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."

Blue Suit 2: January 12th

Adam scoffs at my late arrival to his room.

"Oh," he chuffs, rising from his brown leather reading chair and setting down his drink.  "Oh, I see.  Are we taking numbers?  Am I next?"

Gray laces his hair like frost settling over an otherwise brown lawn.  His heavy brow is raised in mock concern for me in the slow light of his room; a treasure trove of all that which might make a man into a man.

His expectant face makes him look like Gary Oldman, but Adam tends to, whether he's just standing here, or melting into deaf musicians, fat prime ministers, Carpathian princes, crude pimps, or violent lovers.  His suit is pale and steely blue, and there's a sheen to the fabric tonight.  He's starched and ironed himself into right angles and sarcastic amusement.

I wilt at his line, which he intended me to do.

"I..."

I hesitate in the doorway.  Adam's room is a foreign place full of pools of delicate gold light, strange artifacts, broken machines, and the quiet whispers of his cruelty and his rage.  He's grown all these sharp edges and hard thorns for me to soften, now, and he's done it just so.  Just because.  Just in case.

He moves his jaw to explore his teeth with his tongue, and I by the way the shadows fall, I can see he's skipped a day of shaving.  So he's meant to burn me, as well.

Adam's bed is dark and imposing, tall and impossible to climb into without standing on one of the dozens of stacks of books he keeps around it.  The items within are crammed into cabinets, and the cabinets make the room feel cave-like.  Currently, the bed is tossed with a blanket made of tawny red fur I gifted him once - fox fur.

"Evelyn," he recites my name to me, sliding his hands into his pockets.  "Just who the fuck do you take me for?"

"Adam," I tell him, shutting the door quietly behind me, shrugging my way around it with guilty shoulders.  "You're mad at me."

"I am, that, Doll," he snorts.  "I am, that, indeed."

His tie is navy.  The suit is slim-cut, notch lapels, single breasted, two button.  The cuffs of his shirt beneath are two button mitered cuffs.  I learned the names of everything for him, and he spits out his favorite word at me now in total disdain.

"Evelyn."

"Adam."

"This is our night."

"I know."

I look up at him, my expression blank.  Adam's moods are better weathered before response, because he so often talks himself out of his rages.  Glasses have shattered in the fireplace and holes have been smashed into the drywall before he looks up sheepish and admits his own fears, and so I say nothing, and I do nothing, while he clips his words short and terse to me in irritation of my blasphemy.

"You see, I had thought," he steps toward me, trying to get a read on my emotions, and I interrupt him.

"I know."

He presses me against the door.

"You know everything, is that right?  You know what this all means to me?  I see, so there's no need to discuss it further."

"Adam-"

"Evelyn."

"I just-"

"He took you home," he fumes at me, and turns his back on me.

"What?" I ask him, suddenly nervous.  "What do you mean?"

Adam stands with his back to me, and I watch his shoulders move and adjust as he unfastens the buttons at his wrist, and on his coat.  He shrugs the jacket off without looking at me, and it occurs to me what's happening.

He deposits the jacket on the back of his reading chair and begins to loosen his tie, and I feel panic setting in.

Since I came home to Gray House, there were two things treated as ritual: that Adam and I were Home to one another, and when that was compromised by disagreement, we fought naked.  I think subconsciously or even consciously, Adam thought that being naked meant we would be more respectful to our true natures.  I can see now that because I hadn't respected the first ritual, I am going to be made to choke on the second.

Of course, I hadn't thought that talking to Brad about Denton, or listening to the mix, or even going there would constitute this level of infidelity he was acting like I'd committed.  Sure, I had drawn Brad from some other time and place to sit inside the house we built within each other in order to see how we'd always been together, but that's, like, not a crime.  It didn't make that place home any more than it had been when I'd come to Gray House, which was not at all.  I mean.  Right?

The edges of my nonchalance begin to rankle.

