Denton, midnight

There are some things we can't know until the universe or God or Fate puts us in a position to see it for ourselves.  Rosie calls those moments the Truth, and she talks about it like it's coming for us all, looming huge and inevitable on the horizon.  If I don't believe in something - and I usually don't - she'll just shrug it off and tell me the Truth will come out someday.  So I don't think Brad loves me?  I will eventually, because at some point in my future, the columns of my life will collapse one by one to reveal the single moment when I'm stranded with that love and the certainty of it's endurance.

She tells me all the time that's the reason she's not worried when Jack lies.  Those lies will either come true or they won't.  It's not for us to say, and it's between God and Jack.

Living in Gray House, those moments come for me all the time, usually in a sudden realization of what someone has been talking about all along.  My cursory understanding and ability to empathize can take me all the way to the front door of some idea, but it's something supernatural which shoves me inside.  For me, it's far less likely that I would be bathed in the wondrous blah blah blah of Brad's love, and more likely that I would feel it from the inside out; the twisting rattlesnakes of his affections for me with all their strikes and dangerous rattles, infecting every other woman he meets with a specific poison.

I explain all this to Adam as we drive Bev to the house in Denton.  He's reapplied his layer of suit over bare skin, donning only the essential pants and shirt and jacket, leaving the underwear and tie in his bedroom.  He rolls a coin between his fingers as I drive, his arm lazing out of the window.  Rosie and I quit smoking over a year ago, and the chain-smoking Gray Boys had done their best to cut back to a more respectable amount.  Adam's crutch had become fidgeting with a silver dollar he'd been given by his uncle Jim when he was fourteen or so, who swore under drunken oath it had been forcibly projected from the pussy of a showgirl, thereby making it good luck.

Adam refers me back to the summer before last, when I had learned to be a boy by becoming one, and he had been a voice in my head telling me all it meant to be a man.  The secrets of masculinity had been passed on to me by the First Man himself, then.

"Yeah," I agree with him, turning down the long drive to Denton.  "I understood it intellectually until it was time to live it."

He stays quiet until I pull up to the front of the house.  The dust of the road settles down around Beverly, and I turn off the engine and the headlights die against the front door.  We sit in the close silence of the car for a moment.

"So, what will I be living inside here?" he asks me.  "Or rather, what will you?"

I think for a moment before answering.

"The fear of an amnesiac," I tell him, and he scratches his eyebrow with his thumb.

"A difficult, but stunning, album," he considers.  He rolls up the window and the smell of his cologne takes over the scent of Beverly's new leather seats Clyde installed for me last Christmas.  Adam smells, on most days, like the pine woods men have spent their whole evolution trying to escape.  He's quiet, and I know he's thinking about whatever secret he has about Amnesiac that no one will talk about.  Some haunting of 2001 that he and Rosie and Brad refuse to acknowledge.

The exterior of the Denton house is brick and siding, angular designs in the garage door which betray the decade it was built.  The windows in the front are large, but covered with drapes.

"It's scary when you remember something you forgot," I tell him, and the coin vanishes in favor of a second cigarette.

"Sometimes," he agrees with me.

"Half-remembering is even worse," I tell him, staring at the aluminum screen door covering the red front door.  "It's like... if you went back to a summer house.  If you hadn't seen it for years."

Adam picks tobacco off of his tongue and nods slowly.

"Yes.  As if it had been abandoned, by you, although you've since forgotten."

"Yeah."

We stare for a minute more in silence.  I look for the sign of movement in the windows, and see none.

"The house in Black Diamond felt like that," he reminds me.  "To most of us."

A different house, and a distant memory.  A time before me, or maybe it wasn't.  No one can remember what they remember anymore, and so maybe everywhere we go will begin to feel like this; like we were run out of this castle so young, we can't remember anything but the way light falls onto a river.  I remove the keys from the ignition, and we get out of the car.  Bev's driver side door creaks a little when I push it open.  It's a sound I like.  It means she's old enough to know better.

On the front stoop, I reach under the old black rubber welcome mat and extract a key.  The screen has an aluminum knob on it, and it rattles when it opens.  When I push the front door open, the dark of the house yawns back, and a smell comes with it which makes Adam clear his throat.

"Ahem, yes," he says.  "I uh.  I believe I've been here, before."

I reach inside, to the light switch on the wall.  It illuminates a single hanging lamp in the corner, brown glass suspended over an easy chair.  The remnants of Brad and I litter the room, from when we were here before.

When we were here before...

