FROM THE POOL came a strange, laryngeal thud. No more than that. Something had gone in. Even though he knew it was too dark to see, Darius slipped out of bed and pressed his forehead to the window screen. He smelled dust and the cool aluminum frame. Sometimes a dog jumped in. A messier splash. This sounded hardly bigger than a frog. But Darius was positive it was a person. Trodden water tickled the concrete and made the overflow baffle cluck. Hushed voices clinched it: angry (bare feet on sycamore litter), hysterical peep, groan (water too cold) and, “Get in!” “Sh!” A boy’s mock-heroic yelp was followed by a great limp of a splash and the after-drizzle. A girl screamed shyly. The back yard lights came on.
Downstairs, Oliver was just as quick as Darius. Just as silent. Not timid, but indifferent, and too dignified, he’d skip the outraged property-owner’s bluster. He’d let self-consciousness run its course. In the bloodless glare one girl held her forearms like double doors over her breasts. Teenaged buttocks flashed as white as a toad’s belly, yet beautiful.
Sibilant strides wetted the asphalt drive. They slap-slapped to the front of the house. Laughter and car doors. The teenagers squealed away, probably to the Schwartzbaugh’s pool, or the Aveni’s. The water still moved. Darius stayed at the window. The scene ought to have been melancholy—him alone up there, them on a spree—but he didn’t experience it that way. He felt an indescribable pleasure. Now that they were gone, he did. Wound up, his thoughts and heart raced. He pressed his cheek to the screen, which gave like soft cloth. Even the rubble of insects in the gutter of the window frame was spattered by the—call it love that gushed from him in pools-full.
Love? He had a strange understanding of things. For him, everything good in life only came into its own, was only pure, though faint, when time had stopped, as in the great rotunda of a library or in the secret trays of a fanatical collector or at a window or in the moment after someone has gone. He didn’t belong with the teenagers, but right where he was. Because he was—this isn’t quite exact, but close—eternal. A quality like antiquated fame. Fame in the dry, stopped time, outdated encyclopedia sense, which doesn’t care how obscure one has become over the centuries. Darius was a boy a few years shy of puberty and in every way unknown.
Others had no idea he had the good fortune to be so illustrious, though occasionally, when they looked at him, or listened, their gaze paused as if they just made out something in him, something brightly lensed by the invisible grandeur of eternity. Darius hoped so anyway.
He was modest about his illustriousness. A lonely boy’s fantasy. A sort of timidity, perhaps. In his memory he held the pallor of those buttocks as a collector would a rare bivalve, with studious and immobile zeal. The love, faint as it was, was almost too strong to bear. Now the memory would last forever. Darius had, or was convinced he had, consecrated it to eternity.
He was fortunate in another way, too. Rich in the conventional way, as you could tell by a glance at the house, the pool, the showy luxury of his father Oliver’s silk dressing gown or the opulent brocade curtain Oliver held aside with a finger. You could tell, but Darius was still too young for this real wealth to have much meaning to him. Oddly enough, his delusory wealth, his wealth of time, was far more vivid.
If he really thought about it, really exercised his memory, he’d have to say his illustrious quality went back several years to the time he decided to live in his own underground. His parents indulged him. They let him move down to the basement for a while. The basement of the house was enormous. Storage rooms, a vast laundry with a mangle, an ancient coal room, terrifying as an oubliette, a modern boiler room, a labyrinth of slatted closets filled with garden things and broken beach umbrellas and shelves lined with dusty jars of peaches in brandy.
Darius set up in the largest of the closets, which was littered with desiccated daffodil bulbs and seemed the most burrow-like. In another of the closets was an antique spool bed, which was pulled out and assembled for him. Oliver came down every night to check on his son. The elfin tinkle of his martini was at odds with the weary shuffle of his slippers on the gray wooden treads of the basement stairs. Darius could tell his mother had ordered Oliver to the basement, but once downstairs his father made the best of it. His smile wasn’t too pained. And however long this life underground lasted—a few days? A week? Not a month; memory was unclear—Darius and Oliver seemed, to Darius, utterly complicit, almost like one person.
