Bed

Sincerity

Once, while having sex with his girlfriend Alicia, the theme from Star Wars had gone into Aaron’s head and he had suddenly and loudly begun to hum it, which he could not, then, sustain, as he had started to laugh.

He laughed and laughed.

And things changed after that.

Sex became a precarious thing. Often, it could not happen. Songs or tunes, little ditties — tom-tom drum beats, kazoo-y cartoon music — would automatically go into both their heads. The required focus and grave seriousness of sex, that inner, outer-spacey concentration toward some black and scrappy source, some vague but findable piece of lust — it could not happen anymore. Only songs could happen. And there were other changes. Their quarrels — they had always fought — took on a tone of mocking and farce. Sometimes, now, fighting with Alicia, both of them yelling — shrieking at times, and crying, even, like babies! — something in Aaron would scald white and clean, like a flash pasteurization, and he would tickle her until she fell down giggling. Or he would just start laughing, then have to chase down and tickle her, to sort of convince her — delude her — of his otherwise unacceptable behavior. And Alicia, too, underwent change, having once, during a fight, opened a drawer and taken from it a glass of water — she had premeditated it! — and, after telling Aaron, sincerely, that he was an asshole, grinned and poured the water on his head.

This new flippancy, though, was not strictly joke-y and fun. There was something, Aaron felt, murderous to it. In each moment of laughter or play there was a small probability of manslaughter, a percentage chance of violence and jail-time. Alicia sometimes went too far, Aaron felt. She cut him once with a fork. Another time, Aaron daydreamed for a very long time about setting a death-trap for Alicia; a spiked pit, perhaps, in some parking lot — a death pit!

In this way, then — unable to assimilate these feelings of assassination, farce, song, and play — they became a bit reckless. They grew daring and confused. Though their fights increased noticeably in frequency and lies when they spent more than one consecutive night together, and though, Aaron knew, they did not really love each other, not anymore, maybe not ever (they had become like siblings now, except that they lacked the responsibility of family, that kind of forced love, and so were less siblings than just sort of moody, interdepartmental co-workers) — though, in other words, they really should not have been getting an apartment together, they went ahead and got an apartment together, signed a two-year lease, as, in addition to their new brazenness, they were not — and had never been — energetic people, but were, to be honest, needy people; prone to disillusionment, lazy about new things, and very much fearful of loneliness, desperation, meaninglessness, and dating. They needed each other, they knew, needed the vague momentum of two, the mild tyranny and oppression of it — that second brain like an orbital satellite and remote control to the first brain — to let them know what, at any given moment, was the point in life; and also to argue with and complain to.

Their new apartment was sunny and spacey in an atomic-bombed way. It had wood floors. It was on the edge of a massive, abandoned, wasp-infested shopping center plaza, a few miles from the university. It was a dry place, with no cockroaches or mildew, but many spiders and moths and silverfish — bugs that were better than other people’s bugs, Aaron liked to say, were wittier and more role-playing; sometimes, on the weekends, two large spiders would walk out into the center of the bedroom and stay there for hours, like henchmen; then when no one was looking, usually during the night, they would hurry away, like lovers.

In bed, they watched a moth walk experimentally across the floor, taking small, tottering steps.

“How funny,” Alicia said. “So funny.”

“It’s like a little … brown bear,” Aaron said. “A tiny one, because of the fuzziness.”

“I can see that,” Alicia said. “That’s kind of scary. I imagine it turning into a bear.”

The moth walked slowly out of view, behind a desk, then — back in view, going faster now — into the bathroom, where it lifted and flew noisily around, steady and aimed, and fulfilled, Aaron thought distractedly, as a miniature blow-dryer. They were talking now about spring break. Someone had brought up what to do over spring break. Who, though? This seemed to matter. Aaron had a feeling that, depending on who had brought it up, he should be either apprehensive or relieved.

“Maybe we should go to London,” Alicia said.

“London has no literary value,” Aaron said. Though his face was turned away, he sort of forced a grin anyway. He hated it when people got so inured that they went around being sarcastic without ever changing their facial expression. It was inhuman. It was so cheaply disenchanted. There was no compassion to going around meanly making jokes in people’s faces. Though, Aaron didn’t like it when comedians laughed at their own jokes. It was too … human, or something.

“They have Stonehedge. Stone … thing,” Alicia was saying. “Stonehenge. I have this fantasy … of living inside of Stonehenge. I know it’s not a house.” They didn’t say anything for a while. “You have no literary value,” Alicia then said.

