The O. Henry Prize Stories 2011

Chris Adrian
The Black Square

Henry tried to pick out the other people on the ferry who were going to the island for the same reason he was. He wasn’t sure what to look for: black Bermuda shorts, an absence of baggage, too-thoughtful gazing at the horizon? Or just a terminal, hangdog look, a mask that revealed instead of hiding the gnarled little soul behind the face? But no one was wearing black, or staring forlornly over the rail. In fact, everyone was smiling. Henry looked pretty normal himself, a man in the last part of his young middle age dressed in plaid shorts and a T-shirt, a dog between his legs and a duffel bag big enough to hold a week’s clothes at his side.

The dog was Bobby’s, a black Lab named Hobart, borrowed for the ostensible vacation trip to make it less lonely. It was a sort of torture to have him along, since he carried thoughts of Bobby with him like biting fleas. But Henry loved Hobart as honestly as he had ever loved anything or anybody. And, in stark opposition to his master, the dog seemed to love Henry back. Henry was reasonably sure he would follow him, his paws fancy-stepping, through the black square. But he wasn’t going to ask him to do that. He had hired an old lady to bring Hobart back to Cambridge at the end of the week.

He reached down and hugged the dog around the neck. Hobart craned his neck back and licked Henry’s face. A little girl in enormous sunglasses, who’d skibbled over twice already since they’d left Hyannis, did it again, pausing before the dog and holding out her hand to him. “Good holding out your hand for the doggie to sniff!” her mother called out from a neighboring bench, and smiled at Henry. “What’s his name?” the girl asked. She hadn’t spoken the other two times she’d approached.

“Blackheart’s Grievous Despair,” Henry said. Hobart gave up licking her hand and started to work on her shoe, which was covered in the ice cream she’d been eating a short while before.

“That’s stupid,” the girl said. She was standing close enough that Henry could see her eyes through the sunglasses, and tell that she was staring directly into his face.

“So are you,” he said. It was one of the advantages of his present state of mind, and one of the gifts of the black square, that he could say things like this now, in part because his long sadness had curdled his disposition, and in part because all his decisions had become essentially without consequence. He wasn’t trying to be mean. It was just that there wasn’t any reason anymore not to say the first thing that came into his mind.

The little girl didn’t cry. She managed to look very serious, even in the ridiculously oversize sunglasses, biting on her lower lip while she petted the dog. “No,” she said finally, “I’m not. You are. You are the stupidest.” Then she walked away, calmly, back to her mother.

He got surprises like this all the time these days, ever since he had decided to give up his social filters. A measured response from a five-year-old girl to his little snipe, a gift of flowers from his neighbor when he’d told her he didn’t give a flying fuck about the recycling, a confession of childhood abuse from his boss in response to his saying she was an unpleasant individual. The last was perhaps not so surprising-every unpleasant individual, himself included, had a bevy of such excuses that absolved them of nothing. But there was something different about the world ever since he had discovered the square and committed himself to it. People go in, someone had written on the Black Square Message Board, which Henry called up over his bed every night before he went to sleep, but have you ever considered what comes OUT of it? Most of those who wrote there were a different sort of freak from Henry, but he thought the writer might mean what he wanted him to mean, which was those sort of little daily surprises, and more than that a funny sense of carefree absolution. Once you had decided to go in (he didn’t subscribe to the notion, so popular on the board, that the square called you or chose you) things just stopped mattering in the way that they used to. With the pressure suddenly lifted off of every aspect of his life, it had become much easier to appreciate things. So many wonderful things have come to me since I accepted the call, someone wrote. It’s too bad it can’t last. And someone replied, You know that it can’t.

The girl’s mother was glaring now, and looked to be getting ready to get up and scold him, which might possibly have led to an interesting conversation. But it didn’t seem particularly likely, and one surprise a day was really enough. Henry got up and walked to the bow of the ferry. Hobart trotted ahead, put his paws up on the railing, and looked back at him. The island was just visible on the horizon. Henry sat down behind the dog, who stayed up on the rail, sniffing at the headwind and looking back every now and then. Henry laughed and said, “What?” They sat that way as the island drew nearer and nearer. The view was remotely familiar-he’d seen it countless times when he was a little boy-though it occurred to him as he stared ahead that he had the same feeling, coming up on the island, that he used to get facing the other way and approaching the mainland: he was approaching a place that was strange, exciting, and a little alien, though it was only the square that made it that way now. Nantucket in itself was ordinary, dull, and familiar. You are especially chosen, a board acquaintance named Martha had written, when he’d disclosed that he had grown up on the island. Fuck that, he had written back. But as they entered the harbor, he hunkered down next to the dog, who was going wild at the smells rolling out from the town and the docks. “Look, Hobart,” he said. “Home.”

