chapter 20
The bright fluorescence in the foyer of Emily's dorm hit Nate like the glare of dawn and he squinted to avoid it. He heard Emily and her friends spill through the doors behind him, laughing. It was two in the morning and they'd been drinking since before dinner, roving through parties on campus and off.
"You can't sleep there," someone shouted, calling Nate off the bench where he'd taken a seat. He rose, trailing behind the others. Emily was toward the front of the group whispering something to her friend Alex. He was a slender boy, a bit shorter than Nate, his hair slicked up in the front with gel. Though he wore vintage T-shirts and hipster jeans and had that well-groomed dishevelment about him that suggested a perfect nonchalance, he'd seemed anxious to Nate ever since they'd met a few months ago, when Nate had come for his first visit, sometime before Christmas. Anxious in a way Nate recognized. Emily's other friends had welcomed Nate as a part-time member of the scene, but Alex had mostly avoided talking to him.
Now he knew why. This evening Emily had told him that Alex had asked her what Nate's status was - gay or straight, available or taken. "You're fair game," she'd said as they left the dining hall. "You might as well live here."
Her dorm room was a social hub of sorts from where her hall mates came and went with their laptops and iPods and the occasional textbook or novel, which they would glance at between the trading of notes and music and IMing with friends across campus, attending to assignments in the down moments between jokes and gossip. They were like a troupe of nervous dancers working earnestly on their poses, shifting quickly from one to the next, until the weekend came, when they'd drink enough to undo all that practice.
On the third floor, people started splitting up, heading back to their rooms, someone calling out a reminder that they had to be up by eight to catch the chartered bus to New York for the protest. When Nate eventually pushed through the doors onto Emily's hall, she had already slipped into her room.
"You coming with us tomorrow?" Alex asked. He was standing by his door, feeling in his pockets for his key.
"I guess so," Nate said, his head moving gently forward and back in search of balance.
Less than forty-eight hours ago, he had been sitting in the back pew of Finden Congregational at Charlotte Graves's belated memorial, listening to one of her colleagues, a former teacher of his, talk about how dedicated she had been to her students. And he'd listened to her former students as well, four or five of them, a woman who'd become a literature professor, a man who worked for the Geological Survey, people in their thirties and forties and fifties, all of whom spoke of how hard she'd been on them and how thankful they were for it. And when they were done, Charlotte's brother had got up again and said how moved he was that the church was full and how Charlotte wouldn't have believed it.
Ms. Graves would want him to go to the protest, he thought. The march to stop the war.
"Do you want a beer?" Alex asked.
"I should go to bed."
"You're welcome to come in if you want."
Alex was trying to play it cool but the tightness in his voice gave him away.
Faggot, Nate thought, weakling. With a flick of his tongue he could murder some small piece of this boy. The little power gave him a sickening little thrill.
"So you're inviting me in?" he asked, almost coyly, giving nothing away.
"Yeah. I am."
The walls of his room were surprisingly bare. Just a few postcards tacked over the desk. Nate had expected art posters and political slogans but there was none of that. Books that didn't fit on the overstuffed shelves stood in stacks along the floor and in piles by his computer. Above the bed was a small picture of Kafka.
Alex walked to the stereo and put on some Radiohead before getting them each a beer from the mini-fridge.
"Here," he said, pulling out his desk chair. "Take this." He sat opposite, on the edge of the twin bed. For a minute, the two of them sipped their last wasted drinks of the night, looking away at the walls and the floor and the bright vortex of the screen saver with its endlessly morphing patterns.
"I guess Emily probably told you that I asked about you. She's not a big one for secrets."
"That's for sure."
He wondered if he had appeared to Doug as Alex did to him now: bold and terrified at the same time.
"It's okay," Nate said. "It's cool."
"We don't have to do anything if you don't want to. I wasn't angling for that. You just seem like a sweet guy. And I think you're kind of cute, too."
Nate examined the spines of the novels on the bookcase, amazed his legs were still capable of trembling after all he'd drunk.
"Thanks," he said, taking another swig. Queer, he thought. Coward. Predator. Weakling. Monster. Only he couldn't tell to whom the words were directed, Alex or himself. All he knew was that the derision moved in his blood like venom.
Just then he heard the music as if for the first time. As if his ears had been plugged and now the stoppers had come loose. The singer's words were hard to make out beneath the wash of sound, but the plaintive tone was unmistakable, calling out through the dark orchestral swirl, the voice promising nothing but itself, no reassurance or escape, no comfort or caress, just testament to a longing that mere touch would never satisfy, the resonance of it reaching so much deeper into the past than touch ever could and so much farther into the future, calling the aching spirit from its hiding place, at least for a moment. And Nate saw then, in his mind's eye, the form of his father's corpse laid out on the floor in front of him, his garroted head resting to one side, his neck bruised from ear to ear, the poor, dear man. And lying there beside him, Ms. Graves, in her flannel skirt and cardigan, her gray hair brushed down over her ears and her eyes closed, the two of them hovering in the netherworld between the living and the forgotten dead.
"Can I ask you a question?"
"Sure," Alex said.
"Is it okay if we kiss?"
Alex nodded, and Nate stood, stepping through the shadows at his feet to cross the space between them.