It had been different, and it had meant something this time which it hadn't meant before.  Downplaying it now to keep Adam's feelings safe meant undercutting in some way what had happened between Brad and I, and maybe that's how things got this way.  Maybe, since I first set foot in Gray House, I've been so scared of losing something I've never really had anything.  I take a deep breath and kick off my ballet shoes.

Adam's slacks hit the hardwood floor with the jangle of his belt-buckle.  His wristwatch and our wedding ring clink onto his nightstand.  He peels off his undershirt and his underwear and adjusts his weight to one foot, crossing his arms over his now bare chest.

I slink my way guilty from my white sundress, and I let it fall to the floor.  Adam doesn't bat an eye at my red bra and panties.  I add them to the puddle of my dress at my feet.  He waits for me to take off my jewelry, also, and I hesitate before depositing my necklace and ring onto the bookcase next to me.

The psychological impulse to crawl into his bed and cover up with the blankets is so strong, I start to move toward the bed surreptitiously, avoiding his eye-contact.

"I've been telling myself there must be some explanation.  Some need for this," Adam muses, looking at me like I've stolen his Corvette when he told me explicity not to drive it.  I circle my arms and lace my fingers together just under my belly.  I touch the relatively new scar on the right side of my stomach.

"There is," I tell him, and his expression shifts from disbelieving back to expectant.  Underneath, I can see his concern and fear.  "I'm not sure I can explain it," I add.

"This isn't a god-damned obligation, Evelyn, and I won't have it treated as such," he cautions me.

"No, I know, I wanted to come."

He relents to letting me climb into the bed, and the air shifts to one of his need to understand.  The fox fur is rough under my legs and I look out over the strange vistas of Adam's bedroom.  He has a watch taken to pieces on his writing desk, and a row of vials beside it filled with greenish liquids.

I came to Gray House for Brad, and Brad alone.  It was an innocent encounter between two like animals that had drawn me Home, and Adam and I had so catastrophically interfered with everything.  Like a car crash, Adam had just happened to me, and we crashed into one another and we kept crashing, loud and heavy enough to drown out the sound of all other things.

In the cramped kitchen of the Old House, we'd collided that night in January, when we were finally alone, and everything Brad and I had been building together, inside, was razed and replaced with a single white tree onto which I had carved the name "Adam."  We had tried to pick our way through the landmines of human interaction that is Gray House, but it hadn't really worked, and the River came crashing down the sides of the granite mountains west of Eden, and carried everything else away; even Brad, even Clyde.

"Did you want it that way?" I ask him, and he climbs into the bed beside me.  We'd shared this same bed for almost two years, and this bed nearly exclusively.  He looks straight ahead, at the wall.

"Well, yes, of course," he admits.  "I told you as much, the day I gave you permission to sleep with Clyde.  I have no more intentions of being gentlemanly."

"You also told me that you'd never do anything to interfere in my relationship with Brad."

"I lied," he answers me quickly.  "And it was an innocent lie, but it was a lie.  Any interfering I did, I did in a playful kind of rivalry.  I've never done anything to harm you, or him."

He examines his fingernails, neatly scrubbed of engine grease and trimmed to thin white crescents at the ends of his fingers.

"Yet," he adds, his voice light and airy.

It's true he might, someday, abdicating any promise he's made me so far.  Adam is by nature treacherous and disloyal, even to me, because he feels infected by me as much as he feels obsessive of me.  We both know, sitting in the gold silence, that he might interfere in any one of my other relationships in the future, but that I would also remain chained to this dreadful and politic faithfulness, no matter what he did.

We put first who we put first.  The reason we do it probably doesn't matter, because it would dissect the love we have for everyone else, and measure it, and compare it in depth and passion and constancy, and what a fucking distasteful thing to do.

But maybe that's what Adam wants, really, and maybe he wants to be naked when I do.  I cringe, and pull the fur over my legs.  Whatever slight Adam feels tonight is one tenth of the poison I know is in Matthew's heart, waiting for me far beneath Gray House, in the warmer parts of Hell.  Adam has the capacity to play this game, and to walk steady along this high-wire.  Matthew does not.  Being a ghost, for Adam, meant learning to experience the love between others, in order to possess it for himself.  Being one for Matthew meant disappearing from love forever.

