When you hang the entire weight of your happiness from one person, how they ache to throw you off and free themselves, and how it agonizes at the points of contact between you where the dead drag of your need pulls down, relentless and unforgiving. Ghost bruises forming where you intersect. Micah stands in the clouded half-light of the bathroom and touches her swollen lips, her shoulders, the hollow of her throat, her hips where his fingers spider over the curve of bone and skin and leave trails of touch that take hours to fade. And her stomach, growing now inconvenient and hard to ignore, the most important yet most distant point of contact between them. She can feel him everywhere, hard and soft, the ruinous impact of a car wreck and skimming insubstantial as a glance from someone wholly unfamiliar. There is no escaping it, there is no escaping him, and she hangs stricken and dependent from one breath to the next on his reactions, rigid with the certainty that he will throw off her weight in one final careless jerk at any second. And that even if there was a clean way out, she would not take it.
*
This is how she will most often see Gabriel: with his head lowered and hair obscuring his eyes at the scratched piano in his apartment, angled slightly sideways as though unwilling to submit completely to anything, his left hand playing something melodic and resonant that rises from the keys like smoke. The heel of his left hand rests on his knee, arched upward to hold a burning cigarette aloft in his delicate and deliberate way, this sense almost of femininity about him, fussiness, economy and care of movement that contrasts directly with the granite cold emanating from his black eyes, his closed mouth and razor jaw.
Always pulsing from him like a field of radiation is the sense that you should not touch, that he is just out of reach. His bones, the lines of him, hard and whip tight like wires. Something dangerous you will hurt yourself on. This sharpness, and the meticulous way he carries his body, spare like a predatory cat, no movement unless deemed absolutely necessary, drawing from the well of stillness that feeds his intractable willpower: it makes her weak. It ruins her. She perches on his couch stupid and wordless as a mannequin, searching for a reason to speak and finding none and struggling to appear content with the silence.
The music stops but his hand rests light on the keys. His foot slides from the sustain pedal and hovers cocked above it. He lifts the cigarette to his mouth and she sees a flash of his white teeth. In the bottomless quiet of the apartment she hears the paper burning as he inhales. She moves not at all but feels every second beating through her as though she is strung to him by nerve endings. He crushes the cigarette into an ashtray that sits on the opposite end of the bench, exhaling, and tucks his hair behind his ear where it stays for only a moment before falling loose again. Then he turns the full force of his stare to her and they are both motionless, breath held, they are waiting. She wonders as she always does what he is thinking. If he cares. If he wants. Or if this is impulse only. It doesn’t matter.
He sinks a finger into the keyboard and a note in full volume peals across the room. She is startled and smiles briefly and then retracts it immediately. But this is early. This is one of the first times. So he returns it in his lean way, with one corner of his mouth, and shifts towards her on the edge of the bench. He takes his hand from the piano and touches the tip of his tongue to the tip of his thumb and then rubs away something invisible between thumb and forefinger, a small circular motion she watches with eyes that feel starved. She watches with eyes that feel like mouths, eating him. His long hands rest on his knees. He is lit, every stark detail, with an abundance of midday sun pouring through the far windows. White curtains are drawn over the dirty glass, purifying the light, and they are utterly alone.
In his soft voice, deep and liquid, “Come here.”
She rises and goes to him, sick and electric inside with the force of this divine mistake.
*
Surrounding Gabriel is a sense of disgrace. She detects hints of it at first and discerns details later. He worked hard and succeeded young. A prestigious teaching job at a private college, something specialized and rare that only upperclassmen have the freedom to take. Those around him were jealous because of his age, his quick rise, his expertise which bled into arrogance. Then something happened to drop the bottom out of his life and he fell far, and hard. In the rare moments when he talks about himself, on his back in the dark with his arm over his eyes, standing at a window looking out but seeing nothing, she feels his outrage at a world with the audacity to assert itself into his trajectory.
He implies but does not say outright that whatever happened to take it all away was an exaggeration or a lie. She can never quite catch what that was, but suspects drugs perhaps – she can see this, a younger Gabriel, emotional armor not yet intact, in the sliced light from his blinds at three o’clock in the morning with a belt between his teeth and a needle biting neatly into his vein, seeking release from himself. Or, more likely, he was caught with a prominent faculty wife, or an underage girl. Another girl like her.
Questionable moral character. He spits out these words, bitter and contemptuous. She reflects the reaction he wants – wordless always, her mouth sealed shut in both deference to and imitation of his own characteristic silence – but she feels none of his conviction. Her high school badge tucked in her purse, lies to her mother fresh on her tongue. To say nothing of her own moral character, she knows firsthand that his is questionable at best.
The job he has is beneath him, utterly, but also responsible for bringing him to her. She is secretly selfish and greedy with his life and would wish nothing good for him that might take him away. She senses that his involvement with her is in fact a symptom of this failure, a pointless defiance that comforts him subconsciously. She is collateral damage to his fallout. She doesn’t care. From the moment he leaned over her outdated computer in that strip mall tutoring center that, to his humiliation, required him to wear a plastic ID badge, and she tipped her head up to meet his eyes, her hair falling against his arm, the faint smell of tobacco and the soap and salt of his skin, and there was that stutter in time, that spasm that made the florescent lights pulse brighter and then close dark around them, a sheer second but she felt it and she saw him feel it. Saw something burn in his eyes, deepen his scowl. He drew in a deep and careful breath. And then his gaze flicked away like it was nothing, and he tapped the computer screen with the side of his fingernail. Told her what to do in one terse sentence. Drew away and left her to shudder in the cold absence of him. She placed her fingers on the keyboard but was still. Trying to still herself inside. Not quite able to turn her head and look for him.
It was all her mother’s idea, during a rare fit of involvement. “You are terrible at math, mija,” she sighed, massaging her feet on the couch after work. “I’m taking you to a tutoring center so you’re ready for your PSATs this year. You need to do well. I can’t pay for college. Scholarships, baby.”
So she went, unwilling but pliant as she is in everything related to school, and slumped at the grubby computer tapping despondently at the math software until it jammed, and he leaned into her from behind with one hand braced beside her keyboard. Without touching, they wrecked like cars. That was the beginning.
Her mother waited in the lobby, holding her purse in her lap, absorbed in her phone. It took a moment for her to look up and see her daughter standing there with one foot on top of the other, trying to seem blank and bored as would be expected. But she can feel his eyes on her across the shabby, low-ceilinged room. Tracking her. She can feel it as surely as his fingertips on her fevered skin. As if her body already intuits the deep, hypnotic stillness of his touch, his voice, his stare. “All right, Micah,” her mother says, pushing herself up out of the chair, and at that moment Micah allows her head to turn and it goes like a magnet to the exact space that he occupies, his shoulders against the wall and his body angled out, his arms crossed, and he is staring at her, unblinking, unmoving. He puts her name in his mouth, tests it just once, Micah, she sees him do it and goes loose and unstrung in her joints.
Her mother asks, rummaging for her keys, missing this moment as she will miss so much in the coming months, “Are you hungry?”
Yes. She is hungry.
*
The first time they are alone, they are surrounded by people. Yet it is still somehow naked and illicit. She slides into the chair across from him, meets his eyes for a heartbeat before having to look down at the scarred tabletop. The reality of him is more than she knows what to do with. Her bag slides to the floor beside her and she is embarrassed of it: the pen scribbles along the strap from second period, the keychains dangling from the zipper. It is a child’s bag. Mentally she scours for other adolescent tells. This is the first conscious suppression of who she is and it is a relief, to turn her back on herself. He arrived before her and ordered black coffee for both of them, a small early indication of his arrogance, that he would order two of what he drinks without consulting her, without offering to get her something different. She arranges her hands around the mug to stop them from trembling. The silence between them is enormous and uncomfortable and within it he is motionless. He is the eye of it. She imitates him, a practice that will soon become second nature.