“You have no face value,” Aaron said. He laughed. “I didn’t mean anything by that. Why did I say that?”

“Face value,” Alicia said.

“Because your face is ugly. That’s why I said it.” Aaron rolled over, grinning, and looked at Alicia. “Really, though. It’s because of the idiom or whatever. What’s the face value of this rare coin I found in my backyard? See.” He looked at her a moment more — looked at her face; her two eyes, black and incremental as a Japanese animation, her nose and mouth like well-made trinkets; how could anything true and complex ever be expressed? — and then rolled her carefully over and held her, loosely, like a thing that needed comfort, but also needed air. Alicia didn’t say anything. It was only October, Aaron knew. They probably shouldn’t have been talking about spring break. It was elliptic, foreboding talk. It assumed certain things about winter break.

“Who started talking about spring break first?” Aaron said. “A minute ago.”

“What,” Alicia said. She had a habit of automatically saying ‘what.’ Sometimes she’d say ‘what’ and then respond immediately after — cynically, without any visible shame. But it was a good way to buy time, Aaron had to admit, a cautious, maybe even considerate, thing to do. Probably it started that way, as a conversational strategy, but now just continued as a thing of her identity — a crucial part of her identity! Aaron felt some contempt for her. He felt bigoted and tired. He wasn’t going to repeat his question.

“What,” Alicia said again, after a while.

“ ‘What’ what,” Aaron said.

They didn’t talk for a long time, did not move, just lay in bed. Eventually, then, they made it somehow into the kitchen, and from there, affected no doubt by sunlight, they became a bit zealous and drove to a movie theatre and watched two movies, then ate dinner, slowly and dully, without drinking any water — feeling sort of shadowy and eradicated after the movies — and were now back in bed. Neither of them had spoken for a long time. Aaron was feeling very complacent, falling asleep a little. There were times when he stopped thinking — his cares and concerns left him, in a faraway smoke; a smoke he could see, in the distance — and everything around him stayed the same, so that he then just sort of passed, one-dimensionally — time-wise — through it all, feeling honest and fine and worriless.

“Do you want to know what I’m thinking about?” Alicia said. But Aaron had fallen asleep. Alicia waited a minute, then woke Aaron and repeated herself.

“What are you thinking about?” Aaron really wanted to know. Sleep had made him curious about Alicia. He had forgotten her, and would now relearn her. He felt grateful and intimate.

“I’ve been worried,” Alicia said. “Can’t you tell?”

Aaron now wondered why she hadn’t asked what he was thinking about. It seemed maybe hypocritical, what was happening right now, seemed almost — somehow — adulterous. “My sister hates me,” Alicia said; she and her sister had been close until Alicia left for college; now Alicia was worried; she felt guilty, and urgent, as time was running out, she felt, for reconciliation — and then there were some intricacies that Aaron had never fully understood. He had heard this talk before. He began to wonder if they ever resolved that thing with the face value; and there was something about spring break. What was that? Aaron realized that he wasn’t listening to Alicia at all, was not even trying. He could hear her voice, but was somehow able to process it not as language but as sound. He laughed. “Wait,” he said, interrupting her, “what are you saying right now? Sorry, I wasn’t listening.” He laughed again. “Can you start over, please?”

“Should I make her a card? What should I write on it, though,” Alicia said. Aaron was losing concentration again — so fast, he thought factually — was thinking about a story he had been working on, but then Alicia’s voice became suddenly very loud. “You’ve got to stop doing that,” she said. “You can’t just phase out like that. That’s so rude. Do you know how rude that is?”

“I know,” Aaron said. “Sorry. I’m really sorry. I know it’s really rude. I really am sorry.” He was. But should he be apologizing this vehemently? It felt mindless and insincere. “You do it too,” he said. He didn’t know this for a fact, but it was a good, vague thing to say, probably. There was a long moment of silence, and then he tickled her; she tensed and got quickly out of bed.

She walked to the bathroom door, slowly turned around, came back to the bed, and lay down.

“I’m going to sleep,” she said, but then got out of bed again, left the room, and came back with a steak knife, held by her head, like to attack. She walked to Aaron and stabbed him in the chest. The blade was flimsy, Aaron saw. Plastic. He laughed. “I’m serious,” Alicia said. She was grinning. “I’m kind of angry.” She threw the knife across the room, where it fell on a shirt, from which a silverfish darted out, stopped, and then glided slowly into the bathroom.

