Short

WORK FROM HOME by Jenn Salcido

June 10, 2024

It’s not looking good for us, Jeremy thinks, as he opens the fridge and peers inside. A small, desiccated head of broccoli, provenance unknown, stinks up the whole place like farts. A pickle jar sits inert, nary a pickle floating inside. A sprig of grapes wilts on its vine. Jeremy shuts the door. “We don’t have any food,” he calls out to Dog, the dog. Dog barks. Jeremy makes a motion with his hands like what is he supposed to do about this, moves to the living room, and commences with his morning fretting routine. First, he backs his body up as far against the wall as he can, jamming his heels against the baseboards. Then he begins to pace. Dog eventually starts following him, whining every so often. The doorbell rings––a jangly, incongruously upbeat tune. Just as he’s about to turn the knob, the thing flings open. Jeremy was sure he had locked it but whatever. “Hi,” Jeremy says, warily eyeing his friend, Morris Beagle. He stands there, quiet, expectant, irritated, all of his usual states. Then he remembers how human people are supposed to act. “Uh, did you want to come in?” “Well, I’m already here, so,” Morris says, shuffling through the door and beginning to dismantle his scarf, coat, driving gloves, mittens, muffler, earmuffs, eye goggles, and so on and so forth, handing Jeremy a raggedy piece of neon paper. “It’s an OPPORTUNITY,” he says, and snatches back the paper almost immediately. “I took THE WHOLE THING so that NO ONE ELSE would get to it first.” “I wasn’t done reading it, Morris.” “Oh, you weren’t reading it,” he scoffs. “Anyway, I can tell you everything you need to know. I’ve researched it. Thoroughly.” Morris ruffles the paper in front of Jeremy’s face, points at some words. He’s standing too close. Jeremy’s stomach growls and he thinks of the empty, farty fridge, and so without really understanding what he’s agreeing to, he says, “I’ll help.” Morris sits down and pats the sofa cushion next to him, wanting Jeremy to join. Jeremy perches as far as he possibly can from Morris. “So I called these people yesterday,” says Morris. “I talked to them more this morning and they’ve sent some onboarding materials to my work email.” “You don’t have a work email, Morris.” “I do,” says Morris. “I do; you just don’t email me there ever.” The room is silent for a moment save the slurps from Dog, who is licking his crotch.“Okay, Morris,” says Jeremy. The flier describes the project as being “in the tech space,” and so Jeremy assumes this is going to have to do with food delivery, transportation, or pornography. None of these things are things that Jeremy would immediately dismiss, but he does have a few questions. “You know Relations.com?” Jeremy nods. He remembers seeing commercials for the service: you spit in a thing, you pay the lab, and then they send you a report about what the spit says. “It’s not that,” says Morris. “What it is is, it’s like that, but it’s for dogs. People like your friend here,” Morris says, motioning to Dog, completely without irony. “They’re just like us. They have chromosomes too.” Morris pauses to laugh heartily at himself, even slaps his knee. Jeremy is starting to feel like maybe this is a pyramid scheme. “Is this a pyramid scheme?” “What? No,” says Morris. “Why would you say that?” “It just seems like you’re trying to give me the hard sell,” says Jeremy. “Nah,” says Morris, and Jeremy can tell from Morris’s complete lack of facial twitching or leg jiggling that he is telling the truth. “I’m just excited about it. Don’t you ever get excited about anything?” Jeremy is quiet while he thinks about this. In short, the answer is probably no. But he really thinks. Inside him there is, as usual, a numbness, a feeling of deletion. “Okay, well, this is a problem for another day,” says Morris, his eyes bugging out in disbelief at the sheer anhedonia hanging in the room. “You might want to start by getting yourself out of this house. This house is unsettlingly beige.” Jeremy blinks, looks around. He’s always lived in this house.“Anyway, so this thing––what happens is, people can send in a small sample of their dog’s blood, and the company will tell you the precise genetic composition of the dog,” says Morris. Jeremy looks at Dog, who looks at Jeremy, who looks at Morris, who looks at Dog. Jeremy can’t remember why he let Morris in, or if he let him in. “We are to help translate these reports generated by the company into layman’s terms, so that people can really have a greater understanding of the precise genetic composition of their dog,” says Morris. “But Morris,” says Jeremy, suppressing a yawn. “We’re not scientists. Did you even go to college? I’m sure you recall that I did not.” “That’s elitist and entirely besides the point,” snaps Morris. “I’m assured by the company that they supply contractors with everything needed to accurately and satisfactorily complete the job,” says Morris, who then arches an eyebrow and waves a hand toward the desktop computer as if offering a kindness, a generosity. A chance. He gawks expectantly at Jeremy. “Well? What are you waiting for?” he asks. Jeremy rolls his eyes again, heaves himself across the room and into a creaky rolling chair set too low to the ground. He feels like a child with Morris towering over him and breathing his login details in his ear in hot whispers. “The username is Morris Beagle,” he says. “The password is Morris Beagle.” What Jeremy finds in Morris’s inbox makes his vision go momentarily blurry. There’s spam, and then there’s whatever is in Morris’s inbox. It is an oscillating galaxy of nonsense so impenetrable that it occurs to Jeremy, for the first time, that maybe Morris is actually some kind of CIA heavyweight and all of his emails are encrypted. What else could it mean that he has 47 unread emails from someone/thing called Hadabadabingbong, all of which have subject lines written purely in Wingdings? “Are you reading my correspondence?” Morris barks, displeased with Jeremy’s lack of discretion. “Don’t even look at that. Don’t think about it and don’t look at it. I want you to open the email at the top.” Jeremy does as he is told, clicking on an email titled “Work From Home! Earn $.”