Here, memory was vaguer. What did they do? Darius seemed to recall they spoke in a foreign language. Maybe Oliver would pronounce the words, half distracted, and Darius would repeat them fervently. As if from a great distance, Oliver might smile and nod, only occasionally taking the trouble to correct the boy, more often making a “that’s close enough” twitch of his eyebrows as he wet his lips in his martini. The glassy man’s invisible attention, nervous as a fly on a window, was unbearably exciting to Darius, who remembered having to keep himself from thrashing under the covers out of pure high spirits. If he were able to stay perfectly motionless, Oliver might talk to him as he would to an adult when a conversation’s going nowhere. “This bed you’ve got here used to belong to the man who had the house before us. Colin Vail, peculiar, artist type, one of those stor- ies—”
He wouldn’t tell the story. He’d look at Darius for a long moment and then wink.
On the subject of Colin Vail, Darius’s memory became frankly fantastic. Did his father really come to the basement sometimes and carry the boy into a second closet? There, piled helter-skelter like grave goods, were shabby cardboard models of houses and villages, boxes of absurd objects. Trial-sized bottles of Prell and Mardi Gras beads had been glued into place in a shallow frame covered with bright yellow feathers. On the one hand, it was impossible. On the other hand, Darius had the unshakeable notion, almost a memory, that his father and he had made these things together. That this was their workshop. And that these objects were a playful and secret form of art entirely unlike the masterpieces of the world above. It was a real memory. But everything in that storage room had supposedly been created by this other person, Colin Vail.
Several years later, the man’s sister showed up. Darius didn’t remember her except as a tall woman with a clarion, haughty voice unlike his mother’s whisper. His mother, who hated the basement, stayed upstairs. Oliver led the sister to the storage room. She peered in. She looked a little angry at the contents. Her hand brushed the mere thought of dust from her backside. Oliver eyed her. Emotions were charged, and Darius was careful to efface himself.
“Oh, and Cassie, there’s an old bed we set up for the boy,” Oliver said with an unctuous chuckle as if being a father embarrassed him. “Freak of fancy. Got it into his head to sleep down here.”
They trooped over to the burrow-like closet. The bed was still there, forlorn without its mattress. Along the slats sprouted the velvety gray buds of insect chrysalides. The sister made a face. “It’s something he’s attached to?”
Oliver shrugged. Darius felt their attention turn to him. His answer was going to be momentous. He said, “Yes. I’m sorry.”
The sister shrugged in turn. “No, that’s fine. Who cares? It’s yours.” She looked back at the bed with an overbred flicker of a smile and sighed. Darius was certain he’d taken something precious from her. That the loss would be with her always. It was hard to keep himself from saying, “I’ve changed my mind. You can have it.” But he remained silent. Soon afterwards, two workmen came to empty the closet of Colin Vail’s creations. They took everything off in a van. Everything except the bed, which was cleaned up and put in an attic maid’s room. By that time it was Darius’ whim to live in the highest place in the house instead of the lowest.
These memories were uncertain and remote. The only evidence of Colin Vail’s existence, of the treasure chamber of private art, which Darius and his father had actually made themselves, the only evidence that Darius had lived in the basement or spoken a secret language with Oliver, was the bed. It was still in his room under the eaves, and he slept in it every night. And when he had that sense of his illustriousness, of his former fame, as he did when he watched the naked teenagers in the pool and understood that time operated differently for him than it did for them, which is to say it didn’t really operate at all for him—though the intuition didn’t come to him in the form of articulate ideas like “immortality,” “fame,” or “eternity” any more than ideas of “food” or “beauty” would come to an albatross noticing the scaly glimmer of a flying fish hundreds of feet below—when this exaltation came over him and he wondered, “How did I end up like this?” he supposed it might have had something to do with his artistic work in the night with Oliver long ago and underground.
