Adam Haslett - Union Atlantic

She paused to breathe.

“You see, then, what I mean?” she asked.

“I guess so.”

“Not that you would agree with any of this, would you?” she said, leaning down to address the mastiff. “He’s become such a reactionary lately. Haven’t you, Sam? All your religious blather. Do you have dogs?”

“No. We used to have a rabbit.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“Sorry, I—”

“No, no, I wasn’t talking to you. Sam here’s just a bigot. Thinks you’re a Catholic. Rabbits you say. My grandfather was fond of shooting them. They’d pop up in the yard and he’d rest his gun on the sill right there and open fire. Drove my grandmother to distraction. You’d think they’d have come back in strength by now but I never see them. He, of course, was a mugwump. Have you covered the 1880s? Republican, of the very old stripe. Bolted the party in ’84. Small-town lawyer, edited the Finden Gazette . Didn’t like machine politics. Laissez-faire, of course, but it was another time. He railed against the trusts as much as the city bosses, and there he was prescient. You look at the World Trade Organization today and it’s all rather familiar. The way those conglomerates are making up the rules so they can run roughshod over the locals. Nothing the railroads didn’t do to the state legislatures,” she concluded, examining a patch of the mastiff’s back for ticks or lice.

“I’m afraid the bullies here need their walking,” she said. “I’m sorry if I’ve run on a bit. But there’s a lot to cover.” She looked up at him then, meeting his eyes directly for the first time. “You will come back, won’t you? Next week?”

These last many months the intuition of others’ needs had become Nate’s second nature, as if his father’s going had cut him a pair of new, lidless eyes that couldn’t help but see into a person such as this: marooned and specter-driven. What choice did he have?

___________

AS SOON AS he got out of the house, he phoned Emily.

“Give us your location,” she said. “We’re in transit.”

Fifteen minutes later, Jason’s Jetta pulled up behind the Congregational Church in the center of town and Emily rolled down the passenger-side window.

“All right, the medevac’s here.”

In the backseat, Hal lay slumped against the far door with his eyes closed, a cigarette dangling from between his lips. A lanky, effete, mildly gothic boy, he prided himself on his superior intellect and perpetual indolence. To the alarm of his parents, he’d clicked through on some Internet ad and got himself admitted to a university in Tunis. From there he planned to spend the fall traveling the Maghrib.

“The Valp’s holding,” Jason said, speeding onto a side street. “But if we don’t get there soon he’ll smoke it all himself.” They avoided the streets still heavy with commuter traffic until they had crossed all the way to the other side of Finden and pulled up in front of a white stucco house with three Japanese maples in the front yard surrounding a giant vertical boulder that looked as if it had been airlifted out of Stonehenge.

“What’s with the rock?” Emily asked.

“I don’t know. His mother’s got a witch thing going on,” Jason said, stepping out of the car. “She runs some kind of regional coven.”

“I hung out with this Valp guy once,” Emily said. “All he talked about was North Korea. Those rallies they have with the colored cards, you know? Like at the Olympics, where everyone in the crowd holds one up to make an image. Apparently they’re very good at it over there.”

She sounded bored, as usual, wearied by this petty world of high school. Emily had lived in London with her parents sophomore year and returned with a coolness unimpeachable by anyone except the three of them, who mocked her attempts to exempt herself from the indignities of Finden High.

Up on the lawn, from beside the obelisk, Jason was waving for them to come inside. “Christ, can’t he just score the shit and get out of there?” Emily grumbled, leading the other two up the driveway.

Arthur Valparaiso had a slightly intimidating presence at two hundred and twenty pounds with a shaved head and clad this evening in an orange judo outfit. They had apparently interrupted some kind of deep-focus session, in which Arthur assumed a single lunging pose for up to an hour, a feat his girth rendered implausible. But now that he’d been disturbed, he was inclined toward a bit of company before completing the sale. As Nate’s father had once said of God, the worst thing about drugs was the other people who believed in them.

The bong was produced, the music turned on, and the usual desultory conversation commenced. Knowing that the goal was an early exit, the four of them went light on the smoke, letting Arthur suck down most of the bowl, which had no discernible effect on him. Despite the smallness of his hit, Nate felt a tingling starting up at the back of his head, and slowly his thoughts began to wander as he stared at the walls of the basement rec room, which were covered with pictures of crowds: black-and-white aerial photographs of rallies in squares and piazzas, newspaper clippings of marches on the National Mall, stadiums full of rock fans shot from above.

“Have you read much Guy Debord?” Hal asked their host in a voice made all the more languid by the pot.

“Who the fuck is he?”

“French. He shared your interest in the masses. He writes about spectacle, how all this ginned-up collectivity contributes to our alienation.”

“Crowds are where it’s at, dude,” the Valp said. “They’re the future. Individualism is, like, a relic. Burning Man — that’s the future.”

Nate had discovered a vinyl beanbag in the corner. From there he watched Jason attempt to effect a game of pool, but it came to nothing. Eventually, a plea was made to Arthur and the transaction completed. Back in the car, a joint was rolled in the front seat and passed around as they sped down the state route toward the Alden strip, managing eventually to land themselves in the front row of a movie theater, at the foot of a huge screen that dashed their brains with the blood and pillage of some beast war of Middle Earth created, it seemed clear, by other, older drug-takers. They emerged into the parking lot more than two hours later, weakened and lethargic, having no sense of what to do or where to go.

For a while they drove, entranced by the clutter of lights and the bass tones of the car speakers, managing at one point to navigate a drive-through at a Dunkin’ Donuts, and coming down as they munched their crullers and cinnamon buns in silence, gliding back into Finden.

A faint numbness behind the eyes was all that remained of Nate’s high by the time they dropped him home.

He stood awhile in the front yard once they’d gone, staring at the darkened façade, only the porch light and the light up in his mother’s bedroom on. It wasn’t as decrepit a house as Ms. Graves’s nor was it new or by any means empty. He needed to cut the grass soon. The shutters needed paint. Inside, nothing had changed for a long time.

They had arrived for the first time at this house in a rainstorm, he and his brother and sister standing in the front hall listening to their mother shout at their father about how dark it was, how cramped the kitchen and ugly the cabinets and ugly the wallpaper, how the boxes hadn’t arrived and there were no blankets upstairs, and what would they do? How would they manage? As if he had led them all into disaster.

That was ten years ago and the wallpaper was still there, and the cabinets, and the mirror at the top of the stairs which his mother had never liked.

Climbing onto the porch, he closed the front door quietly behind him and switched off the porch light.