After Morris leaves, Jeremy walks Dog down a few blocks from their development, stopping every so often to let Dog check and mark his usual spots. Spring is slowly rumbling up from the ground, the rising temperature melting down the dirty snow piles that line the street on the way to Cumberland Farms. Jeremy goes in, gets his usual (a sad approximation of an Italian hoagie). He then floats into the video rental store nextdoor, mournfully eyeing the candy he can’t afford. The plastic smell of the videotapes is so comforting, and he resists the urge to pull a couple cases close and sniff them. He runs his fingers along the spines of the Die Hard films, sighs, and goes back out to Dog. There’s $5 in his checking account; he really needs Morris’s scheme to work out this time. He didn’t really want to quit his job at the supermarket, he thinks, chewing on the hoagie while walking back to the house. He liked it there quite a bit. Not only for the regular paycheck, but for the sense of order inherent to its universe. He remembers walking from the bus stop before his early morning shift––the air so cold and crystalline, it was like the molecules had stopped moving entirely. He remembers how it felt to come in before anyone else was there and to start stocking the place, section by section. Making sure each of the labels faced out on the voluminous array of pasta sauces. Grinding some beans to get the coffee sampling station ready. Each and every task slotted together in the most predictable, pleasant way. “I’m sorry, dude,” said Ron, his manager, when he finally came back to work after getting out of the hospital. He had essentially ghosted, couldn’t bring himself to call in and let them know what was going on. “We filled your spot. You can’t just, like, not come in.” Jeremy had nodded, sort of loosely holding his palms out and looking down at them instead of directly into Ron’s eyes. “I get it,” he said. Jeremy had wanted to tell Ron so many things: how much he needed the job, sure, but also how much he’d liked it. How much he appreciated the easy, weightless interactions with strangers. How much it helped keep the darkness at bay. Jeremy’s temples start to throb, little silvery jellyfish coming in from the side of his vision. He tries to wipe the thoughts of that time from his mind, concentrating instead on his feet in the slush, on Dog’s delicate prance. He strains his thoughts and his body, trying to root himself in the present and down toward the earth. Sometimes when he starts down this path of memories, it’s impossible to come back; he’ll spend days sleepwalking and hollow, his mind forcibly caught in a sinister time warp. Sometimes, he admits to himself, for a little while, it feels good, like scratching a bug bite. But that’s only sometimes.