Those who ascribed a will or a purpose to it thought it was odd that the square should have chosen to appear on Nantucket, one of the least important places on the planet, for all that the island was one of the richest. Those same people thought it might have demonstrated a sense of humor on the square’s part to appear, of all the places it could have, in the middle of a summer-mansion bathroom, where some grotesquely rejuvenated old lady, clinging to her deluxe existence, might have stepped into it accidentally on her way out of the tub. But it had appeared on the small portion of the island that was still unincorporated, in a townie commune that had been turned subsequently into a government-sponsored science installation and an unofficial way station for the ever-dwindling and ever-renewing community of people who called themselves Black Squares.

Every now and then someone posted a picture of a skunk or a squirrel on the board, with a caption naming the creature Alpha or Primo or Columbus, and calling it the first pioneering Black Square. It was true that a number of small animals, cats and dogs and rabbits and even a few commune llamas, went missing in the days before the square was actually discovered by a ten-year-old boy who tried to send his little sister through it. Around her waist she wore a rope that led to her brother’s hand; he wasn’t trying to kill her. He had been throwing things in all day, rocks and sticks and one heavy cinder block, and finally a rabbit from the eating stock. His mother interrupted him before he could send his sister through. He had put a helmet on her, and given her a flashlight, sensing, as the story went on the board, that there was both danger and discovery on the other side.

There followed a predictable series of official investigations, largely muffled and hidden from the eyes of the public, though it seemed that from the first missing rodent there was mention of the square on the boards. The incorporated portion of the island wanted nothing to do with it. Once the government assured them that it would be a very closely supervised danger, they more or less forgot about it, except to bemoan the invasion of their island by a new species of undesirable, one that didn’t serve them in their homes or clubs. The new arrivals had a wild, reckless air about them, these people who had nothing to lose, and they made one uncomfortable, even if they did spend wildly and never hung around for very long. The incorporated folks hardly noticed the scientists, who once the townies had been cleared out never left the compound until they departed for good within a year, leaving behind a skeleton crew of people not bothered by unsolvable mysteries.

By then it had become obvious that there was nothing to be learned from the square-at least nothing profitable in the eyes of the government. It just sat there, taking whatever was given to it. It refused nothing (And isn’t it because it loves everyone and everything perfectly, that it turns nothing and no one away? Martha wrote), but it gave nothing back. It emitted no detectable energy. No probe ever returned from within it, or managed to hurl any signal back out. Tethers were neatly clipped, at various and unpredictable lengths. No official human explorer ever went through, though an even dozen German shepherds leaped in obediently, packs on their backs and cameras on their heads. The experiments degraded, from the construction of delicate listening devices that bent elegantly over the edge of the square to the government equivalent of what the boy had been doing: tossing things in. The station was funded eventually as a disposal unit, and the government put out a discreet call across the globe for special and difficult garbage, not expecting, but not exactly turning away, the human sort that inevitably showed up.

Henry had contracted with his psychiatrist not to think about Bobby. “This is a condition of your survival,” the man had told him, and Henry had not been inclined to argue. There had been a whole long run of better days, when he had been able to do it, but it took a pretty serious and sustained effort, and exercised some muscle in him that got weaker, instead of stronger, the more he used it, until he succumbed to fatigue. Now it was a sort of pleasure not to bother resisting. It would have been impossible, anyway, to spend time with Bobby’s dog and not think of him, though he loved the dog quite separately from Bobby. It was a perfectly acceptable indulgence, in the long shadow of the square, to imagine the dog sleeping between them on their bed, though Hobart hadn’t been around when they were actually together. And it was acceptable to imagine himself and Bobby together again-useless and agonizing, but as perfectly satisfying as worrying a painful tooth. It was even acceptable to imagine that it was he and Bobby, and not Bobby and his Brazilian bartender husband, who were about to have a baby together, a little chimera bought for them from beyond the grave by Bobby’s fancy dead grandma.

Yet Bobby wasn’t all he thought about. It wasn’t exactly the point of the trip to torture himself that way, and whether the square represented a new beginning or merely an end to his suffering, he wasn’t trying to spend his last days on the near side of the thing in misery. He was home, after all, though Nantucket Town did not feel much like home, and he didn’t feel ready, at first, for a trip to the old barn off Polpis Road. But there was something-the character of the light and the way the heat seemed to hang very lightly in the air-that though unremembered, made the island feel familiar.