Coming into the tutoring center after that first day was excruciating. He didn’t appear to be there and she swarmed with both disappointment and relief. But then he was, and he knelt next to her so suddenly and so close that she tipped slightly towards him, as though into a surge of gravity. He looked not at her but at her computer. His finger traced a line along the screen and she gazed down at his arm, the white sleeve rolled up to his elbow, the fine hair touched with gold brushed flat against his skin, and her attraction was so intense that it spilled into revulsion. Her stomach lurched with it.
“I want to see you,” he said quietly, and her eyes leapt to his face instantly and without permission. “Look at the screen,” he spit, low and hard. She turned to the screen, her face hot. “Outside of here,” he said, “at the coffee place on the river downtown by the museum. Do you know it?” She nodded. “You can get there?” he asked, and she heard the command inside the question: don’t tell anyone. She nodded again. “Tomorrow at noon.” He stood and leaned over her, so closely that the back of her head glanced off his chest, one arm on either side of her reaching to the keyboard, typing in answers, nonsense, it could have been anything. She was blind, spinning, swimming in the heat of his body. “Do you understand now?” he asked out loud.
She nodded, then whispered, “Wait.” He paused and she felt his impatience. “I don’t know your name,” she said.
“Gabriel,” he said, and pulled away. She shivered. Gabriel. And did nothing for the rest of the tutoring session.
He leans towards her over the table and she forces herself to hold his gaze. He is facing the windows, flooded with sunlight, every detail illuminated. His hair is thick and careless, long enough to push behind his ears, too short to stay that way, and his eyes are both dark and bright, liquid, like the black coffee she can barely swallow. He is not handsome, not the way people want to be. The lines of his face are clean and sharp and his mouth is thin. There are tight knots of tendon at the hinges of his jaw as though it is clenched constantly. She will learn that even in sleep he never completely unravels.
“I hate bullshit,” he says, and his voice is low but the power of it cuts through the noise surrounding them. “So I’ll be blunt. There’s something about you that attracts me,” attracts, she feels that word melting slow inside of her, “and very little attracts me. So I want to be around you. You can find me here, often.” She feels a pang of vague disappointment. A coffee shop jittery with college students – whatever it is she wants from him, it’s not this. “Or,” he says, and the word makes a complete sentence. They stare at each other.
She nods, barely. Or: yes.
He takes in his coffee like breathing, the whole cup gone in one deep swallow, and asks, “How important is it that you come to that tutoring center?” She shrugs with one shoulder. Her mother could lose interest in that at any time. “Try to quit. I don’t want to see you both places. When can you meet me here again?” he asks.
What is the right answer to this? She wants to say, take me back to your apartment now, she feels the clamor of that sentence crowding her mouth after so much silent dumb nodding, but she says, “Monday during the day.”
He says, without a second of hesitation or consideration that she will be missing school, “Noon. That’s enough for today,” and stands, and there is a moment when it seems he might touch her but he picks up his book instead. “I’ll see you then,” he says, brushing past the table, and the worn brown leather of his belt where his shirt is caught in the waistband of his jeans passes an inch from her face. Her hand twitches upward to hook his belt loop and drag down, find his skin stretched drum tight under the fabric lying flat against his hunger-skinny body, find the secret architecture of bones under the skin, but he is past her and gone.
There is a faint tumult of bells as the door to the city swings shut behind him. She sits, incredibly alone, and the voices of strangers tumble back down around her to fill the space he slipped out of so effortlessly.
*
The highs and lows of their connection are so steep, so severe, the costs and rewards so rich, she becomes addicted to both equally and balances on a perilous line between discipline and self-indulgent recklessness. There are times when her self-control cracks like an overburdened dam and she makes mistakes that she knows are mistakes and she makes them anyway. Even rarer are the moments when his own impenetrable façade slips and reveals something other than flat indifference. Later, during the long silence, she will think often of these times, when the barrier between them ruptured and bled.
Once, as he lets her into his apartment, his hand darts out and catches her arm, turns it so a bruise on the inside of her wrist is exposed. He lays his own thumb over the bruise, lightly, as though measuring. He cuts his eyes to hers and she feels a thrill of shock. In his face there is anger, and something sharper, something brighter. Vigilance.
He says, “Who hurt–”
And stops. Retracts. Releases her, closes the door after her with perhaps too much force and moves away deliberately, creating distance. She edges into the apartment. Entire minutes roll past before he touches her, sealed tight into himself again as though nothing happened.
She echoes this moment later, and pays for it. One late afternoon, after, she on her side facing him and he on his back with his arms above his head, the fingers of one hand pushed into his hair to rake it from his face, her self restraint snaps and she draws up onto her elbow. His eyes flick to her in mild surprise. It is an unspoken absolute that the more motionless she is, the more invisible, the longer these moments stretch before he ends them. She lays one hand along his ribcage. There is a divot here, a flaw in his symmetry, as though his lowest ribs were broken and healed badly.
She feels his body shrink from her touch without moving, and asks, her voice soft and fractured from disuse, “Who hurt you?”
He is gone in an instant. His body pours up from the bed and he says with his back to her as he finds his discarded jeans, his knife blade spine catching light and casting narrow shadow, “This isn’t a fucking movie.” Each word bitten off sharp. He is through the door and out of sight and she hears the scratch of his lighter.
She falls into his pillow and breathes in, greedy for any trace of his smell. It is barely there, a ghost or an untended memory.
*
Another time: “You are fucking heartless.” The words falling from her mouth before she knows they are there, and she doesn’t even mean them, or she doesn’t mean exactly that, and there is a beat of stunned silence. The first words she has spoken against him. Her hand is on her stomach. Her jeans no longer button. Tears prick her eyes but she will not blink, she will not allow them. He is watching her with his eyebrows up, interested but dispassionate. Almost amused.
“Then leave.”
*
Another time: His voice low and dead cold but racing just a touch too fast, a crack in the blank exterior, “Don’t act like you care about this,” his eyes darting quickly down to her stomach, “don’t act like this means anything, don’t pretend this is something it’s not. Goddamnit, regardless of anything, I will not tolerate your adolescent bullshit.”
These words stay with her. In the car with her mother, in Geometry and the cafeteria, in the shower where the baby moves for the first time like an uneasy thought rolling inside her. In the long silence later. Aching with truth.
*
His apartment, predictably, is spare and open with nothing on the white walls and nothing on the surfaces. There is a battered upright piano, a couch, a table and chairs, a bookshelf filled with hardbacks, little else. The building is old so the windows are broad and deep, sectioned into small rectangular panes by delicate flaking ribbons of wood, and drawn over them are sheer white curtains that she imagines were here when he moved in. Beyond is the dark hallway that leads to his bedroom. Her eyes fly to it and away. He catches this and there is an almost imperceptible swell in his breathing, something slightly out of his meticulous control. He does not have himself absolutely in hand. Looking back, she knows their situation was not yet categorized and dismissed in his mind, that he was still in an uncertain place. It knocked him out of character. She relishes these rare missteps, these fissures that give her flashes of insight into the visceral disarray of who he truly was.
He meets her at the coffee shop as arranged, but outside. As she reaches for the handle, her name rises from under the din of downtown, Micah, and she startles back. He is right there, leaning against the rough brick of the building, watching her. There is something predatory and unsettling about the fact that she was an arm’s length away and did not see him, like catching peripheral sight of something poisonous, jaws open, inches from your unprotected skin. “Come on,” he says, and she trails him to his apartment a block away.