Morris promised he’d come back a few days later, and now it’s a few days later, and Jeremy hasn’t opened the folders. The mail truck signals that it’s late morning, and finally Jeremy flips open the first folder, looking around the room for some kind of inspiration or assistance. Dog is stomping on his smelly sleeping cushion, curling around and around like an ouroboros. He cannot help Jeremy. Inside each folder, a stapled sheaf of papers awaits some kind of translation. As Jeremy feared, it’s entirely inscrutable: strings of numbers and letters, percentages and probabilities, an occasional bolded set of symbols. He opens the document that he downloaded from Morris’s email, the so-called onboarding information from the company. It’s pretty simple, just a word document with a list of steps. Step 1 is to open the folder. Step 2 is to read the file. Step 3 is to fill in the DNA report template with the findings. Step 4 is a black-and-white sideways smiley face.Jeremy closes his eyes, counts to ten, and tries again to make sense of the paper. He realizes with some relief that, on the second page of each packet, there’s a copy of a questionnaire filled out by each dog’s human. “Your name, dog’s name, dog’s age, breed,” he reads aloud to the room, Dog’s ears perking up at the two mentions of dog. He flips back and forth between the second page and the first, the one covered in a cipher of hard science. Then, manna from heaven: a third page, which is just a printout of one to three photos, some of them even in color, different angles of the dog as chosen by its person. This first packet belongs to a dog named Godzilla, and Godzilla looks to be 100% chihuahua. Jeremy checks the second page to be sure; yes, Godzilla is, in fact, a chihuahua. Jeremy flips back to the third page, holding it close to his face as he squints, trying to discern if there are any subtle traces of other breeds to be found in Godzilla’s countenance. He heard once that all domesticated dogs are descended from the Gray Wolf. He looks into the pictures for evidence of the wolf, looking occasionally over at Dog, a pug mix. Dog is asleep on his cushion, his paws flicking gently back and forth as he loses himself in dreams, probably rolling in something stinky and dead. After what feels like hours of staring into the flattened eyes of Godzilla, Jeremy opens up a second file that he’s downloaded to the desktop, the one called DNATEMPLATEFINAL-FINAL(3).DOC. He is pleased to find it’s pretty basic. He can work with this. He starts by filling in the identifying information on the second page, a small spark of comfort starting to glow inside his heart, one he hasn’t felt since his days stocking cans and shuffling jars. This could be it, he thinks, this could be the thing I do. Buoyed by the notion, he slides through the rest of the data entry for Godzilla, feeling something continue to unclench deep within his body. But then he gets to the part where he’s supposed to populate a table connected to a pie chart, and this is where things get hairy. Godzilla is 100% chihuahua, he thinks again. But when he types “Chihuahua” into one column and “100%” into the other, the pie chart fills in all blue. The full circle of it looks menacing, final. Jeremy wonders how much each well-meaning soul paid for these files. He feels bad for the people on the other end, feels that he owes them some sort of more detailed information. Not just contractually––which, of course, he does––but in the broader, more relational sense. What were they hoping to find, sending in a precious vial of blood from their dog? Jeremy begins to experiment with the table, adding different percentages and breeds. He starts with feasible selections from a pre-set drop down menu in the file: dachshund, beagle, terrier. He futzes with percentages and watches other colors pop into the pie chart, notices the pleasing interplay of bright primary colors as he assigns varying values and breeds. If he wanted to, he sees, he could make a pie cut into four for Godzilla and it would have all of his favorite colors: blue, green, yellow, red. Just then, Jeremy has another idea. He opens up his web browser. Typing “dog” into the search bar, he waits for the slow roll of information to come back from the ether. Once the screen refreshes, he quickly loses himself in a never-ending stream of professional photos of dogs. Minutes pass, then half an hour, and he’s imprinting on the dogs, tilting his head to the side to match theirs. He clicks on one photo, then the next; he clicks through so many photos that when he emerges he feels slightly seasick when he looks around the room, washed ashore in reality. Tom, the next dog in question, is more promising. His photo is a side view, for one, so Jeremy can see more of him. Tom is long and fat, his belly straining towards the ground. His butt has one of those truncated tails, like it was vestigial instead of integral to the composition of the dog’s spine. Tom’s feet splay out comically in front of his low, broad body, almost like the webbed flippers of a duck. His coat is kind of a brindle color and smoother looking than you’d normally expect from a corgi. The head is all wrong, though, Jeremy thinks. Tom has little ears that flop over themselves triangularly, echoed in the striking geometry of the head itself. It is blocky, heavy-looking, like a pit bull or rottweiler. Then a lightning bolt. Jeremy clicks back to his browser and types “corgi” into