Or maybe cry? Adam asked, and she looked at him.
At how fucking sad this dude is maybe. Or yeah like for my mom who is married to him. Like he doesn’t realize the audience has gone home while he’s just going on and on. And then I seal-crawl so slowly under the table across the carpet holding my breath into the kitchen. My mom has stopped cleaning and now she’s on the other side of the island and doesn’t see me and I stand up really quietly. She’s holding her pink wine looking out the window at the lake or more at her reflection in the glass because it’s night. I get the bottle from the fridge door and pour most of it into a plastic cup and come up to her with my like Big Gulp and she’s coming back from Mars and about to say something to me but I shush her with a finger on my lips and whisper: Listen. We can hear my stepdad in the dining room telling nobody about Ross Perot. (He was obsessed with Ross Perot. Ross Perot and China.) And my mom maybe doesn’t understand what’s going on yet but we tiptoe over to the doorway and stand there looking into the dining room while he talks to the air like AM radio and wine is almost coming out of my nose. We stand there forever before he looks up, like we caught him beating off. He looks at my chair then back at us and now my mom and I start really cracking up. Then he gets this fucked-up smile that’s pure rage. Like how dare you cunts laugh at me. But I give him the stepdaughter smile back and hold it, hold it. We basically have a staring contest and my mom’s laughter gets all nervous until finally his face relaxes and it’s all a big joke.
It would take Adam twenty years to grasp the analogy between her slipping from the chair and from the boat. He asked her some questions about her dad and she answered them. He considered telling her about entering the wrong house—maybe he could bring out the poetry of it—but he did not tell her, didn’t want to risk it. To protect himself (from what, he wasn’t sure), he imagined that he was looking back on the present from a vaguely imagined East Coast city where his experiences in Topeka could be recounted only with great irony.
But he was back in his body when they kissed goodbye and her damp hair was in his face and her tongue was in his mouth, running over his teeth, tobacco and mint, Crest toothpaste. The kiss deepened and as he moved his hands under her sweatshirt he saw against the black back of his eyelids little illuminated patterns flaring up. Phosphenes, tiny fading Rorschachs formed by the inherent electrical charges the retina produces while at rest, an experience of light in the absence of light. He knew these shapes from his concussion as a child and from his migraines and more recently from this kind of contact; he knew them from when he was little trying to fall asleep, watching gray circles migrate across the darkness; if he pressed his closed eyes near the temples, the forms would brighten. He’d wondered if these patterns were unique to him, evidence of some specialness or damage, or if they were universal, if everyone saw them. But they were so faint and difficult to describe that he was never able to figure out if his parents or friends shared this experience just above the threshold of perception; the patterns dissipated under the weight of language, remained irreducibly private. He’d hear people talk about “seeing stars” when they hit their head, but he saw no stars; he saw rings of red or yellow light or tessellated feather shapes that started to shake if he attended to them or dull gold spirals that spun across his field of vision—or whatever you call your field of vision when your eyes are shut. Instead of moving a hand toward the inside of her thigh as was expected, he moved both hands now toward her face; he held her head and ran his thumbs across her closed eyelids, carefully applying distinct but intermittent pressure; did she also see a few red sparks, a network of faint lines?
She pulled back a little, laughing, What are you doing? He told her the word for it he’d learned from Klaus, who said phosphenes might be triggers of psychotic hallucinations. That some people have tried to draw them and the drawings look strangely like those cave paintings, the oldest art. He hoped she liked the poetry he made out of it, how he wanted her to see what he saw, and to imagine seeing with or as her; the world’s subtlest fireworks announcing the problem of other minds. Soon they were kissing again and he didn’t know if they would fuck. But that night in Topeka’s premier housing community conveniently located near West Ridge Mall, she separated from him gently, decisively; maybe she was on her period. Maybe she didn’t really care about him. She climbed out of the passenger side with one of his cigarettes and the lighter; she walked around the front of the car and returned the lighter to him through the window. Where’s the boat? He said he’d driven around the lake drinking for a while, wasn’t sure where he’d parked it; he was tense again, worried he’d have to admit his various navigational failures, but she was unconcerned.
Win me a medal tomorrow, she said, smiling, when he started the engine again. Soon he was speeding away from the McMansions on Urish Road, cool air thundering through the sunroof that he’d opened. Where Urish hit Twenty-First he stopped at a flashing red light and saw to his right the Rolling Hills Nursing Home, a single-story prefabricated building where his now-nonverbal maternal grandfather had been a resident, a patient, a prisoner since moving, since being moved there, from Phoenix two years before; his grandmother, who was in fine shape, lived in Topeka’s premier assisted-living community a few miles to the south. He flicked his cigarette butt out of the window, watched the embers scatter on black asphalt, and made himself look at the building. Bright streetlights in the almost empty parking lot; otherwise it was dark. Weird to think of the small old man sleeping in there now. Some brief but hideous analogy between the mechanical hospital bed and the reclinable driver’s seat occurred to him, was gone. He pushed All Eyez on Me into the tape deck and turned it up very loud, wondered if anyone inside the home could hear it. Then he drove on.
* * *
Four hours later his alarm clock woke him. Half-asleep, he showered and put on the black suit he’d bought with his mom at West Ridge. He tied one of his father’s two ties. He drove the short distance to Topeka High, pulling up beside his coaches, Spears and Mulroney, who were looking over a AAA map, their breath visible in the streetlight. The former was drinking coffee from his large thermos; the latter sipped, as ever, her Diet Coke. Other formally dressed adolescents wheeled large plastic tubs from the school and loaded them into the backs of two nearby vans. He did not condescend to move his own tub; an underclassman would take care of it. He saw his partner, Joanna, and nodded in greeting; they weren’t friends; their alliance was purely tactical. Once in the van, she wanted to talk strategy, but he leaned his head against the cool window, watched the rise and fall of telephone wires in the dark, and soon he was moving through tract housing in his dreams. He woke up when they pulled off the highway to stop for breakfast at McDonald’s, familiar contours of the molded seating.
Dawn was breaking as they arrived at Russell High School. He would normally have skipped such a small tournament, but because Russell was Bob Dole’s hometown, and because Bob Dole was running for president, the Russell Invitational would this year draw the best teams from across the state; the logic was unclear to him, but Mulroney had insisted they attend. From similar district-issued vans and buses, other awkwardly costumed adolescents were unloading their own tubs, hauling them across the cold parking lot to the school’s main entrance. When he and Joanna walked through the doors, their would-be competitors made way.