Every Visible Thing, page 8
Owen has spent a lot of time wondering if what they do can be considered “fucking around.” Nothing has come close to the topic in Human Development, and his book only mentions it once, in passing, then refers the reader with questions to a section about homosexuality. Owen is afraid to read that section. He tells himself that it is not the same thing as what Danny does with Amanda, because they don’t touch. Then he wonders what it means that he wants to.
“I don’t think you should risk it,” Owen says about Danny’s plan to visit Amanda Peters. Danny laughs, an exaggerated guffaw meant to ridicule, and Owen realizes he didn’t mean it. Danny has a tendency to dare Owen toward an idea he has no intention of carrying out. The first time he suggested Owen join him in beating off, Owen was sure it was some sort of trap.
When he is done laughing at him, Danny sighs. “This project is lame,” he says.
“It’s easy, though,” Owen says. “Who’d you pick?”
“Some war hero,” Danny says. “Probably a fag.” He pauses for a moment, cocking his head, as if he is listening to the rasp of Owen’s charcoal. “Hey,” he says finally. “Is your brother in here?”
Owen looks up to see if this is one of Danny’s jokes, but his friend is gnawing at a hangnail, his look too blank to be taunting.
“This is a historical cemetery,” Owen says. “They haven’t buried anyone here in a hundred years.”
“I know,” Danny says. “I was just kidding anyway.” He stands up, brushing at the butt of his already filthy jeans. Owen feels sorry for him, and guilty for being so condescending. Most of the time, he does not think of himself as being smarter than other people. But Danny, even though he is better in math, often does not know simple facts that Owen has known for years. His geography is abominable, he never used a computer before transferring here, when he reads it is painfully slow, and he has the large, overly controlled handwriting of a first-grader. There seems to be a gap between what he sees and what he retains, and Owen has begun to wonder if it’s because he is always stoned.
Danny leans so close that Owen feels a familiar thrill that is part arousal and part fear. He angles his head to read the grave rubbing Owen has almost finished.
Under the curved top is a worn-down outline of angel wings bordering a realistic skull. At the bottom, where Owen has pushed aside the overgrown grass, is an epitaph. He is not here, he is risen. The name appears on Owen’s rice paper as white block letters in an abyss of black: BENJAMIN ASH 1775–1786.
“He was eleven,” Danny says.
“Yeah,” Owen murmurs, going over a dull letter with sweeps of his charcoal.
“What do you think happened to him?”
Though Owen has already imagined a short but highly melodramatic history for a dead eighteenth-century New England boy, to the point that he doesn’t want to research him in the library because he prefers this made-up biography, he shrugs.
“I don’t know,” he says, as if, about this, as well as anything else they might discuss, he couldn’t care less.
“Wanna play after school?” Danny says. His breath tickles the hair on the back of Owen’s neck.
Owen makes an effort to breathe deeply, to keep his answer from tumbling out of him too soon—eager, transparent, and raw.
The fight that occurs after Lena cuts her hair is the worst Owen can remember in the history of his family. His parents rarely raise their voices in anger. His father, who ran group-therapy sessions when he was studying for the priesthood, is always trying to see someone else’s side of things. Owen’s mother grows silent when she’s mad, her eyes bulging from the effort to hold it in. Why all of this restraint should suddenly fall apart just because of a bad haircut, Owen is unsure. Though he is sent to his room as soon as they glimpse the shining black remnants of his sister’s hair, they are yelling so loudly Owen can make out every word. Lena’s words are the most surprising—almost every other one is a curse. It’s the abandon Lena takes in swearing at their parents that he finds the most frightening, though on some level it is also thrilling. All of the words he has recently learned to repeat nonchalantly with Danny, filling them in wherever they seem appropriate and sometimes when they don’t, Lena is screaming at their soft-spoken parents, people who, except for that one incident with the priest and an occasional slip due to bodily injury, do not use such language. Lena flings more swear-words in one performance than have been uttered in their house for a decade. Most of it goes something like this:
FATHER: We want to know who you’ve been hanging out with.
