Michael Cunningham - By Nightfall

Peter turns from the window. If that was supposed to be some kind of epiphany, it didn’t take.

And then, maybe because he’s had no epiphany, even though he’s finally seen the sad-looking man across the street (it’s not Peter’s older self, it’s not as tidy as that), he goes to the door to Mizzy’s room and quietly, so quietly, edges it open.

How crazy is this?

Not so very crazy. If Rebecca wakes up, there are a hundred reasons he might be in Mizzy’s room. I heard him moaning, I thought maybe he was sick, just a nightmare, though, everybody back to sleep.

The door opens silently, too flimsy to creak. Inside: Mizzy’s slumber breath, and his smell, the latter a now-familiar mix of some herbal shampoo and a hint of cedar and an underlayer of boy sweat, part acrid, part chlorine. Yes, he’s sound asleep, dreaming of God knows what. There’s his dark form under the blankets.

Peter has stood here before, when it was Bea’s room. He has, in fact, checked up on Bea when she cried out in the night (she was eleven when they moved here, no memories of her as an infant in this room), and it occurs to him—is this actually a lost-child thing? It is possible that Mizzy is not Rebecca reincarnated, but Bea; Mizzy the child Peter could have managed better, Mizzy the graceful and sensitive—could Peter have rescued him from the druggy aimlessness he derived (maybe, who knows) by coming too late to the Taylor family, by growing up as his parents grew out of their youthful eccentricities and aged into low-grade insanity? Because Bea, let’s face it, was a challenging child, willful but strangely uncurious, not particularly interested in school or, really, in much of anything. Is Peter meant not to be Mizzy’s platonic lover but his lost father?

How exactly did he fail with Bea? Why does he so ardently want to present his case to some heavenly tribunal? How reprehensible is it that he’d like his daughter to share some of the blame?

Children don’t. They don’t share blame. Parents are the mystified criminals, blinking in the docks, making it all the worse for themselves with every word they utter.

He closes the door and goes back to bed.

In bed, more dreams. Only fragments remain when he wakes for the second time: he’s wandering through Chelsea, can’t remember where the gallery is; he’s being sought by, not the police, someone more frightening than the police. This second time, he’s right on schedule—4:01. Rebecca stirs and mutters beside him. Will she wake up, too? No. Does she sense that something’s going on? How could she not?

A dilemma: the only thing worse than Rebecca suspecting is Rebecca not suspecting; Rebecca that oblivious to his agitation and unhappiness. Has she grown so accustomed to Peter’s agitation and unhappiness that it no longer registers? Has it become, to Rebecca, simply his nature?

A fantasy, unbidden: he and Mizzy in a house somewhere, maybe it’s Greece (oh, humble little imagination), reading together, just that, no sex, they’d manage sex with whomever, they’d be platonic lovers, faux father and son, without the rancor of lovers or the fury of family.

Okay, stay with that fantasy a minute. Where does it lead? Does Mizzy, sooner or later, fall in love with some girl (or some boy) and leave? You bet he does. There’s no other plausible outcome.

The question: Would it be so bad to be abandoned in that hillside house with its view of grove and water, old but not old old, your life flattened and evacuated, with nothing to do but take a new step into the unknown?

The answer: no. He would be someone to whom something large and strange and scandalous had happened. He would be able—he would be compelled—to surprise himself.

A stray fact: insects are not drawn to candle flames, they are drawn to the light on the far side of the flame, they go into the flame and sizzle to nothingness because they’re so eager to get to the light on the other side.

He gets up and goes to the bathroom for another pill. The loft continues to be inhabited by the sleep of his two loved ones and by the restless, still-living ghost of Peter, who for the moment could easily have died without knowing it, could be at the beginning of his life as a wandering shade.

Back to bed, then.

Ten minutes, more or less, of obdurate wakefulness, and then the tidal pull of pill number two.

Mizzy is gone the next morning. There’s just his neatly made bed and the absence of his clothes and backpack.

“That little shit,” Rebecca says.

She has gotten up before Peter, whose double dose has done its work. When he rises he finds her sitting disconsolately on Mizzy’s bed, as if she were waiting for a bus to take her somewhere she doesn’t particularly want to go.

“Gone?” Peter says from the doorway.

“So it would seem,” she answers.

He must have crept out during the night, after they were both asleep.

Yep, those pills did the trick. If Peter had been undrugged, he’d have heard Mizzy leaving.

And what, if he’d heard, does he think he’d have done?

He and Rebecca search desultorily for a note, knowing there isn’t one.

Rebecca stands helplessly in the middle of the living room, hands at her sides.

“The little shit,” she says again.

“He’s a big boy” is the best that Peter can do.

“What he is is a fucked-up little boy whose body somehow grew up.”

“Can you let him go?”

“Do you think I have a choice?”

“No. I don’t think you do. Have you called him?”

“Yeah. Do you think he picked up?”

Here it is, then: the solution. Mizzy has ducked out. Better all around. Thank you, Miz.

And, of course, Peter is heartbroken.

Of course, Peter wants nothing more than for Mizzy to return.

Sadness and disquiet crackle through him like electric shock.

Rebecca says, “Did something happen yesterday?”

Crackle. A vertiginous swoop of blood to his head.

“Not particularly,” he answers.

Rebecca goes and sits stiffly on the sofa. She could be a patient in a waiting room. There’s no denying it—it’s like losing Bea all over again. It’s like coming home after they drove her to Tufts, that numbed emptiness mingled (neither of them could say this) with a certain relief. No more sulks and accusations. A new form of worry, sharper because she’s out of their sight but at the same time muffled, separated. She’s on her own now.

“Maybe it really and truly is time to give up on him,” she says.

Peter can scarcely hear her for the racket of blood in his ears. How is it possible that she doesn’t know? He is briefly, murderously angry with her. For knowing him so little. For failing to understand that he’s been, all along, the object of a fixation; that a beautiful boy has been fantasizing about him for the last two decades. (Peter has decided, for now, that Mizzy’s love is genuine, and that every word he said on Carole Potter’s lawn was true.) Peter the Skeptical has vanished along with Mizzy himself.

He goes and sits beside her, drapes an arm over her shoulders, wonders how she can’t smell the deceit in him, how she can’t hear the buzz of it.

“You can’t save his life for him. You know that, right?” he says.

“I do. I do know. Still. He’s never just disappeared like this. He’s always told me where he is.”

Oh, right. Part of it, for her, is the idea that she’s his special friend. That he prefers her to Julie and Rose.

Silly humans.

They sit quietly together for a while. And then, because there’s nothing else to do, they get dressed and go to work.

The Victoria Hwangs are halfway installed, thank you, Uta. Peter stands with his morning Starbucks among what’s gone up (Uta is in her office, doing her own Ten Thousand Things). It’s more of the same—now is not the time for Vic to be changing directions. One of the installations (there will be five) has been entirely put up: a monitor (dark now) that when turned on will be a ten-second video of a portly middle-aged black man, hurrying somewhere, dressed for success, his hair clipped close, wearing a presentable but inexpensive charcoal gray suit under the ubiquitous man-coat, a beige trench, on which he clearly spent a little extra, carrying a surprisingly battered attaché, doesn’t he know that’s a giveaway, you can’t show up for a meeting with your briefcase all dinged and scratched like that, does he believe it’s cool and uncaring (it’s not) or is it simply too expensive to replace it right now? The man crosses a street in Philadelphia among other businesslike pedestrians, athletically dodges a windblown plastic bag, and that’s it. That’s the movie.