Adam Haslett - Union Atlantic

“Bracing stuff, no? The question is, can you chant personality without devolving into solipsism? Can you trust the pulse of life without becoming Mr. Fanning? Because he is the future. One way or the other. His kind of rapaciousness, it doesn’t end. It just bides its time.”

___________

LATER THAT EVENING Nate stood in the middle of Doug’s kitchen watching him spread the files across the counter. He’d gone home first to shower and change but on the walk back he’d sweated through his T-shirt again.

“Does this mean she’s going to lose?”

Doug fingered an envelope, glancing at the return address.

“She was always going to lose,” he said. “It’s just a question of when.”

“She’s not evil, you know.”

“You feel bad, huh?”

“Wouldn’t you?”

Doug flipped through another folder, ignoring Nate’s question. “This is good,” he said. “You’ve done well. There’s beer in the fridge if you want it.”

Taking one, Nate wandered down the hall, through the first empty room, and into the space where the TV stood in the corner. Here, binders and files now covered a large portion of the floor. Two laptops, their power cords running several yards to the wall sockets, were set up on the kitchen table, which had been brought in and placed beside the couch.

Doug followed him in and turned on the Sox-Yankees game.

“The fact is, she was obliged to give us copies of those papers weeks ago. That’s the law. So you can relax. It’s not on you.”

They watched as the designated hitter, Ramirez, struck a ball deep into center field, driving home the runner at third and bringing the crowd at Fenway to its feet.

It wasn’t too late to walk back into the kitchen, Nate thought, to gather those papers up and leave. “You were wrong about the baseball thing,” he said. “I did watch it before I met you.”

“You’re a weirdo.”

“Yeah. So are you.”

“Why don’t you go upstairs. Go ahead. Take your clothes off. I’ll be up in a bit.”

Nate’s heart thudded against his chest. “What if I don’t want to?”

“Suit yourself.”

The bed hadn’t been made. Nate pulled the sheets up and tucked them in, arranging the cotton blanket at the foot of the mattress and putting the pillows back in place. He wondered if he should keep the lamp on but decided not to, leaving only the light from the bathroom. He folded his trousers and put them with his shoes and belt on the floor in the corner. The nights he’d stayed over they had always been under the sheets together, Nate getting Doug off, never the other way around. He had never even been naked in front of him.

He waited there in his underwear, terrified at the thought of what kind of person he was for wanting this. He waited ten minutes and then another ten. He could hear the television still on downstairs, switched to a different station.

Eyes closed, trying to forget everything — his life and the world outside this house — he sensed that for all the highs he’d experienced while stoned in the back of Jason’s car or tripping by the lake, for all the cares that such forcings of the brain had displaced, none would free him from himself as this might.

To be pressed down into the bed by Doug’s full weight, the last remnant of the minding self rubbed into oblivion. To be taken over and used up and made to go away. A body as strong as Doug’s could do that to you.

At last the sound of the TV ceased and a few moments later Doug came through the bedroom door. He walked to the window and leaned against the sill.

“You’re not taking your shirt off?” he asked.

“I don’t look like you. I’m not muscular.”

“That’s fine. You’re more like a girl that way.”

“Is that how you think of me?”

“I’m just saying, you’re fine. Go on. Take your shirt off. And the boxers.”

Nate pulled his T-shirt over his head and laid it on the bed beside him and then he slipped his shorts off, his throat tightening, just a thread of air reaching his lungs.

Pushing his shoes off and unbuttoning his shirt, Doug approached the bed.

“My God, you’re young,” he said, taking Nate’s chin in his hand. “You really are.”

Withdrawing from his touch, Nate lay back on the bed, covering himself with one hand.

“I’ve never done this,” he whispered.

Making no reply, Doug picked Nate up by the rib cage and turned him over onto his stomach.

“Just close your eyes,” he said, shifting onto the bed. And then Nate felt Doug’s knees pressing against the inside of his own, spreading his legs apart. He’d been self-conscious about his body for so long, for so many years, and yet he’d still never known the sensation could be this intense, as if, perversely, by enacting the fantasy of self-forgetting the self only grew stronger and more ineluctable than ever. He heard the drawer of the bedside table open and close.

“Here. Up on your knees.”

Doug’s hands grasped him at the waist, pulling him backward. He turned his head to look up at him but again Doug told him to close his eyes. A thick warmth pressed up against his ass and then, after a moment of struggle, he felt a sudden, sharp ring of pain coil up through his body and into his head, making the blood beat at his temples and forcing him to gasp for breath.

“Don’t worry. I’m not going to rape you.”

That he would lose control of his bowels seemed certain but when that sensation ended he found himself able to breathe again, breathing and sweating, still in great pain but a pain that moved too fast along the tips of his nerves to make him want to stop.

He felt Doug’s pelvis flat against him and the muscles of his back and neck released and he let go, the vigilant self finally fading as the thrusting began, the shock of it driven into him over and over.

From the base of his spine some liquid locked deep against the bone released and burst up into his skull, heating his brain to the edge of fainting. Leaning down on his forearms, his forehead to the mattress, he held on for another few seconds and then came without touching himself, his head jerking sharply backward, his shoulders contracting down his back.

A few strokes later Doug pulled out of him and rolled flat on the bed.

Nate stood and headed quickly for the bathroom, closing the door behind him.

“You all right?” Doug called out a few minutes later.

“Yeah,” he said, leaning against the tiled wall of the shower, the old dread of discovery and the basic penal shame washing back over him with the scalding water.

From the window of his office on the tenth floor of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Henry Graves looked down over the crowds rushing westward along Liberty Street and up Nassau toward the Fulton Street station. Those who hadn’t already been let out early for the Columbus Day weekend moved with more than their usual haste toward the buses and subways that would drain them from the city by the tens of thousands, emptying them into Jersey, Westchester, and Long Island, where supermarket inventories had already dropped a few points and the local banks had balanced their sheets for the week and sent their people home.

Downstairs, the Open Market Desk would trade Treasury bills for another half hour but the volume would be light. Soon Fedwire would settle, clearing everything from corporate bond sales to the credit card purchases of the secretaries and mutual fund salesmen hurrying now along the street below. Over the weekend when these people went to the movies or the mall they would swipe their cards through magnetic strips and thus do what for centuries had been the sole province of kings and parliaments: they would create money. Short money to be sure, but money nonetheless, which until that moment had never appeared on a balance sheet or been deposited with a bank, that was nothing but a permission for indebtedness, the final improvisation in a long chain of governed promises. And as they slept, the merchants’ computers would upload their purchases and into the river of commerce another drop of liquidity would flow, reversing their commute, heading back into the city to collect in the big, money-center banks, which in the quiet of night would distribute news of the final score: a billion a day shipped to Asia and the petro states.