He lets her in and closes the door without a sound. She stands in all that unapologetic light and space conspicuous as though on a stage. He goes to the refrigerator and brings back two bottles of water, both of which will go untouched. As she takes one she sees the faint smear of ink on her left hand where she wrote his name and rubbed it away immediately. This was during second period. The idea of school buzzes distant and surreal, already too far from her to have any effect. Health, English II, Government. Bells ringing somewhere in the irrelevant distance, her day as it should have been streaming forward without her while she sat with her legs tucked under her in the apartment of a man she should never have known. She pushed through the side doors and crossed the teachers’ parking lot, unhurried and unnoticed. Why is everything important so easy to walk away from?
He sits turned sideways with his elbow on the back of the couch and his thumb pressed to his temple. A foot of space between them. They ask each other innocuous questions but it is strange and stilted. Despite his self-expressed preference for bluntness, the true questions hover between them unvoiced. Have you done this before? Will I be your first? Why do you need this? How bad is this idea? How much will you hurt me, how deep will the wound be?
What he does ask when they finally finally touch, when he reaches for her with his free hand and gathers her shirt in his fist and she moves into the space between his body and the couch, and his thumb leaves his temple to skim her bottom lip and ease open her mouth and the edge of her tongue tastes the salt of his skin, is, “Can you do this and not get caught?”
She says, “Yes,” and it is true. No one will ever know the extent. Not conclusively, and not from her. He kisses her, with excruciating slowness at first, so soft and full that she can’t settle the rhythm of her breathing within it. Then the edges get rough, his hands on her strong and hungry, and she finds herself and presses back.
At some point, he breaks off and pushes her from him just enough to search her face. He is agitated, his eyes restless. “Fuck,” he breathes, almost a groan, and later during the long silence she wishes often that she could go back to this moment and stand beside herself saying pay attention, pay attention because it will never happen like this again, he will never be this stripped again, “what is it about you?”
This is what hums inside her when she leaves and walks slowly back to her life: his bare skin in the unblinking daylight, her hair wound around his hand like a rope, the taste of his mouth like clean water, silence broken by breathing with disobedient strains of his voice escaping. They stop just shy. “That’s enough for today,” he tells her again.
She makes her unsteady way home in the low light of evening, his words skimming down her body as sensate as touch, What is it about you? The only time he would betray her true effect on him. Pay attention, she begs into the long silence, struggling to arch back through time towards that moment, before everything, before the end and the beginning of the end.
*
What is it about her? Micah thinks she knows.
There are parts of her body he will always focus on: her back. Her shoulders, her collarbone. Her hair. The line of her jaw. But this is not what is special about her. Her common traits of beauty – anyone might have those. Any girl who walked in and out of that tutoring center before her, who watched him from across the coffee shop, who uncrossed and crossed her legs in the front row of his class when he taught at the college. But her otherness, the separation that lived inside her and made every human transaction feel hollow and forced. This was more rare. This, she believed, is what the antenna of his own sucking isolation homed in on. Like a code that only someone from your planet can understand, and the planet is desolate and abandoned and the code has been repeating for years, unanswered. Then she jammed her math tutoring software and he leaned over her, exhausted and despairing of his entire unremarkable life, and she looked up and there it was in her eyes. That aloneness, like a galaxy revolving silent and uninhabited, enormous, eating light and air, allowing nothing in and nothing out. It shocked him – to see it outside of the mirror – and he ached towards it. He wanted to own it, control it, feed it, swallow it. Take it in his hands and make it something else. Break it. This is what Micah thinks.
Among those her own age, she is avoided. She has had friends but not close ones. People feel her stillness and separateness and mistake it for other things. She weathers cruelty and judgment far off the mark from who she is and what she deserves. Boys her own age perceive her as frigid so she becomes a conquest. During her time with Gabriel, there is one of these, a senior who should have graduated the year before. He follows her sometimes. Looks at her sideways in a way that makes her feel threatened. She has started to show in an undeniable way. Students cut a wide path around her in the hallway and she sits alone in the cafeteria on the days she goes to school, although of course none of this is new exactly. The reason has changed, but the end result is much the same. This boy continues to watch her, regardless.
One day he seeks her out in the cafeteria and sits next to her, too close, backwards on a chair so that his legs are spread. He has a toothpick in his mouth. He talks through his teeth, scanning the people surrounding them as he speaks. “I see you,” he says. “Who you fuckin?” She stares down at her tray, says nothing. She can feel him look at her, exhale slowly onto her face, and there is a smell of old alcohol. She has an impulse to wipe it away but does not move. “Oh, all right. Don’t tell me shit. That’s cool. You damaged goods now,” he says softly. “So it don’t matter anymore. You decide to stop acting high and mighty, hit me up.” He stands, leans over, spits his toothpick onto her tray. She swallows against her nausea.
She had sworn to herself that she would stay at school that day. But following this, she leaves through the side doors and walks to Gabriel. He lets her in without a word. She follows him down the hallway to his shadowed bedroom. Later as he lifts her hair from where it lays heavy as a black wing on her chest and spills it over her shoulders, down her back, his eyes skim over her face and she knows he sees her eyelashes wet, her mascara smeared. He says nothing, and she is grateful.
This is why, she thinks. This is why he wants me.
And this is why finally in the throes of the long silence she understands that it is her hand clutching the wheel. And his hands are lifted away. Letting her.
But Micah is not ready to think about that yet.
*
She learns. The good student. However briefly, however insignificantly, they began as teacher and student so there is a natural adherence to these roles. She learns what to do to please him and when to hold back so that he is forced to pursue. She learns that he likes to unbutton, unlace, unbraid. She comes to him fastened up tight and he releases her slowly in the soft darkness of his bedroom.
After the first day, he does not kiss her often, not on the mouth. Not deeply. Even in her deficit of any meaningful experience, it seems clear to her that although he is quite skilled in a thorough and deliberate way, he has not had much, if any, experience with affection, with someone he loves who loves him back. As in everything, he is simultaneously absorbed and removed, frowning as though she is a problem to be solved and the measure of his success can be found in the speed and harshness of her breathing, the arch of her back, the tension in her muscles, the state of the sheets on the bed: clutched, sweaty, pulled off at the corners. She feels him evaluating and adjusting as he goes. Analyzing. He is a doctor. In this way, he is largely selfless with her, but in that, selfish. He creates and consumes her reaction to touch like food. Swallows it slowly and whole until he is full.
At the end she is physically and mentally exhausted and limp as the dead, staring at him, struggling to hold each second as it bleeds away from her. All she wants is this: to watch him as he stares at the ceiling. As he smokes a cigarette on his back. The way he lights it. The way his hair is damp at the temples. She is work and he goes to it diligently. Her eyes are most often closed during, or slitted just enough to see the idea of him without letting on that she is looking, but afterwards they blow open wide and deep and unblinking and she stares until he stands and pulls on jeans over nothing. This is always the end, her signal. She collects herself, touching the back of her head where it ground into his pillow, his mattress, the cup of his hand, and leaves. Shocked always to find the world still moving and less time than she thought possible having sifted away.
The one time they forgo protection is different. He is already up, jeans on, standing at the end of the bed. She should be pulling herself together. But there is something about the tilt of his head as he lifts the lighter, something about his mouth on the cigarette, his hair tangled untended against the blade of his cheekbone. The details of him. She moves to the end of the bed, allowing the sheet to fall away, and hooks one finger into his belt loop the way she envisioned that first day at the coffee shop. He looks down at her, his eyebrows raised, and lowers the lighter without having lit the cigarette. She says his name, exhales it. This is a crack in the discipline, this is a mistake, to call him by his name as though it means something. As though it is precious to her. This is something she must hide.
