His mother had been right. Going back to school had been a nightmare. The whole world changed in an instant, collapsed to a place where Seth almost didn’t even live. After Christmas vacation was over and he’d stepped back onto school grounds, there had been only him and everyone else. Far away. Beyond reach. The school tried to clamp down on the worst of the abuse, but they couldn’t catch it all. And the whispers were everywhere; his phone vibrated constantly, even throughout the night, with jeering texts. Nor did he dare look on any social networking, where the picture – and accompanying comments – seemed to be everywhere. His private universe exposed to the egged-on scorn of all.
But he couldn’t leave. Gudmund was still out of school while his parents decided what to do about him. And Seth had to be there, for whenever he came back. He had to bear it, alone.
“Self-contained,” Gudmund had described him, but what that really meant was that it felt like he’d had a private burden to shoulder for as long as he could remember, and maybe not all of it even to do with what happened to Owen. Worse, it had been accompanied by an equally hard lifelong yearning, a feeling that there had to be more, more than just all this weight.
Because if there wasn’t, what was the point?
That had been the other great thing about Gudmund since that surprising spring night at the end of junior year when they had become more than just friends. It was suddenly as if, for the briefest of moments, the burden had been lifted, like there was no gravity at all, like he had finally set down the heavy load he’d been carrying –
He knows he should stop this thinking, knows he should get moving, keep himself occupied with simply surviving this place, but he feels like he’s at the bottom of a well, with sunshine and life and escape all miles away, no one to hear him, even if he could call for help.
He’s felt like this before.
He lies there, listening to the rain, for a long, long time.
Eventually, biology again forces him to get up. He has a pee, then stands at his front door. The rain pours, rivulets coursing everywhere through the mud. He wonders for a moment why it doesn’t just wash away, but he sees that the street is slowly becoming a stagnant flood, great ponds forming at blocked drains, everything swirling together in a muddy mess.
It’s nearly as warm as it was yesterday, so he gets the block of dishwashing liquid, leaves his clothes in a heap, and uses the rain as a shower right there on the front path.
He lathers himself up, making a soapy mop of his buzzed-off hair, then closes his eyes and lifts his face to the rain to let it all rinse off. Almost idly, he tries to see if playing with himself will have any results, but the weight on his chest is too heavy, the memories of everything too much. He gives up and just crosses his arms, letting the soap slowly wash off him, the suds slopping down to the brown water gathering on the footpath.
Have I done this? he thinks, pulling his arms tighter around himself. Have I brought this rain? Have I made this place even more miserable?
He stands there, motionless, until he begins to shiver.
The rain isn’t that warm after all.
It rains all through the day, the flooding on the street getting bad down at one end, but most of it near his house draining slowly into the sinkhole before it gets too deep. He hopes the fox and her kits are all right.
He heats up a can of potato soup. While it cooks, he looks out to the back garden, watching the rain come down on the deck and the now-soaking pile of bandages. The sky is a uniform gray, impossible to separate out any individual cloud, just solid rain from horizon to horizon, however far away those horizons might be. When the soup is hot, he takes two mouthfuls before losing his appetite and leaving the rest by the switched-off camp stove.
There’s no television, of course. No computer. No electronic games. For lack of anything better, he takes a book from the bookcase. It’s one of his father’s, one Seth has already read part of years ago, sneaking it from the shelf in America when his father wasn’t looking. It was far too old for him at the time and, he smiles wryly, is probably too old for him now. There’s large quantities of good-spirited sex, metaphors that run on just for the hell of it, and plenty of philosophical musing about immortality. There’s also a satyr who features heavily, which Seth remembers was the thing that got him caught. He’d asked his father about “satire,” having heard that word said out loud and assuming it was the one he was reading. After a lengthy, baffled explanation, his father had said, “Why on earth are you asking?” and that had been the end of that reading adventure. He remembers now that he’d never actually been able to sneak it off the shelf again to find out what happened in the end.
So he reads on the settee, letting the rain continue and the day pass outside. At some point in the afternoon, he grows too hungry not to notice and heats up a can of hot dogs, eating half and leaving the rest beside the cold can of potato soup. When dusk comes, he lights one of the lanterns he took from the outdoor store, sending stark shadows around the room but illuminating enough to see the pages.
He forgets about dinner.
A book, he thinks at one point, rubbing his eyes, tired from so much focused reading. It’s a world all on its own, too. He looks at the cover again. A satyr playing pan pipes, far more innocent-looking than what it got up to in the story. A world made of words, Seth thinks, where you live for a while.
“And then it’s over,” he says. He’s only got about fifty pages left; he can finally find out what happens in the end.
And then he’ll leave that world forever.
He folds down a corner to mark his place and sets the book on the coffee table.
It’s fully dark now, and he realizes he’s never seen this place at night. He picks up the lantern and stands in the front doorway again, keeping out of the rain, which seems lighter now but still steady.
He’s amazed at the unyielding blackness. Not a single other light is shining back at him, not a streetlight or porchlight or even that glow that’s always on the horizon from the gathered lights of a city.
Here, there’s nothing. Nothing but darkness.
He flicks off the lantern, and for a moment, the world disappears completely. He stands there, breathing into it, listening to the rain. Slowly, slowly, his eyes begin to adjust to a dim light, which can only be the moon behind the clouds. The neighborhood starts to resolve itself into house fronts and gardens, the mud now swirled in rivers and deltas on the sidewalk and street.
Nothing stirring, nothing moving.