Alicia lay down facing away. “Did you like that?” she said. “It wasn’t just for fun.” She pulled the covers up, tight, to her chin. “Don’t worry. I’ll get over this,” she said. “I’m just sleepy. I’m just worried about my sister. Nothing’s wrong.” Lately, they were always reassuring each other that nothing was wrong; and probably it was true — life wasn’t supposed to be incredible, after all. Life wasn’t some incredible movie. Life was all the movies, ever, happening at once. There were good ones, bad ones, some went straight to video. This seemed right. That’s exactly, literally, right, Aaron thought, already mocking himself. He could not sleep and began to worry about his parents. They were always yelling at each other, about the stock market. They stayed home every day and had no friends. Actually, they did go to the movies every week; they did that. Still, there was something disastrous about them; that they had only each other, as they were immigrants and so had no relatives nearby; or that they didn’t seem to have any hobbies, or interests, even. They were incomprehensible to Aaron. He was, though, writing a story about them, whatever that meant.

He had an idea one day, to switch into Alicia’s writing workshop. He would surprise her or something. He was lazy to do the official switching, so one day he just affected an air of having switched — something of ironic efficacy, of recent bureaucratic struggle overcome, he guessed — and then went in, a little blank in the face, prepared to blame the registrar. But no one said anything, not even Alicia.

“Aaron, yay,” she had said, actually; but that was all.

A few weeks later, they were discussing Aaron’s story; not the one about his parents — he was still working on that one, as it had changed on him, taken on a made-for-TV movie tone, which a story could do — but a different one; not a serious story, but one that Aaron was proud of. He had worked very hard on making it impervious to criticism.

“This has no literary value,” Alicia said, after some generic praise from the class.

“You have no literary value,” Aaron said. “You as a person.”

“That’s so good,” someone said softly.

“You’re quoting me,” Alicia said. “Everyone; he just quoted me.” She had been depressed lately, she had been telling Aaron once or twice per week. (“You’re not depressed,” Aaron would say. “If you’re depressed so am I. We both are.”) She was thinking about quitting school, moving back home, up north. She worried about her parents and mildly retarded brother; and her sister, who had stayed home, seven years now, rather than go to college.

“You’re quoting me,” Aaron said. It was his word against hers, he knew, though probably they shouldn’t be quarrelling in class like this. But he was grinning, so probably it wasn’t quarrelling — probably the grinning made it okay.

“College … has no literary value,” someone said. The class was an incisive one, though in a meek and circuitous way, as they were shy people, really — fearful, above all, Aaron knew, of the stupid remark, the trite sentiment; always coming in late to avoid small talk; the dreaded small talk! — though, depending on mood, and on drugs, no doubt, they could get a bit wild, as they all had good senses of humor and playful spirits (after reading D.H. Lawrence’s The Blind Man the previous week, they had laughed and laughed at D.H.’s use of a mollusk simile; the lawyer who was like a mollusk whose shell is broken).

“What about community college?” the teacher said. “I think those have literary value.”

“Community colleges with minority make-ups have literary value,” Aaron said. He remembered something; a few days ago he had joked about community colleges — condescendingly, Alicia had thought; and then they fought — had said something about the vague leper colonies of them. “Community colleges on the west coast have beach value.”

“Littoral value,” Alicia said slowly. Aaron looked at her.

“Well then, what’s more important,” the teacher said. “Literary value, or beach value? Compare and contrast. Two pages, choose your own font, due next week.” The teacher claimed to believe that no one would write anything of importance between the ages of fifteen and forty. He was not very attentive in class — sometimes letting discussion dwindle into woozy, melancholy, time-distorting silences; sometimes getting up casually to use the restroom, like a student! — but was really good at taking sarcasm to the next level, which the class found idiosyncratic and refreshing and really liked, a lot.

They drove two hours to visit Aaron’s parents one day.

Aaron’s mother was sitting in the living room, blushing, crying a little. The TV was on. Aaron’s father was in the computer room. He said that Aaron’s mother had just lost $20,000 by shorting the wrong stock. He was hunched close to the computer, and did not look angry, but nervous, or else giddy — it was hard to tell.

“They always fight about the same things,” Aaron said in bed. “They’re not in love. Not even close. Actually, I don’t know. I don’t know anything. All I know is I’m worried about them. All I know’s I have this image of a swamp and it’s rising up and moving into me, like a fog. I read about swamp-fogs. Swamp gas. They rise up and move and people think they’re spaceships. Will-o’-the-wisp. That sounds like a toilet paper for elves. Upper class elves.” He felt excited. Being with Alicia in a large house in his childhood bed excited him for some reason. He really was worried, though.

