It happened in a moment, a look that lighted on Braden’s face. He understood what Wright had never told him, the belief that was too foolish to say aloud. They had cooked breakfast for some friends, Tony—who was called Fucking Tony because he was forever making some fool-hearted mistake, taking home some transient who stole his entire wardrobe, accepting a catering gig that paid a third in coupons, what has Fucking Tony done now—and Jean, who was tall and French and had a way of making anything sound like an aphorism he had coined there on the spot. The bagel it is better because of the part that is missing, no? It was a line they howled and repeated.
They sat on two chaises, arranged to make an L around a coffee table, hunched over their plates. On the window was a spray of eucalyptus, lolling across the floor in the breeze from the bay windows were three nearly deflated blue balloons, vestiges of a birthday party the week before. God bless your mother, it still said in lipstick on the bathroom mirror. The television was on, the channel changed every so often by someone who forgot to pay attention anyway. When they had mopped up the last bits of hollandaise they sat back into their hangovers, sorting through the narratives of the night before, deciding what needed to be explained or forgotten. The three of them had gone out, a night at a friend’s, poppers on the roof, but Wright had stayed home. He was trying to be curious about who he was when alone, among only the things he owned and had arranged himself. There was always a moment, a few hours into solitude, when he panicked at the simplest of decisions, to bathe or make a cup of tea, when he balked at the responsibility of a whole body. He had been in the city three years now and no longer felt that it could absorb him, that just by being inside of it something in him was being polished.
It was December 1984 and the conversations all seemed to be rolling the same way, a slant to the floor of how they were living that was becoming more pronounced. Who did you know who had died? How had he looked at that party in Diamond Heights, and was it only six months ago, and did you remember how he had corralled a group of them—yes, twenty of us walked there, that rope swing that flew out into the view. It was the year people started saying, low voices into cupped hands, I almost slept with him, we had a date that I canceled because of a cold. The men who were sick or gone were always talked about in terms of proximity, as one might mention a movie star, and it was true that their deaths had made them famous and abstracted, the whole of their lives reduced to whichever salient, adaptable anecdote. Anthony the ballerina who had once bottomed en pointe, Forest from Florida who wanted to die with his watch on.
On the television identical twin girls, fourteen and Aryan, leaned out right and left from a tandem bicycle and blew green bubbles of gum. A white woman in shoulder pads lowered her sunglasses at a white man in khakis. There was no one like them in the commercials for small cellophane candies, antidotes to migraine, juice so fresh it jumped from the glass and clothing so clean it glowed. There was pride in this, that their lives were unmappable, irreducible, existing under the known American fabric, but also fear, like some nightmare in which the mirrors when you pass by them are empty.
“He was always at the gym,” Braden was saying. “He did handstands as a party trick.”
“That’s right. He liked to walk on his hands. I saw him do it down the middle of Dolores.”
“Twenty-eight.”
As was his role with them, Tony came in with a discursion, always looking, as he placed the opening remark, like he had just been woken from some sleep in the sun.
“The other day?”
“Yes, Tony.” Braden had a cigarette in his mouth and was rolling pennies from the jar they kept by the door. He could only stand Tony’s talk if he was accomplishing something else.
“Downtown. I saw this guy on the street?”
“Shocking. Foot traffic, in this city?”
“And as he was coming closer I couldn’t remember his name or where I knew him from, and I felt so guilty. Cute, but very shadowy, I mean some real unnecessary sunglasses, a bad Bogart trench. I figured oh, a very intoxicated conquest, because definitely I had a memory of him with his shirt off! So I decided not to be a puss about it and make eye contact. But our young friend clearly did not like it, because the more I looked at him and waved the more he looked the other way, and then I started getting angry! We’ve all been rejected. It is never a day at the fair, but still.”
“It is to us like temperature,” Jean said. “We only can face it.”
“Thank you, Jean, profound, yes,” Braden said. “And?”
“So as I’m about to pass him I straighten up and I say, real vicious, ‘I’m sorry I fucked you and never called, okay?’ He looked like he was going to flag down an ambulance right there. I was very pleased with myself and decided to walk all the way home, and about ten minutes in I realized where I knew him from. It was Tom Hanks.”
The minute they spent laughing stretched and tightened and Tony got up and bowed, tipping an invisible hat. Wright had his face in the crook of the couch and could feel that the elastic waist on his pajamas had slipped around. He kicked his slip-on Vans in delight. In the silence after there was the flint of his lighter and a car passing below playing Donna Summer and the light turning over into afternoon.
“Hello!” Jean said, in a way he did they had ceased correcting, the way one might say, hey, you forgot your wallet, hey, you can’t do that here. He insisted that the two were interchangeable, hey and hello, and anyway it mitigated his confrontational streak, because he was the type of person always accusing someone else of having spilled his drink. Instead of the charbroiled melancholy that was his nature, he gave off a kind of confused gregariousness, a near-constant state of greeting. “Hello!” he had said when a seagull shat on him at China Beach. “Fucking hello!” he repeated, disturbing a passing family, who could not imagine why this man in a leather jacket, with runny avian excrement coming perfectly down his side part, would be choosing this moment to make their acquaintance.