The sleeping bag Brad found in the closet is still tossed on the carpet of the living room.  A coloring book is half-colored, a puzzle is half-done on the coffee table.  This room is a time capsule of some life I don't remember.

The kitchen chairs are brown and spindly-legged.  The linoleum is yellowing in the corners.  If I tore it up, I think I would find my name written underneath.

Adam stands in the center of the open living room and dining room, looking around with his critical eyes.  I sit in the dim light on a green couch.  I wait for him to say the words I know he's going to say.

"Evelyn," he mutters, his cigarette shortening in his teeth.  "This is... well."

I know he's cycling through names to call it.  The Dragon's house, my house, the house I grew up in, the house Brad had installed here once and I'd torn it down immediately because I didn't want to live in it anymore.  The place we started when I'd come home in the first place.  He slips his hands back into his pockets to consider the wood paneling on the walls.

"And the piano," he gestures, and I nod.  Adam had played that piano the winter we'd been snowed in together, in 2000.

"But it's changed some," he observes.

"Yeah, I'm not sure why," I tell him.

The world is so depressingly short on places I recognize.  The things I grew to see as familiar have all been torn down and replaced with things maybe my children will grow up feeling comforted by.  But sometimes it's made me feel like my life could be entirely erased because there's no evidence of my experiences anymore.  Every surface I touched has been painted over or torn down, and it has always made me feel lost in a certain way.  In this way.  In the way that made Brad build it and me destroy it again.

But here it is, and maybe that means we can also endure long past the fear we won't.  I wanted to wear a hole in the world, in the places I walked over it enough times to disintegrate carpets to ruin, but when I couldn't, I think I got scared, and pushed every familiar thing away.  The Dragon, and the house I grew up in, and even Brad.

Adam picks his way through the living room and remembers how we moved the couch in front of the fireplace.  Another time, and another place, but connecting now.  He asks me questions about where and when we might be, based on history I know.

"Is this the Cartwright home? he asks me, referring to a world where Brad and John and I are triplets and live across the street from Rosie and Drama.

"No."

"And... well, no, this couldn't be the Garage."

"No."

"It smells of you," he admits to me, putting his cigarette out in the amber ashtray on the table.  "Things only I would recognize."

At first I think he's telling me this to brag, but I can see his expression as he glances around, and I know it's because it also smells like Brad and how we're a common denominator in his life.

And yes, it smells like me, but it also smells like Brad and it also smells like the dust left over all our things we forgot...

Just the way the air in Eden was thick with possibility, so the air of Gray House has become similarly thick and full of the passing of moments out of the order and thought of time.  Ever since Drama came home, it's been like this, and so it begs the question, did Drama take us back to Eden?

Or maybe we never left, and like everything else in life, losing it is a simple act of believing yourself to no longer have it.  Could the world really change so drastically by just believing it was different one morning?

Adam removes his jacket, and rolls the sleeves of his shirt deliberately to the elbow.

That's what had happened with us, wasn't it?  I'd gone to sleep one night with Adam and woken up to a different world.  The night everything changed.  I remember I'd even tried to go back to my old life after that - to resume the every day as if it was all the same as before - and I'd been unable to.  So I have evidence that it is that simple, and it's wholly dependent on who or what you happen to be falling in love with.

It shocks me as I'm considering our history to see Adam's tall and brusque outline doesn't fit in this room.  He looks out-of-place here, like a lost traveling salesman.  I see he's taken off his jacket in reaction to this intrusion, in an effort to be what he would call "more comfortable."

It's a small and maybe petty thing, that I notice Brad belongs here and Adam doesn't.  But this might be the only place it's true, and so I feel like protecting it.  I feel like holding still and waiting for him to pass me by, as if he were a prison guard of this reality, and I have to make sure he doesn't see the hole I've dug to the beach.  I curl up on the couch, hugging my own knees and Adam gestures to the sleeping bag on the floor.

"You made love," he observes, his voice quiet.  He can feel my tension rising, and I can tell he's trying to make himself soft-voiced and slow-moving.  He summons all the tricks of men to get animals to eat from their hands.

"Yeah."

"What was it like?" he asks, trying to keep his tone casual, light.  Flowers bloom in my chest and wilt and bloom again in a fast procession, tickling adrenaline and closing up my throat.  I don't answer him, but he can see me blush.

He kneels carefully and puts his hand on the now cold fabric of the sleeping bag.  Yes, we made love, but it could've been decades ago.  It could have been just a dream.  It could've meant everything or nothing.  I could be Evelyn, or the span of the planet she came from.  It's up to me to tell him what I believe.

"This is where I came from," I tell him.  "Me and Brad found it together."