“Your dad on the computer, he was like a mad-scientist,” Alicia said.

“They have money but never spend it. All they do is lose it in the stock market.” Aaron laughed. “They’re so bad at the stock market. What is the stock market anyway? A computer or what? It’s like an idea or something. It’s probably an entire country. Some tiny country between Mongolia and China, with a rainbow-colored force-field around it.” He thought about that and felt a bit nostalgic. He kind of wanted to move to that place. “And what’s gravity? No one knows. No one cares. Why is there gravity? That’s so weird. That’s like, why are there things? That’s so depressing, that that question even exists. But sincere, I think. I mean I don’t feel fake at all, asking that. Finally, I don’t feel fake!” He had talked too long, he knew. He wouldn’t talk anymore. Alicia would talk. Or she wouldn’t. Aaron had the feeling that she was devoting little to no attention to him while worrying secretly and intensely about other things. “Are you thinking about your sister?”

“You and I always fight about the same things too,” Alicia said.

“We’re working on it though,” Aaron said. They were. They had even come up with a plan, that whenever one of them started to get angry, the other would let them know — show them how useless it was — and then they would hold each other. “We have the plan.” He laughed. Actually, he had come up with the plan; it had been his idea!

“What are you so happy about?” Alicia said.

“I’m not,” Aaron said. “I’m actually really, really, really worried.” He tickled Alicia until she fell off the bed, onto the carpet, from where she crawled to the bathroom. They were getting lazy. They weren’t trying anymore. Alicia shouldn’t be crawling like that, Aaron thought slowly, that’s strange and unhappy. He waited for her, but fell asleep.

For some time now Aaron had been writing every day. There were moments when he felt sudden blots of something — truth? serotonin? worse, cholesterol? — in his head, new and startling things, and he’d resolve them into words, and there would be some complicated, ulterior, and life-affirming, he suspected, pleasure in that; and he even felt, sometimes, the somewhat comforting beginnings, maybe, of something like a career. But he had certain disillusionments about writing that he felt he could not ignore. He didn’t like the subjectivity of it. He liked a thing to be perfect and meticulous and all-encompassing and, finally, unchangeable — unworryable. But there were, he knew, only momentary perfections, which were not perfections at all, but delusions. It worried him. Could one delude oneself through a life? Yes, he knew. Probably that was the only way.

But Aaron was not good at delusion. He had, in his life, he suspected, learned something, grasped some knowledge — in a once and random, adolescent way, like chicken pox, or else in a worked-at way, like a skill; probably somehow both — that prevented him from moving entirely into the delusion of a thing. And he had learned this something very early in his life, he knew, as he could not remember ever having really believed in anything. Not in religion, which made him restless, the cul-de-sac of it, how it turned you around a little, patted you on the head, held block parties in celebration of itself; not in society, with its earnest system of nonexistence, how it existed, really, in the unhappened future, in progress and realization; and not in himself, as what did it mean to believe in oneself — wasn’t that just a sneaky way of proclaiming yourself God? It was, and Aaron especially did not believe in anything as vague and clichéd — and with as many capitalization rules — as God.

Yet he nevertheless had always been able to play along, to live mostly contently, he guessed, and sanely — as he had a small talent for meaningfulness, for patching together cultural units and other people’s beliefs into his own makeshift sensibilities and short-term convictions. He could take a thing from the world and fold it over, like a handkerchief, make a little wad of it, and then pack it inside of his own heart, as a staunching thing, a temporary absorber of new blood, a thing to pump and pool into — honestly and without too much cynicism — and it was in this way that he was okay, he felt, at living; he was pretty good at it, probably as good as he would ever be.

In class they discussed Aaron’s story about his parents, which Aaron had given up on, leaving in, among other things that should’ve been cut, a non-sequitur about the mother’s son feeling fluttering and doomed as a hummingbird with a spinal disease and a description of the father’s head that was intended to imply worry but instead implied, if anything, Aaron knew, cold-slice bologna—his pocked and boyish eyes stuck like salt-washed olives in the peppered meat of his face. It was called “Eddy,” which was the name of the son in the story. Aaron had wanted to avoid in the title irony, cleverness, smugness, frivolousness, profundity, melodrama, condescension; and had ended up not with sincerity, he felt, but a woozy, resounding sort of tonelessness and maybe a little — or possibly a lot of — irony.

“This is a serious story,” Aaron said. It was. Or at least he had wanted it to be. Or rather, he didn’t want the class to assume it was parody, which they would otherwise do. If anything, it was satire. Though truthfully, Aaron knew, it was probably less a story than twenty pages of failed sentences, a few of which worked, if precariously, as jokes.

