Adam Haslett - Union Atlantic

Hal stood, tightened the belt of his bathrobe, and shouted, “I’m ready.”

“This is a very bad idea,” Emily said.

But Jason was already out the door and they were following him down the curving staircase.

THE HOLLANDS’ KITCHEN appeared roughly the size of a tennis court. Seeking a base of operations amidst this vastness, they made for a distressed farmhouse table on the far side of the room. When they got high in the car, Nate could let sensation spill over with no interference from the world. Not so now. Circumstance had forced him to his own personal battle stations, where he waged a desperate campaign against the inner flood.

“I’m on this wacky Listserv,” Mrs. Holland called out from the range, “with these old friends of mine, and who knows who else for that matter — anyone, I suppose, everyone — the terrorists!” She cackled. “Anyway, someone sent out this crazy thing professing to be a Sumerian cookbook. Can you imagine? Julia Child running around Mesopotamia four thousand years ago. Lunatic really. But I thought I’d give one of these cold dishes a try. Lucky for you Whole Foods didn’t have yak. I used venison. With this river grass they’re all enthused about. None of you are on a silly diet thing. Emily, you’re not doing one of those, are you?”

“No,” Emily said, her hands clutching the edge of the table. “I’m on a regular-food diet.”

“Well, consider it part of your multicultural education,” Mrs. Holland said, pouring herself another drink. “You know Jason’s father is all in favor of that sort of thing. Such a progressive man.”

“She’s headed for a meltdown,” Emily whispered to Nate. “I’ve seen it happen.”

Nate glanced at the other two, trying to gauge their coordination, affect, and overall cogency. He watched, stunned, as Jason, eyeing a fly that had settled on Hal’s face, said, “Hold on,” and then took a walnut from a bowl on the table and whipped it at Hal’s forehead, missing the insect by three or four inches.

“Oh fuck,” Hal said, unresponsive to the nut, but smiling broadly now. “We’re out of time.”

Slowly, Jason’s eyes fluttered shut. Their boat’s only rudder was coming loose.

Suddenly, Mrs. Holland placed a bowl of some dark, vaguely living substance on the table in front of Nate. He stared up into her blazing eyes and heard her say, “You guys look like you just ran a marathon. Should I turn up the air conditioning?”

Atop the mush in his bowl, Nate saw a mucus beginning to form, suggesting the larval stage of some dreaded prehistoric creature. What rough beast, he wondered, had come round at last, unborn since these ingredients had last mingled in some glade of the ancient world?

“Keep it together over there!” Jason whispered harshly, bringing Nate into sudden awareness that only an inch separated his face from the gestation unfolding before him. He sat quickly upright, trying not to cry with fear.

“You all go ahead and start,” Mrs. Holland said, miles away again. “I have to get this grain paste sorted out.”

Emily’s neck stiffened. “Something,” she said, “something has to be done.”

Nodding vigorously, Hal reached under his robe into his trouser pocket and somehow managed to make his cell phone ring, a call that he promptly answered.

“Oh my god,” he said, loud out of all proportion. “You’re kidding? Our family kitten? Out there on the highway? Right now? Oh, Mom. What can I do? You want me to come right now?”

He glanced at Jason, who turned quickly to his approaching mother and, looking somewhere over her shoulder, said, “Gee. I guess, well, so Hal — it looks like he’s got this … situation. I mean, this pet. This family pet cat. It looks as if it needs help.”

Forgetting the premise of the ruse, Hal placed his phone down on the table.

For a moment the only sound was the crackle of insects being burned to death by the caged blue light on the porch.

“And what about your dinner, mister?” Mrs. Holland said.

At that moment, Nate realized he had been drafted into a kind of psychic air traffic control, minus training or any chance of success. Mrs. Holland’s final, bitter word had dropped from beneath the clouds like an undetected passenger jet sailing straight for the terminal.

“Come on, Mom. This stuff looks like shit.”

Her groggy eyes narrowed.

“Is that so? I’m glad you’ve learned to be so honest, Jason. It’s a great quality in a man. I suppose you’ve told your friends that you’ve failed too many classes to graduate. Have you told them that?”

“Fuck you,” he said, rising from the table. “Come on, guys, we’re leaving.”

He crossed the room and walked out the back door, the screen slapping behind him. Sheepishly, Emily followed.

“You know, Mrs. Holland,” Hal began, spotting a box of matches by the salt and pepper and finally lighting the cigarette he’d been holding between his fingers all evening, “I appreciated the Sumerian angle. It’s always interesting to consider the origin of things. Particularly in these times. That sounds like a really wonderful Listserv you have there.” He inhaled, blew the smoke up toward the ceiling, and then, pushing his chair back, exited in the opposite direction from the others, back into the front hall.

Alone with her now, Nate watched as the viscosity in the air, which he had prayed was just a passing warp of his eye, began to leak openly into the world, the ceiling above Mrs. Holland becoming a slick, throbbing ooze, the lights in the room starting to pulse, bleeding along the edges of her rigid mother body, and then within her as well, her whole form glowing a dim orangey-red, the ember of some slowly dying need.

“I’m sorry,” he said, standing up from the table. “I’m really sorry.”

HE HURRIED ACROSS the yard trying to catch up with the others, relieved by the lack of brightness on this darkened stage of willows weeping branches into pools of lamplight, the air about him soft and damp. He could hear Jason up ahead, and then he saw them as he rounded the turn and came up alongside them, no one taking any notice. They walked for what seemed a long while down Chandler Drive and onto the college campus. Making their way into the woods, they followed the path to the round stone terrace and stepping onto it saw the expanse of the lake stretched out before them, black and smooth under a dome of stars.

At the railing of the terrace the four of them stood, passengers on the prow of a stilled ship.

Jason slipped his sneakers and shirt off and walked down the steps, wading into the water up to his chest. He turned to the three of them, reached his arms into the air and lay back, falling into the bed of water, his head and body disappearing beneath the dark surface long enough for the vibe to reach uneasily toward after-school specials in which wasted kids drowned and the town held a candlelight vigil, their night on the verge of becoming one of those earnest, tragic affairs covered by local news, involving ribbons and flowers, yearbook snapshots, hope snuffed, etcetera, actual life and grief cheated and frozen by the arrogance of sentiment, and then his head and shoulders appeared again a few feet farther out and Emily laughed.

Stepping out of her sandals, she climbed down to join him.

“This,” Jason said, floating on his back, “this is the matrix most mysterious. And you know what? It doesn’t give a damn about us. It could care less if we even existed.”

He began a slow backstroke away from the shore.

Nate remained at the railing, the visible world trailing out behind itself and stretching forward, the glow at the tip of Hal’s cigarette and Emily’s bobbing head becoming the blurred average of the still-discernible past and the imminent future, the sky likewise a series of white lines sketching themselves back and forth across hundreds of bright centers. Making him wonder if a feeling could have such a pattern: want crossing over fear crossing back over longing crossing menace, the bright center of it all being the awful urge he’d felt standing before the man in the front hallway of the mansion just a few hours ago, wishing the man would just put him out of his misery and touch him.