A young man who thought himself a writer arrived, one August afternoon, in the city ravaged by plague. Ravaged is too strong a word, but we won’t let diction detain us here: not yet. He’d taken refuge from this plague, that summer, in his mother’s house. Every July afternoon he and his mother would drive to a lake to swim: he the length, she the width. Then she would give him forty or so dollars to buy fish and vegetables at the farmer’s market: he cooked the fish simply, leaving it unadorned, bathed in its own brine. “We’re finally adults together,” his mother said, more than once that summer, as they sat together in the backyard under what she called the canopy of an ancient maple tree. It was here, some years earlier, that she’d told the young man who already, then, thought himself a writer: “It’s true, I made you into my lover and your brother into my husband.” His brother, a law student with a predilection for driving past his ex-girlfriend’s house three times a day, came over once a week to mow the lawn and make sure the sump pump in the basement was functioning correctly.

 

At first the young man who thought himself a writer was obsessed with swimming: his second night in the city, taking off his clothing among old men with pendulous hoary testicles, a thunderstorm struck. The old men slid off their dry swimming trunks, covered their testicles with stained underwear. City rules, they grumbled: even indoor pools had to close during thunderstorms. The young man didn’t change back into his shorts and t-shirt. I’ll wait, he told himself, till the storm passes. The old men muttered, they reminded him of the city ordinance, and they left in moist masks, ranting about a military excursion, somewhere in some desert, that had finally come to an end. The young man–his name, for what it’s worth, was Ollie–twirled his goggles and dismissed their opinions as entirely banal. His mother called, as he sat on the locker room bench waiting, his mother who herself still swam the width of their special pond every day.  She asked him if he’d made it to the pool. “I’m waiting for a storm to pass,” he said. “Even indoor pools?” she asked, when he explained the city regulation.  “Even indoor pools encased in glass,” he said.

 

“And by the time the storm passed,” he said, the next night, to a medical student called Charlotte, “I was the only one in the pool.”

 

“I love the glass walls there, the way you can see the sky as you swim. It’s like you’re floating in sky. But I only went there for a few weeks.” She swam now, twice a week, at the YMCA.

 

“I won’t be the only one next time. It’ll be a battle to get the best lane. I’ll have to race the geriatrics.”

 

“We can swim across the city,” she said, though she would never see him again after he walked home from her dormitory the next morning. She was bright, and excited, and sweating: healthier than most girls he pursued, taller and more palpable and present. She’d arrived with a helmet in her hands. They were eating massive slabs of dripping pizza. Between bites she said, “I only have two vices: diet coke and cigarettes.”

 

They smoked her Marlboro Lites, later, on the roof of the med-student dormitory. He tried to remind himself to ask questions, though he talked mostly of himself: which is to say he talked about literary style, disdain, the bleakness of trying to write anything at all, at this epoch, his attachment to certain words, his attempts, as yet unrealized, to regenerate the Language itself. She appeared, to him, as she listened, more than merely tolerant of his verbal excess. She talked about her father in the past tense and her brothers as though they were strange untongued beasts. She smoked two cigarettes, he smoked four, and, when he went for a fifth, she drew the pack away from his hand. “That’s enough,” she said. He pretended petulantly to grab the pack from her but then softened his grip on it and walked his fingers up her arm. “It’s just–I never know how to move from the talking,” she said. “You just did,” he told her.

 

In her room she put the cigarette butts, her two and his four, into a Ziploc bag, which she slid into the drawer of her night table. “Can I take off your shirt?” she asked. “Silly seersucker shirt.” He discovered that her ass had a surprising heft to it, once she’d straddled him on the bed. She’d seemed so limber and lithe, but then the heft had to do with her healthiness, or what he told himself was her healthiness: her robustness. He was nervous and worried his penis would fail him. “Can I put it in my mouth?” she asked. He told himself to moan, as he knelt and watched her, to show her that he was present, which, alas, he almost was. “Are you clean?” she asked. “If we–?”

 

He hadn’t been inside a woman since last August. He’d spent most of the year in what with some romance he’d deemed exile, living in a dorm at an ersatz boarding school where elongated boys from odd, vaguely imperial corners of Europe drowsed and loped about while waiting to be recruited by college basketball teams. One afternoon one of the boys who lived on his hallway writhed and went inert on the basketball court, his heart having unaccountably stopped functioning, only to be revived, after three and half dead minutes, by the school nurse, a blonde woman with generous farmy thighs who drove around campus, in a golf-cart, with her beloved goldendoodle. The boy who’d died for three and a half minutes was much praised for having made contact, mouth to mouth, with her, and three days before the last day of school, told the young writer that he’d parleyed this success into bringing two girls up to his room, where, under our hero’s unwitting chaperonage, he’d fucked them all afternoon. “I’m happy someone’s doing it up there,” said the young writer (whose name, again, for what it’s worth, was Ollie). And that was the one intrusion, really, of sex into his life, that year, notwithstanding nonsensical and or lachrymose phone calls from one or two ex-girlfriends–Mary-Anne, for example, from a facility in California, her words a sunny slur of xanax, celebrating their last night on Earth together, as she put it, oh, how he’d played them that John Lennon song, again and again, on guitar; or Alice, who was living, now, with a stout computer programmer, and who reminded him, on the phone, of when they’d, yes, he remembered, in the shower in Minneapolis, the summer, right, after graduation, the way it had been, really but not really, the first time for her.