He showed the dog around. It was something to do; it had never been his plan to go right to the square, though there were people who got off the ferry and made a beeline for it. Maybe they were worried that they might change their mind if they waited too long. Henry wasn’t worried about changing his mind or chickening out. The truth was he had been traveling toward the thing all his life, in a way, and while the pressure that was driving him toward it had become more urgent since he came to the island, he still wasn’t in any particular hurry to jump in. There were things to say good-bye to, after all; any number of things to be done for the last time. He had spent his last sleepless night in Cambridge in a bed-and-breakfast down the street from where Bobby lived with his bartender, lying on the bed with his hands behind his head, staring at the ceiling and enumerating all those things he’d like to do one last time. He wasn’t organized enough to make a list, but he’d kept a few of them in his head. It turned out to be more pleasant to do them with the dog than to do them alone, and more pleasant, in some ways, to do them for the dog instead of for himself. Last meals were better enjoyed if Hobart shared them with him-they ate a good deal of fancy takeout in the hotel room, Henry sitting on the floor with his back against the bed, Hobart lying on his belly with his face in a bowl resting between his legs. Henry made a tour of some dimly remembered childhood haunts, rediscovering them and saying good-bye to them at the same time: a playground on the harbor, a pond that he thought was Miacomet but might have been Monomoy, and finally the beach at Surfside.

He had pictures of himself at that beach on his phone, taken by his father during Henry’s very well-documented childhood. He was his father’s last child, and the only one from his second marriage. His brothers were all much older than him, born when their father had been relatively poor, when he still made his living, despite his Haverford education and his well-received first book, playing piano in bars. Henry came in well after that, when there was money for cameras and camcorders and time, attention, and interest to take a picture of the baby every day. He had thumbed through them in bed the night before, showing them to Hobart, who somehow got conditioned to yawn every time he saw a picture of Henry at the beach with a bucket and a shovel. It was a less melancholy pastime, and less pathetic, to look at old pictures of himself, instead of pictures of himself and Bobby, though he did that, too, late into the night, with Hobart’s sleeping head on his chest.

They spent the morning making their way slowly down the beach by throws of a rubber football the size of a child’s fist. Henry had a reasonably good arm: once or twice he threw the ball far enough that Hobart disappeared around a dune to go in search of it. He daydreamed considerably as they went, and thought indulgently of Bobby as Hobart leaped and galumphed and face-planted into the sand. He had to be persuaded every time to give up the ball, running back as if to drop it at Henry’s feet, then veering away and playing a prancing, high-stepping keep-away until Henry caught him around the neck and pulled open his jaws. It made him a defective sort of retriever, and it doubled the work of play with him, but Henry didn’t mind it.

He laughed at the dog, and thought of his father laughing behind the camera at him, and thought of something Bobby had said to him more than once. He’d accused Henry of being unable to delight in him, and had said that this was part of the reason that Henry had never been properly able to love him, or anybody, really. Bobby had said deflating things like that all the time-he’d kept an arsenal of them always at hand and ready to spoil any occasion-and the Bobby in Henry’s head still kept up a running commentary years after they broke up. But it had been fair, for Bobby to say he was delightless, a million years before, when Henry had been an entirely different person, selfish and self-loathing and more in love with his own misery than with the man who wanted to marry him.

All that had changed. It was far too late to make any difference with Bobby, but now he was the sort of person who couldn’t help but take pleasure in the foolish exuberance of a clumsy black Lab. “Look, Bobby,” he said quietly as Hobart raced after the football. “Look at him go.” He shook his head at himself, and sat down, then lay down on his back with his knees bent and his arms thrown out at his sides, staring up at the sky for a while before he closed his eyes. “I’m tired, Hobart,” he said, when the dog came back and started to lick his face. “Sit down and relax for a minute.” But the cold nose kept pressing on his eyelids, and the rough tongue kept dragging across his cheek and nose and lips. He swatted at the dog’s head, and grabbed his collar, and reached with his other hand to scratch the Lab’s neck.

In another moment his face was being licked from the other side. When Henry opened his eyes he discovered that this was Hobart. The dog he had been petting was someone else entirely, another black Lab, but with a face that was much pointier (and frankly less handsome) than Hobart’s. The owner came trotting up behind him. He was standing in front of the sun. Henry only registered his hairy chest and baseball cap before the man asked him, “Why are you making out with my dog?”