“Serious,” said the teacher. “What do you mean?”

“I don’t know. When I wrote it … I had this mean look on my face. I had a piece of paper taped on the computer screen that had all the synonyms for ‘existence’ written on it.” He didn’t want to talk about his story anymore. He wanted to talk about existence. What was it? What was to be done about it?

“I looked up existence the other day,” someone said. “A synonym for it — the internet said — was the word ‘something.’ I didn’t get that.”

“ ‘Something’ can be a synonym for everything,” Alicia said. “Anything.”

“Good insight,” the teacher said. He smiled a bit wildly at Alicia.

“Good job, Alicia,” someone said, and began to clap. Other people clapped. Some people stood, and soon everyone was standing and applauding, Aaron the loudest. His story felt puny now; felt, in a distanced and forgiven way, sort of perfected — it was but a moment in all the others, a single squishy, lopsided beating of some imperfect but trying heart; a happened and unfixable thing.

After the standing ovation, someone said something about D.H. Lawrence and clams and everyone laughed. There was a long and pleasant silence, everyone smiling, and then someone asked Aaron if he had read Antonya Nelson; she wrote about families too. Someone else said something about Nelson Mandela, and then talked about his own life — his crazy life! — for quite some time, which could sometimes happen, usually near the end of a class, and was looked upon by classmates not with contempt, but with sympathy and understanding; sometimes you just needed to talk about yourself for five or ten minutes straight.

Alicia’s story was workshopped a few weeks later, around Thanksgiving.

She was a strict autobiographical writer, not even changing names. It made the class alert and, at first, preachy — they could critique her actual life, her flawed and disgusting life! — but then hesitant and depressed, as who in the class knew how to live their own life? Who could say what was better for Alicia, what was wrong and how to change?

“Why does Aaron stay with Alicia if he doesn’t love her really,” Aaron said. They had become very open with one another recently, had both admitted, among other things that made them nervous, having wished sudden and accidental deaths onto their parents, as they were both fearful and unwanting of what would otherwise happen — their parents would still die, of course, eventually, but what before that? Fifteen years of Alzheimer’s? Dementia? Cancer? Aaron and Alicia felt they would not be able to deal with any of those. It had brought them closer, Aaron felt. In the farness of their worrying — the tedious escape of it, how it shuttled you slowly away from real life, into a sort of deep space — they had come, truly, closer to each other, in an echoed, gaping-expanse-between-them way. Or not. Probably not.

“He isn’t really staying with her, I think. He’s more just not leaving her,” someone said. “There was that thing about a two-year lease. They signed a two-year lease.”

“What do people think about Alicia,” Alicia said. “Should she move home?” Before leaving for college, she had helped her sister take care of their brother, who, Aaron learned — with vague recognition — from the story, was a bit abnormal due to sleeping pills he was given as an infant. Alicia felt poisoned and covered in nets, like in a fishing net with poisonous starfish and things in it, said the story. She was not a good writer. Though, actually, Aaron really liked that line. It had an alien, adolescent charm to it.

“Alicia’s sister should realize that family is arbitrary,” someone said. “Alicia’s realized, so her sister should too. That would solve things. Plus it’s true, objectively. I’m just stating facts right now, like a computer.”

“What has Alicia realized?” Alicia said. “Be more specific.”

“I disagree with that,” Aaron said. “Everyone should realize that everything is arbitrary, and so nothing is — which is also true — and so everyone should try and be nice to their family, in the way that everyone should be maximally nice to everyone.” Start with your family, Aaron thought without much conviction, that’s what a person needed to do — that was the given task, probably, the world’s free and weary advice — and from there, then, spread out from family to include, gradually, everyone else. “I’m profound,” he said aloud, by accident, but effectively, as some people laughed.

“Is it important Alicia’s parents are immigrants?” Alicia said. Her parents, like Aaron’s, had, for whatever reason — neither of them knew exactly why — left (escaped?) their families and friends for a new, relativeless, friendless, equally middle-class, less communicable place; a place, maybe, with less worries?

“You didn’t explore that,” someone said. “That’s not your focus. Or is it?”—people had gotten more sarcastic and long-winded as the semester went along; without their shyness, actually, Aaron suspected, they were all jerks—“Ignoring it, that may be a political statement. Maybe. Not to say you have an agenda. Not to say you’re running for office.”

“What do you mean by political?” Alicia said. “What are you talking about?”

“Politics,” said the teacher. “Social relations involving authority or power.”

