailed him out the next morning, but told him that she and Jared were packed and going to Brunswick to stay with her parents. No, she did not know when they would come back. She did not know if they would come back. If even one of the hundred rumors around town were true, she couldn’t spend another minute with him.