Текст книги "The Goldfinch "

Автор книги: Donna Tartt

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Текущая страница: 21 (всего у книги 55 страниц)

Chapter 6.

Wind, Sand and Stars

i.

OVER THE NEXT YEAR, I was so preoccupied in trying to block New York and my old life out of my mind that I hardly noticed the time pass. Days ran changelessly in the seasonless glare: hungover mornings on the school bus and our backs raw and pink from falling asleep by the pool, the gasoline reek of vodka and Popper’s constant smell of wet dog and chlorine, Boris teaching me to count, ask directions, offer a drink in Russian, just as patiently as he’d taught me to swear. Yes, please, I’d like that. Thank you, you are very kind. Govorite li vy po angliyskiy? Do you speak English? Ya nemnogo govoryu po-russki. I do speak Russian, a little.

Winter or summer, the days were dazzling; the desert air burned our nostrils and scraped our throats dry. Everything was funny; everything made us laugh. Sometimes, just before sundown, just as the blue of the sky began darkening to violet, we had these wild, electric-lined, Maxfield Parrish clouds rolling out gold and white into the desert like Divine Revelation leading the Mormons west. Govorite medlenno, I said, speak slowly, and Povtorite, pozhaluysta. Repeat, please. But we were so attuned to each other that we didn’t need to talk at all if we didn’t want to; we knew how to tip each other over in hysterics with an arch of the eyebrow or quirk of the mouth. Nights, we ate crosslegged on the floor, leaving greasy fingerprints on our schoolbooks. Our diet had made us malnourished, with soft brown bruises on our arms and legs—vitamin deficiency, said the nurse at school, who gave us each a painful shot in the ass and a colorful jar of children’s chewables. (“My bottom hurts,” said Boris, rubbing his rear end and cursing the metal seats on the school bus.) I was freckled head to toe from all the swimming we did; my hair (longer then than it’s ever been again) got light streaks from the pool chemicals and basically I felt good, though I still had a heaviness in my chest that never went away and my teeth were rotting out in the back from all the candy we ate. Apart from that, I was fine. And so the time passed happily enough; but then—shortly after my fifteenth birthday—Boris met a girl named Kotku; and everything changed.

The name Kotku (Ukrainian variant: Kotyku) makes her sound more interesting than she was; but it wasn’t her real name, only a pet name (“Kitty cat,” in Polish) that Boris had given her. Her last name was Hutchins; her given name was actually something like Kylie or Keiley or Kaylee; and she’d lived in Clark County, Nevada her whole life. Though she went to our school and was only a grade ahead of us, she was a lot older—older than me by three whole years. Boris, apparently, had had his eye on her for a while, but I hadn’t been aware of her until the afternoon he threw himself on the foot of my bed and said: “I’m in love.”

“Oh yeah? With who?”

“This chick from Civics. That I bought some weed from. I mean, she’s eighteen, too, can you believe it? God, she’s beautiful.”

“You have weed?”

Playfully, he lunged and caught me by the shoulder; he knew just where I was weakest, the spot under the blade where he could dig his fingers and make me yelp. But I was in no mood and hit him, hard.

“Ow! Fuck!” said Boris, rolling away, rubbing his jaw with his fingertips. “Why’d you do that?”

“Hope it hurts,” I said. “Where’s that weed?”

We didn’t talk any more about Boris’s love interest, at least not that day, but then a few days later when I came out of math I saw him looming over this girl by the lockers. While Boris wasn’t especially tall for his age, the girl was tiny, despite how much older than us she seemed: flat-chested, scrawny-hipped, with high cheekbones and a shiny forehead and a sharp, shiny, triangle-shaped face. Pierced nose. Black tank top. Chipped black fingernail polish; streaked orange-and-black hair; flat, bright, chlorine-blue eyes, outlined hard, in black pencil. Definitely she was cute—hot, even; but the glance she slid over me was anxiety-provoking, something about her of a bitchy fast-food clerk or maybe a mean babysitter.