Adam rips off the skin of his cuticle with a toothy sneer, and it begins to bleed.

"I can't abide you keeping things from me," he mutters into his lap.  Of course, Adam wouldn't have cared if I never came to him tonight, if I'd let him watch me from a dark corner somewhere.  If I'd let him possess the actions I'd taken with Brad for himself, to study and interpret.  I glance over at him, knowing this is the moment his rage turns to the aforementioned self-pity.

"We're very good together," I remark at him, taking his torn finger and stuffing it into my mouth.  He squints his dark eyes at me in disgust, as if I've purposely given him a disease, and maybe I have.  I suck the blood from the tear, copper and salt.

"Hardly," he cuts.  "You're a... a menace," he argues, taking his hand back.

"I didn't think," I tell him.  "I should've told you, I'm sorry.  I was with Brad, and I wanted him to... I wanted to show him..."

I hesitate and struggle for words before I begin to cry.  It happens to me usually so fast someone not looking directly at me would think I'd begun to laugh.  Adam, knowing better, just pushes the fur over me and moves closer to me in the bed.

"You two have always struggled," he sighs.  "Living proof, of course, that you don't really love yourself.  You're so much better off with someone... well, much less like you, Evelyn.  And so is he."

"Maybe we don't really work, but we love each other," I plead to him, like he hasn't been listening to me.

"Well, yes, naturally," he relents as he pulls me to his chest.  "Such is it with Nicholas, and I."

Invoking his own twin brother quiets me enough to begin to think about them.  Adam and Nick have always had a deep and unrelenting hatred which runs almost as deep as their deep and unrelenting love.  You can't know someone, maybe, how we end up knowing each other and not hating them as much as you love them.  Or loving them for the truth of who they are, which might actually be the same thing.  Maybe we never worked as a couple because I'd spent so much time and energy trying to make us into one, and we just aren't.

In the breadth of human history, we've only ever found three or four relationships to have with someone.  Beyond those parameters, only few have dared to tread, and usually have done so famously and disastrously.  It leads me to think there are certain inevitable ways a heart breaks, which we can count on.  But here Brad broke my heart by removing himself from it, slowly over years, like removing a railroad spike and giving me time to heal.

"When I came to Gray House, Brad and I were already breaking up," I tell Adam.  "We broke up and found out we could never ever ever get back together.  And then we moved backwards."

"Mm," Adam murmurs, and I feel the sound vibrate in his chest.

"We went backwards, and after we broke up, we were in a relationship with a lot of problems.  We had lost our house, but then it grew back.  And then we were in a relationship that was kind of good, but we could tell it was going to end.  And then we were in a new relationship."

"So.  Now.  Having gotten to that place, what happens next?" he asks me.

"I don't know," I admit to him.  "I've never felt like this about anyone else.  I've never gone back in time before.  Or even through it all mixed up, like it has been."

"But you took him to the house," Adam protests.  "The house which now stands, untouched by your destructions.  Isn't that right?"

I nod.  Adam lights one of his cigarettes from the case on his nightstand.

"Well, I'd very much like you to show it to me," he decides.

Denton, 10000 BC

Evelyn to Brad - Denton

We wake when the Dragon wakes, warm under the pale wallow of his belly.  The three of us stretch in the morning sun of spring and slither out into the Garden, to run to the River in our sneakers.

Eden is the gestation of the Earth; things like Time and Space and Dreams are crowded together into this womb to wait to be born.  Running to the River might take an hour, but we travel through the heavy air to get there, thick with ideas and fate.

Of course, we don't know that, John and Joel and I.  We won't know that until the Storm comes, and Time spills out of the gate of Eden like afterbirth, spreading out flat and useless and thin.  For now, we tear off our thin t-shirts, my own a pale yellow, and we wade into the cold water, sucking our breath in hard and laughing.  The Dragon stretches, and the trees groan distant as he presses them with his wings.  He blots out the coming daylight with a single unfurl before launching himself into the pearl sky, turning high to show us his gray back ridged with hard scales.