Private mythologies like this are incredibly hard to shake. Rather than checking things against his parents’ memories, Darius kept it all to himself. Oliver didn’t seem like the kind of magical personage who would make art or speak an unknown language. Not anymore anyway. There were no more periods of complicity between father and son, if there had ever been one. His father seemed perpetually fogged by adult concerns. His twitchy attention migrated over Darius in wintrier and wearier haste. Once or twice a year the name “Colin Vail” might be mentioned. Contentedly Darius narrowed his eyes and thought, Ah so! He felt in no hurry to ask questions.
Darius had recognized a couple of the teenagers from that flying pool party. Perhaps his mother was the first to mention it a month or so later—a horrible car accident on a treacherous hill before the turn-off to the Lawrence Academy upper school. A boy was killed. Everybody knew him. White pants sagging to his hips, he’d worked at the club snack bar, but he wasn’t just a local kid. He was a Lawrence student. People knew his parents. The thing was tragic. Darius didn’t recognize the boy’s name. He made the connection later, one morning when he studied his father studying the newspaper. A halftone of a long-haired blond shifted back and forth in front of him. Button-down shirt and leather choker, three-quarter “casual” school profile, raffish smile. The dead boy. The boy who’d also taken a midnight dip in the Van Nest pool. The nakedness, the slapping feet and laughter and, especially, the squeal of the car, all came back to Darius. “Nude,” he mouthed. A chill rose from the undersides of his thighs, through his armpits to the nape of his neck. A corner of his father’s broadsheet wilted.
Distinctly Darius said, “Nudalia sexalia runawayedia wetten.”
He got no response for a long time. Oliver folded and refolded the paper into fussy quarters and mumbled, “If that’s supposed to be French, we’d better fire the David creature.”
“It’s not French. I’m thinking about that boy who was killed.” Darius was careful not to sound emotional in the least. But replaying the living memory of the boy was like being hit in the belly.
Oliver wrestled with the paper. The dead boy faced him now instead of Darius. Oliver looked like he thought the boy a fool. Yet he managed a chilly sort of compassion as his reading glasses winked up and down the yearbook photo. “Well, that is sad. Pathetic.”
“He came over here one time.”
“I don’t think so,” Oliver said. He checked the surname. “We don’t know them.”
“I invited him over.”
“You did?”
“We swam.”
“No, you didn’t. This boy was older than you. You’ve only had that Barry what’s-his-name over.”
“No. I’m serious. He came over to swim.”
His father looked at him with a touch of eternity-lensed intensity. Darius had the pleasant sensation of being recognized. He felt something unpleasant as well. He couldn’t put his finger on it. Oliver may have been experiencing the strange distaste certain grownups can’t suppress when they see children playing at unearned experience. He asked, “Are you pretending? Don’t pretend all over somebody else’s tragedy, Darius. That’s a trashy thing to do. You don’t even know what it’s like to lose somebody.”
“I’m not pretending. He came over to swim.”
The death was big news at school. There was a moment of silence. The kids excitedly acted stunned and woeful. But was it all an act? A gruesome detail stuck in Darius’ mind. Apparently the body had been so mangled that, with the long blond hair, no one could tell at first whether the victim was a boy or a girl. That sort of unrecognizability, which seemed like complete and eternal anonymity, spooked Darius. In his view, that was more “death” than death was. Just like his eternity was more “life” than life.
When he came home, he took candle stubs from a kitchen drawer and ran up to his room. He was going to pray, see if he could get in touch with the world beyond, which was as familiar—through masterpieces and memories—as it was unverified. He had a lot of love stored up for the blond boy. He dressed himself in a ratty old satin comforter. In his closet, he bowed his head three times and solemnly shook a heavy chain hanging from the ceiling. The jingle was meant to be a sonorous knell. He burst through the bamboo curtain hanging across the closet doorway. With stately tread he marched around the spool bed and knelt by the open window. He jammed the candle stubs into the aluminum runners of the window screen frame. The air was just still enough to light the wicks. But when Darius took his cupped palm away the flames shrank to tremulous, imagination-thin drops of light. If they go out, there’s no life after death. Everything I believe is a dream.