One heard various stories about Lenny. He was alternately from San Francisco, or Houston, or Pittsburgh, or Nantucket, or someplace no one had ever heard of. He was a teenager, or an old man, or in his middle age. He was perfectly healthy, or terminally ill. He was happily married, or heartbroken and bereft. He was a six-foot-eight black man or he was a diminutive honky. He might not even have been the first one to go through. It was only certain that he’d been the first to announce that he was going, and the founding poster on what became the Black Square Message Board. As the first official Black Square (the anonymous individuals who might have passed in before him, as well as the twelve German shepherds, together held that title unofficially) he had become something of a patron saint for everyone who proposed to go after him. Lenny knows was a fairly common way to preface a platitude on the board, and his post, this is not a suicide, had become a motto of sorts for the whole group. The post had a ceci n’est pas une pipe quality about it, but it was consistent with what became the general attitude on the board, that the square offered an opportunity to check into another universe as well as the opportunity to check out of this one. He should have said, This is not MERELY a suicide, Martha wrote. Not everything she wrote was stupid, and Henry was inclined to agree with her on this count. There was an element of protest to Lenny’s leap into the square: it was a fuck-you to the ordinary universe the likes of which it had not previously been possible to utter. By entering into the square you could express your disdain for the declined world, so far fallen, to some people’s minds, from its potential for justice and beauty, as effectively as you could by blowing your head off, but instead of just dying, you might end up someplace else, someplace different-indeed, someplace full of people just like you, people who had leaped away from their own declined, disappointing lives.

The pointy-nosed Lab’s name was Dan; his master’s name was Luke. Henry ought not to have talked to him beyond saying “Sorry!” Meeting yet another handsome, witty, accomplished fellow who was utterly uninteresting on account of his failure to be Bobby was not part of the plan for his last days on the near side of the square. Henry tried to walk away, but the dogs were already fast friends, and Hobart wouldn’t come. The man was smiling and looking at Henry in a particular way as Henry tugged on Hobart’s collar. He was short and muscled up and furry, and had a pleasant, open face. Henry was trying to think of something inappropriate to say, but nothing was coming to mind. The man stuck out his hand and introduced himself. Henry, his left hand still on Hobart’s collar, stuck out his own, shifting his balance as he did, so when Hobart lunged at his new friend he pulled Henry over. Henry ought to have let go of the stranger’s small, rough, appealing palm-he thought as he squeezed it harder that it felt like a blacksmith’s palm, and that it went along nicely with the man’s blacksmith build-but he gripped it harder as he fell, and pulled the other man over on top of him. They were momentarily a pile of bodies, human and canine, Luke on Henry on Hobart, with Dan on top of all of them. Henry got a paw in his face, and a dog nail scratched his cheek, and his face was pressed hard into Luke’s chest. Luke smelled like coffee and salt, and tasted salty too, when Henry thought he had accidentally tasted the sweat on the man’s hairy chest, but it turned out that it was his own blood on his lip, trickling from the scratch.

The injury, though it wasn’t totally clear which dog had inflicted it, prompted profuse apologies and an invitation to dinner. Henry felt sure he should have declined. All his plans aside, he knew that he wasn’t going to be interested in this man as certainly as he knew that the sun got a little colder every day, or that eventually the whole island would be incorporated as surely as Hilton Head or Manhattan, and that the rich folk would have to ferry in their household help from Martha’s Vineyard. It was inevitable. But he considered, as he wiped the blood off his face and listened to Luke apologize, that he might be overlooking another gift of the square, and that it didn’t matter that loving Bobby had ruined him, and smothered in the cradle any possible relationship with any other man. He had no future with anyone, but he had no future at all. That took the pressure off dinner. And it was something else to say good-bye to, after all: dinner with a handsome man.

“Sometimes I kind of like being the only homo in a ten-mile radius,” Luke said while they were eating. “Or almost the only one.” Henry had asked what had possessed him to come to Nantucket for a vacation. When Henry cocked his head at that, Luke asked him the same question.

“Something similar,” Henry said, reaching down to pet Hobart’s head, a gesture that was becoming his new nervous tic. They were sitting outside at a restaurant in ’Sconset, both dogs at their feet and a bowl of clams between them. Dan was just as well-behaved as Hobart was. They both sat staring up at the sky or at another table, or staring intently into each other’s eyes, leaning forward occasionally to sniff closer and closer, touching noses and then touching tongues before going back to looking distracted and disinterested until they started it all over again with a sudden glance. Henry and Luke took turns saying, “I think they like each other.”

“I was born here,” Henry added. Luke was smiling at him-he seemed to be one of those continuous smilers, the sort of people that Henry generally disliked (Bobby, until he had left, had always appeared perpetually troubled), but there was something sad, or at least resigned, in Luke’s smile that Henry found appealing.