But this time, he permits her mistake. He moves around the bed and places the cigarette and lighter on the nightstand, perfectly aligned and parallel with the edge. Here again is this extreme precision of movement, this fastidious nature in direct contrast to the void she knows yawns wide and treacherous inside him.
He allowed her many transgressions during this one time, for what reason she would never know. She unbuttoned him, a role reversal. She kissed him and buried her hands in his hair. She touched his face, his jaw, turned his head. She said his name again, into his neck, into his mouth, and felt a burst of fear as she heard herself do this, like swerving too close to a perilous edge.
Because she was the one who drove this encounter, there would always be an unspoken understanding between them that it was her fault no protection was used. That it was her fault, the result.
Afterwards he asks, “Do you think we’ll be okay?”
The question is so enormous, with such deep implications, it shocks Micah. She cannot understand why he asked it. Later she will, but in the moment, she flounders. Finally, she says yes because saying yes is the only way to keep the door closed against her increasingly compromised heart, although she is thinking, Of course not, because you can’t love me.
He stands, rakes his hair back from his face, finds his jeans. The lighter sparks. She rights herself on exhausted legs. The damage yet unknown, but done.
*
With incredible ease, her original life atrophies in deference to the parallel universe that she and Gabriel inhabit. It was hardly nurtured anyway, but without the cursory attention she gave it, it dies outright and she sleepwalks through it. Waiting for him.
He doesn’t have a cell phone or any kind of phone in his apartment, no computer that she knows of, no method of contacting the outside world beyond his actual physical interaction with it. So her own cell phone goes increasingly untouched in her bag. This was one of the few typical adolescent trappings in which she had indulged: hours spent hooked into the screen, spiraling down pointless rabbit holes. It was a means of escape, but the escape she achieves through Gabriel is so much more intense that this pales and she falls easily out of the habit. The phone becomes little more than a way to lie to her mother about where she is. A way to call the school and let the attendance office know that Micah Soto will be out sick that day. Then she kills the screen and puts it away, a cold rectangle of glass no longer smudged with fingerprints and low on battery.
To have her life play out completely in real time, moment to excruciating moment, no escape and no distraction, is painful but she savors this. Time and how she weathers it becomes something to grind herself against. Something to stretch her limits. This is what Gabriel does to her, emotionally and physically, pushes her to breaking, and more and more she finds herself addicted to torment however it comes.
Since there are no means by which to contact him, she simply shows up at his apartment as often as she dares and hopes he is there. If he isn’t, she walks to the coffee shop and looks for his gaze lowered to a thick book and the crooked part in his hair, his white mug of black coffee, his cigarette held up and to the side between two long fingers creating a halo of smoke around his dark head. Usually, she approaches him and he gathers himself to leave, silent and unhurried. Sometimes he senses her where she stands outside on the sidewalk and lifts his sharp eyes directly to hers. And she feels the strange, aching point of connection between them like an arrow running through separate but identical wounds.
Once she sees him through the glass and his head is up and there is no book. He is leaned back in his chair with his ankle crossed over his knee, crushing a cigarette in the ashtray at the middle of the table. And he is laughing. For a moment she is mystified. Then she realizes with a terrible thrill that he is sitting with someone who is obscured from her vantage point. She searches Gabriel’s face, hungrily, his eyes bright and slitted, the dimple along one side of his mouth that she had no idea existed, the way his body is loose and relaxed. In this moment, he is simultaneously still her most familiar sight, occupying her brain every second as he does, and incredibly alien. He leans forward, his elbows on the table, and talks to the person with his hands animated, smiling as he speaks, then leans back again and laughs. Shrugs with exaggeration, holds his hands up as though not to be held responsible for whatever he said. Before he catches sight of her, she stumbles blindly up the sidewalk. She never saw the person he was with and would never know who they were, if they were male or female. How they managed to tap into his sealed heart as she never would.
When she sees him next, he is the version of Gabriel she has always been presented with. Wordless and frowning, granite cold inside and out. Her betrayal is enormous, and her confusion; she cannot swallow it. So she misbehaves deliberately and pricks his irritation to life and his ensuing rejection becomes the largest feeling inside her. Almost.
Nothing completely eclipses this incident until she comes to understand exactly why he asked her that question: Do you think we’ll be okay?
*
She tells her mother in as few words as possible. And predictably her mother weeps and lapses back into Spanish, calls her names in both languages, demands to know who is responsible. Micah says, “I am responsible,” and refuses to answer any other questions. She waits out the tantrum, the slamming around the house, the tragic speech, and finally her mother’s dramatic exit to her sister’s house. Then Micah goes to Gabriel.
Telling Gabriel is like closing her eyes and stepping off the edge of a building, slicing down through the air, bracing for the impact to rise up and liquefy her. After she says the words, he watches her unblinking, chest still and empty of breath, and she forces herself to stare back. Then he steps towards her from where he was leaning against the kitchen island, falls back uncertainly, and raises one hand as though to ward her off.
“Say that again.” His voice is deadly quiet.
She says it again and he turns his back on her, lowers his head into his hands, and she hears his voice quiet but rough, desperate, “Fuck, fuck, I cannot goddamn fucking believe this,” and her heart sinks. But this is her stupidity and her adolescence at its most extreme, she knows. What did she expect, exactly? And what she expected was this, of course, but it still tears through her, the impact, as her compromised body hits the earth and breaks apart. She watches him until finally he turns around. His face is blank but his hand trembles just slightly where he holds it in midair.
“What is it that you want?” he asks carefully, each word ending completely before the next one begins. Micah shakes her head. Certainly there is nothing that she wants that she will voice at this moment. “What is it that you want to do?” he asks. She goes cold everywhere, hit suddenly with the realization that in this moment everything could end. If she says the wrong thing. Betrays the wrong reaction. She clears her throat and says, “Nothing. I’ll handle it.”
He asks her again, raising his voice and emphasizing as though she is stupid, “What is it that you want?”
She feels her temper flare. “I want for it not to have happened,” she snaps, “but it’s too late for that.”
At these words, his body slumps back against the island and he rubs his eyes with the heels of his hand like a child. It is one of his rare out of character moments. She recognizes his reaction as relief. After this for a long time he stands with his arms crossed and his head lowered. She remains motionless where she was when she first said the words, in the middle of the room.
Finally, he straightens and looks at her. “Are you willing to have an abortion?” he asks, and his voice is flat. She feels an unpleasant shock that he said it aloud, such a bloody word. Bald and ugly. The idea of an abortion scares her, to say nothing of what her mother would do to her if she found out.
Micah shrugs. Struggles to look as blank as he does. Imitating him always, reflecting him so he gets the reaction he wants. “I don’t know,” she manages to say. “I’ll handle it. One way or another. It’s my problem.”
This is patently untrue, and she knows it, but it is what he has been waiting to hear. He pushes himself upright. “I’ll take you,” he says, “if you abort it.”
She nods with difficulty.
“I have to go,” he says, and his words are clipped. Irritated. “I have somewhere to be.”
This is an obvious lie but she is out the door without looking back before the last of it is out of his mouth.
The idea of returning to her house, claustrophobic with her mother’s self-pity and disappointment, is abhorrent. She finds herself planted outside his building, staring at his name on the doorbell until dark. G.Scott. He never comes out of his apartment, not that she expected him to. She is visible from his windows, her white t-shirt glowing in the orange streetlight. She knows that if he were to catch sight of her there, he would turn his back.