Jean had snapped his fingers and was pointing at Wright, his middle finger still curled under.
“Do you know who you look like?”
Wright shrugged and sucked on his cigarette, using it as an excuse not to speak. In his slippers his feet were pricked with sweat; in his mouth there was not even the memory of saliva.
“Vincent Kahn. It is crazy, it is exactly. No? All you need is the suit. We must fashion you one.”
As he turned to Wright, Tony had his hands spread amenably on his thighs and his mouth a little open. Braden, who was tipping his head, then nodding with some conviction, locked eyes with Wright and stopped. The glance that passed between them was a whole late-night conversation, questions backed up to and answered indirectly, shock, exhausted laughter. Inside of it was the evening Braden had knocked on Wright’s bedroom door and found him drunk at his desk, writing a letter, and he had barked not now. Wright tucked his chin to his neck, briefly, as if to acknowledge to Tony this had been said before, but the confirmation was for Braden.
“I think there’s nothing more boring,” Braden said, “than insisting everything and everyone you’ve known has some counterpart or mirror. The referential is a weakness, I think. Abandon it.”
His intellectual arrogance was familiar to them, what they hated about him and why they ran to him when they were frightened of themselves. Tony made an involuntary noise in his throat, as though Braden’s idea itself were caught there. Rolling his eyes, Jean moved his hand quickly up and down a small invisible cock.
“What is the expression? Why are you being such a dirty blanket,” Jean said. “It is Sunday and I am looking only to enjoy, lovely, relaxed, and you are face-fucking me with this philosophy.”
“This wet blanket,” Braden said, stacking their dishes on his arm and sashaying toward the sink, “cooked you a spectacular breakfast.” Wright made his way down the hall with his hands on the western wall, someone caught on a shelf of rock, and he crawled into bed with his shoes on.
HE WOKE TO BRADEN AT the foot of his bed, sitting there dressed for the dinner shift, his hair still wet from the shower. The only light came from the streetlamps that had just turned on, the red paper lantern in the hall.
“What do you want to tell me,” Braden said, “about that look on your face when Jean said what he did.”
“Right now?”
He was buffeted still by sleep and tried to release it, sitting up and throwing the blankets off and passing a hand over his face.
“Right now.”
“Which war manual did you lift this tactic from? ‘Interrogate the prisoner on his most fearful secrets while he is mostly unconscious.’”
“Is it a secret?”
“‘Ensure the prisoner cannot tell his waking state from his sleeping.’ What do you mean is it a secret?”
“Is it a fact?”
“I told my grandfather once. A therapist in college.”
“Only a fact can really be a secret, right? Otherwise it’s just a sad thought you’ve been keeping to yourself. Something that isn’t real can’t really be confined.”
“That’s kind. I’m feeling very hopeful about this conversation already. The dates line up, Braden.”
“Which dates. Tell me exactly which dates. This is not something she told you.”
“The dates she worked at her sister’s bar outside an Air Force base where he was a test pilot. In the Mojave Desert. Starting in 1957. No.”
“What else. Is there a photo? Is there a letter?”
He knew how it would land before he said it, so he didn’t. People say I look like him. The referential is a weakness, Braden had said earlier in the living room. He asked for his cigarettes on the dresser to buy himself time. He wanted to be his own creation, as Braden was, as was everyone they knew, and somehow he could not. Around the room were his shoddy attempts, the books about Greek architecture he had dog-eared, the photos of the two of them in the frames he had painted.
“Why are you doing this,” he whispered instead.
Braden stood to turn on a light, the brass lamp with the swinging head that was clamped to Wright’s desk. Stacked on the desk were the books he had recently read, a reminder of the information that was at his disposal now, and Braden picked one up and opened to a page in its middle.
“‘The first conscientious objectors in United States history, the Shakers’ pacifism can still be understood as revolutionary,’” he read aloud, and shut it. “I’m doing this because your believing this is keeping you from something.”
“They believed god is male and female. What is it keeping me from? Tell me what it’s keeping me from.”
“That’s the whole thing about prison, isn’t it? You don’t know what it’s keeping you from. Anything could be happening outside of it, and you’re lucky if you get a window.”
“They knew exactly, about any object they built, where it would go in a room.”
“I’m late to work,” Braden said. “I’m sorry I can’t go there with you. I would if it made any sense. I would if I thought it would help you.”
The door shut and his heart rate tripled and he heard Braden gargling his mouthwash, humming “Happy Birthday” to time it. He looked around his room and thought about how nothing in it, except the ring on his finger, was something his mother had touched. If it had all turned out to be a mistake—if she had not died, if she had not left—she would not know where to find him, and if she did, she would not know what to ask.