“I didn’t think anybody was born on Nantucket,” Luke said. “I thought people just magically appeared here once they made enough money.”

“They do,” Henry said. “Sort of. There’s a ceremony. You claw your way naked through a pool of coins and they drape you in a white robe and everyone chants, ‘One of us! One of us!’ But if you’re poor you just get squeezed out of a vagina and they put your name on a plaque in the hospital.”

“You have a plaque?”

“Sure. Henry David Conroy. May 22, 1986.”

“I figured you were special,” Luke said, managing to smile differently, more warmly and more engagingly and more attractively. Henry looked away. It was part of his problem that flattering attention from handsome men only made him more sad, and made him feel Bobby’s rejection more achingly and acutely. The handsomer the man, and the more flattering the attention, the greater his sadness. To date, anybody else had only discovered in miserable degrees how thoroughly and hopelessly they were not Bobby. But there was always that homunculus in Henry, weakly resistant to the sadness, that protested in a meek little voice whenever he said good-bye early, or declined an invitation up to someone’s apartment. Proximity to the square made it a little bolder, and Henry thought he could hear it shouting something about saying good-bye to sucking on a nice cock.

Henry took a clam and looked at the dogs. They were looking away from each other now, but he said it anyway. “Look at that. They really like each other, don’t they?”

“They sure do,” Luke said.

Because of my mother, somebody wrote. Half the messages on the farewell board were unsigned. You were only supposed to post your final notes there, but this was a rule that was impossible to enforce, since anybody could retire one ID and come back with a new one. And you were supposed to limit yourself to just one reason, either by prioritizing, or, more elegantly, by articulating a reason that contained all other possible reasons. While Because of my mother could be unpacked at length, there was something crude, or at least unsophisticated, about it. Because of incorporation was its political equivalent: it contained a multitude of reasons, all the accumulated disappointments of the past decade for the people who cared to mourn the dashed hopes of the early part of the century. But it was less subtle and less mysterious than Because I believe, into which one could read a richer sort of disappointment, one that was tempered with hope that something besides oblivion lay on the other side of the square. This sort of post could be crude as well: Because I want to see Asian was its own common type. Still, there was something pleasing about these notes that looked forward through the square and saw something or someone waiting there, Aslan in Narnia, Dejah Thoris on Barsoom, or more private kings in more particular kingdoms. Because I have suffered enough was less appealing than Because I wish to suffer differently.

Most mysterious and most mundane of all were the last posts of the lovelorn. They were neither necessarily hopeful nor despairing. Because of Alice could mean anything in a way that Because of my mother generally could not-Alice might be hero or villain, after all, but all mothers were villains on the board. Because of Louise, Because of Juliet, Because of John, Because of Alan and Wanda and Bubbles-that one seemed like cheating to Henry, though he liked it for the possibility that Bubbles might be a chimpanzee, and for the likelihood that the circumstances driving the poster through the square must be uniquely weird and horrible. Because of George, Because of Althea, Because of you. Because I broke his heart, Because she broke my heart. Because of Bobby.

Henry took Luke and the dogs out to the old barn. There were pictures of that, too, taken back when it had been Henry’s home. Henry had called them up on the ceiling and they had all looked at them, even the dogs. It was hardly a first-date activity, to share your distant past this way, though he’d done it with Bobby, the two of them sitting in an overpriced café in Cambridge with their phones on the table, excitedly trading pictures of their dead brothers and fathers. That had felt like showing each other their scars, part of the process of recognition by which they came independently to understand that, while it was probably too early to say they were meant for each other, they were at least very lucky to have collided. It was a less intimate revelation to show pictures of himself at five years old, naked except for a little cowboy hat and boots, to a man he had fucked three times in the twelve hours he had known him, but it was still a startling bit of progress. He hadn’t been interested in that sort of thing-the moving on that his friends and shrinks and Bobby himself had encouraged him to do-largely because it seemed both impossible and unnecessary. Trying to not be in love with Bobby was like trying to not be gay anymore, or like annulling the law of gravity by personal decree. It was ridiculous to try, and anyway gayness and gravity, for whatever sadness or limitation they might generate, felt right. Henry still wasn’t interested in moving on, but there was something about his pending encounter with the square that made it feel like this was something else, similar in form but not in substance to getting over it at last, since he was about to make a permanent attestation to his devotion to Bobby, and to his objection to the end of their relationship.