“I meant if it’s important as to what people … should do,” Alicia said. “I’m not talking about social power.” She had changed, Aaron knew. She used to be happy, maybe. Now she was just distracted and incomprehensible all the time.

“Alicia should do drugs,” someone said. “Then her family can worry about her and she won’t have to worry anymore. And later she can write a raw, unflinching, but ultimately redemptive novel or memoir about it.”

“Alicia should be like a crustacean whose shell has been bludgeoned,” Aaron said. Everyone laughed, though in an exerted way, with many enunciated “ha-ha’s”; the mollusk thing was getting old. Though maybe Aaron was mocking exactly that. Yeah, he thought, he was.

“Alicia’s so detached and melodramatic,” someone else said. “She sort of isn’t believable. I don’t believe she exists — as a real person. Why would anyone sign a two-year lease? I don’t believe that. Which is okay, though. I mean, Moby Dick, yeah, that’s really believable. Not that I liked Moby Dick. I didn’t. I mean, I didn’t read it. Never mind though. Sorry. I don’t know what I’m talking about. I’m just … stupid. Please don’t listen to me. Okay.”

“She’s like a green mussel that’s been eaten so there’s just the shell left,” Aaron said. He was very quietly and completely ignored, which could sometimes happen in a workshop; he was not embarrassed at first, but a little bit proud — his joke was simply too true and complex (too good) to be acknowledged — then he was embarrassed.

“Do you exist, Alicia?” the teacher said. “If you don’t, then you don’t have to answer that.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Alicia said.

It was getting uncomfortable. Everyone stared not at Alicia, but at their own hands, or else abstractly at some piece of table or wall, as there had become in the room a feeling of immobilization, something of both nostalgia and doom — a sort of gigantic helplessness that could take affect, sometimes, near the end of class; everyone feeling elderly and pointless from all the criticism and subsequent qualifications and admittances of not knowing anything — an unpleasant urge to stay still for a very long time, for ever, perhaps, not saying or thinking anything, but just accepting one another, entering and absorbing and maybe, finally, somehow — with anonymity, osmosis, conjecture, and luck — then, experiencing one another.

For winter break they went to Aaron’s house.

They fought about how Aaron never went to Alicia’s house. “You haven’t been back to your house in two years or whatever,” Aaron said, “am I supposed to go there by myself?” but then immediately apologized and said that they would go to her house, then, for spring break. He had almost no anger these days, and he hugged her and apologized two more times.

With Aaron’s parents, they went to a theme park, the movies.

On New Year’s Eve, in a large-windowed restaurant atop a pier at the beach, his parents fought about the stock market. Aaron’s father called Aaron’s mother stupid; she told him to stop acting like a baby. They had spoken English at first, so that Alicia could understand, but had gotten lazy after an hour or so and now spoke only Mandarin.

“A ten point gain is better than a ten percent gain. That’s what she thinks,” Aaron’s father said to Aaron. “That’s how her mind works.”

“That’s right, I’m the stupid one,” Aaron’s mother said. “He likes stupid girls of course. It gives him a feeling of superiority, a feeling he can’t live without.” She sat up very straight. “He lost forty-thousand last week,” she said loudly to Aaron. “He’s a day-trader, a professional.”

“Is a ten point gain better than a ten percent gain?” Aaron’s father said. He looked down, at an angle, toward Aaron’s mother. “Is it?” He had been grinning before, but now his face was red and tense.

Aaron laughed. He liked his parents, and wished, now, sitting here, that they were all the same age and friends, in middle school or something, hanging out. “Calm down,” he said. “Don’t be so ridiculous. You know she knows it depends on the stock price and is just stubborn to admit you’re right. And she knows you know all that, too. The facts are all known. So there’s nothing to talk about — argue about.” He had just come up with this, but it sounded right, if a bit depressing, as one had, despite falseness or whatever, to be accusatory every once in a while; small talk had to be made, things needed to be said — provocations, sudden risky beliefs and improvisational generalizations — one had to tread water with these preconceptions, these prejudices and quarrels, keep one’s head buoyed and in the sun; kick at the dark, wet, worried meaninglessness below.

Aaron’s father repeated his question to Aaron’s mother. He was grinning again, though tensely.