What Micah did over the coming weeks was exactly nothing. Her mother wrote her off, dramatically and over and over again, accompanied by speeches that Micah suffered in silence. Gabriel seemed to have dismissed the situation completely when she saw him an excruciating three days later. He had that luxury. He treated her body with the same blend of meticulous attention and emotional indifference as he always had. She sank into it. Sometimes he enabled her to forget everything outside of that exact moment in time: his hands turning her, his body testing hers in the deep underwater light of his bedroom. At first, there were days when it was exactly as it had been. And then increasingly, days when it wasn’t.
Her body changed gradually and she ignored it as much as possible for as long as possible. Then the precarious dam of her self-control began to give, in trickles and sluices, small at first, but edging without control towards a catastrophic break.
*
Here is how the end begins. They are lying side by side and within Micah there is the smallest brush of movement. She puts her hand to her stomach and says, without thinking, “The baby moved.” Gabriel stands abruptly. She can feel his irritation and disapproval like heat. And she snaps.
“You know, this is happening. It exists,” she says, sitting up with the sheet clutched to her, and her voice is reckless, rising, not at all how she wants it to be. But during these moments, she loses her ability to imitate him.
“For now,” he says quietly. She watches his hands as he buckles his belt. He is absolutely calm. The centrifuge of their rare explosive conflicts throws them to predictable opposites: she increasingly frantic, he more Arctic and remote than ever.
“I can’t get an abortion,” she says, and she hears the hysterical edge to the word. This is the first time she has said it aloud. They have fought about this before, but always indirectly, always just to the left of it, and always briefly because she is terrified to give him a reason to throw off her weight permanently as she knows he sometimes yearns to. “Do you have any idea what my mother would do to me if I had an abortion?”
“Oh,” he says, and steps back, holds his arms out to indicate himself barely clothed, his bedroom, his bed with the mattress exposed under wrecked sheets, and among them, Micah, still naked. “Now you care what your mother thinks? That’s convenient.” He collects his shirt from where it hangs over the mirrorless closet door and his pack of cigarettes and lighter from the top of the dresser and leaves the room, as unhurried as if she was not there. She scrambles into her clothes and follows him. He sets the cigarettes and lighter on the kitchen island, perfectly parallel with the edge, and shrugs into the shirt. Then he tugs each cuff down sharply and begins carefully rolling the sleeves. She could drop through the floor and his world would seal shut after her, he would go on seamlessly with his cigarettes, his books, his black coffee, his silence.
“I found out it’s a girl,” she says and her voice is high and thin. This is a lie. She has never been to the doctor. The baby grows inside her wild and untended as a weed or a secret disease.
Gabriel starts to button the shirt from the bottom. A frown crosses his face and he shakes his head just slightly as though trying to rid himself of something. He says nothing and she swells with hurt and rage.
“What do you want your involvement with this baby to be?” she demands. Her anger is streaked with fear. The continuation of what little they have, what little he allows her, is so tenuous, hanging as it does on his mercurial interest. Sometimes the force of his attention towards her is obsessive, overwhelming. Other times she can feel his skin crawling in anticipation of her departure. Nothing is stable. He is not stable, she can feel the hectic unrest twitching just under his skin. These words could end everything. She throws herself into them headfirst regardless and says it again, shrill, “What exactly do you want your involvement to be?”
Gabriel looks at her. His shirt is buttoned to just under the hollow of his throat, where she put her mouth the one time they went without protection. Where she drank into herself the heat of his body and released his name like a prayer. He snaps the collar upright, folds it back down, straightens it. His eyes are dead, there is nothing there. The void hovers horribly close to his surface.
“Monetary,” he says. “If that.”
He turns his back on her and picks up the cigarettes, slides one out with perfectly steady hands.
“You are fucking heartless,” she says, her voice breaking. He looks at her, eyebrows lifted just slightly, almost amused. Lights his cigarette while she shakes, then rests the heel of his right hand against the island with the cigarette tipped upright and slides his left hand into his back pocket. He runs his tongue over his bottom lip, quickly, unconsciously. In that moment she would find him beautiful if she had room inside her for anything at all. Smoke wanders out with his words.
“Then leave.”
So she does.
*
The plan she makes is not a plan. She will not be capable of absorbing exactly what happened or what her intention was until much later.
She goes home and locks herself in the hall bathroom and sits on the cold tile until her bare legs go numb. There is a bulb out above the cracked sink so the light is low, anemic. She breathes steadily and deliberately and looks at nothing. Finally, she takes out her phone and uses it for the first time in days to look up a clinic in the next city. It must be real in case he knows. In case this has happened to him before. This seems like a possibility.
When she returns to his apartment the next day, he lets her in and then retreats to the far side of the kitchen island with his arms clasped loosely over his chest. Watches her. Waiting to see if she will make it right. The one who has invested is the one who stands to lose. He has invested nothing, so he waits, impervious.
She makes it quick. She tells him she thought it over and decided to have the abortion. He glances down at her stomach and she tells him she found a place that does late term abortions in the next city. She stole her mother’s credit card. She brought a change of clothes. The appointment is for the morning. Will he drive her there?
Gabriel regards her. Micah keeps her gaze steady. She has lied to him successfully before, not because she is a good liar, but because he does not care enough to detect the lie. Finally, he says yes; he’ll drive her. “It’s the right decision,” he says, and she nods. Truly she knows he is right. It is the right decision. No one wants this baby.
However, it is not the decision she has made.
He goes to her then and frames her face with his hands, combs back her hair, kisses her mouth. She imagines that this rare affection is her reward for falling in line. She drinks it in without remorse. He pulls her by the wrist down the dark hall, to the bedroom, where he stretches her back and closes her eyes. It is easy to fall into this. His care in sliding her out of her clothes, his touch at this stage so soft she could almost trick herself into believing there is love in it. His own shirt pulled off the way he always does, by the back of the collar, so his hair obscures his face and he has to shake it out of his eyes. His weight on the bed as he settles next to her, his hands fit to her, effortless, finding her, bringing her out of herself. His slow, measured exhalation pouring down the side of her neck.
After all, this is what she wanted. To the destruction of all else. This is how they escape, how they forget, and there is no forgetting like this kind of forgetting.
For a short time they sleep. She wakes first and watches him in the blue glow of the alarm clock. His head is turned towards her. His eyelashes are still against the vulnerable skin under his eyes and one hand is curled loosely on his chest. But the muscles at the hinge of his jaw are tight. His breathing is both deep and accelerated. He is never at peace. The thought of this tears at her, aches in her throat. He is never at peace.
To wake him she touches her fingertip to the divot above his top lip. He comes alive and recoils from her. There is a flash of something in his eyes like fear or confusion, which he blinks away immediately.
“We should go,” she says.
On the way out Gabriel pauses and turns back towards the apartment. It is cold and blank in the late night darkness, utterly without heart. Micah looks over his shoulder from the yellow light of the hall and thinks, No one lives here. He glances down at the keys hooked on his middle finger and then once more back into the apartment and she wonders whether he subconsciously feels a kind of ending settling into place. He closes and locks the door and they turn away without hesitation.
Outside the river swells the air with wetness and the street glitters black from a fresh rain. Gabriel’s car, a small unremarkable grey two-door, is parked on the street behind his building. She follows him to it, watching the way his shoulderblades shift under his shirt as he unlocks the door. She is suppressing a constant urge to touch him, stronger than usual, either because they are alone together at a time they have never been and the world feels halted around them, or because there is an edge, a change approaching rapidly, Micah’s doing, although she cannot quite look directly at what that is. Despite this, she feels calm and certain. His touch from the hours before still hums on her skin.
He shuts the door after her, packing her in the wadded silence of the car, and comes around to his side. Starts the engine. She names a street, a highway, and he pulls away from the curb, checking carefully for traffic despite the deserted road.