“So what do you think?” said Boris eagerly when he caught up with me after school.

I shrugged. “She’s cute. I guess.”

“You guess?”

“Well Boris, I mean, she looks like she’s, like, twenty-five.”

“I know! It’s great!” he said, looking dazed. “Eighteen years! Legal adult! She can buy booze no problem! Also she’s lived here her whole life, so she knows what places don’t check age.”

ii.

HADLEY, THE TALKATIVE LETTER-JACKET girl who sat by me in American history, wrinkled her nose when I asked about Boris’s older woman. “Her?” she said. “Total slut.” Hadley’s big sister, Jan, was in the same grade with Kyla or Kayleigh or whatever her name was. “And her mother, I heard, is a straight-up hooker. Your friend better be careful he doesn’t get some disease.”

“Well,” I said, surprised at her vehemence, though maybe I shouldn’t have been. Hadley, an army brat, was on the swim team and sang in the school choir; she had a normal family with three siblings, a Weimaraner named Gretchen that she’d brought over from Germany, and a dad who yelled if she was out past her curfew.

“I’m not kidding,” said Hadley. “She’ll make out with other girls’ boyfriends—she’ll make out with other girls—she’ll make out with anybody. Also I think she does pot.”

“Oh,” I said. None of these factors, in my view, were necessarily reasons to dislike Kylie or whatever, especially since Boris and I had wholeheartedly taken to smoking pot ourselves in the past months. But what did bother me—a lot—was how Kotku (I’ll continue to call her by the name Boris gave her, since I can’t now remember her real name) had stepped in overnight and virtually assumed ownership of Boris.

First he was busy on Friday night. Then it was the whole weekend—not just the night, but the day too. Pretty soon, it was Kotku this and Kotku that, and the next thing I knew, Popper and I were eating dinner and watching movies by ourselves.

“Isn’t she amazing?” Boris asked me again, after the first time he brought her over to my house—a highly unsuccessful evening, which had consisted of the three of us getting so stoned we could barely move, and then the two of them rolling around on the sofa downstairs while I sat on the floor with my back to them and tried to concentrate on a rerun of The Outer Limits. “What do you think?”

“Well, I mean—” What did he want me to say? “She likes you. Sure.”

He shifted, restlessly. We were outside by the pool, though it was too windy and cool to swim. “No, really! What do you think about her? Tell the truth, Potter,” he said, when I hesitated.

“I don’t know,” I said doubtfully, and then—when he still sat looking at me: “Honestly? I don’t know, Boris. She seems kind of desperate.”

“Yes? Is that bad?”

His tone was genuinely curious—not angry, not sarcastic. “Well,” I said, taken aback. “Maybe not.”

Boris—cheeks pink with vodka—put his hand on his heart. “I love her, Potter. I mean it. This is the truest thing that has ever happened to me in my life.”

I was so embarrassed I had to look away.

“Little skinny witch!” He sighed, happily. “In my arms, she’s so bony and light! Like air.” Boris, mysteriously, seemed to adore Kotku for many of the reasons I found her disturbing: her slinky alley-cat body, her scrawny, needy adultness. “And so brave and wise, such a big heart! All I want is to look out for her and keep her safe from that Mike guy. You know?”

Quietly, I poured myself another vodka, though I really didn’t need one. The Kotku business was all doubly perplexing because—as Boris himself had informed me, with an unmistakable note of pride—Kotku already had a boyfriend: a twenty-six-year-old guy named Mike McNatt who owned a motorcycle and worked for a pool cleaning service. “Excellent,” I said, when Boris had broken this news earlier. “We ought to get him out here to help with the vacuuming.” I was sick and tired of looking after the swimming pool (a job that had fallen largely to me), especially since Xandra never brought home enough chemicals or the right kind.

Boris wiped his eyes with the heels of his hands. “It’s serious, Potter. I think she’s scared of him. She wants to break up with him but she’s afraid. She’s trying to talk him into going to a military recruiter.”