the search bar. He clicks on a photo. Then he hits print. Then he types in “pit bull.” He clicks on another photo. He hits print again. Aligned with the whirring of the printer, something comes to life inside him. Even Dog notices, lifting his head up from his bedding to watch Jeremy rifle through the desk drawers for some scissors and glue. He makes some quick cuts, then slathers the pieces with glue. Proudly, he arranges them together on the backside of Tom’s photo printouts. It is rough, true, but it works: clearly, Tom was the result of a corgi and a pit bull who had made love. After pushing the pieces around a little bit here and there, and after he is satisfied with the alignment of the head on the body, and after taking a good, long look at the actual photos of Tom, Jeremy opens up another report file and starts typing. His fingers fly with a surety he feels in his very marrow. But then he is confronted by a new issue: the math problem of the pie chart had effectively stopped him in his tracks. Does a dog’s body account for 50% of its composition, the head being the other half? Or is the head merely 25%, due to the relative length of the head versus the body entire? Or should he technically be subdividing more––assigning a percentage to each leg, each paw? The tail? At this thought, Jeremy’s left shoulder starts to twitch. Noticing the twitch, his other shoulder twitches, then the original begins to twitch again, each twitch exponentially reflecting the next twitch and the next. This is a side effect of Jeremy’s medication, one he takes for anxiety, which is then exacerbated by his anxiety, multiplying infinitely. “FUCK,” he screams, pushing himself away from the desk. He was doing so well! Everything that had unclenched within him has gnarled itself up again like ancient tree roots. He shakes his hands loose. He inhales, holds it, and exhales. He looks at Dog, no longer sleeping, up on all fours and alert, the worried pathways of his forehead wrinkles on full display. “I’m sorry, pal,” he said, calling Dog over with a clicking noise. He scratches under Dog’s chin, feels himself release and relax a little when Dog closes his eyes and points his snout up. Jeremy lies down on the floor and tries to affect the effortless cool of a fish in a clear, cerulean sea. But his mind is on another trajectory, sinking towards shipwrecks of impossibility down below. More than anything else, this is what had led to the logical conclusion of the hospital last time: the idea that possibility was beyond him, not necessarily because of any moral failing or inherent weakness, but just because it was in one realm, and he was simply in another. Trying to explain it to the doctor at the hospital, he had likened it to standing in front of a full cupboard of food and being unable to eat, being unable to comprehend the meaning or purpose of food. More than that, even, he felt physically unable to reach into the cupboard, to comprehend the feeling of wrapping his fingers around any one item, much less pulling it down and preparing it. At least this was the closest he could come to making any sense of it, and he could tell from the doctor’s expression that it had not, in fact, made any sense at all. At the conclusion of this thought, Jeremy’s mind clicks into a familiar track, and he is thinking in pictures: the carton of Camels his roommate let him filch from, the woman who left on a Monday looking triumphant and hopeful and returned on a Friday looking like a crumpled paper bag. The ginger ale from the dayroom. The thoughts come faster and faster, the twitch traveling to other extremities. “Are you okay?” Jeremy opens his eyes. The light in the room has changed. He’s not sure how much time has gone by. Dog is in his bed, snout on paws, watching him intently. Morris, above him, peers down. “Yeah,” he croaks, realizing from the cobwebbiness in his throat that he may have actually fallen asleep, his body shutting down as part of a well-oiled dissociation mechanism he’d honed long ago. He gets up slowly, feeling dizzy. “I was just taking a break.” Without his usual machinations, Morris puts down his ever-present briefcase and goes into the kitchen. After a few minutes, he comes back with a glass of water. He opens his briefcase, extracts a small bag of trail mix, and hands it to Jeremy. “Here,” he says, “why don’t you sit down for a little bit and I’ll take a crack at it.” Jeremy is too tired to argue, and slides with relief onto the sofa, appreciating the cool water and the snack. Appreciating Morris. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I thought I had a good thing going, but I got a little hung up on some things.” Morris nods, assessing the papers spread out around the computer. “This is great,” he says, almost softly. “I don’t know what you’re worried about.” Jeremy explains it to him, most of it anyway: the process, the math, the frustration, the lack of possibility. He leaves out the twitch but knows better than to think he can hide it. Morris has been onto him for a long time, not so much about the twitch, but what lies beneath, deep down in Jeremy’s nervous system. Morris has been with him for so long, Jeremy thinks. Morris might be the kindest person he knows. “I think we can solve this,” says Morris in the voice of some primitive authority figure, trying to galvanize himself and Jeremy, potentially also Dog. “I really do.” The clouds (the screensaver is clouds) part as Morris