 

Charlotte smiled, Ollie thought, rather eerily as he fucked her: as though a strange but ultimately semi-pleasurable procedure were being performed upon her in a vague state of anasthesia. He worried over the state of his erection but told himself maybe to lick her tits, try to live in her nipple for a moment, escape into the licking of it. In the main he wanted simply to complete the act so that he could proclaim his year of exile officially over by virtue of her flesh: she was living proof at his fingertips. He really said this to himself as he watched her eerie smile: she’s living proof at my fingertips. “Can I?” he asked, finding what he thought to be her absent eyes. She said he could, they always said that, it seemed, and he moaned, as he did, to suggest, again, that he was present and palpable. It was a discharge at once grateful and perfunctory.

 

He wanted to entangle her in his legs, but she drew the sheets about herself and remained a little sealed off and far from him. She talked about a case she’d been sent out on for observation, an old woman, the apartment was like a capsule of the nineteenth century, she said, an old woman who was convinced her legs had died, that the very bones had rotted away. “Do you think she could have moved if she’d really wanted to?” he asked, to ask something, though he knew, too, that this anecdote presented him with an opportunity to express his eloquent and sophisticated command of psychological discourse. “Maybe that’s not the right question to ask,” Charlotte said. She peeled the sheets off herself.  “I’m going to brush my teeth,” she said. She was covering herself now in a bloated old t-shirt.  “Come with me. I always have two toothbrushes.” 

 

In the mirror, as they scoured the evening’s accretions from their mouths–the film of oozing pizza, Marlboro Lites and each other’s saliva–he watched himself watching her. They stood before the mirror mundane and, he told himself, intimate, as though they’d enacted this nightly ritual for years. What had she said, at one point, as they smoked on the rooftop? You hardly know me. He watched himself watching her, and he wanted to laugh, he wanted to laugh so as to alert her to the new quotidian closeness they were achieving as they rinsed and spat beside each other. He wanted her to laugh too, and he waited for her to come to the same comic realization of their sudden quiet togetherness. But she just said, “here,” took his toothbrush, which had never really been his toothbrush, and put it back in a glass by the sink. “I hope I can sleep,” she said. “I never can after smoking.”

 

It would be a mistake to let Charlotte the medical student, whose father was dead and who wanted to swim across the reservoir in Central Park, insofar as that was possible–these are the details which allowed Ollie to tell himself he did in fact know her–detain us immoderately here. In some iterations of this story, insofar as it is a story, our hero, insofar as he is a hero, told himself, too, that he was in love with Charlotte; she was so, he told himself, grounded, embedded firmly in something resembling reality. She would check his grandiosity, he thought, with her tolerant directness; she would–he really thought in these woulds–be immersed enough in her medical life to preclude the development, in him, of the emotional claustrophobia and panic that heretofore had pushed him to retreat from the true patterned dailiness of love. His third night in the plague ravaged city, and he’d found her, the girl who would compel and schedule his days.

 

Yes: It would be a mistake to let Charlotte detain our narrative–insofar as it–this–is a narrative, and not only because, four days after kissing Ollie goodbye outside a Le Pain Quotidien, she texted him to say, “I know this sounds abrupt, but I just don’t think we’re a match.” He smoked cigarettes in the rain, a hurricane had blown in from the south, because that was what someone like him did in this situation: smoked in the rain, a hurricane no less, and waited for the right words to arrive. When finally he responded with words that were a little less than right, that were indeed rigid and over-composed, she sent him a smiley face. “I have your number,” she wrote. He told himself that he was lighter now, relieved, after his last cigarette; maybe those were the right words: lighter, relieved. He was new to the city, anyway, and wanted, inside, to be alone. The woman who he thought would compel and schedule him was just an initiation scar.

 

His apartment was a long, dark hallway at the end of which lived Jackson, his roommate, a pale man who didn’t walk so much as lurch due to a mysterious series of childhood injuries or inborn defects. Jackson his pallid roommate subsisted on nuts and seeds and elixirs made from various grasses which he pressed through a cumbersome creaking device every morning on the kitchen floor. He seemed never to leave the apartment, rarely even to drag himself down the long dark hallway, but stayed in the safety of the kitchen, boiling potions of herbs and citrus and emitting half-muttered denunciations against a litany of gods and governments. “There’s gonna be a lot of water ‘round here soon,” he said, when Ollie told him, on the eighth night in the plague ravaged city, about the end and beginning of Charlotte.  “A diluvian onrush is in the offing. She just filled you with pizza and smoke? You’ll find another one of these sluts in no time.” Then they talked of rhyme schemes and chord progressions, the pacing of certain paragraphs only they seemed to know, arcane fragments of poetry whose resonance only they appreciated. Ollie walked down the long dark hallway to his room at three in the morning.  His skin as he drifted off smelled of smoke and chlorine. He told himself he’d been cleansed.

