Michael Cunningham - By Nightfall

Peter will, of course, tell Rebecca that Little Brother had a drug dealer over. How could he not? He’d have told her tonight but… what? But there was his charade, playing ill like that, getting fussed over, and it was seductive, being treated as an invalid without the inconvenience of being actually sick. And so it seems he’s permitted himself to put off, for one night, the long, anguished conversation with his wife, all those questions about what to do. They can’t (they’ve looked into it) have Mizzy committed to a halfway house against his will and they can’t kick him out, can they, now that he’s using again, that would be like sending a child alone into the woods, but they can’t let him stay either, can they, not if he’s giving their address to dealers. And Mizzy, of course, like any addict, has no relationship to the truth in any form, he might swear that he’d never ever buy drugs out of the loft again, he might tremble and weep and beg forgiveness, and it wouldn’t mean anything at all. Fucking Taylors. Because, let’s be honest here, they live for this, they love fretting over Mizzy, it’s the family pastime, and really, having granted himself this false affliction, who could blame Peter for wanting to put off, if only for a night, the depths of Rebecca’s disappointment and worry, the frantic calls to Rose and Julie, the appeals to Peter for his opinion about what to do and the likelihood that his opinion, whatever it is, will be deemed too harsh or too lenient, because he can’t be right about Mizzy, ever, because he is not a member of the congregation.

Peter slips off into sleep, wakes again. Dream blips dissipate: he has a secret house in Munich (Munich?), some doctor has left a message there. Then he’s returned entirely, it’s his bedroom, Rebecca is sleeping beside him.

And he is now utterly, hopelessly awake, at twenty-three minutes after midnight.

He feels, as he sometimes does, as most people must, a presence in the room, what he can only think of as his and Rebecca’s living ghosts, the amalgamation of their dreams and their breathing, their smells. He does not believe in ghosts, but he believes in… something. Something viable, something living, that’s surprised when he wakes at this hour, that’s neither glad nor sorry to see him awake but that recognizes the fact, because it has been interrupted in its nocturnal, inchoate musings.

Time for a vodka and a sleeping pill.

He gets out of bed. Rebecca does that sleep-move thing, that subtle but palpable drawing into herself, the little flutter of her fingers, the resettling of her mouth, by which he knows that although he has not awakened her she understands, somehow, in her sleep, that he’s leaving their bed.

He leaves the bedroom. He’s halfway across the living room before he sees it: Mizzy, standing naked in the kitchen, looking out the window.

Mizzy turns. He’s heard Peter approach. He stands squarely on both feet, with his arms at his sides, and Peter thinks briefly of the Visible Man, that clear plastic model with the colored organs inside, which he had lovingly built at ten and which, to his ten-year-old brain, seemed touched by the divine. It had seemed to him that angels might look like this, forget robes and billows of hair, an angel would be immaculately transparent, an angel would stand before you as the Visible Man did, as Mizzy does now, offering himself, neither imploring nor standoffish, simply present, and naked, and real.

“Hey,” Mizzy says softly.

“Hey,” Peter answers. He keeps approaching. Mizzy is as motionless and unabashed as a model in a life-drawing class.

Okay, this is strange, isn’t it? Peter keeps walking, what else can he do? But something’s going on, right? There’s this sense (can’t be true, but nevertheless) that Mizzy has been waiting for him.

Peter gets to the kitchen. Mizzy is standing in the middle but it’s a big enough space that Peter can get around him, just barely, without either touching him or making an elaborate effort to avoid touching him. He pours himself a glass of water at the sink, because he has to do something.

“How you feeling?” Mizzy asks.

“Better. Thanks.”

“Couldn’t sleep?”

“No. You, too?”

“No.”

“I have some Klonopin in the bathroom. I am, frankly, a big fan of a vodka and a Klonopin at times like this. You want one? I mean, you want both?”

Oops, wait a minute, he’s just offered drugs to an addict.

“Are you going to tell her?” Mizzy asks.

“Tell her what?”

Mizzy doesn’t answer. Peter steps back, sipping his tap water, and appraises this naked boy who seems to be standing in his kitchen—the modest cords of vein, one apiece, that lazily span each biceps; the hairless, pale pink slats of the abdomen, and, jutting out from its modest tangle of chestnut-colored pubic hair, the thing itself, respectable, big enough but not pornographically huge, its tip purpled by the dim light. Here are the sinewy young legs that can run up a mountainside with ease, and here are the surprisingly square, vaguely ursine feet.

Tell her what?

Mizzy has the good sense to let a silence settle, and Peter has neither the skill nor the inclination, after a few seconds worth of quiet, to insist on ignorance. To be truthful, he hasn’t got the strength.

“I think I have to,” he says.

“I wish you wouldn’t.”

“Of course you do.”

“Not for my own sake. Not only for that. You know as well as I do. My sisters get crazy, and it doesn’t make any difference.”

“When did you start again?”

“In Copenhagen.”

Skip over, for now, the unthinkable privilege of this boy, whose parents continue to send the checks, who breezily stops off in Copenhagen on his way back from Japan. Try not to hate him for that.

“Would the word ‘why’ be entirely absurd?” Peter says.

Mizzy sighs, a sweet reedy sound, not unlike the particular royal sigh Matthew perfected all those years ago.

“It’s a perfectly good question. It just doesn’t really have an answer.”

“Do you want help quitting again?”

“Can I be honest with you?”

“By all means.”

“Not right now. In a while.” He lifts his hands and cups his palms close to his face, as if he were about to drink water from them. He says, “It’s always so ridiculous to say to someone who’s never used, you can’t understand.”

Peter hesitates. “Ridiculous” is the least of it. How about offensive, insulting? How about the implication that “someone who’s never used” is a sad and small figure, standing on the platform, sensibly dressed, as the bus pulls in? Even now, after all those ad campaigns, after all we’ve learned how about bad it really and truly gets, there is the glamour of self-destruction, imperishable, gem-hard, like some cursed ancient talisman that cannot be destroyed by any known means. Still, still, the ones who go down can seem as if they’re more complicatedly, more dangerously, attuned to the sadness and, yes, the impossible grandeur. They’re romantic, goddamn them; we just can’t get it up in quite the same way for the sober and sensible, the dogged achievers, for all the good they do. We don’t adore them with the exquisite disdain we can bring to the addicts and miscreants. It helps, of course—let’s not get carried away—if you’re a young prince like Mizzy, and you’ve actually got something of value to destroy in the first place.

Is it any wonder that the Taylors obsess over this boy? What would they be without him? An aging academic who’s published two unremarkable books (the evolution of the dithyramb into spoken oratory, some hitherto overlooked foreshadowings of classical Greek culture in Mycenae), a woman going harmlessly dotty (obsessions with thrift and recycling, oddly paired with a complete indifference to household filth), and three lovely daughters who are doing variously well (Rebecca), slightly suspiciously too well (Julie), and neither well nor badly (Rose).