LENA: None of your fucking business.
MOTHER: Why have you done this to yourself? Is it a cry for help?
LENA: Fuck, that’s deep. Been browsing the teen pamphlets at the hospital, Mom?
FATHER: What is this really about? Why can’t you tell us?
LENA: Jesus Christ, you guys are clueless. You really are.
MOTHER: Fine. If you can’t communicate like an adult, we’ll treat you like a child. You’re not to leave this house except for school and a trip to the hairdresser.
LENA: As if you could fucking stop me.
FATHER: Are you on drugs? Is that it?
LENA: Since when do you give a shit?
Owen thinks his sister has pushed things too far this time. He is sending mental messages to her to tone it down, but she continues to swear at them, hard, sharp curses, the silence afterward making them seem like slaps to his parents’ cheeks.
Owen doesn’t want to take sides. He would rather they all shut up. He would like to tell Lena to drop it and go to her room, his father to ignore her and escape to his reading chair in the living room. His mother to give that quick, impatient wave of her hand as she leaves the house, checking her pockets for the tools she will need at the hospital. Most of Owen’s life, at least the part he can remember, has involved the members of his family sequestering themselves in their assigned chambers. He’d prefer it to remain that way.
Still, the fight is too tempting for Owen to stay in his room. He opens his door and creeps down the hall, stopping by the door to the living room. They are all yelling at once now, Lena spilling out foul insults, his mother sounding unhinged and hysterical with her battery of questions, his father trying to make an ultimatum above their chorus. Owen peeks in just at the moment that shocks them all. Lena rises from the sectional sofa, ready to storm off to her room in the way she has perfected, rattling the china cabinet from four walls away. Instead of their normal response to Lena’s stomping, a roll of their eyes and exaggerated alarm at the damage she may cause, their father grabs hold of Lena’s upper arm, tightly enough that Owen can see her fair skin bleeding white at the edges of his fingers.
“Sit down,” he growls. Lena, momentarily stunned by this new tactic, allows herself to be pushed, a bit too firmly, back against overstuffed maroon velour. The impact causes her to bounce a bit, and the sectional piece to misalign from its twin on the left. There is silence, all of them unsure how to react to this moment which seems more suited to TV than any scene from the Furey family. Lena looks down at her father’s hand, still clamped on her arm, and back up again. Owen thinks he can see the corner of her mouth twitch with a smile at the opportunity.
“What are you going to do now, Dad?” she says. “Hit me?” There is a noise from Owen’s mother, somewhere between a gasp and a remonstrative hiss. Owen’s father lets go of Lena as if her skin has been burning his hand all along and he can’t hold on for another second.
“That’s enough, young lady,” he says, not yelling now. Lena crosses her arms at her chest, mashing her lips together to indicate she’s through. She rubs purposefully at the now-red stains her father has left on her arm.
“I don’t care about your hair,” he says simply, as though he hasn’t been yelling about her disrespect for her body for forty minutes. “Leave it. You look ridiculous, but that’s your business. You will not,” he says, louder now, because Lena has looked up, squinting, as if preparing to let go with more, “disrupt this family just for the sake of doing so. I won’t stand for this fabricated melodrama. I won’t stand for it.” When he repeats it, it is quieter, but just as cruel. It is not usual for their father to speak to them like this—his dealings with his children are sweet, if vague. Owen considers him the easy one. It is their mother who can clamp so naturally, almost happily, onto ultimatums. But their mother is silent, apparently shocked, by Lena or her husband Owen can’t tell.
“Jeez,” Lena says, with the same contempt, but not looking her father in the eye. “Excuse me for living.” Their father can’t seem to find a response to this, though Owen thinks he sees his jaw shaking on the edge of one.
After Lena is finally, mercifully, released back to her room, Owen’s mother goes to the hospital and his father lies on the sofa with a book for about five minutes until he falls asleep. Owen pads down the hall in his socks and knocks quietly on Lena’s door. With no answer he tries again, four knocks instead of two, using all his knuckles. He’s beginning to wonder if she’s even in there when he hears a low, runny-nosed response.
