Michael Cunningham - A Home at the End of the World

When he awoke in the mornings, he’d look around with a startled expression, realize where he was, and smile. The light slanting in through my window turned the medallion of hair on his chest from gold to copper.

I bought myself a pair of boots like his. I started growing my hair.

With time, he began to talk more fluently. “I like this house,” he said one winter evening as we sat idly in my room, smoking dope and listening to The Doors. Snowflakes tapped against the glass, whirled down into the empty, silent street. The Doors sang “L.A. Woman.”

“How much would a house like this cost?” he said.

“Can’t be too much,” I said. “We’re not rich.”

“I want a house like this someday,” he said, passing me the joint.

“No you don’t,” I told him. I had other things in mind for us.

“Yeah,” he said. “I do. I like this place.”

“You don’t really,” I said. “You just think you do because you’re stoned.”

He sucked on the joint. He had a cultivated, almost feminine way of handling his dope, pinching a joint precisely between thumb and middle finger. “So I’ll stay stoned all the time,” he said on his exhale. “Then I’ll always like this house and Cleveland and everything, just the way it is now.”

“Well, that would be one way to live,” I answered.

“Don’t you like it?” he said. “You should like it. You don’t know what you got here.”

“What I’ve got here,” I said, “is a mother who asks me first thing in the morning what I think I’d like to have for dinner that night, and a father who hardly ever leaves his movie theater.”

“Yeah, man,” he grinned.

His forearm, thick-wristed, golden-haired, rested casually on his knee. It just rested there, as if it was nothing special.

I believe I know the moment my interest turned to love. One night in early spring Bobby and I were sitting together in my room, listening to the Grateful Dead. It was an ordinary night in my altered life. Bobby passed me the joint, and after I’d accepted it, he withdrew his hand and glanced at a liver-colored mole on the underside of his left wrist. His face registered mild incredulity—in the thirteen years he had known his own body, he had apparently not taken stock of that particular mole, though I had noticed it on any number of occasions, a slightly off-center discoloration riding the fork in a vein. The mole surprised him. I suspect it frightened him a little, to see his own flesh made strange. He touched the mole, curiously, with his right index finger, and his face was nakedly fretful as a baby’s. As he worried over that small imperfection, I saw that he inhabited his own flesh as fully and with the same mix of wonder and confusion that I brought to my own. Until then I had believed—though I would never have confessed it, not even to myself—that all others were slightly less real than I; that their lives were a dream composed of scenes and emotions that resembled snapshots: discrete and unambiguous, self-evident, flat. He touched the mole on his wrist with tenderness, and with a certain dread. It was a minute gesture. Seeing it was no more dramatic than seeing somebody check his watch and register surprise at the time. But in that moment Bobby cracked open. I could see him—he was in there. He moved through the world in a chaos of self, fearful and astonished to be here, right here, alive in a pine-paneled bedroom.

Then the moment passed and I was on the other side of something. After that night—a Tuesday—I could not have returned, even if I’d desired it, to a state that did not involve thinking and dreaming of Bobby. I could not help investing his every quality with a heightened sense of the real, nor could I quit wondering, from moment to moment, exactly what it was like to be inside his skin.

Night after night we roamed the streets like spies. We befriended a bum named Louis, who lived in a piano crate and bought us bottles of red wine in exchange for food we stole from my mother’s kitchen. We climbed up fire escapes onto downtown roofs for the strangeness of standing in a high place. We dropped acid and wandered for hours through a junkyard that sparkled like a diamond mine, rife with caverns and peculiar glitterings and plateaus that glowed with a bleached, lunar light I tried to scoop up with my hands. We hitchhiked to Cincinnati to see if we could get there and back before my parents realized we were missing.

Once, on a Thursday night, Bobby took me to the cemetery where his brother and mother were buried. We sat on their graves, passing a joint.

“Man,” he said, “I’m not afraid of graveyards. The dead are just, you know, people who wanted the same things you and I want.”

“What do we want?” I asked blurrily.

“Aw, man, you know,” he said. “We just want, well, the same things these people here wanted.”

“What was that?”

He shrugged. “To live, I guess,” he said.

He ran his fingers over the grass. He handed me the joint, which was wet with our mingled saliva, and I blew a stream of white smoke up into the sky, where the Seven Sisters quivered and sparked. Cleveland sent up its own small lights—television and shaded lamps. A passing car left a few bars of “Helter Skelter” behind on the cold night air.

April came. It was not swimming weather yet, but I insisted that we go to the quarry as soon as the last scabs of old snow had disappeared from the shadows. I knew we’d go swimming naked. I was rushing the season.

It was one of those spring days that emerge scoured from the long, long freeze, with a sky clear as melted snow. The first hardy, thick-stemmed flowers had poked out of the ground. The quarry, which lay three miles out of town, reflected sky on a surface dark and unmoving as obsidian. Except for a lone caramel-colored cow that had wandered down from a pasture to drink in the shallows, Bobby and I were the only living things there. We might have hiked to a glaciated lake high in the Himalayas.

“Beautiful,” he said. We were passing a joint. A blue jay rose, with a single questioning shrill, from an ash tree still in bud.

“We have to swim,” I said. “We have to.”

“Still too cold,” he said. “That water’d be freezing, man.”

“We have to, anyway. Come on. It’s the first official swim of summer. If we don’t swim today, it’ll start snowing again tomorrow.”

“Who told you that?”

“Everybody knows it. Come on. ”

“Maybe,” he said. “Awful cold, though.”

By then we had reached the gravel bed that passed for a beach, where the cow, who stood primly at the water’s edge, stared at us with coal-black eyes. This quarry had a rough horseshoe shape, with limestone cliffs that rose in a jagged half circle and then fell back again to the beach.

“It’s not the least bit cold,” I said to Bobby. “It’s like Bermuda by this time of year. Watch me.”

Spurred by my fear that we would do no more that day than smoke a joint, fully clothed, beside a circle of dark water, I started up the shale-strewn slope that led to the clifftop. The nearer cliffs were less than twenty feet high, and in summer the more courageous swimmers dove from there into the deep water. I had never even thought of diving off the cliff before. I was nothing like brave. But that day I scrambled in my cowboy boots, which still pinched, up the slope to the cracked limestone platform that sprouted, here and there, a lurid yellow crocus.

“It’s summer up here,” I shouted back to Bobby, who stood alone on the beach, cupping the joint. “Come on,” I shouted. “Don’t test the water with your fingers, just come up here and we’ll dive in. We’ve got to.”

“Naw, Jon,” he called. “Come back.”

With that, I began taking off my clothes in a state of humming, high-blown exhilaration. This was a more confident, daring Jonathan standing high on a sun-warmed rock, stripping naked before the puzzled gaze of a drinking cow.