The Dark Space (6 page)

So, yeah. I wasn’t sure how much of that it was cool to tell Winnie. Or how much I had to tell her, since it was pretty clear she could read my mind. Sometimes.

I was trying not to think too hard about it.

Winnie linked her arm with Sarah’s. They were new best friends, apparently. I spent ninety minutes saying
The stage is big
and
The walls are tall
with hipster muttonchops Jason, and Winnie had some kind of transcendental experience.

“Was he good?” she asked Sarah.

Sarah gave me a considering look. “He was better than I expected.”

“So why just two times?”

She twisted her mouth into a sly little smile. “I met this girl.”

Winnie smiled, too — a big, open smile that I’d never seen before. One of her top front teeth is darker than the other, more opaque, but only so you’d notice it in full sunlight.

I saw it for the first time, and I wanted to throw myself on the ground at her feet. Roll around there like a dog.

I mean, honestly. What the fucking fuck?

There was a sound then, like fingers snapping in my consciousness, and I thought about taking both of them to the coffee shop to tell them the story about my mom.

I wanted to ask them,
What’s happening to me? Is it magic? Am I nuts?

Why does it feel so fucking good?

We could have had one of those throwdown moments then, if we’d done it. We’d have been like the Scooby-Doo gang, where ten different creepy things are happening to them separately, and then they all come together in the van and figure out, cripes, this is a
thing
going on here. This is fucking
crazysauce
.

Maybe we would’ve gone to talk to Maggie, laid it all out for her.

Everything would’ve been different if we had, I’m sure of it. That morning — that cold February morning when the sky was overcast but the light so clear, like the gray was a filter that kept all but the purest rays out — it was a turning point.

We turned it when Winnie reached for my elbow. Even through her mitten, through my coat, I could feel her smile all up and down my arm, soaking into my side. I could feel that darker tooth vibrating on its own frequency, not quite the same as the others, setting up its own assonance and dissonance.

I could feel the piece of my future that was shaped like LA — a rumbling and a fracture, and that whole continent of myself shearing off. Floating away.

“Let’s go back to my room,” Winnie said. “The three of us.”

And there was just no question in my mind.

Wherever Winnie went was where I was supposed to go.

I hung back, walked behind them, which seemed right. I liked looking at them together. Sarah had nearly a foot on Winnie, and dozens of inches everyplace else. Winnie’s black winter hat completely covered her head, and it matched her knee-length black coat. That brown scarf. Her laced boots. Sarah’s coat went nearly to her ankles, was ten different colors, and had some kind of inexplicable llama or alpaca tableau worked into the back. Her dark hair was loose, and there were pieces in it that were bright pink.

It was like, between them, I could imagine the entire possible spectrum of women. All the sizes and shapes of them, all the textures and colors of them, all the sounds and smells of them. They walked together in that snuggly girl way I always liked to watch on campus, Sarah’s head bent down to Winnie’s, Winnie’s bent up to Sarah’s, and there was no question at all about the general superiority and potential regency of women. It made me feel
comfortable
.

Safe.

I also knew I had taken a detour, and the signage was fucking terrible, and self-doubt was the monster hanging behind the biggest, darkest trees ready to eat me.

I hung back to reassure myself of their strength, I know that now. They were my champions. On the outside, it looked like I was doing what I had always done, which was say
yes
.

Yes
, I will drive all night to Chicago with these four people I barely know.

Yes
, I will go to Barcelona for study abroad where I will, of course, learn everything I know well about cunnilingus from the hosting university’s Spanish history professor and be so moved as to change my major from Political Science to Spanish.

Yes
, I will eat, smoke, drink, kiss, touch, fuck that.

On the inside, though, it was a different trip entirely. The thing about
yes
is that it’s a highway. You get on it. It is high-speed travel to a single destination, and even if you’re not sure what the destination looks like, you agreed to the red pin on the map in advance.
Yes
isn’t some scenic route. It’s not a quest.

Whereas this trip was different. It was trusting in my companions and intuition, reading signs and wonders, stopping at every possible way station and seriously contemplating going back. It was the long way, so long that time was impossibly expanded, and not only was it ridiculous to ask,
Are we there yet?
but also, I found out later, there might not ever be a
there
.

Those first few steps behind Winnie were the steps that would send me on a trajectory that made my previous orbit mathematically impossible.

It wasn’t me saying
yes
.

It was just me.

When Cal tells this next part of the story, it’s always with a wink in his voice, a knowing sort of leer that sets people up to think they know what happens, and it involves a lot of slapping flesh and one very happy penis.

Cal is such a dork.

What we actually did next was play Euchre.

I had the set at the bottom of a milk crate by the foot of my bed — a wooden box that held a deck of cards and pegs to go in the holes on the top, one beside the symbol for each suit, two neat rows of holes for counting to ten.

All of it pristine, because of course, who would I ever have asked to play?

In my fantasy life, all those fantasy years I spent in the Quad Cities and Coeur d’Alene, Reading, Harrisburg, imagining I was in Gambier or Oberlin, I thought I would go to college and play cards. I thought I’d find my tribe, my happy band of misfits, and that we’d spend late nights listening to music and laughing over Euchre.

I thought that kind of thing just happened in college, but it turned out that it didn’t happen to me.

I was starting to understand that I was responsible for making it happen.

So I dug out those cards, and I set up the board on the floor while Sarah studied my puzzle box and Cal sat on my bed, studying both of us.

“We’re playing cards?” he asked when he sussed out what I had in my hands.