“You’d better be careful that guy doesn’t come after you.”

“Me!” He snorted. “It’s her I’m worried about! She’s so tiny! Eighty-one pounds!”

“Yeah, yeah.” Kotku claimed to be a “borderline anorexic” and could always get Boris worked up by saying she hadn’t eaten anything all day.

Boris cuffed me on the side of the head. “You sit too much around here on your own,” he said, sitting down beside me and putting his feet in the pool. “Come to Kotku’s tonight. Bring someone.”

“Such as—?”

Boris shrugged. “What about hot little blondie with the boy’s haircut, from your history class? The swimmer?”

“Hadley?” I shook my head. “No way.”

“Yes! You should! Because she is hot! And she would totally go!”

“Believe me, not a good idea.”

“I’ll ask her for you! Come on. She’s friendly to you, and always talks. Shall we call her?”

“No! It’s not that—stop,” I said, grabbing his sleeve as he started to get up.

“No guts!”

“Boris.” He was heading indoors to the phone. “Don’t. I mean it. She won’t come.”

“And why?”

The taunting edge in his voice annoyed me. “Honestly? Because—” I started to say Because Kotku is a ho which was only the obvious truth but instead I said: “Look, Hadley’s on Honor Roll and stuff. She’s not going to want to go hang out at Kotku’s.”

“What?” said Boris—spinning back, outraged. “That whore. What’d she say?”

“Nothing. It’s just—”

“Yes she did!” He was charging back to the pool now. “You’d better tell me.”

“Come on. It’s nothing. Chill out, Boris,” I said, when I saw how angry he was. “Kotku’s tons older. They’re not even in the same grade.”

“That snub-nosed bitch. What did Kotku ever do to her?”

“Chill out.” My eye landed on the vodka bottle, illumined by a clean white sunbeam like a light saber. He’d had way too much to drink, and the last thing I wanted was a fight. But I was too drunk myself to think of any funny or easy way to get him off the subject.

iii.

LOTS OF OTHER, BETTER girls our own age liked Boris—most notably Saffi Caspersen, who was Danish, spoke English with a high-toned British accent, had a minor role in a Cirque du Soleil production, and was by leaps and bounds the most beautiful girl in our year. Saffi was in Honors English with us (where she’d had some interesting things to say about The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter) and though she had a reputation for being standoffish, she liked Boris. Anyone could see it. She laughed when he made jokes, acted goofy in his study group, and I’d seen her talking enthusiastically to him in the hall—Boris talking back just as enthusiastically, in his gesticulating Russian mode. Yet—mysteriously—he didn’t seem attracted to her at all.

“But why not?” I asked him. “She’s the best-looking girl in our class.” I’d always thought that Danes were large and blonde, but Saffi was smallish and brunette, with a fairy-tale quality that was accentuated by her glittery stage makeup in the professional photo I’d seen.

“Good looking yes. But she is not very hot.”

“Boris, she is smoking hot. Are you crazy?”

“Ah, she works too hard,” said Boris, dropping down beside me with a beer in one hand, reaching for my cigarette with the other. “Too straight. All the time studying or rehearsing or something. Kotku—” he blew out a cloud of smoke, handed the cigarette back to me—“she’s like us.”

I was silent. How had I gone from AP everything to being lumped in with a derelict like Kotku?

Boris nudged me. “I think you like her yourself. Saffi.”

“No, not really.”

“You do. Ask her out.”

“Yeah, maybe,” I said, although I knew I didn’t have the nerve. At my old school, where foreigners and exchange students tended to stand politely at the margins, someone like Saffi might have been more accessible but in Vegas she was much too popular, too surrounded by people—and there was also the biggish problem of what to ask her to do. In New York it would have been easy enough; I could have taken her ice skating, asked her to a movie or the planetarium. But I could scarcely see Saffi Caspersen sniffing glue or drinking beer from paper bags at the playground or doing any of the things that Boris and I did together.

iv.