Gradually the city thins around them and the streetlights grow few and far between, bars of orange sliding through the car at long regular intervals like a monitor on a dying heartbeat. There are fields on either side of the car. She stares at him in the glow of the dashboard: a luxury she allows herself. He is trained steady on the road, his hands vised at the top of the wheel. She imagines the world receding around them like something folding into itself, a plant dying, water drawing back, and they are alone together at the eye of everything. The car is an arrow slicing both towards and away. This once, she will surprise him.
His right hand leaves the wheel long enough to turn a dial and music rises through the car. Something melodic and resonant but with a painful edge. A bitter hardness vibrating underneath. The voice aches. Micah feels the hair along her arms stand on end. “What is it?” she asks.
Gabriel clears his throat. “Exit Music,” he says.
“It’s good,” Micah says, and she thinks, It’s right.
“It’s very good,” Gabriel says, and Micah thinks, Now.
She lifts her hand and touches his hand on the wheel, fits her fingertips into the jigsaw of his knuckles. Her eyes are on the line of his jaw and his sharp profile, his intractable internal stillness on which she hones herself.
Then all at once the sky rotates on an unnatural axis, the fields rise, their bodies are swept sideways in a sickening lurch, and there is the monstrous din of the road biting into the car as it flips.
*
At this point, reality and Micah’s grasp on it begin to unravel.
*
Gabriel is standing in a hospital room. Micah watches him from the doorway.
The hospital room is old and bare and the light is dim. He holds something along his left forearm, a white bundle, and with his right hand he carefully peels away the top layer as though drawing a bandage from a fresh wound. She understands that this is the baby, their baby, and watches with welling dread as he unwinds and unwinds the sheet. It pools in yards of white at his feet and still there is more, the bundle never decreasing, never revealing whatever is concealed at its core. His movements are deft and unhurried. Patient. His face is blank with absorption. His breathing is trancelike and abysmal. He unwinds and unwinds the sheet. She focuses on the movement of his arm and realizes that it is repeating, a loop, carving the exact same path in the universe with every pass of the sheet, unwinding and unwinding. It is hypnotic. She is watching a bit of captured infinity, waiting for an end that does not exist. In this place, this is what is always happening: a nightmare, an image from Gabriel’s obsessive mind cut indelibly into the universe. Incessantly he unwinds and unwinds the sheet from around a baby whose face will never be graced with the light of day.
This is only the first of many. There are more rooms like this to which she will bear witness. From within the long silence, Micah becomes intimately acquainted with the pain and the strangeness inside Gabriel.
*
There are voices, bursts of static, unhurried footsteps punctuated by the high crunch of glass underfoot. Red lights spinning rhythmic but silent, the sirens doused. Micah sees above her a curve of ruined metal edged with glass teeth and beyond that the sky dense with stars. She follows the curve of metal down to a steering wheel canted at the wrong angle, a dark shape covered with fabric, and finally a hand turned palm up, resting on the soft cheap lining that covers the ceiling of the car. The hand is completely still at the end of an arm that is stretched from the shoulder to lie behind the back, as though someone is pulling the body away from something. Micah sees the neck, the angle of jaw, the dark hair in disarray, and she knows this is Gabriel. He is motionless. The muscles at the hinge of his jaw are flat. Unknotted at last. He is at peace.
The voices hover right above them. Micah sees their dark legs, hears their bones cracking and boots twisting on glass and road gravel as they squat. Hands fit themselves on Gabriel’s limp body, moving him easily, pulling him away, and she feels a spike of jealousy at the proprietary way they manipulate him. His face is turned from her and stays that way as they lift him out of her line of sight. She tries to follow where he goes but finds that she cannot move her head. The hands come for her next, gripping her by her shoulders and dragging her from the car into the road. She feels her body rise and come into contact with something soft and then a white sheet is drawn over her face, blocking the brilliant black sky. Red light skims over the sheet and is gone, over and gone, and she thinks the sheet must be to keep her calm but this is not necessary: she is enormously calm. Calm in a deep and permanent way, finally, she and Gabriel both. Simultaneously asleep and awake, hushed inside, the misery that pushed them from the rest of the world and into each other silenced. They are at peace.
She tries to call Gabriel’s name, reach out with her index finger for the divot in his top lip to rouse him. She imagines them walking together from the corpse of the car, baptized clean by the catastrophe of impact. But she can’t move. The sheet presses against the tips of her eyelashes. She blinks.
She is back in the car. Static, voices, red lights sweeping over and gone. Over and gone. There is the twisted curve of metal and glass, the sky dense with stars, Gabriel’s motionless body and his quiet hand, his face turned from her. The voices and the legs come close and squat by the car and they pull his body out and above her line of sight. Micah struggles to call his name, to reach for him. If she could just wake Gabriel they could crawl from the corpse of the car under their own power and walk together into whatever comes next. They drag her body from the car and she rises and comes into contact with something soft. The sheet is drawn over her face and the red light skims over and is gone, over and gone. The sheet presses against the tips of her eyelashes. She blinks.
She is back in the car. Static and voices and sweeping red light. Gabriel’s face is turned from her, his hand curled and quiet. His limp body is pulled out and above her line of sight. She is dragged from the car and lifted and comes into contact with something soft. The sheet is drawn over her face and the red light skims over and is gone, over and gone. The sheet presses against the tip of her eyelashes. She blinks.
She is back in the car. Gabriel’s limp body is pulled out and above her line of sight. She is dragged from the car and lifted and comes into contact with something soft. The sheet is drawn over her face. It presses against the tip of her eyelashes. She blinks.
This happens and happens and happens until it stops happening.
Then they are alone with a soft conciliatory wind spilling through the skeleton of metal and over them, crossing Micah’s helpless face like a hand, stirring Gabriel’s hair.
*
Once in the very beginning when Gabriel talked about his life before and its disintegration, he said, “What I lost wasn’t the position or the power or the money. It was the purpose. I have no purpose now. I have nothing.” His voice was quiet and tight and strangely full. He lifted his hand to gesture briefly at the apartment around them, the sparse expanse of his life. “This is fucking pointless.”
She pushed herself up on her elbow and looked down into his face. He kept his gaze trained perfectly still on the ceiling and the room was dark but she could see in the sheen on his eyes that there were tears there. She felt stunned and powerless. She lay back down carefully and said nothing. Later he would return this favor.
“It was death,” he whispered. “I died.”
*
They exist within the long silence for immense fathoms of time.
The universe spirals around them on its interminable axis sometimes with laborious slowness, sometimes in a hectic frenzy. The fields sprout and flourish and winnow away to flatness, many times over, as rapidly as a heart beating, and then zero down to a pace so glacial it takes an ocean of time for a single blade to unfurl itself from the crust of the earth. Like an accelerated clock hand the sun sweeps past, pulling behind it an orange and rose gold sky cooling to eye-blue then violet then black shot with starlight and finally the ever closing and opening white iris of the moon. Galaxies reveal themselves and hang heavy from the sky, planets throbbing deep gold and red, dense milk-white coils of stars, all rotating suspended so close to Micah she can feel the insistent crush of gravity against her body. If she could move she would reach. If she had tears she would cry. The gift of the long silence is the realization that this rich beauty vibrating like a tuning fork struck to her bones has been there always, but only now, paralyzed in the amber of the long silence, is she able to see it. The world has flung itself open to her.
And through it all, there is Gabriel and her vigil over his motionless body. She watches the turning seasons and the relentless trajectory of time play over him and wonders if he feels it as she does. Dew in the tangle of his hair, a skin of snow along his shoulder, rain collected in the shallow cup of his upturned palm. Sun crawling like honey over the vulnerable cords of his throat. Sometimes the wind slides a hand beneath his shirt and he seems to breathe. But then it wanders away as wind always does and she sees that his stillness is final. Infinite.