wakes up the machine, his fingers flying with assurance whereas before Jeremy had only ever seen them hunt and peck. Jeremy finishes the crackers and feels a little trickle of life enter the base of his spine, understanding that the future is not entirely out of his grasp. Just for a second. It is enough. He gets up from the couch and hovers behind Morris, watching magic unfold. Morris is searching and zooming and cropping and printing. The high-pitched whine of the printer is getting to be a little too much for Dog, who galumphs out of the room like that’s enough of that. “What are you doing?” Jeremy asks, not in the usual tone reserved for when people ask Morris Beagle what he is doing. Then Jeremy feels as though he is in the company of a secret genius, even though he has no idea what’s happening. Isn’t that how genius is supposed to work, he wonders, thinking about all the movie montages that felt just like this very moment. “I think you’re not looking closely enough,” says Morris. “I don’t mean this as an affront to you or anything, let’s be clear.” Jeremy lets a smile creep across his face. “No, no, never.” “This is what I am proposing.” Morris gathers up the printouts and starts cutting, printer paper clippings flurrying around as he does it. Jeremy watches intently as Morris assembles a jigsaw puzzle with a glue stick: there’s an ear from a French bulldog, another ear from a Boston terrier. A muzzle from a petite German shepherd puppy, the worried eyes of a Vizsla. “This is truly unholy, Morris,” says Jeremy, in awe more than anything else. “I don’t think it’s going to work with the pie chart, either.” “Oh, fuck the pie chart!” “But, like, the pie chart is for the people who are paying us?” Morris waves this off with one hand like it’s truly some insane suggestion; the other hand stays on the mouse clicking print, print, print. “If they don’t see that this is a million times better than a pie chart, I don’t really want their money.” “I kind of do, though,” says Jeremy, thinking less of the food and more of all the Die Hard tapes he had to leave behind in the store. “We have to think bigger.” Morris smiles at Jeremy. Jeremy returns the smile, gestures at the screen, invites Morris to continue. There is no twitch left in Jeremy’s body now, only readiness for what comes next.

A FINAL AND PERSONAL PRINCIPLE by Sean Cavanaugh

June 6, 2024

Connor’s room had big windows and blinds with strings that touched the floor, and which were always drifting unevenly, a little to the left or to the right, halfway up or basically closed, but always open slightly because of an interceding object or a crease in the PVC, so the sunlight was partial and unfulfilled. There were a few old trophies on his dresser and a fishbowl, forever bubbling, with two statuettes and a little red beta. In front of the bed was a large TV, and to the side was a small leather couch where he’d sit with his friend Neil. Tonight, Neil brought Girl Scout cookies. He said they were selling them off of a table outside the Stop & Shop, that there was a Salvation Army guy, but he didn’t stand a chance. “Cookies,” he said. Then he laughed. Connor asked if he’d seen anything good lately, and he said, “Different Chinese movies.” He said I’ll show you later, then they got into the cookies, which they ate thoughtlessly and with little dialogue, and which they finished in a few minutes. Fuck, they said.Neil asked if they could step onto the balcony for a smoke, then they did. The snow made things look matted out and finished. Connor’s backyard, really his dad’s backyard, had a bunch of evergreens in a circle in one corner, and whenever it snowed, it looked like they were guarding something obscure. He never mentioned it, but he actually did trudge to the trees one winter, not even when he was that young, to lie in the middle and look up. It was generative, like resting on the stigma of a big white flower, and he decided then that something could enter his life and change him from the inside. He said he liked the snow in their town, and Neil said it snowed other places, too. After they finished, Neil washed his hands and Connor didn’t, and they sat on the couch and watched a movie that Neil had in mind, one he thought they’d both like.Neil picked the movie for the same reason he always did: because he had stronger opinions about movies and, though neither acknowledged it, because he had a forceful way with his friend, a tendency to assert himself that didn’t show up elsewhere in his life. At one point, Connor noticed that he’d been tracking his time with Neil’s obsessions, like a mnemonic device—That happened when he was into Gundam, so I was working at Bagel One. The phases lasted about two years and revolved around movies, games, books, shows, anything that he could consume at night then go on his phone and read the context, build taxonomies. Privately, Neil was acting in total earnest, driven by a zeal for the new and a desire for knowledge, deep and wide. Connor understood that, and tried his best to engage with his friend’s interests, even to the point of occasional revelation, but he didn’t like feeling coerced.Tonight’s movie, for instance, was a Taiwanese actioner from the 1960s, and Neil spent the runtime explaining the Republic of China and the significance of the tropes used, eventually settling into a low-volume prattle of actors’ names and their other famous roles. Connor talked too, making jokes about the costumes