Adam Haslett - Imagine Me Gone

After the countless hours I’d gorged on polling data and campaign gossip, scraping for angles in all that trash of information, I wanted to purge myself of it, too. Still, the first two evenings I couldn’t help walking up the road to the one spot where I got a signal and standing there, shivering, as the headlines loaded. Michael had brought his laptop, but without new messages or updates from his myriad listservs to constantly anticipate and check, he hardly bothered opening it.

On our third morning I woke more rested than I had in a long time. Michael hadn’t stirred yet. I dressed and went out into the yard, into the freezing air, and walked down the jetty to the dock from which we used to set out for the island.

Beyond the few boats still on their moorings, a bank of fog was moving in off the sea. I watched it slowly cover the spit of land at the mouth of the inlet, shrouding the fir trees and the granite shore, and then the whole end of the bay, covering the barnacled outcroppings where the cormorants landed and seals basked in summer, rolling slowly toward me over the water until I saw that it wasn’t fog but snow, the flakes tumbling thick and silent out of the encompassing cloud, and I remembered that was how it had been up here when we were kids, seeing weather approach from a distance, a thunderstorm on the horizon, rain sweeping toward us like a curtain across the water, and how it had thrilled me, that enormity and power, how oblivious it was of us. I had an inkling of that again now, of that state of being wide open to time, not as a thing to use or waste, but as a motion of its own, an invisible wholeness made apparent by the motion of the world.

By the time the snow reached me, I couldn’t see more than twenty yards, the rocks and the water and the boats all gone. When I went back into the cabin and saw my phone on the counter, I powered it off and stowed it in a kitchen drawer.

After breakfast with Michael, I made him walk the half mile with me to the general store. This became our routine, which he consented to more readily once he knew they sold doughnuts. In the afternoons we spent longer than necessary up on Route 1 restocking our food supplies and browsing every aisle of the video store, and in the evenings we watched one action movie after the next. Still, there were plenty of idle hours, and when Michael started having trouble sleeping, in what seemed the first sign of withdrawal, those hours began to gnaw at him.

“When is he going to stop that?” he asked me late one afternoon at the end of our first week, standing by the window in the dining room, peering over the embroidered half curtain.

All morning the lobsterman across the road had been chopping wood in his yard. He worked at a methodical pace, each gap long enough to make you think he was done. Until you heard another thwack of the ax, and the splintering of a log.

“When he’s through, I guess.”

“How old do you think he is?”

A loaded question, coming from Michael, who considered himself so ancient. He’d begun referring to these as “the winter years” of his life. Absurd on its face for a thirty-seven-year-old, droll, even, as a complaint about early middle age, though not the way he said it, with grim conviction.

As for the guy across the street, I’d noticed him a few times coming home in the late afternoons, and had watched him switch out the damaged lobster traps in the bed of his truck with replacements from the stack in the yard. He was some fisherman’s son, not the old man himself. Thirty, maybe, with a build you could see through his thermal work shirts, and a dirty-blond crew cut. In the absence of Seth and pornography, I’d closed my eyes the night before and imagined him bending me over the hood of his Ford.

“I don’t know, forty?” I said, for Michael’s sake.

“No, no. He’s not that old.”

“Thirty-eight?”

Michael shook his head dismissively. “I always imagined I was younger than men like him. The way you imagine you’re younger than your dentist. But I’m not anymore. He’s married to that woman who drives the Bronco. She could be in her late twenties. They live in that house. It’s amazing.”

“It’s a pretty ordinary house, actually.”

“I don’t mean the building. I mean he lives here in this polar vortex, surrounded by nothing but deer and a smattering of white people, and he’s found a sexually attractive woman to live with him year-round. I find that shocking.”

I couldn’t help but smile. His voice was back. The speed of it, the acumen. He hadn’t noticed it. But his halting forgetfulness was gone. He sounded almost like himself again. He even seemed to have more color in his face.

“I do give him credit for the bumper sticker, though,” he said. “‘They call it tourist season. So why can’t we shoot them?’ I like that. No doubt he spends his spare time lobbying for an expansion of the welfare state, as well he should. But I wish he’d put a stop to that manual labor. The sound is harrowing.”

He paced back into the living room, where I was reading an old copy of Vanity Fair, and scanned the room as if for intruders.

“How are you feeling?” I asked.

“Wretched,” he said.

With no private clinic spa to help take the edge off, I started driving us to a gym I’d seen a little ways past the supermarket. It occupied a defunct car dealership, three walls of glass and a concrete backdrop enclosing a small field of secondhand Nautilus equipment. Up here in the off season it was as close as we were going to get to a regimen of something other than television.

Surveying the scene on our first visit — a woman in a terry-cloth tracksuit reading US Weekly on a StairMaster and a teen waif loitering by the free weights — Michael asked, “Where are all the muscle queens?”

Through music he had learned gay culture long before I had. The meaning of the Village People may have eluded me as a child, but it had never eluded him. I hadn’t delayed coming out to him from any fear of rejection. If anything, being gay improved me in his eyes, placing me at least one step off the throne of patriarchy that he himself had so effectively abdicated. I just hadn’t wanted to face the awkwardness of discussing sex with my brother.

Back then he had dressed so immaculately. All those English designer shirts of his, and the peg-legged trousers, and the dark suit jackets that hung so well on him, like a young Jeremy Irons done up to New Wave perfection. Once he returned from London, I’d never been able to keep up.

Now here he was on the treadmill in ancient gym shorts and a V-neck undershirt stained at the pits, straining under the weight he’d put on. He hadn’t complained about his weight to me. He’d just commented in a way he never had before about how thin I looked, and I sensed his embarrassment at having had one kind of body his whole life, worrying he was too thin, and then suddenly having another, heavy not with muscle but fat. There was a perversity to it. Watching him struggle on the machine seemed like watching myself age in a sickly fashion. But at least here we could burn off a few calories, and another hour of the otherwise empty days.

Michael, however, was resolute that the workouts did him no good.

“No,” he said flatly, when I asked him on the way back from one of our outings if he didn’t feel just a bit more relaxed.

“Okay,” I said. “But what is true is that you’re taking one pill, not six. And you’re not drinking the tea. The fact is, you’re better than when we got here. You’re more alive.”

“Maybe,” he said. “I don’t know. Everything’s shaky.”

“Sure it is. You’re waking up.”

“You know it’s not that simple. It doesn’t change my situation.”