I STILL SAW HIM—just not as much. More and more he spent nights with Kotku and her mother at the Double R Apartments—a transient hotel really, a broken down motor court from the 1950s, on the highway between the airport and the Strip, where guys who looked like illegal immigrants stood around the courtyard by the empty swimming pool and argued over motorcycle parts. (“Double R?” said Hadley. “You know what that stands for, right? ‘Rats and Roaches.’ ”) Kotku, mercifully, didn’t accompany Boris to my house all that much, but even when she wasn’t around he talked about her constantly. Kotku had cool taste in music and had made him a mix CD with a bunch of smoking hot hip-hop that I really had to listen to. Kotku liked her pizza with green peppers and olives only. Kotku really really wanted an electronic keyboard—also a Siamese kitten, or maybe a ferret, but wasn’t allowed to have pets at the Double R. “Serious, you need to spend more time with her, Potter,” he said, bumping my shoulder with his. “You’ll like her.”

“Oh come on,” I said, thinking of the smirky way she behaved around me—laughing at the wrong time, in a nasty way, always commanding me to go to the fridge to fetch her beers.

“No! She likes you! She does! I mean, she thinks of you more as a little brother. That’s what she said.”

“She never says a word to me.”

“That’s because you don’t talk to her.”

“Are you guys screwing?”

Boris made an impatient noise, the sound he made when things didn’t go his way.

“Dirty mind,” he said, tossing the hair out of his eyes, and then: “What? What do you think? Do you want me to make you a map?”

“Draw you a map.”

“Eh?”

“That’s the phrase. ‘Do you want me to draw you a map.’ ”

Boris rolled his eyes. Waving his hands around, he started in again about how intelligent Kotku was, how “crazy smart,” how wise she was and how much life she had lived and how unfair I was to judge her and look down on her without bothering to get to know her; but while I sat half listening to him talk, and half watching an old noir movie on television (Fallen Angel, Dana Andrews), I couldn’t help thinking about how he’d met Kotku in what was essentially Remedial Civics, the section for students who weren’t smart enough (even in our extremely non-demanding school) to pass without extra help. Boris—good at mathematics without trying and better in languages than anyone I’d ever met—had been forced into Civics for Dummies because he was a foreigner: a school requirement which he greatly resented. (“Because why? Am I likely to be someday voting for Congress?”) But Kotku—eighteen! born and raised in Clark County! American citizen, straight off of Cops!—had no such excuse.

Over and over, I caught myself in mean-spirited thoughts like this, which I did my best to shake. What did I care? Yes, Kotku was a bitch; yes, she was too dumb to pass regular Civics and wore cheap hoop earrings from the drugstore that were always getting caught in things, and yes, even though she was only eighty-one pounds or whatever she still scared the hell out of me, like she might kick me to death with her pointy-toed boots if she got mad enough. (“She a little fighta nigga,” Boris himself had said boastfully at one point as he hopped around throwing out gang signs, or what he thought were gang signs, and regaling me with a story of how Kotku had pulled out a bloody chunk of some girl’s hair—this was another thing about Kotku, she was always getting in scary girl fights, mostly with other white trash girls like herself but occasionally with the real gangsta girls, who were Latina and black.) But who cared what crappy girl Boris liked? Weren’t we still friends? Best friends? Brothers practically?