“Yes,” Aaron’s mother finally said. “A ten point gain is always better than a ten percent gain.” Their entrees came. Aaron’s father said something about cooking, at which Aaron’s mother put her fork down loudly. She asked for chopsticks, but it was a Cajun restaurant. She looked at her fork and picked it up. She devoured her catfish and then talked at length — looking around the table in a storytelling way — while everyone else ate at a normal speed. She talked in a formal mandarin that Aaron couldn’t understand that well. “He meets his young, stupid wife — a person so stupid that here she is now. He has big plans, moves to America. He realizes his big plans. Meanwhile he has his house slave, his cook and child raiser, his nice little affair on the side, his very successful career. He makes a lot of money; he is known in his field. But is he happy? He isn’t sure. He wakes in the night. Sweating, panicked. Hungry. But he is a genius and now he is going into retirement, and a genius going into retirement cannot be stopped. I don’t know. Listen to me. I don’t know.” She looked around and then stopped looking around and stared through the window at something outside; a gray and dusty light moved against and off the surface of her eyes, like the wet-dry shine from a cold, unwashed grape. Outside, a gull came into view, floated in place, wobbled, and then pitched back and away, out of control. Aaron laughed a little. Alicia squeezed his hand under the table. Aaron had forgotten she was sitting here, beside him. He had stopped translating for her a long time ago.

Later, at home, Times Square on TV, Aaron’s mother apologized, said that Aaron was right about them being stubborn and ridiculous. She patted Aaron’s shoulder and smiled at Alicia. On TV, the electrocuted lychee of the New Year’s ball — spiked and radioactive as a child’s depiction of a thing — ticked smoothly down in imperceptible increments.

The next semester, Aaron — his stories widely rejected by literary magazines — began writing sort of science-fiction conceits for workshop; crude, uncritiqueable things that did not fuck around, but got straight to the point, which was always bafflement. In one, an alien civilization discovers that gravity is the cause of worry, love, and fear, the underlying desire of all things to occupy the same space (to correct the big bang, go against God’s, or whoever’s, big impulse move, that shady decision of somethingness) to again become one final, gravityless, unchangeable thing — and is baffled.

He thought it might make a good children’s book one day, a collection of them. Fairy Tales for the Young Disillusionist, or something. Handbook for Doomed and/or Disenchanted Children: a Pop-up Collection.

“I like you,” Aaron said in bed. He had begun to like Alicia more each day. She had become quieter and nicer — more lifeless. She felt physically softer. They rarely fought anymore, and when they did it was in a mollified and absent-minded way, with many accidental moments of agreement and overlaps of argument. But they laughed less, too — less loudly — and almost never joked or played, as there was, always, now, the danger of an emotion — any emotion, or even too instantaneous a physical activity — losing sense of itself and then recovering too fast and wrongly, asserting itself as sadness; causing, then, a sort of sourceless, disembodied weeping. They had to be careful of that.

“I like you too,” Alicia said. They talked no longer of love, but only of like. Talk of love made them feel banished and of the dark-ages. Like was beginning and new; like was when you grew wings that made you lithe and interesting; love was when those wings kept growing, became thick and unseemly — tarp-like — and then smothered you; wrapped you up, like a bodybag.

Though, still, Aaron kind of wanted to say that he loved her.

“I like you more each day,” he said.

“Really.”

“I like you more each day, and a lot, overall.” Lately, Aaron worried that Alicia would leave him. “Yes, really.” She had begun to talk to friends everyday, on her cell phone — friends from high-school. Aaron himself had not kept in touch with friends after high school, though maybe he should have. “I like to hold you,” he said. At night, every night now, for twenty or thirty minutes before sleep, Aaron would hold her, from behind, both of them thinking their own things, round-pupiled in the dark, looking out into their bedroom, at all their unseen but no doubt capering bugs, and sometimes forgetting the other person, the conscious, changing life of them, but just holding on to the warm, DNA heap of them.

For spring break, they flew to Alicia’s parents’ place in New England.

At dinner, at The Olive Garden, Alicia sat by her brother — who seemed, to Aaron, not handicapped, not at all, just a very shy person — but they did not speak to or look at each other. Alicia’s parents seemed more like grandparents, and they too did not speak. Only Alicia’s sister spoke; she ordered for everyone.

After dinner, in the parking lot, Alicia’s brother fell, somehow, into a tree. His face turned a reddish white as he unwrenched his clothing from the branches. In the car, he looked brutalized and war torn. He sat by Aaron and talked to himself. His voice was small and eerie and Aaron tried not to listen to it.

Late that night, Aaron and Alicia walked around her neighborhood. They did not hold hands, but — feeling wild and young from the airdropped newness of the first night in a different state — walked and sometimes ran a little in erratic, separate directions, over strips of grass and sidewalks. The houses were all dark and large and shoebox-shaped. There was a cool, quick movement to the sky above — a cold-watery moonlight, below the clouds but above the rooftops, as between the houses, on the street and lawns where they walked, it was black and still and breezeless.