Sometimes she is afraid that what she sees of Gabriel is all there is: the back of his head, his jaw and stretched neck, his shoulder, his trailing arm, his side and one leg, the end of which disappears into wreckage. Mostly she can take for granted that the rest of him is there, hidden from her by the angle. His beautiful details. The thumbprint of his navel. The hollow at the center of his chest. His vocal chords stilled but holding within them the memory of his voice both soft and deep with a touch of gravel at its lowest register, the voice that said her name outside the coffee shop the first day she followed him back to the apartment and breathed in that agonized way What is it about you?
But sometimes she fears that all of this is gone and what she sees is a facade, a hole in the universe filled with her last impression of him, and what lies on the other side is nothing. His hair falling over a flat blankness where the face isn’t. His shirt fluttering loose, the other sleeve empty. As though the void inside him howled loose on impact and blew him away like sand, leaving only what she was able to pin in place with her eyes. And now he is nothing more than the edge of himself.
At these times his name swells in her throat until she feels the flesh ache towards splitting and her need for him is so strong she can almost move and close the brief distance between his hand and hers.
But this fades. She remembers him as he was. She remembers him standing at the piano in his apartment. Reading at the coffee shop. Behind her on the bed in the dark, unbraiding her hair with his careful fingers, his knuckles sliding up her spine, so slowly she feels faint and has to close her eyes. Then once again she can take on faith that he is there even if she cannot see him. She can take on faith that she does not occupy the long silence alone.
She hopes that his dark eyes are open as hers are so that he can see the abundance of beauty surrounding them. Or if they are closed, that his lashes lie still and peaceful on the vulnerable skin under his eyes, and that he draws deep from a well of untroubled sleep.
*
As an adult, a young man, a teenager, a child, Gabriel exists within a particular set of formative memories and dreams that ceaselessly reoccur.
They appear to Micah as rooms in a long shadowed hallway. There are things here that she is meant to understand. Over many visits, Micah walks the hall and absorbs each of them, struggling to draw into herself the peculiar shape and quality of his monstrous pain like poison from a wound. Gabriel’s hall is long, the end a pinpoint receding into the distance. She thinks of his knotted jaw muscles and her realization from that last night, He is never at peace.
In one room he is a teenager, slumped on the couch in a psychologist’s office. His eyes are cast down and his whole face is shut like a door. There is a jagged split in his lower lip, fresh and swollen with blood, and the knuckles of his right hand are bruised and crossed with small cuts. He rubs them constantly. The psychologist asks, “Can you tell me when it began?” His pen is poised to write. Gabriel jerks his head to one side, an involuntary spasm. A frown crosses his face and he shakes his head slightly as though to rid himself of something. The psychologist waits, turning his pen in his fingers.
Then he is a child, maybe four, standing on a porch with his hand hooked around the railing. There is a car in a driveway. It starts, sweeps backwards into the street, and drives away. The man at the wheel does not look back. Gabriel comes down the steps and stands in the middle of the yard squinting after the car. He shifts from foot to foot, slowly.
Then he is an adult, his hair cut short and his face clean-shaven, sitting in a chair with his elbows on the armrests and his fingers steepled. Across from him is an older man in a grey suit. When Gabriel speaks, his voice is steady and dead-cold with rage, each word distinct from the last. He says, “As you are well aware, my class fills and goes to wait list five minutes after open enrollment every single semester and students stand along the back wall to audit it, and you’re firing me because I fucked your daughter?” The man behind the desk says, smoothly, “If you aren’t off campus in five minutes I will press charges and you will register as a sex offender. Either way, you will never teach again.”
Again an adult, in a different office with a beautiful girl. She is leaning forward against the edge of his desk, her hands braced on a stack of paper scored with line after line of small, intense handwriting. Gabriel is behind her, his chest flush with her back, her long hair gathered into his fist at the nape of her neck, one hand spread open over her ribcage just below her breasts. Her eyes are closed but his are wide and wolfish, dilated. He tugs her head gently back until her rapt face is tipped to the ceiling, her throat exposed, her ear at his mouth, and says, “Can you do this without getting caught?”
Then he is a teenager kneeling on the cheap pad under the communion rail, a wafer placed over and over again on his tongue.
Then he is a young man, standing for an entire endless night straight and still in the center of a dark living room, the pad of one thumb pressed to his closed mouth.
Then he is a child, shaking and holding a dead mouse in his palm.
Then he is a teenager, bolting from a classroom to vomit on the floor in the hall while a sex education video plays in the background. The students watch him, silent and shocked, down on his knees in the mess he’s made, struggling to suck in a breath.
Then he is Gabriel now, balanced on his elbow in his bed, watching Micah sleep with her hands tucked between her face and the pillow. Although he motionless, there is misery and unrest written on him everywhere.
Then he is Gabriel the day they first met at the coffee shop, back at his apartment later that evening, sitting at the piano. His right hand plays something resonant and melodic but with a painful edge and she realizes that she knows it. From the day he played while she sat on the couch and watched, dying inside for him to turn and speak to her. And from his car at the last moment. Exit Music. The hair on her arms stands up. He drops his head to his wrist along the edge of the piano after the music fades, his leg bouncing rapid fire. Making the same decision that ruined his life once, again.
The final room is the most important. It takes many visits to reach it. Micah feels the tension and the pain coming from this room like heat from several doorways down. Her breathing accelerates as she approaches and heavy revulsion shakes loose inside her. Here at last is something no one should see, something fierce and killing, that melted down the inside of Gabriel like nuclear fallout and rendered him a wasteland. An island, quarantined.
The way he kept himself just out of reach, as though he was something sharp she could hurt herself on: this is why.
At first what she sees seems strange but innocuous. But the more she watches it, the more upsetting it becomes, insidious, seeping inside her. As though she is too close to a source of toxic radiation and the poison is bleeding into her bones.
It is a bedroom, an adult’s bedroom. Gabriel, no older than nine, is in front of an old fashioned full-length mirror. His eyes are cast down away from his reflection. Behind him a woman kneels. The front of her body is laid flush against the back of his and her arms stretch around him. With slow, careful fingers, she unbuttons his shirt from the bottom button up to the top. Taking her time. Watching her hands in the mirror, engrossed, breathing hard through her mouth. Pressing forward against him.
When she reaches the top button and his shirt is completely open, a frown crosses his face. He shakes his head just slightly, as though trying to rid himself of something.
Micah makes herself watch and watch. Gabriel’s face shutting itself down from the inside, and then that involuntary ripple on the surface once the shirt is unbuttoned.
The woman’s face. Absorbed and nakedly hungry. Her mouth open. And her undeniable resemblance to Gabriel himself. His aunt, maybe his sister, but most likely – his mother. Her body sealed to his, predatory and possessive, suffocating. Their similar faces twinned in the mirror.
Micah blinks and she is back in the car. Gabriel’s still body is once again next to her, although now she understands that part of him is always in that bedroom. In that moment and the sickness that flowered open after.
*
There is one day that Micah thinks about often within the long silence: their sweetest day, an anomaly in their pattern. It was just after she told him about the baby and they had made the decision, mutual and wordless, to ignore the situation. But the situation is inside Micah, so for her this agreement was an unsustainable lie.
They are in bed side by side. Gabriel is staring at the ceiling, nursing his mute unknowable thoughts, and she is watching him, trying not to blink because her eyes are filled with tears. Without warning the misery rips loose inside her and she drags in a sharp, shuddering breath. He looks at her, startled, and she whispers, “I’m sorry.” The tears release, she can’t control them, and soak into his pillow. She holds her breath, trying to stop. Trying to blank her expression.