“Euchre. But you’ll have to teach me.”

“Tight,” Sarah said.

“You need four, though.” Cal’s eyebrows were worried when he told me this, but those ninety minutes we’d spent in class today had wiped all my fear away.

It was so
simple
. Everything was simple.

“Go find us a fourth, then.”

“I don’t know anybody who lives in—”

I just gave him a push, right on the pink spot, and he went. While he was gone, Sarah played with my hair, raked it one way, then another. Her fingers against my scalp both made me sleepy and concentrated my thoughts into a neat, winding spiral.

Cal came back with the most beautiful boy I had ever seen — tall and slim and brown, sleek as an otter, his hair slicked down to his scalp and smelling of hair oil, of coconuts when coconuts were exotic. He wore a tuxedo shirt with loose flapping cuffs, gray trousers with a fine pink pinstripe, ankle boots covered in silver studs.

“I hear one of you is a virgin,” he said when he came through the door. The light that came off him was the cool blue beautiful of neon, electrified in its tube.

“That’s me,” I said. “I’m Winnie.”

He said, “I know” and folded into a seat across from me. “We’ll be partners.”

Cal to my right. Sarah to my left. The game was as easy to pick up as I supposed sex would be when I got around to it. The boy’s name was Marvin. He lived one floor up. I’d never seen him before, but he’d seen me.

“Lots of times,” he said when Cal asked him. “I’m always seeing her.”

Everything was so easy.

When Cal tells this story, he says,
Then we played cards
, and he watches his listeners’ faces for disappointment. He draws it out, talks forever about what kind of cards. Who won, by how many points, the time Sarah went alone and got all five tricks, how they still managed to lose because I was a natural and Marvin fed me cards.

I love watching him tell the story, because he ends it different every time, whichever way he thinks will have the most effect.

Then we had a four-way
, he’ll say.

Then Winnie sucked Marv off while me and Sarah watched.

Then Sarah tied us all up and made us lick her.

Then we took a nap together.

Then Winnie fucked my ass with a dildo until I cried.

He loves shocking people. Loves making them look at me wide-eyed, making them
look
if they haven’t seen me, and, I admit, I oblige him. I pull back on my energy, wait for that moment, then let it out, let it fling from my skin like I’ve thrown open a door.

Just to see Cal smile and look at me with that indulgence, that pleasure to have demonstrated it all over again: I’ve been here the whole time.

What actually happened, though, after Marvin and I kicked Cal and Sarah’s asses at Euchre two hands in a row, was that Cal invited us over to his parents’ house for dinner.

The rest of it would come later.

Every day was a pearl on a string, completely separate from the others and, yeah,
precious
and whole. I found time, just found it, could read entire books and spend seven hours at dinner talking to Sarah and Winnie, Marvin. I went to all my classes and for once kept my mouth shut and let other people have a piece. I stopped calling my profs by nicknames just because they had held me when I was a baby. I started looking at them in actual fucking wonder, thinking,
They held me when I was a baby.

That’s right. Repeat the statement until you understand the complete truth of it.

One day, I cleaned my room, like I was twelve, throwing away old schoolwork, shelves of meaningless novelty figurines, fantasy paperbacks that reeked of mold, old event T-shirts, crusted glass pipes, just piles of bullshit.

I had always imagined myself driving to LA in my ’99 forest green Golf, a single box of books and a suitcase of T-shirts and board shorts rattling around in the back. Where the fuck had that come from? My real life was nine trash bags of crap that stank of scented candles and crotch.

When I was done, I even took the curtains off the windows and polished the glass with newspaper and vinegar.

My mom started hanging out with me in my room, all winter sun and bare floors, to read together — me in my beanbag, her curled on my bed with a quilt she had found for me that her mother had made.

One afternoon, I went snowshoeing with my dad, something we hadn’t done in forever, and for a short part of the trail he reached out without saying anything and held my hand. I remembered how I used to jockey to hold my dad’s hand on outings when I was small, how much more preferable it felt to hold his over my mom’s, because it made me feel like a
guy
.

I wondered when it had started to feel manlier to avoid holding my dad’s or any other dude’s hand at all costs.

My want for Winnie was the song on repeat in my head that I never got tired of, that directed how my body moved and enhanced the meaning of all of my actions and the actions of others. Stroking myself in the shower, in the morning before I opened my eyes, had become a legitimate prayer — repetition, love, release,
please
.

One morning, I took off all my clothes and curled around a pillow, naked and shaking, and I didn’t think about anything but Winnie’s upper lip, how it curved into a perfect arch without even a dip of a bow. I thought of her lip, and I stroked over my balls, my inner thighs, my ass. I thought of her lip and I squeezed my dick and then licked the pre-come off my fingers. I pumped into my fist, slow, and with my other hand I scratched my nipples, caressed my throat. When I came in long, hot spills, I moaned into the crook of my elbow, broken and loud.

I had come imagining putting my tongue on Winnie’s upper lip.

In class, Jason noticed I always had a hard-on, and I just told him,
Yeah, it’s for Winnie, nothing to do.
Then he confessed that all he wanted was to make out with Finn, the synth music guy, that he thought about it all the time, had dreams about Finn, and had even asked him for downloads of his music. Finn wasn’t even his type, he said, his normal type being women, but one day when we were sitting in our share circle, our arms outstretched, our fingertips near touching the people to either side of us but not, he felt this
thing
come through him,
You know, dude?
The energy Finn passed to Jason had cracked into his hand, made an audible snap, broke apart something inside of him that left some Finn-shaped hole.