“This is okay,” he said to Hobart, the only other one of the four still awake after the slide show. Luke and his dog had fallen asleep before it finished, and now the man’s head was on Henry’s chest. “This is okay,” Henry said again, staring down his nose at Luke’s face. He was doing a whistling sort of snore, in through the nose, out through the mouth. “I’m not making out with your dog,” Henry said quietly. “He’s throwing up into my mouth.” He wondered why he couldn’t have thought to say that two days before. Hobart crawled up the bed and added his head to the empty side of Henry’s chest. It was a little hard to breathe, but he still fell asleep that way.

The barn was in as much of a state of ruin as the law would allow. No one had lived there for five years, and no one sanely inclined to keep it up had lived there for fifteen. A friend of his father’s, a crazy cat lady who kept birds instead of cats, had moved in after his father had died, and after she died Henry had left it empty, never visiting and only paying now and then to have it painted when the nearest neighbor complained that it was starting to look shabby in a way that was no longer picturesque. All the nearest neighbors were eventually eaten up by incorporation, and there were mansions all around now in the near distance, but Henry had never sold the place in spite of offers that grew both more generous and more threatening. He’d left it to Bobby with instructions never to sell, which he probably wouldn’t-Bobby was not exactly a friend of incorporation-but who knew. Maybe he and the Brazilian would want to make another baby together, and Bobby’s grandma had only been good for one.

“You used to live here?” Luke asked in the morning. “All the time?”

“All the time,” Henry said. “It’s why my manners are so atrocious.” They were standing in what remained of the living room. A pair of squirrels were staring at them from a rafter above. The dogs were staring back. “It was fine,” Henry said. “It was great, actually. As much as I remember. It doesn’t have anything to do with … it.”

“Yeah. Mine neither,” Luke said. They had started talking about the square during breakfast. Henry wasn’t the one to bring it up. Out of nowhere and all of a sudden Luke had asked him what he was going to wear when he went through. “Shorts,” Henry had said, not thinking to deny it, or even ask how Luke knew he was a Square.

“I brought a parka,” Luke said.

“Because you think it will be cold?” Henry asked.

“Because I like the parka,” Luke said. “It’s my favorite piece of clothing. It’s puffy but not too puffy.” A silence followed, not entirely awkward. They were eating in the room, on the bed, and had just moved the plates to the floor for the dogs to finish up. Henry was still trying to decide what to say next when Luke reached over for his cock, and what followed felt like a sort of conversation. Henry had always thought that having someone’s cock in your mouth ought to provide you with some kind of insight on them, though this hadn’t ever been the case. Staring into someone’s eyes while he pounded on their ass made him feel infinitely remote from them, except of course for Bobby, and maybe it was the extraordinary intimacy he had achieved doing such things with Bobby that spoiled it with everyone else. But there was something revealing in the exchange between him and Luke. Luke was holding on to him too tightly, and he was holding on too tightly to Luke, and Henry thought he heard notes of agonized sadness in both their voices when they cried out at each other as they came. By the end of it Henry felt as if they had communicated any number of wordless secrets, and that he had a deep, dumb understanding of why Luke was going through the square, and felt sure that Luke felt the same way, and it seemed all of a piece with the whole process that it would fuck things up by asking if this was true.

“I was such a happy kid,” Luke said. “Not one single thing about my childhood was fucked up. I always wanted to put that on my gravestone, if I was going to have a gravestone.”

“Mine would say …” Henry started, and then thought better of it.

“What?” He had been going to say, He made bad choices.

“Poodle,” he said. “Just, Poodle. And let people wonder what that meant, except it wouldn’t mean anything.” Luke put an arm around him.

“I like you,” he said. “I like you.” The way he stressed the like made it sound as if he hadn’t liked anybody for a while.

“I like you, too,” Henry said, feeling stupid and exalted at the same time. It changed nothing, to like somebody. It didn’t change anything at all about why he was here, or what he was going to do. He could like somebody, and say good-bye to liking somebody, in the same way he was saying good-bye to ice cream and gingersnaps and blow jobs and the soft fur on the top of Hobart’s head. It didn’t change the past, or alter any of the choices he had made, or make him into a different person. It didn’t change the fact that it was too late to do anything but proceed quietly and calmly through the square.

The dogs were taking turns leaping and barking uselessly at the squirrels. “I like you,” Henry said again, trying to put the same charming emphasis on the word that Luke had, but it only came out funny, his voice breaking like he was thirteen, or like he was much sadder or more overcome than he actually was. Luke gathered him closer in his arms, and pressed his beard against Henry’s beard, and Henry was sure this man was going to say something that would be awkward and delightful and terrifying, but after five minutes of squeezing him and rubbing their faces together but never quite kissing all he said was “You’re cuddly.”