“Go away, Owen,” she calls out, and he is so angry that he forgets completely his plan of comfort and allegiance—he was going to tell her that her haircut looks cool—and instead kicks the door and blurts out the first thing that comes to his mouth.
“Freak.”
Owen and Danny go to the graveyard to drink. Danny provides the forty-ounce Budweiser bottles dressed in brown paper sleeves. In between barely lip-moistening sips, Owen pours the cold foam into the soil between his legs, feeding the bones. He doesn’t like the way even a little beer makes him feel, heavy and drowsy and unguarded, images of himself pressing his mouth into Danny’s appear frequently and without the usual alarm. He prefers the pot, which makes him hypervigilant. Rather than the smoke doing damage to his lungs, it seems to expand them, burning pockets of congestion the same way the red ember on a joint eats its way down toward his fingers. He likes passing it back and forth, the paper barely growing cold in the space between his and Danny’s mouths.
Danny gets the beer by waiting around the corner from the liquor store, asking customers to buy for him. He takes Owen to show him how it’s done. Sniffing out potential buyers is the tricky part. They must be old enough to have real IDs—college kids with fake IDs won’t risk the double crime—but young enough that they don’t have kids yet and haven’t developed the moral superiority of a parent. Twenty-one to twenty-six seems to be the magic window. Men are more promising than women, though certain, slightly slutty women are guarantees if you flirt with them. Owen tests out his instruction on one twenty-something guy in jeans and a thin leather tie, and then on a punk girl holding a wad of money she has collected from her friends who are double-parked. He fails both times. Danny, annoyed and impatient, takes over and finds them a buyer in two minutes.
That night the first snow of the season has blanketed the graves, and a few days of melting sun and frigid temperatures has formed a frozen crust thick enough to hold them. Owen takes meager sips of the beer; a taste he will not be able to separate from what happens next for the rest of his life.
Either because he gets drunker this time or because, as Owen hopes, Danny, too, can no longer stand to wait anymore, in the middle of Owen’s tirade against his sister, Danny puts a hand on the back of Owen’s head and pulls him against his mouth. The kiss is much more gentle than Owen imagined it would be; somehow he thought if it happened it would be quick and hard and dirty, something they’d need to get out of the way before losing their nerve. But Danny kisses him as delicately as if he is a frightened girl, at times barely touching his lips in a way that flares every inch of Owen’s half-frozen skin. He has to make a conscious effort to remain quiet, because the capture of Danny’s mouth, the taste of the cloves and beer on his tongue, and the welcome fall as he is pushed back against the crust of ice, which breaks with a series of pops, all make Owen’s chest tighten with the urge to release an unbidden, mournful sound. Like a cry of pain.
It’s the kissing Owen likes, the kissing that, every time they go to the graveyard or into Danny’s room, or the bathroom at Woolworth’s or, once, in Owen’s closet while his father is making tacos in the kitchen, he tells himself is all he really wants. Despite the feeling that always takes over, after a few minutes of teasing wet mouths, that he can’t press himself hard enough, that his hands can’t move fast enough, that kissing itself is such a pale imitation of what he really wants, the details of which are still unimaginable, but still give him the urge to bite Danny’s lips in frustration.
Other than pressing him against hard surfaces, and the occasional caress of his father’s gun, Danny won’t touch him, so Owen makes up for this lack by touching anywhere and in any way his friend seems to want. This mostly involves the imitation of what he has watched Danny do to himself, often enough that he can reproduce the process with identical timing. Most of the time the whole process—the feeling of his spit-soaked palm rubbing dry, the sight of Danny’s pubic hair tangled with sweat—makes him nauseated and angry and flushed, as if someone has made a public fool of him. He has to close his eyes and press blindly on. But then there are the other times, when he forces himself to watch Danny’s face and witnesses the moment of helplessness that passes across it, where he seems to be begging Owen both to stop and not to stop at the same time. As if there is something about the pleasure he simply cannot stand. This makes Owen almost proud, like he has finally pinned Danny down in a wrestling match and demanded uncle. He enjoys the look of anguish that mottles Danny’s face the second before he comes and often imagines, though he knows better, that there is real pain involved. The first time he saw this he stopped, and Danny, who then hid his face in his Star Wars pillow, let out a cry and grabbed his hand back. Owen asked afterward what coming felt like, and Danny was lulled and grateful enough to tell him.
