Austin Bunn - The Brink - Stories

“Beer?” Henry asks.

Van shakes his head and asks for a soda. “I’m sober these days, chief.”

When Henry hired him, Van had been a mess. Van showed up at work with bloodshot eyes, lazy about feedback. Henry sensed around him a general state of transition, and he felt compelled to know it, join it, as if he himself were there, choosing his life all over again. Earlier this year, when Van’s car got repo’d — a negotiation in the settlement had gone sour — Henry picked him up and drove him home, an errand that became the high point of his days. With his feet propped on the dash like a boy, Van would monologue about how bad his divorce had become. What Henry truly remembered, in a way that he was only beginning to understand, was the dark prairie of hair on Van’s forearm, the surf at his collar: the places on men that he only now allows himself to see.

Henry dances the salt and pepper shakers in his hands for an hour, angling up to his confession. It is difficult to be honest with the people you find beautiful.

“I feel about twenty years late to this, but I think I just finally found out I am. .” Henry says, “someone who is. .”

“Gay,” Van says with a sly grin.

“Was it that obvious?”

“Come on, it’s theater . Everybody’s gay. Or at least tried out the buffet.” This alights Henry’s sense of an opening. He feels relieved and vulnerable, newborn.

Van digs in the fridge. “I’ll have that beer now.” When Henry shows surprise, Van shrugs. “Special occasions.”

They talk, rambling their way to midnight. On his departure, Van hugs him and Henry registers that a man has never held him so forcefully, so intimately. The sheer surface area nearly makes him puddle. “Congratulations,” Van says into his ear, and his hot breath makes new weather across Henry’s interior life. “You’ll never have boring sex again.”

Effie comes by Henry’s apartment with throw rugs, donuts, and a scented candle the size of a layer cake that gives him headaches. She is in college in the city, and to his amazement, now that he is damaged, she’s taken more of an interest in him, like the three-legged hamster she ministered to as a child. When Henry speaks to Margot, once a week by phone, she makes him feel as though his new life is a lunge from a moving vehicle. But Effie is Florence Nightingale to Henry’s foot soldier, off in a war where the opposing armies touch penises. They’re good together; raising her was the one thing he did well. She even wants to help him write a personal ad, for Craigslist or Manhunt or DaddyCentral or the cavalcade of humiliations online, but some things your daughter cannot help you do.

“CuriousFather,” he types. It sounds strange to him, his new name, if it is a name. He decides he is Oral Versatile Bear, a box he’d never thought he’d have to check in this world. He crops Margot out of a vacation photograph and posts it.

Within an hour, he has responses. The first is from a teenager in Poughkeepsie who asks him if he has back hair. The second, from FurJock06, wants to know his feelings on “cockfighting.” He wades, blindly, through the acronyms — NSA, PNP, 4:20, P.A., T but V — but the shorthand is endless. A lanky, flawless young man named ThckReggie comes on strong, asking him, “Wanna get off?” before he even knows Henry’s name. “Woof. You cam?” is Reggie’s next message, followed by a link to a pornographic website. When Henry replies, Reggie seems not to listen or care. In fact, when Reggie continues to message, Henry discovers Reggie is a robot of some sort, and Henry finds another rung of indignity. Self-esteem dissipating by the second, he e-mails the kid in Poughkeepsie to report that he has back hair, yes. Two wings across his shoulder blades that he never, in a million years, would call an asset. The kid does not reply, will never reply.

The next day, feeling frustrated and combustible, Henry stops for gas and, across the cement island, a driver in sweatpants, sweatshirt, and sunglasses flashes him his penis, a thumb in blackened grass. Henry looks around, unsure if he is in the intended audience for a penis out in the daylight. But yes, the view is his and his alone. It’s all Henry needs to break a sweat.

“You like?” the driver says, leaning against the flank of his SUV.

“I do,” Henry says. “I only saw it for a brief moment. But it made an impression.”

The driver nods. “I go for the coach type.”

“You a big sports fan?” Henry asks, because it seems germane and is something he can say. But the other driver seems not to hear him, or care, or has decided he is no longer the coach type. The gas pump clicks, he puts the nozzle back into the pump and settles back in his car.

“Wait, could I get your number?” Henry asks, but the other driver is already pulling out. Henry follows him, feeling confused and abbreviated. In a low-grade sex fever, he tracks the SUV into the wilds of Monmouth County. Finally, the other driver drives into the three-car garage of a suburban manse, and Henry parks at the curb, about to choke on the possibilities. Then the other driver steps out of his car — he’s squatter, more thuggish than Henry remembers — and unmistakably shakes his head at Henry, decisively, brutally, no , and vanishes inside.

Henry decides that since he has come this far out of his way, he deserves something, the gift of a body at least. He crosses the front lawn and peeks in the bay window. Track lights halo a bowl of polished stones on a console table. Across the room, he can make out the colorful plastic of a child’s play castle, and he’s desperate enough to not to care if there’s a baby in the vicinity. The baby can watch, honestly. Suddenly, he finds he is knocking at the front door, knowing with every step that he is moving somehow away from a person he understands.

A woman opens it, in a white blouse, working the earrings from her ear. “Can I help you?”

The other driver, Henry’s prize, cowers on the stairs. Henry can feel his secret becoming a knife.

“I’m sorry,” Henry says. “I must have the wrong address.”

“Who are you looking for?” she asks, and Henry turns and runs.

Three weeks later, he’s is on the train upstate to Dawn Manor. He’s been instructed to get off at a small station where a van will pick him up. “We’ll be doing bodywork,” Bodi Charles told him over the phone. “Make sure to bring comfortable clothing.” Henry gazes down his front. In the stress of the separation, with Effie’s donuts and nachos for dinner, he no longer has comfortable clothing.

A nondescript minivan idles in the station lot. The driver, in a leather jacket and black T-shirt, jumps out and throws open the passenger door. He introduces himself as Spike, and his handshake, it reassures Henry to find, is vigorous with heterosexuality. Spike’s face and scalp are as smooth as glazed ceramic except for a brown goatee so manicured it could be topiary. Henry finds he is the only passenger and sits as far back as possible.

The densely forested road gives way to acres of rolling hills. Henry feels out of joint in such an isolated and rustic place; if he’s going to find himself, it’s going to be somewhere off the Garden State Parkway, near Indian food and a Hobby Lobby. Spike turns into a long gravel driveway. A peace flag bolted to a roadside maple only increases Henry’s sense of personal doom.

“Look, I’ve changed my mind. Could you take me back to the train station?”

Spike answers, “There’s only one train a day.”

“I’ll stay at a hotel.”

“There’s no hotel.”

“Then I’ll call a cab,” Henry says.

But Spike has already parked in front of the Manor, a three-story Victorian painted, of all possible colors, purple. A wooden double door, impeccably restored, opens onto a broad porch with a row of wooden rocking chairs. The house is surrounded by trees, as though they carved the property out of forest.