Some days I’m INTO, Martha wrote, and some days I’m THROUGH. But I’m never not going. Everybody had those days, when the prospect of going into the square, with no expectation of anything but oblivion on the other side, was more appealing than the prospect of passing through it to discover a new world where pain was felt less acutely, or less urgently, or even just differently, although most people liked to pretend that they were only interested in the latter destination. These were not suicides, after all. But how many people would pass through, Henry wondered, if it were in fact a guaranteed passage to Narnia? He wasn’t sure that nuzzling with Aslan would make him any less troubled over Bobby, or that topping Mr. Tumnus’s hairy bottom would dispel any unwanted memories. Living beyond Bobby, beyond the pain and delight of remembering him, beyond the terrible ironies of their failed almost marriage, required something more than the promise of happiness or relief. It could only be done someplace farther away than Narnia, and maybe even someplace farther away than death, though death, according to the deep illogic that had governed all Henry’s actions since he and Bobby had broken up beyond any hope of reconciling, was at least a step in the right direction. When he had made his drunken attempt to hang himself all Henry had been thinking about was getting away from Bobby, from loving him and hurting over him and from the guilt of having hurt him, but when he actually settled his weight down on the telephone cord around his neck and let himself begin to be suspended by it, some monstrously naive part of him felt like he was accelerating back toward his old lover. Killing himself, as he tried to kill himself, felt like both a way forward and a way back.

He blacked out ever so gently-he’d chosen to hang himself for the sheer painless ease of it-and he felt sure that he was traveling, felt a thrill at having made what seemed like a reportable discovery, that death was falling. This seemed like tremendously important news, the sort of thing that might have validated his short-lived and undistinguished scientific career. He thought how sad it was that he wasn’t going to be able to tell Bobby-It’s all right after all, he would have said, that our brothers are dead and our fathers are dead because death is only falling. And at the same time he thought, I’ll tell him when I see him.

He woke up with a terrible headache, lying among the shoes on his closet floor, all his neatly pressed work clothes on top of him and splinters from the broken closet bar in his hair. He spent the night there because it seemed like this was the place he had been heading all his life, and the dreary destined comfort of it gave him the best night’s sleep he’d had in months. When he woke again all the desperate intoxications of the night before had worn off, and he only felt pathetic, failed suicides being the worst sort of losers in anybody’s book, his own included. He stayed in there through the morning-he’d wet himself as he lay unconscious, and did it again without much hesitation-feeling afraid to go out into what seemed now like a different world. It was early evening before growing boredom forced him to look at his phone. He’d sent a text to Bobby-I’m so sorry-and received no reply.

Henry went walking at dusk with Luke along the fence around the station where the square was housed. The dogs went quietly before them, sniffing at the grass that poked around the chain link but neither one ever finding a place to pee. When they came into view of the concrete shed, Dan barked softly at it, but Hobart only lay down and appeared to go to sleep. Henry and Luke stared silently for a while, holding hands.

“How did you know I came to Nantucket for this?” Henry asked.

“I don’t know,” Luke said. “Same way I knew you were gay, I guess. Squaredar.”

“Huh,” Henry said. “I didn’t know with you until you asked. And then I knew.” This seemed like a terribly lame thing to say. He was reminded of all his late conversations with Bobby, before Bobby had ended their long fruitless talk about whether or not they should try being together again by marrying the Brazilian, when hapless unrequited love of the man had kept Henry from making a single articulate point.

“And you didn’t know I was gay until I came in your mouth.”

“I’m slow,” Henry said. “But that doesn’t make you gay. Hundreds and hundreds of straight guys have come in my mouth. Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds.” It suddenly occurred to him that holding hands they would be too big to fit through the square.

They were quiet for a little while, until Luke heaved a big sigh and said, “There it is.” His tone was somehow both reverential and disappointed.

“You couldn’t have thought it would be bigger,” Henry said. “Everybody knows how big it is.”

“No. I just thought I would feel something … different. If I close my eyes I can’t even tell it’s there.”

“Well,” Henry said. “Maybe it’s just a hole.”

Luke shook his head. “Look,” he said, and pointed. Someone was approaching the shed. Luke raised a little pair of binoculars to his eyes and made an odd noise, a grunt and a laugh and also something sadder than either of those noises, and handed the glasses to Henry. It was a woman wearing a short, sparkling dress. “I don’t think it’s very practical to go through in heels,” Henry said.

“Makes it difficult to leap properly,” Luke said. “She’s probably just going to fall in, which isn’t right at all.”

Henry put the binoculars down. “Why do you think she’s going?”

Luke shrugged. “ ’Cause she’s too pretty for this world.” He took the glasses back from Henry, who gave them up gladly, not wanting to watch her pass through the door.