Gabriel shifts onto his side towards her. They are inches apart. His eyes wander over her face, carefully, as though trying to decipher something. Then he sighs, deeply, and lifts his hand and draws the side of his thumb under her eye and down her cheek. He brushes back her hair and settles his palm to her jawline. His fingers stretch to the back of her neck. His hand is warm, almost hot. She breathes as he breathes. Even, calm. The knot inside her loosens.
He asks, “Are you hungry?”
She sits, dressed, her hair tucked behind her ears, on the stool that usually holds a stack of books and watches him work at the kitchen island. His feet are braced apart on the floor, his stomach against the edge of the island. He slices bread, tomatoes, cheese, in the measured, deliberate way he does everything. Frowning, focused. As though how the task is accomplished matters just as much as accomplishing the task itself. In this moment she feels enormously comforted, and safe. It is a surprise to slip so easily into the guise of safety with him when normally his principal effect is to throw her sharply off balance and into crippling doubt.
Wordless, without looking at her, he holds up the one extra rectangle of cheese and she takes it from his hand with her mouth. Then he sets the knife to the side and builds four identical stacks on the cutting board: bread, olive oil from a glass bottle, salt, a slice of tomato, a slice of cheese. They eat in silence.
When they’re finished, Micah slides from the stool and pulls her shoes on and finds her bag. Gabriel is at the sink, his back to her, running water over the cutting board. She hesitates, her eyes on the back of his neck. Often she leaves without a word or a glance between them, just the neat click of the latch as the door shuts and separates them back into their real lives. This time feels different. She wants something more, some sort of ending to this heartbreaking flash of normalcy so she is able to go home and grieve it.
He turns towards her, drying his hands, but she has already shaken herself awake and is at the doorway. Berating herself for even the thought of expecting anything beyond the bounty he has given her today.
She is in the hall and the door almost closed when Gabriel’s voice comes quiet but strong. “Micah,” he says, and she stops. Lifts her eyes to his where he stands halfway to the door as though he started after her but thought better of it.
“It’s okay,” he says.
Aching back towards this day from the long silence, Micah sees double. Before she only knew Gabriel’s profound level of control over his every action, his rigidity, his outward calm. But now, caged inside this calm like an animal suffering inhumanely, she sees the emotional turmoil that characterizes his entire life. She understands the supreme deftness with which he controls his own damage, how he forces himself to move normally through the constant roaring pain, and she is stunned. Reverent.
*
At last, Micah finds herself back inside the car moments before everything ended. There is something about what happened that never fully registered and she is meant to absorb it.
The car is dark, punctuated with bars of orange light sliding through at intervals. Gabriel’s hands are vised at the top of the wheel. He is trained steady on the road. She watches him in the glow of the dashboard: a luxury she allows herself. His right hand leaves the wheel long enough to turn a dial and music rises through the car. Something melodic and resonant but with a painful edge. A bitter hardness vibrating underneath. The voice aches. Micah feels the hair on her arms stand on edge.
“What is it?”
“Exit Music.”
“It’s good.” It’s right.
“It’s very good.” Now.
Micah sees her hand rise, her fingers fit into the jigsaw of his knuckles. Her eyes are on the line of his jaw and his sharp profile. Then all at once the sky rotates on an unnatural axis, the fields rise,
She is back in the car. Gabriel’s hands are vised at the top of the wheel, he is trained steady on the road. She watches him in the glow of the dashboard: a luxury she allows herself. His right hand leaves the wheel to turn a dial and music rises through the car. Something melodic and resonant with a painful edge. She feels the hair on her arms stand on end.
“What is it?”
“Exit Music.”
“It’s good.”
“It’s very good.” Now.
Micah sees her hand rise, her fingers fit into the jigsaw of his knuckles. Her eyes are on the line of his jaw and his sharp profile. Then all at once the sky rotates on an unnatural axis,
She is back in the car. But a second or two farther ahead. The music already plays. They have spoken their last words. Her hand is in the air moving towards his. This time she keeps her focus on their hands as she fits her fingers into the jigsaw of his knuckles. Then all at once the sky rotates on an unnatural axis, and she sees it.
She sees it, and learns too late the lesson of how love misgiven can mutate into ruination: her hand not on his but between his, white-knuckled and unwavering, wrenching the wheel violently around as far as it will go, cutting the tires to an impossible angle and sending the car into its catastrophic spin.
And beyond this, she sees Gabriel’s hands up, letting her, lifted the way they were that day at the coffee shop when he laughed with someone else, lifted in a denial of responsibility. As the car flips, in slow motion, in the dreamlike stasis of the long silence, she sees his hands brace for impact, one against the window and one against the soft cheap fabric covering the ceiling. His head is cocked back against the headrest, his eyes closed, and these words wrest from his throat, rough and desperate as the fevered seconds before release, It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay
Yes
Yes
It’s okay
*
She is absolved.
*
Micah blinks and she is lying on the road. Gabriel is in his eternal position next to her. The mid-morning light is pearlescent, opaque, and the fields are gilded with frost. A low cold wind touches Gabriel’s hair and runs down the fabric of his shirt like a finger.
She blinks and sees the winding sheet room and the hallway stretching far beyond to his childhood self being forever unbuttoned.
She blinks and sees the night sky, the twisted metal of the car edged with glass teeth, swept over and over with red light. She hears the voices and boots on glass and road gravel, the percussive bursts of static.
She blinks and sees Gabriel at the piano that early day in his apartment. His body turned slightly sideways as though he refuses to submit completely to anything. His hair fallen forward, obscuring his eyes. One long hand holding the lit cigarette, propped on his knee, one on the piano bringing forth the slow, melancholy notes of the song that would trigger her at their ending. Exit Music. She sees him crushing the cigarette in the ashtray on the bench, turning his head towards her and giving her the full force of his stare. His finger sinks into the piano key and a note in full volume peals across the room. There is her startled smile retracted immediately, and his barely returned half-smile. He shifts his lean body to the edge of the bench then, facing her, and she holds her breath, waiting for him to speak.
Micah struggles to keep from blinking, struggles to keep him here, here, right here, please, if she could just hold him this way with the abundance of midday sun in his apartment lighting up his every stark detail and his long hands at rest on his knees, his black gaze on her strong and insistent as touch and god, god, but he is beautiful.
In his soft voice, deep and liquid, “Come here.”
And Micah’s eyes roll closed. The turning red lights die, the hallway darkens and the rooms seal like mouths finally finished speaking, Exit Music faces into silence. Lashes still at last against the vulnerable skin under her eyes, Micah draws deep from a well of untroubled sleep: she is at peace.
Chelsea Laine Wells is a graduate of the Columbia College Chicago Fiction Writing Department whose work has appeared in PANK, The Butter, Bluestem, wigleaf, Evergreen, Heavy Feather, and the short fiction anthology Nouns of Assemblage. Honors include first place in the Columbia Scholastic Press Association Awards, first place in the Guild Complex Literary Awards, nomination for two Pushcart Prizes, and nomination for Best of the Net. She served twice as a co-editor of Hair Trigger, Columbia College’s yearly literary anthology, as well as a judge in Columbia’s Young Author Writing Competition for many years. Chelsea is proud to be a high school librarian who, among other things, leads a stone-cold pack of weirdos in a kick-ass student writers club. She lives with her husband Nick and daughter Atlee Harper in the Oak Cliff area of Dallas, TX. Find Chelsea’s website at www.chelsealainewells.com.
IMAGE COURTESY: JEFFREY BETTS