and references to other movies, and Neil would grunt in assent or bob his head left and right, indicating a contention. They ate snacks from downstairs and hit Connor’s dab pen, and for long stretches, they just enjoyed the movie. At one point something happened, and Connor said holy shit, and Neil said fuck, I know. Neil had been worried to see how the night would go and was surprised to be laughing as much as he was. He thought Connor seemed better than usual: he’d been very distant lately, and he’d never been good with his phone. It was stressful to know that if Connor was mad, he’d never say it—he’d just leave. After the movie, they ate ice cream in the kitchen, where they had to be quiet, and Neil asked if he’d applied for jobs or anything. Connor pulled the spoon out of his mouth and frowned, then made eye contact: He was moving. Neil asked where, and he said Saint Paul. “But we live in the South Shore.” Connor grabbed two glasses from the pantry and filled them with water. Neil asked why, and he said he met a girl online. Wasn’t that a bit rash? Connor didn’t think so. Neil pulled a chair out from the table and sat down, then traced his finger around his cup. He asked Connor if he had a job waiting for him, and he didn’t, but he was convinced he could find one because he had someone who believed in him. “Unbelievable,” said Neil. He’d been unemployed for five years, but he’d just go out there and find work. Did he realize how stupid that sounded? Connor said he’d apply to gas stations and coffee shops, that one benefit of underqualification is the ubiquity of bad options. “So that’s that?”“Come on,” said Connor.Neil told him not to call when his fish died, then walked out of his life forever. He didn’t think it would last that long; he knew he wouldn’t reach out, but he figured Connor would. Still, he was wrong about the fish, which he thought would die within the month, and which would actually live for two more years in Saint Paul. He started buying fish for Connor when they were twenty-three because he thought it would help him build responsibility, and eventually self-respect. The program was a disaster: they flushed whole schools over the years, from goldfish to clownfish and blue tang, purely because Connor couldn’t muster the discipline, and because he eventually switched to overfeeding, unable to moderate himself long enough to keep something alive. Whenever they died, though, he would FaceTime Neil during the flush, always really hurt, sometimes on the verge of tears. Once, he paused for a moment to ask why he couldn’t do it, if there was something wrong with him, if it was obvious to everyone else and they just wouldn’t say. The move to Saint Paul, disastrous though it would be, marked a milestone in his pet stewardship. Eventually, he would get a dog. After that night, they would exist in each other’s lives as a bad possibility. Neil would block Connor on social media to keep himself from stalking his accounts, which he did for the first few months, and which gave him a feverish thrill. Connor would have regular nightmares where Neil reached out to him, a call he would have to answer, and which would fundamentally upset his life. After he left, he saw what Neil did to him: he told him what he was capable of (more than this, man), what was beyond his means (college, most women), what to be proud of (he could draw), and where to point his shame. It felt good to be who his friend thought he was, even if that meant affirming a cruel assumption. One night, after a week of abstinence, he caved and bought cigarettes. He called his friend, truly despondent, and was treated to warm, homely love. “I get it, man. It’s fucking hard.” Smoking on his deck that night, he wondered how it would have gone if he’d quit for real. No phone call, no affirmation. Neil would still smoke himself, he’d just be weirder about it.And Neil was already weird about it. It was the week after graduation, the week he moved back home, that he sniped at Connor most directly. They were at a townie bar, The Spout, that was a little further out from the rest, a little shittier, and much less likely to spawn unwanted high school acquaintances. Connor started going there when his dad stopped inviting him to the Elks, and since then, he’d gotten kind of good at darts. That night, he beat his friend handily and they ducked out to smoke. Neil grimaced, then asked if he felt bad for getting him started. Connor paused; it hadn’t crossed his mind. He’d never pressured him to do anything, and they were teenagers when they picked up the habit. Still, Connor gave him access. Left to his own devices, Neil may have lost interest before he reached eighteen, and his addiction might not have followed him, as it would, to the end of his life. Connor felt himself tearing into doubles, triples, incompatible co-parents of the truth. He felt staticky and nauseous, and he didn’t know it yet, but he felt resentment, too.