“Let’s go,” Henry said.

“Hold on,” Luke said, still watching. “She’s stranded here from another dimension, and thinks this might be the way back.”

“Or some dead person told her to do it,” Henry said. “To be with them again. Let’s go.”

“Just a minute,” Luke said, and lifted his head like Hobart sniffing at the harbor smells, cocking his head and listening. Henry turned and walked away, whistling for Hobart to follow him, but the dogs stayed together, sitting next to Luke, all of them sniffing and listening. Henry kept walking, and shortly they all came bounding up behind him. Luke caught him around the shoulders and pulled him close. “She’s gone,” he said matter-of-factly. “Did you feel it?”

All through dinner Henry wanted to ask the question that he knew he shouldn’t, the question that probably didn’t need to be answered, and the one that he felt intermittently sure would be ruinous to ask. But it wasn’t until later, as Luke lay sweating on top of him, that he couldn’t resist anymore, and he finally asked it. “How come?” he said into Luke’s shoulder.

“What?”

“How come you’re going through?”

“It’s complicated,” he said. “Why are you going?”

“It’s complicated,” Henry said.

“See?”

“Yeah. Dumb question,” Henry said. Though in fact his reason for going through no longer seemed very complicated at all. If it was simple that didn’t make it any less powerful, but crushing hopeless loneliness was something Henry suddenly felt able to wrap his arms around even as he wrapped his arms around Luke. “I’m lonely” did no sort of justice to what he’d suffered in the past two years, and yet he could have said it in answer and it would have been true. It seemed suddenly like it might be possible that loneliness did not have to be a crime punishable by more and more extreme loneliness, until a person was so isolated that he felt he was being pushed toward a hole in the world.

“Not dumb. Not dumb.” Luke kissed the side of Henry’s neck each time he said it. “You’re cuddly.”

“I was going to go tomorrow,” Henry said. “That was my date. That’s what I paid for. But I was thinking of changing it.”

“Really?”

“Really. It’s not going anywhere, right? It’ll be there next week. And the next week. It’s kind of nice, you know, how it’s always there, not going anywhere. Nice to know you could always just go in, whenever you want. But that you don’t have to, yet, if you want to go to the beach tomorrow instead. Or if you want to play tennis, instead, or before. Tennis, and then in you go. Unless you want to make pancakes first.”

“I don’t think Hal gives refunds,” Luke said. Hal was the guard who took semiofficial bribes to look the other way while people took one-way trips into the shed.

“I don’t mind,” Henry said. “It’s just money. When were you going?”

A long silence followed. Henry was afraid to ask again, because he couldn’t imagine that Luke hadn’t heard him. But Luke only lay there, dripping less and less and breathing more and more deeply, until Henry decided that he was asleep. Henry was almost falling asleep himself, for all that the unanswer was a disappointment, when Luke spoke, not at all sleepily, into his shoulder. “Next week,” he said. “Around then.”

Then he really did fall asleep, and Henry stayed awake, thinking of the week to come, and the one after that, and the one after that, and of repairs to the barn, and sex among the power tools, and the dogs frolicking, and of Bobby wondering what happened to his wonderful fucking dog, and whether Hobart would be sad if he never went back to Cambridge. Henry fell asleep not any less sad, or any less in love with Bobby, but surprised in a way that did nothing to satisfy his cynicism. Nantucket, he thought before he slept, and two dogs, and a good man asleep on him. It was all relatively all right.

How a two-hundred-pound man could roll off of him and get dressed in the dark and take his parka out of a closet full of rattling wire hangers without waking him up Henry never could figure. He left a note. You are lovely but the square is lovelier. It was pinned to Dan’s collar. Both dogs stared at Henry impatiently while he sat on the bed with the note in his hands, probably wondering when they were going to go out, or be fed, or be played with, or even acknowledged when they licked his hands or jumped up on the bed to nuzzle his chest. Dan eventually peed in the corner, and then joined Hobart to lie at Henry’s feet, both of them wagging their tails, then staring up at him with plaintive eyes, then eventually falling asleep as the morning turned into the afternoon. Henry finally dozed himself, the note still in his hand, maintaining the posture of sad shock he felt sure he was going to maintain forever, and did not dream of Bobby or Luke or the square or his brother or his father or the frolicking dogs or of the isle of Nantucket sinking into the sea. When he woke up he stood and stretched and rustled up his phone from where it had got lost amid the sheets. Then he called the old lady, sure he was going to tell her there was an extra dog for her to bring to Cambridge until he left her a message saying he would bring Hobart back himself.