The current of the River is clear and untouched, is polluted by a paper mill, is reddened with blood from a battle, is low and then high again with the rains that haven't come.

"I want a Slurpee," Joel confesses, and we agree, tasting the cherry flavor melting over the morning that is the way the invention of the Slurpee tastes, and the medicinal soda-fountain history of it's origin.  It tastes good, and it feels like freedom and industry, and so we agree.

John shakes the water from his brassy hair, and it slaps the sides of his pale cheeks, and sticks there.  There's no way to get clean in the River because the River is made of all things, and in all things one gets only... wet.  Leaves stick to his white chest, skinny and only beginning to form the muscles he'll need to one day lift Joel from the same water and save his life, which we can feel rush by us in the current, making us all shiver.

I remain quiet because I don't know what life is anymore than I know what death is, and it makes me certain of things like taxes and suitcases and the car I know Joel will one day buy when he calls himself Bradley.

"What's the matter, Zech?" he asks me, and I throw a rock into the water, and watch it sink.

On the shore, John is putting his shirt back on, which is red and says Coca-Cola, but I can't read yet.  The cotton knocks the leaves from his body, and they fall to the mud.

Joel crosses his arms over his stomach.  He looks at me, and the air around me, which I might be turning back into night with my thoughts.

The River changes around us to a flat black street, the sun setting instead of rising, Joel and I glaring at one another with 20 more years shared between us.  He's wearing a red leather jacket, and I've finally gotten taller than him.

"To a small man, every inch counts, Zechariah," he smirks at me, and I think about pulling my knife on him, and the invention of knives, and the evolution of murder, and I stop feeling good in my stomach, so I get out of the river.

Beside me on the riverbank, Joel plops his wet jeans with a thunk into the mud. 

"Aw, I was just kidding," he apologizes, wearing the same smirk he wore moments before.  The place he cut off his jeans is frayed, and I pick at the strings that hang along the bone of his kneecap. 

The air smells like frankincense and rose oil.  There are elephants in the woods behind us, bowing low to one another, and I can feel their feet strike the ground when they rise again.  I push my hair back behind my ears, and it lengthens as I do, and turns white-blonde.  Joel puts his shirt back on - forest green and bearing a logo - and it sticks to his wet skin.

"I don't feel good," I whisper to him, and I trace on his arm the map I see of the two of us unwinding forever, through the tall grass browned by a tired world ready to give in.  He feels the same thing I do when I trace it; the fear of failing to reach an important destination. 

Like matryoshka dolls, we wait inside ourselves, the same people we become today, and the day before.  The same nihilistic punk boys and ostracized royalty which feels the oppressive sense of our utter failure creep through the ribs of he and I as children on the banks of the Mnemosyne. 

"We could get married," he suggests, and I think about what that really means at all.

Behind us, I can hear Denton being built, with the hammers and nails of the army men intent on destroying it, and I'm one of them, and so is Joel.  I can feel the cool cast of it's shadow over me that means people are going to take this very simple idea of marriage and make it into an institution of control and justification of power.  I can feel the cold parts of the River which mean some will be happy and some will be unhappy. 

"I don't want to get married," I tell him, afraid of the cold history getting born around us, and the army men we someday become detonate the bomb that destroys Dummy Town, and levels our home.

 Joel pulls a bug off my shoulder and lets it loose on the muddy bank. 

"Well," he thinks, and I watch him cast around for the right time, and the right feeling, his ears still too big for his head at eleven or however old we are.

Behind us, the elephants have gone.  Now, the woods are dark and warm with a change of the season.  The light is gold coming through the trees, and Joel has started to call himself Bradley.  His eyes turn from warm blue to cold blue, and I feel the terror grow inside him from the inside which makes him cold.  He is suddenly 16, suddenly a trapped animal, suddenly full of a scream inside his heart.  The sweat collects at his temples when he asks me.

"Hey, why don't you be my Valentine?"