Dylan Nice: Other Kinds

“Because those who have it will pass it on. His father had them too, but not as perfect as this.”

“He would make an excellent piano player,” she said.

Tom said an absolutely perfect person would have six fingers on each hand. He said Adam and Eve would have had that.

“I don’t see why that’s true,” she said, “why you would want to put it like that.”

“It’s better to have names for things,” he said.

Tom drank from his beer and knew he couldn’t make this a different kind of conversation. He had wanted to talk but this talking was bad and it always turned out that way. You always talked until it got bad and you decided to quit. Elise smoothed her hair and looked towards the end of the booth waiting for someone to ask her a question she could smile at and talk about.

He knew what she thought — things were just stone or water or plastic, just organs and bones. She was able to not care and smile about it. Tom thought everything was still the nothing it used to be. This was the elegance that made sense and was beautiful.

“There are true things,” Tom said, “things that are true that can’t be argued.”

“Like what?” she asked and looked at him.

“I don’t know,” he said.

He told her she should show more grace; she only thought cold ideas. Then he was surprised to see her act hurt in front of everyone. Tom didn’t argue, she said, he hurled insults.

“I feel like I could talk to you about anything,” she said.

He didn’t know what she meant. He felt embarrassed about something. It was a lie or a mistake. He apologized again and Elise rubbed his arm quickly, saying it was okay. That she would touch him was strange to Tom.

His apartment was warm but he felt chills that started on his back and then crawled across his arms and chest. He heard people. Students walked and vomited in the brick ally behind his apartment. There were clips of words, fragments of people talking or arguing, one girl and a boy stopped below his window to talk in low voices. He thought he could hear their clothes touching. She laughed.

His dreams were fast and blurred. Elise was in one with her fiancé, and they were walking. The fiancé told Tom she always argued and he shouldn’t worry. Tom’s dreams changed but he would wake up in the dark and lie there. His body felt smooth and tired.

The chills still came but they felt good now. Cold and crawling from somewhere in the sheets he’d dampened with sweat. The sky outside his window was getting lighter. He was going to call Elise, but now was too early. He waited and then decided to walk and think of things to say.

He walked a sidewalk that led down to a bridge. There were chunks of ice coming down the river — sections of ice that had broken free during the warm day before. They slid down the water fast, showing how fast the water always moved but didn’t look like it because it was so smooth and brown. Below him chunks of ice slammed together. Pieces stopped and were hit by other pieces.

Tom stood there on the bridge a long time, watching. He finished crossing and started into a park. The grass was still brown but the big trees were beginning to show buds. He tried to imagine the place Elise must be from. There were probably rows of houses on long neat streets.

People passed Tom on the walkway, some with dogs and others with their husbands or wives. They wore brown coats and a few of them had glasses. Their clothes were made of washed out colors, and the people smiled when he passed. They lived in houses somewhere, washed and clipped things off themselves. He felt his fingers damp against his denim jeans. Whatever they got on the things they touched they washed off again.

They still touched their fabric and the dirt. Some of them had their hands on each other.

I let my arm press against hers in the way people who are comfortable can. Outside the window it was dark and there were cars and orange roads. I craned my neck like a child. The plane leaned downward.

“Did you see Brisbane as we were flying in?” I asked.

She looked up from her book.

“No,” she said.

The girl had spent some time with me in the spring. Her apartment smelled like hardwood and linen. She would sit with her legs pulled up or lean into me and let her hair fall like curtains. After a few weeks, I imagine she learned I was a coward.

“I just want to read this book,” she said.

I turned toward the window and turned off my overhead light.

We were on the kind of trip students like us took to become better people. We went through Customs and paid cab drivers. We learned small differences: the colors at intersections, the labels on cigarettes. The people there didn’t bark their words as if each had its own significance separate from the ones that surrounded it.

The other students had already arrived at the university where we’d spend a few days before and after a boat trip. There, wallabies lay on the lawns and geckos hid behind curtains. A plant outside our building smelled like rot.

The sheets felt like sheets that didn’t belong to anyone in particular. The first morning at breakfast the girl, Nina, was showered and wore pink. She moved and talked in ways that made me feel smaller than I was. I told her embarrassing things about myself. I thought saying them made them less true.

As we flew to Chicago I had said I once tried to break up with a girl I wasn’t dating.

“We had only gone out a few times and I thought I had to make a big deal about calling it off.”

Nina had laughed. I was looking down at the boxes of farmland under us.

“I was clueless.”

“You still are,” she said.

I kept staring out the window. Along the roads were the tin roofs of houses and barns shining.

“What are you thinking about?” she asked.

“Just the way things look,” I said.

The plane landed and outside it was hot. I told myself on the tarmac that the world was big and we were small. I got quiet as we walked toward our gate.

“You know that thing you said on the plane about me being clueless?” I said.

“Yes.”

“The rest of the trip I’d prefer not to be condescended to.”

There was a long quiet. The airport was long and mostly white — we got in line to wait for a shuttle to the gate.

“I’ll walk and meet you there,” I said.

“That’d be good.”

Near our gate I saw her again and started to walk beside her. She turned toward me.

“I’d rather not be close to you right now,” she said.

It took me a moment to turn and head in the other direction. I walked through O’Hare telling myself it was a good thing to fight with someone and not care. We flew to Los Angeles without talking. I imagined somewhere below me the Grand Canyon or the desert and its rock. It was dark when the plane landed.

“Come and get something to eat with me,” I said. “We’ll both feel better.”

“Okay,” she said, coming out of the jetway. “You have to apologize to my face.”

The airport was cool and fluorescent. Nina and I walked beside each other like two people who had more to do with each other than we did. We talked about where to eat and were careful about what we said. Waiting at the restaurant counter, she asked me if I liked a new student from Pittsburgh, a curly-haired backpacker who spoke in phrases formulated by other people.

“You guys should get along, both being from Pennsylvania.”

“But he’s from Pittsburgh.”

“How’s that different?”

“I grew up in the mountains in a coal patch,” I said. “It’s much different.”

She talked about places; how her parents still did things they had needed to do when they were in China.