“Sorry man,” he said, “It’s one of those things.” Really, Connor thought some vices waited for people. They could dodge them for decades, maybe forever, but they knew who they were, and they would always be convenient. It seemed less likely that he got Neil into cigarettes or Neil got him into weed. The causal tellings got things backwards: their mistakes were always ahead of them, tied to their waists, pulling them into each other’s lives. If they got the impression, which they shared by the end, that they were engaged in a tug-of-war, then they were correct, but they were wrong about the sides: they were pulling together, and they were losing. Neil would start reading history in a decade, and would be comforted by the way it could ignore the will. In a movie or a novel, disaster is an incitement to life, but in history, it doesn’t have to be anything. Resentments go untested, addictions go unbeaten, the rare big bads leave craters that don’t fill in. The night of the confrontation, Connor bought him a beer and they made up. Connor didn’t get his fatalism from Neil, though. He got it from his dad, and it was his dad who kept it around. The woman who brought him to Saint Paul lost interest after two months, then he was alone except for his dad, who called weekly. When he heard about the girl, he said, “That’s about right.” When he heard about the roaches or the heatless winter nights: Fucking management, fucking assholes. Connor didn’t have much to report, though, so he mostly listened. His aunts were always getting sick, his uncles gambling and buying new cars. Grandma was mad because someone made a comment about her dog, but they couldn’t apologize because she wouldn’t say who it was. When his mother died, she left his father a second, messier family, and if he abused them to his son, it belied a real gratitude. He had a drive to observe others, a greed for behavior and judgment, judgment and acceptance. She wouldn’t need the surgery if she went to the doctor in the first place. But that’s your grandma. He loved them the way he could love anyone, Connor excluded: a mocking, back-slapping kind of love that delighted in failure because it affirmed his suspicions. With his son, though, he had all of the tolerance and none of the judgment. He loved him for the obvious reasons.It was for those reasons that, when Neil left for college, Connor’s dad embarked on a project. His son, once a laid-back and observant child, then a skilled appreciator of life, wasn’t even gaming anymore. Instead, he was on his phone or just lying there, vaping. One day, in a tone that never sounded convincing coming from him, he enlisted his help: You don’t have a choice. He was building a pizza oven in the backyard, and because of a recent surgery, he needed someone to handle the bricks. He would build the wood frame and machine the half-blocks, but Connor would deal with the adhesive, the laying, the leveling. At first, Connor was happy to have a to-do. He was bored, deep-tissue bored, even before his friend left. After, he was just material, an unmixed pile that would stick around until something better came along. (Later, pushed to failure in a Minneapolis pizza kitchen, he would remember his weeks in bed, the way he spread outward while time drew to a point.) He took to laying bricks with a newfound conviction, something real and anxious that had been missing from his life.Then it got hard. September is a summer month in Massachusetts, and he’d always stayed indoors if he could help it. “That’s a sunburn,” his dad said, “It’s a new look on you.” Because the project started with pavers, which were heavier than bricks, and which his dad dumped on the front lawn, his first task was a series of back-tearing sprints that muffled his ambition and brought home the possibility of actual, physical failure. At that point, while his dad cut some of the stones, he laid them in a small, open square, staggering their placement to ensure integrity and correcting their alignment with a wooden dowel. Between the stones, he spread landscape adhesive in ugly swirls, and after a few layers, he began to enjoy the way the bottle gripped his hand, the resistance it put up, and its give. That evening, when his dad checked his angles and he placed the cornerstone, he felt exhausted, but refreshingly so, more like something spent than gone dry. He could probably do the same thing tomorrow.His dad joked: Good job with the warm-up. Soon, they both had beers, and they were sitting on the patio, stifled by the cooling air. “Listen,” said his dad. Years ago, he had a friend at the firm: he did M&A, and his buddy did wealth management. They would lunch together and talk about the people they hated, the handies and sleights that made up their world, the soft basis of material life. Sometimes, he told his friend he’d had enough. Don’t you say it, his friend would tell him, don’t you leave me; so he didn’t. Connor’s dad stayed on long after there was anywhere to go, enduring rubbery, overcooked performance reviews and whole-team emails directed right at him. He managed the hunger of bosses that were five years, ten years, twenty younger than himself, and watched Netflix originals so he’d pick up on their references. At one point, they brought in a consultancy, and he realized that, if he had to defend his position, he would decline to comment. He wasn’t laid off, just moved around. Then his friend left for China.