Then again: there was not exactly a word for Boris and me. Until Kotku came along, I had never thought too much about it. It was just about drowsy air-conditioned afternoons, lazy and drunk, blinds closed against the glare, empty sugar packets and dried-up orange peels strewn on the carpet, “Dear Prudence” from the White Album (which Boris adored) or else the same mournful old Radiohead over and over:

For a minute

I lost myself, I lost myself…

The glue we sniffed came on with a dark, mechanical roar, like the windy rush of propellers: engines on! We fell back on the bed into darkness, like sky divers tumbling backwards out of a plane, although—that high, that far gone—you had to be careful with the bag over your face or else you were picking dried blobs of glue out of your hair and off the end of your nose when you came to. Exhausted sleep, spine to spine, in dirty sheets that smelled of cigarette ash and dog, Popchik belly-up and snoring, subliminal whispers in the air blowing from the wall vents if you listened hard enough. Whole months passed where the wind never stopped, blown sand rattling against the windows, the surface of the swimming pool wrinkled and sinister-looking. Strong tea in the mornings, stolen chocolate. Boris yanking my hair by the handful and kicking me in the ribs. Wake up, Potter. Rise and shine.

I told myself I didn’t miss him, but I did. I got stoned alone, watched Adult Access and the Playboy channel, read Grapes of Wrath and The House of the Seven Gables which seemed as if they had to be tied for the most boring book ever written, and for what felt like thousands of hours—time enough to learn Danish or play the guitar if I’d been trying—fooled around in the street with a fucked-up skateboard Boris and I had found in one of the foreclosed houses down the block. I went to swim-team parties with Hadley—no-drinking parties, with parents present—and, on the weekends, attended parents-away parties of kids I barely knew, Xanax bars and Jägermeister shots, riding home on the hissing CAT bus at two a.m. so fucked up that I had to hold the seat in front of me to keep from falling out in the aisle. After school, if I was bored, it was easy enough to go hang out with one of the big lackadaisical stoner crowds who floated around between Del Taco and the kiddie arcades on the Strip.

But still I was lonely. It was Boris I missed, the whole impulsive mess of him: gloomy, reckless, hot-tempered, appallingly thoughtless. Boris pale and pasty, with his shoplifted apples and his Russian-language novels, gnawed-down fingernails and shoelaces dragging in the dust. Boris—budding alcoholic, fluent curser in four languages—who snatched food from my plate when he felt like it and nodded off drunk on the floor, face red like he’d been slapped. Even when he took things without asking, as he all too frequently did—little things were always disappearing, DVDs and school supplies from my locker, more than once I’d caught him going through my pockets for money—his own possessions meant so little to him that somehow it wasn’t stealing; whenever he came into cash himself, he split it with me down the middle and anything that belonged to him, he gave me gladly if I asked for it (and sometimes when I didn’t, as when Mr. Pavlikovsky’s gold lighter, which I’d admired in passing, turned up in the outside pocket of my backpack).

The funny thing: I’d worried, if anything, that Boris was the one who was a little too affectionate, if affectionate is the right word. The first time he’d turned in bed and draped an arm over my waist, I lay there half-asleep for a moment, not knowing what to do: staring at my old socks on the floor, empty beer bottles, my paperbacked copy of The Red Badge of Courage. At last—embarrassed—I faked a yawn and tried to roll away, but instead he sighed and pulled me closer, with a sleepy, snuggling motion.

Ssh, Potter, he whispered, into the back of my neck. Is only me.

It was weird. Was it weird? It was; and it wasn’t. I’d fallen back to sleep shortly after, lulled by his bitter, beery unwashed smell and his breath easy in my ear. I was aware I couldn’t explain it without making it sound like more than it was. On nights when I woke strangled with fear there he was, catching me when I started up terrified from the bed, pulling me back down in the covers beside him, muttering in nonsense Polish, his voice throaty and strange with sleep. We’d drowse off in each other’s arms, listening to music from my iPod (Thelonious Monk, the Velvet Underground, music my mother had liked) and sometimes wake clutching each other like castaways or much younger children.

