a race might be a perfectly appropriate time to use a bear-wrestling metaphor, because if there’s one thing we want to preserve, it’s the metaphor-literality binary.”
“But kiddo,” Zach says, delighted, “bear-wrestling metaphors, they don’t exist! Nobody wrestles bears! It’s a myth propagated by outdoorsmen who need to bolster their fragile sense of masculinity while traipsing around in fabulously bright clothes—”
“Zach,” I say, because this is too much. I like banter. It’s light and airy, induces weightlessness without the need for leaving Earth’s atmosphere, tons of rocket fuel. But too much of it, and you feel diffuse enough to disappear the moment you step through the door. The only thing grounding me is this knot that has formed in my chest.
“—and sleeping in tents with other men,” he finishes.
The knot tightens. “Zach,” I say. “It’s my birthday.”
His face goes rigid, his blue eyes sad. “It’s terrible, isn’t it?” he says finally. “A terrible day. I’m sorry.”
He takes my hand, gives it a squeeze. His is warm and clammy and wonderful.
I could ask him to drink with me, birthday shots. When I drink the pretenses fall away. The more I drink, the less I have to act. Could Zach be acting, too? He must be acting—I want so much to see him as he really is, to make up for volumes of lost poetry. And speaking of paradigms, if Zach succumbs to that drunken urge, so common to Westing, to subvert the clothes-body paradigm, well, that’s a price I’m willing to pay.
“Do you want to drink tonight?”
He retracts his hand by pretending to scratch an itch on his nose.
“I don’t know if that’s a good idea.” He says it so gently I can barely hear him. “I mean I’d love to, Addie’s got me cooped up in here, it’s like house arrest, I tell you. ‘Zachary, the doctor told you not to get up unnecessarily’; ‘Zachary, the doctor told you to drink more water’; ‘Zachary, no junk food’; Zachary Zachary Zachary. She won’t even let me have candy. Too much sugar. God, I tell you, kid, I’ve never been more annoyed with the sound of my own name. But I don’t know if it’s a good idea.”
I don’t want a clarification of their on-and-off-again status. I don’t want to know, I don’t want to know. . . .
“Are you guys—” I start, change my mind. “I was thinking—about the day we ran in the rain. Remember?”
He gives me a wan smile, but his eyes focus on his bedsheets. He pushes himself up against the headboard of his bed and says “Not really.” The knot in my chest pulls at every muscle in my body.
He keeps talking, but I’m not really listening. Why did I come here? He has this impossible capacity for vacillation, for making me as confused as he is, except maybe he’s not confused at all. If I mean nothing to him, then the world will go on without me easily. It will simply spin merrily along. I want someone somewhere to throw a fit, punch a wall, rail against the great tragic powers of the world.
“You don’t remember letting me win?”
“So you admit I was beating you?” he says.
“You don’t remember my head in your lap?”
“No,” he says quietly.
“You don’t remember lying in bed together?”
“I’m sorry,” he says.
I wipe my brow, which is sticky with sweat from an afternoon by the lake. Alice told me I was the best.
“I think you’re the best,” I tell him.
He cringes at that, but I continue: “Do you ever think about—giving it a try? Us?”
He shakes his head. “I’m sorry, Noah,” he mumbles under his breath.
I pitch forward, my head in my hands, and don’t move for fear he’ll see me crying. The bed screeches, and I feel his hand in my hair.
I look up at him, and he stares back at me with a stricken expression and says, “God.”
There are no clean dishes in our apartment.
The stack of dirties rises past the ledge of the sink, so I set about doing what must be done while a light rain begins to knock against the roof. Several times the drain clogs with food, and several times I clean it out with my fingers.
“Hi, Noah.” Alice’s voice makes me jump. She’s where the door would be, if our kitchen had a door, a door I could lock. She watches me intently as I dry a cup, her drenched hair glossy in the light.
“It’s fascinating stuff, I know,” I say.
“Noah Falls, you know better than