Aaron thought of living someplace with Alicia. He was not good at meeting people, did not have the skill of escaping his body and so was always drowned in social situations by his own ducts and glands, thwarted by his own nerve-bundles, which would detach somehow and move stupidly into his bloodstream and bump, then, through his heart, and he doubted that, if Alicia left him, he would be able to meet anyone new. They used to, but hadn’t for a long time now, discuss moving somewhere together after graduating. Maybe he would bring that up tonight, ask her.

He could see them getting MFAs together, then university teaching jobs, being funny and halfhearted and sometimes extraordinary with students, and somewhere in all this taking care of their parents, into old age and death; and, themselves, then, too, growing old and dying.

As one had to expect very little — almost nothing — from life, Aaron knew, one had to be grateful, not always be trying to seize the days, not like some maniac of living, but to give oneself up, be seized by the days, the months and years, be taken up in a froth of sun and moon, some pale and smoothie’d river-cloud of life, a long, drawn-out and gray sort of enlightenment, so that when it was time to die, one did not scream swear words and knock things down, did not make a scene, but went easily, with understanding and tact, and quietly, in a lightly pummeled way, having been consoled — having allowed to be consoled — by the soft and generous worthlessness of it all, having allowed to be massaged by the daily beating of life, instead of just beaten.

And Aaron felt that he could allow this, could give himself up in this way.

He could, with Alicia, accept the stretched and meager thing of life, the little rush of youth and then the slow, vague drift of the rest, until the sidewards tug at the end, into something else, some fluorescent reward-world, perhaps, or just into the bizarre math of nothingness, the distant and sincere art of it — and if he could allow all this, if he could feel okay with all this, then, he guessed, so could Alicia and her parents, and his own parents. But he could not comprehend his parents or anyone else accepting things in this way, could not feel anything vicariously but fear, worry, and regret. And if his parents couldn’t accept, if no one else could, then maybe he couldn’t either. He knew he couldn’t, actually, because though he understood, now, the possibility of such a feeling he did not feel it, and if ever he had felt fine and worriless and accepting in the past it was, he knew, a fleeting, delusional thing. He knew now — knew only — that, in the end, there would be urgency and difficultness, there would be the oncoming and increasingly complicated need to resolve, to be convinced — to be, finally, appreciative, of having once lived, of having at least happened in this sudden and terrific (or was it terrifying?) world.

Aaron went and held Alicia’s hand. There was a helicopter somewhere, and they listened to it; some chopping, flapping noise that maybe was a bird, or a bug — a dragonfly or moth, flying close.

“I’m staying here,” Alicia said. “I’m moving home. I just decided, I’m not going back to school or Florida.”

Aaron thought about their two-year lease. He thought about moving back home, with his own parents. “I like it here,” he said, and waited for Alicia to say something else, but she didn’t. He thought about their plans for spring break, for right now — hadn’t they made plans?

They went back to her house and ate fruit. They watched TV.

“My brother doesn’t even know who I am anymore,” Alicia said in bed. She was crying. “My sister’s said things to him. They hate me. I deserve it. I’m so selfish. Why did I leave? I shouldn’t have majored in English. My sister could have gone to college too. She would’ve double majored in useful things. I wasn’t thinking, ever! What was I even doing? I didn’t think one thing in four years.” She laughed a little, but it was mostly just crying, and she kept talking, and while she talked she moved — she shook a little; her chest, in fits — and Aaron, holding her, felt that moving, the turning of things inside, the loosening of it all, the press and shape of the bones in her back, all of which he was just faintly aware of, as he was thinking hard, thinking of something for both of them, something not to absolve what they were doing, but to absolve what the world was doing, what it was. And in this thinking, then — this incommunicable, impossible thinking; why are there things? — he began to feel a leaving, a vagueness and gravitylessness of self. And from some faraway place, now, from some else and momentary place, he became aware of a strange and bodiless squirming in his arms, a warm and pulsing thing, shifting against him in revisions — in increments and illusions — as he held, carefully, on, and began to fold and pack at himself, so that he might enter, finally, the experience of this thing, and staunch it, at its free and anonymous source, its phantom, nowhere heart that surely must be there; hidden, maybe, but real, and findable — if one wanted enough, and tried hard — as, if not, then where was one to go with all their white and toneless feelings? Where was one to take all their changed and used-up feelings of youth?