“Oh my God, I could have killed him.” But he didn’t. The day he got the news, his friend swaggered to his desk, rapped the edge with one hand, then led him to the elevator and down the street to ‘their’ café. The hostess told them to sit anywhere, and they laughed because they had a table. Their presence had become a joke, the way “how’s it going” becomes a joke after months, or how anything becomes a joke after years. “Nothing good in Worcester?” His friend shook his head: The offer was perfect. As he was now, he couldn’t imagine a better life than he had in Massachusetts. His wife was an angel, his kids were very happy, and his friendship with Connor’s dad felt like a final and personal principle. He wouldn’t always be this way, though, not even in a few months. Obviously, his surroundings would be different, but he saw something other than that. “Arnold,” he said, “The scale.” He set his jaw and rocked his head back and forth. It had been over for a while, Connor’s father knew that, but he would think of that moment for years to come. The night they stopped talking, Neil showed Connor Dragon Inn, a martial arts epic about a Ming dynasty eunuch who murders his enemies’ children. The eunuch trope struck him as odd, and with further viewing became “funny,” a reminder that he was watching a movie from another country. A decade later, when he started reading again, he read a little about China, then bought a book about eunuchs, which he read over a few days, and which would inform how he thought about people in time. The practice of castration was litigated throughout the Ming dynasty, but the station of the eunuch stuck around, and even exhibited a capacity for expansion. Even as the state enforced bans on non-official castrations, people cut themselves or their children, convinced it was the only option for advancement, or the best one available. At one point, twenty thousand self-made eunuchs mobbed the capital demanding work, and when they were rejected, enough killed themselves that the emperors started hiring the remainder. Neil liked that story. He liked how something built to defeat itself could change face and propagate, expand for generations. He liked that a practice, once a stand-in for death, lived for millennia, and he liked that it was dead now, ready to be studied. Neil felt that comfort when he thought about Connor, but especially when he thought about one particular memory, one of their really fine days together. The summer before his junior year, one of the few times he’d ever been grounded, Connor broke him out and they went driving in the mountains. It was late afternoon by the time they got there, so they drove through huge sloping shadows and looked at the valleys and the brightness above, and they smoked cigarettes out the windows and played shitty music very loud. He told Connor almost the entire plot of Evangelion, and he actually seemed to blow his mind. “So is she like…” She’s his mom, dude. At one point, they saw a hawk, and they both said, “Fuck, a hawk,” which they meant in earnest, but which they repeated as a joke, alternating their tone and accent to make the other laugh. The river below looked pleasant and blue, but there was no way to get down, so they just looked without mentioning it and drove along.Eventually, they pulled over to a rec area with some picnic tables and a good view. Connor grabbed a frisbee from his back seat, and they played catch for a while, lobbing big tosses and “weird ones,” diving for catches and twirling the disc on one finger. Sometimes, Connor would throw it straight and Neil would clap his hands in a great whooshing arc, slamming the plastic between his palms with his legs planted a little further than shoulder-width apart. Sometimes, Neil would throw it straight into the sky and Connor would shout, “DEFCON KICK,” and kick it out of the air. It was rare that Connor felt truly athletic, but he did here, jogging to catch the disc and throwing it with style. He felt like he was better at things when Neil was around, like there were areas he could learn from him, and opportunities to shine. They tossed the frisbee until it turned dusky and they started getting eaten. Connor shook his legs off and yawned, then grabbed their camp chairs and started to pack the car.“No but watch this,” said Neil, peeling off to climb a nearby oak. He hugged the trunk at a fork near the ground, then hefted himself up, scrambling for footholds while he swung into a straddle, then a crouch, then he chose the thickest branch and put his belly on the leaves. “Cigarettes,” he said, and Connor tossed them. He kicked his legs and took in the sky, a white pane splotched with color, nighttime settled at the bottom like chocolate syrup. There were birds up there, and clouds, and he could watch it all spill over mountains and into the valley, the water, the flood of life invisible from above. He pictured himself soaring down, cheeks puffed with wind, interminably set on the original source. He blew smoke down at Connor, and it all came back at his face. “Fucking asshole,” said Connor, but Neil just laughed and turned to lean back. Then he felt a crack in the wood and fell twenty feet to the ground. Connor said fuck, fuck, and put a hand behind Neil’s head, the other on his chest, and tried to help him breathe. He was croaking, trying to tell him something, something that wouldn’t come out: I just, I just, I just. Connor grabbed water from the car, and when he handed it over, Neil put an arm around him and smiled. He was grateful and wincing, and there was blood between his legs, where the branch was. Later, when he was able to talk, he didn’t want to say much. They drove back, and Neil’s parents gave them hell; they didn’t expect this from him, a family is built on trust, if he thought he was grounded before, he had another thing coming. It was only the next day, when Connor was cleaning his car, that he saw the stain on his seat and wondered if something more serious had happened.