And yet (this was the murky part, this was what bothered me) there had also been other, way more confusing and fucked-up nights, grappling around half-dressed, weak light sliding in from the bathroom and everything haloed and unstable without my glasses: hands on each other, rough and fast, kicked-over beers foaming on the carpet—fun and not that big of a deal when it was actually happening, more than worth it for the sharp gasp when my eyes rolled back and I forgot about everything; but when we woke the next morning stomach-down and groaning on opposite sides of the bed it receded into an incoherence of backlit flickers, choppy and poorly lit like some experimental film, the unfamiliar twist of Boris’s features fading from memory already and none of it with any more bearing on our actual lives than a dream. We never spoke of it; it wasn’t quite real; getting ready for school we threw shoes, splashed water at each other, chewed aspirin for our hangovers, laughed and joked around all the way to the bus stop. I knew people would think the wrong thing if they knew, I didn’t want anyone to find out and I knew Boris didn’t either, but all the same he seemed so completely untroubled by it that I was fairly sure it was just a laugh, nothing to take too seriously or get worked up about. And yet, more than once, I had wondered if I should step up my nerve and say something: draw some kind of line, make things clear, just to make absolutely sure he didn’t have the wrong idea. But the moment had never come. Now there was no point in speaking up and being awkward about the whole thing, though I scarcely took comfort in the fact.

I hated how much I missed him. There was a lot of drinking going on at my house, on Xandra’s end anyway, a lot of slammed doors (“Well, if it wasn’t me, it had to be you,” I heard her yelling); and without Boris there (they were both more constrained with Boris in the house) it was harder. Part of the problem was that Xandra’s hours at the bar had changed—schedules at her work had been moved; she was under a lot of stress, people she’d worked with were gone, or on different shifts; on Wednesdays and Mondays when I got up for school, I often found her just in from work, sitting alone in front of her favorite morning show too wired to sleep and swigging Pepto-Bismol straight from the bottle.

“Big old exhausted me,” she said, with an attempt at a smile, when she saw me on the stairs.

“You should go for a swim. That’ll make you sleepy.”

“No thanks, I think I’ll just hang out here with my Pepto. What a product. This is definitely some bubble-gum flavored awesomeness.”

As for my dad: he was spending a lot more time at home—hanging out with me, which I enjoyed, though his mood swings wore me out. It was football season; he had a bounce in his step. After checking his BlackBerry he high-fived me and danced around the living room: “Am I a genius or what? What?” He consulted spread breakdowns, matchup reports, and—occasionally—a paperbacked book called Scorpio: Your Sports Year in Forecast. “Always looking for an edge,” he said, when I found him running down the tables and punching out numbers on the calculator like he was figuring out his income tax. “You only have to hit fifty-three, fifty-four percent to grind out a good living on this stuff—see, baccarat is strictly for entertainment, there’s no skill to it, I set myself limits and never go over, but you can really make money at the sports book if you’re disciplined about it. You have to approach it like an investor. Not like a fan, not even like a gambler because the secret is, the better team usually wins the game and the linemaker is good at setting the number. Your linemaker has got limitations, though, as to public opinion. What he’s predicting is not who’s going to win but who the general public thinks is going to win. So that margin, between sentimental favorite and actual fact—fuck, see that receiver in the end zone, another big one for Pittsburgh right there, we need them to score now like we need a hole in the head—anyway, like I was saying, if I really sit down and do my homework as opposed to Joe Beefburger who picks his team by looking five minutes at the sports page? Who’s got the advantage? See, I’m not one of these saps that gets all starry-eyed about the Giants rain or shine—shit, your mother could have told you that. Scorpio is about control—that’s me. I’m competitive. Want to win at any price. That’s where my acting came from, back when I acted. Sun in Scorpio, Leo rising. All in my chart. Now you’re a Cancer, hermit crab, all secretive and up in your shell, completely different MO. It’s not bad, it’s not good, it’s just how it is. Anyway, whatever, I always take my lead from my defensive-offensive lines, but all the same it never hurts to pay attention to these transits and solar-arc progressions on game day—”

“Did Xandra get you interested in all this?”