“There’s a part where you know you’re gonna explode and there’s no way you can stop it and it’s almost scary,” he said. “You’re scared you’re going to and scared you’re not all at the same time.” Though he didn’t say it, Owen could tell that when he was involved it added another fear. Danny was scared he was going to refuse.
No matter if he enjoys it or not, Owen, at the end of these encounters, whether Danny rolls away to sleep or turns his back to hastily zipper the stained crotch of his jeans, is always left with the wish that they could go backward, back to before they ever touched, when he wanted something but wasn’t quite sure what it was.
Thanksgiving is followed by Danny’s twelfth birthday. He has a roller-skating party at Spin Off, and in between skating laps hand in hand with Katie Beck, he sneaks off to the boy’s room to receive a quick hand job from Owen, in a wooden stall crowded with graffiti about fags. December passes quickly into Christmas, a holiday his family has ruined either with overenthusiasm or apathy every year Hugh has been gone. On New Year’s Eve, Owen goes over to Danny’s, and his mother, working as a waitress for the First Night party downtown, leaves them cream soda and Smartfood for their date with Dick Clark. They drink the soda mixed with vodka Danny acquired earlier in the afternoon, by lifting it from the cardboard box full of bottles next to a woman rearranging her purchases in the hatchback of her Saab. They play the Nintendo Danny’s father sent him for Christmas and slurp from spiked soda cans until a half hour before the countdown, when they unplug the game to watch the crowd in Times Square. A reporter with a handheld camera is entering clubs and bars, giving them unsteady glimpses of the parties. In one club scantily dressed people are dancing to Prince’s “1999,” and a chuckling news commentator remarks that the song will be around every new year until the millennium. Owen makes the calculation in his head. In 1999 he will be twenty-four and Danny will be twenty-six. This sounds depressingly old.
At the countdown to midnight, the boys recite the seconds with exaggerated boredom, growing excited when the bright ball appears to stick for a moment in midair. At zero the television speakers blare with cheers and the atonal bleating of noisemakers. The camera sweeps across the crowd, settling on a spot for an instant before someone comes to their senses and jerks it away. In the pause before the mistake is realized, Owen and Danny have a clear image of two men, heads shaved, rings studding their ears, kissing deeply and with abandon, their lips parting just long enough for a glimpse of the muscular underside of a tongue.
Danny jumps to his feet, spilling the popcorn and his foaming soda can. “I’m gonna puke,” he cries, laughing and holding his stomach all the way to the bathroom. Owen can hear him retching in there, spasms interspersed with self-conscious giggles. Though Owen waits for forty minutes, turning off the TV and cleaning the glop of soda-soaked popcorn from the rug, Danny doesn’t come out, and finally Owen goes to bed alone, taking his place nearest the wall on Danny’s futon. When he closes his eyes, the room whirls, and he wonders if Danny has finally managed to get him drunk.
He wakes to the sound of his own voice begging, calling stop over and over again, sweeping his free hand to dislodge the force that pulls at him in the darkness. There is something cold and heavy weighing his other hand to the mattress. His eyelids are gluey and it takes a few tries to pry and keep them open. There is a form crouched over him, perpendicular to his bottom half. Blinking, he makes out the shape of Danny’s shoulders, the perfect shiny darkness of the back of his head. It takes Owen, confused by his own shuddering, the wrenching of his whole being toward one point at his center, a few seconds to realize that the soft wet abyss he is plunging into is his best friend’s mouth.