“Xandra? Half the sports book in Vegas has an astrologer on speed dial. Anyway, like I was saying, all other things equal, do the planets make a difference? Yes. I would definitely have to say yes. It’s like, is a player having a good day, is he having a bad day, is he out of sorts, whatever. Honestly it helps to have that edge when you’re getting a little, how do I put it, ha ha, stretched, although—” he showed me the fat wad of what looked like hundreds, wrapped with a rubber band—“this has been a really amazing year for me. Fifty-three percent, a thousand plays a year. That’s the magic spot.”

Sundays were what he called major-ticket days. When I got up, I found him downstairs in a crackle of strewn newspapers, zinging around bright and restless like it was Christmas morning, opening and shutting cabinets, talking to the sports ticker on his BlackBerry and crunching on corn chips straight from the bag. If I came down and watched with him for even a little while when the big games were on sometimes he’d give me what he called “a piece—” twenty bucks, fifty, if he won. “To get you interested,” he explained, leaning forward on the sofa, rubbing his hands anxiously. “See—what we need is for the Colts to get wiped off the map during this first half of the game. Devastated. And with the Cowboys and the Niners we need the score to go over thirty in the second half—yes!” he shouted, jumping up exhilarated with raised fist. “Fumble! Redskins got the ball. We’re in business!”

But it was confusing, because it was the Cowboys who had fumbled. I’d thought the Cowboys were supposed to win by at least fifteen. His mid-game switches in loyalty were too abrupt for me to follow and I often embarrassed myself by cheering for the wrong team; yet as we surged randomly between games, between spreads, I enjoyed his delirium and the daylong binge of greasy food, accepted the twenties and fifties he tossed at me as if they’d fallen from the sky. Other times—cresting and then tanking on some hoarse wave of enthusiasm—a vague unease took hold of him which as far as I could tell had nothing very much to do with how his games were going and he paced back and forth for no reason I could discern, hands folded atop his head, staring at the set with the air of a man unhinged by business failure: talking to the coaches, the players, asking what the hell was wrong with them, what the hell was happening. Sometimes he followed me into the kitchen, with an oddly supplicant demeanor. “I’m getting killed in there,” he said, humorously, leaning on the counter, his bearing comical, something in his hunched posture suggesting a bank robber doubled over from a gunshot wound.

Lines x. Lines y. Yards run, cover the spread. On game day, until five o’clock or so, the white desert light held off the essential Sunday gloom—autumn sinking into winter, loneliness of October dusk with school the next day—but there was always a long still moment toward the end of those football afternoons where the mood of the crowd turned and everything grew desolate and uncertain, onscreen and off, the sheet-metal glare off the patio glass fading to gold and then gray, long shadows and night falling into desert stillness, a sadness I couldn’t shake off, a sense of silent people filing toward the stadium exits and cold rain falling in college towns back east.

The panic that overtook me then was hard to explain. Those game days broke up with a swiftness, a sense of losing blood almost, that reminded me of watching the apartment in New York being boxed up and carted away: groundlessness and flux, nothing to hang on to. Upstairs, with the door of my room shut, I turned all the lights on, smoked weed if I had it, listened to music on my portable speakers—previously unlistened-to music like Shostakovich, and Erik Satie, that I’d put on my iPod for my mother and then never got around to taking off—and I looked at library books: art books, mostly, because they reminded me of her.

The Masterworks of Dutch Painting. Delft: The Golden Age. Drawings by Rembrandt, His Anonymous Pupils and Followers. From looking on the computer at school, I’d seen that there was a book about Carel Fabritius (a tiny book, only a hundred pages) but they didn’t have it at the school library and our computer time at school was so closely monitored that I was too paranoid to do any research on line—especially after a thoughtlessly clicked link (Het Puttertje, The Goldfinch, 1654) had taken me to a scarily official-looking site called Missing Art Database that required me to sign in with my name and address. I’d been so freaked out at the unexpected sight of the words Interpol and Missing that I’d panicked and shut down the computer entirely, something we weren’t supposed to do. “What have you just done?” demanded Mr. Ostrow the librarian before I was able to get it back up again. He reached over my shoulder and began typing in the password.