 

What little money he made he made by teaching, though the school where he taught was a school in name alone. Classrooms were called project spaces, and classes, such as they were, were built around nebulous themes: his grade, the tenth, for example, focused, thematically, on water, and by studying water and water alone, flowing within it, the students would learn about chemical properties, ancient irrigation systems, and literary motifs. “Think of yourself,” said his superior, who himself had a watery title–the school that was a school in name alone didn’t have disciplines, so there were no department heads, and, indeed, no departments or offices– “think of yourself as a guide to water’s literary properties.” Ollie asked if there was a syllabus he could consult, a list of suggested texts and skills the students would have to master in some finely diluted form. His superior with the watery title said, “Take a walk today to the Hudson and notice. Just notice and think about what your students might notice.” The students paid 65,000 dollars a year to glean from his fluid noticings. In addition to an income he received high-deductible health insurance–he suffered from mild but nagging ailments of the esophagus and lungs, exacerbated by his greedy smoking habit–and a reduced-fee membership to yet another pool. He would, he told himself, after transferring his aquatic noticings onto his students every day, lose himself in the chlorine and in other young bodies, young bodies which were more reachable, perhaps, than those of his lavishly stunted students.

 

They asked him where he was from, his students, and he said, sometimes, Iowa, or Pennsylvania, or Boston. They sensed that the shoddy scaffolding of his lessons could crumble easily under anecdote and learned how to tease digressions out of him. “I live with a ghost,” he told them. “An apparition. I don’t think he’s left the building since the Civil War.” He told himself that he exerted a mesmeric power over these artisanally wounded children, some of whom, it must be admitted, displayed a weird wit. He tried deliquescing upon water imagery in a short story only one or two of them had read: he spoke to a sea of silent sagging sodden masks. It must be admitted that we are overstating his students’ indifference: there was Eli, for instance, who every Monday asked about the “intimate gatherings” Ollie had attended over the weekend, and Nikola, who deemed every other assigned writer a Nazi sympathizer or infidelious lesbian and asked him, one afternoon, H period,  lying sprawled, in the middle of class, on a beanbag, “do you have a girlfriend?”

 

Ollie told himself to remain dusky and distant in his response to this question. But he chose to take on a wry mysterious tone and said, “There’s a sort of–situation.” “Oh, a situation,” Nikola said, her eyes wild with rodent-like mischief. The rest of the class was pretending to type a response to a question concerning the aquatic motif in the short story of rather quaint suburban misery. Nikola’s shirt, as she lay on the beanbag at Ollie’s feet, had slid up from her waist so that he could see her bellybutton. Merely could? “A fluid situation,” he said, staring down into her skin. She tilted her head and assessed herself, as if making a clinical observation–it would be naive of him, he told himself, to believe that she was naive enough not to know what she was doing–and wriggled herself upwards so that her shirt reclaimed the exposed territory of abdomen. “I noticed a mention of waves, and tides, on page 36,” she said. He adopted his stage-director voice, which lent him, it should be said, no additional authority in the eyes of his students: “Okay folks, Nikola has found some good textual evidence on page 36. Waves.”

 

“Turn your phone off when you rhapsodize like this,” Jackson said, in the kitchen, as Ollie discanted upon Nikola’s belly button. “That device is recording everything you say. You’re gonna end up swinging from a prison ceiling.” Ollie wondered whether he were relishing, now, not in his student’s flesh–she was 14, after all, it would ruin him and would be clumsy and stilted, like a five paragraph essay, even one written with passion, on water imagery–but rather in his own talk. He hadn’t told Jackson that he’d described him, to his students, as a ghost, because that would be articulating too clearly the reason why he felt free to expatiate endlessly in the kitchen: his roommate with the burning pallor seemed not to exist within life. He’d hinted at an ex-girlfriend who had lived with him in an earlier iteration of the apartment, whose keyboard, which he himself had given her, sat boxed and forlorn in one of the strange small rooms off the long dark hallway. It seemed he’d sworn off women. “Their uterine anxieties turned me off,” he said. “My ex, she was always waiting for me to–waiting for me to stop rolling from one self to the next, I guess. Waiting for me to become a respectable inseminator. I don’t know, maybe you should stick to these nymphettes.” After checking that Ollie’s phone was indeed turned off– “still, there’s a long tradition of eros in pedagogical settings, and who are you to reject that tradition?”–he narrated a scene from a book Ollie hadn’t read, in which a teacher of English, much like Ollie himself, after a nubile female student left his classroom, avidly smelled her seat. “You’re gonna be just like that– down on all fours sniffing away at her chair.”

 

We worry we are portraying Ollie the young writer, in these seemingly unseemly, charged moments, as artificially passive and detached. He would himself probably say that he maintained a healthy distance from the lure of his students’ flesh. He would confess, readily, that his ramshackle teaching was fueled by their fawning. We don’t want to get stuck in the morass of his classroom life, which, anyway, soon faded into a daytime haze. Though we should perhaps mention the moment, after school one day, that autumn, when, descending to the 1 train , he spotted Nikola about to enter the same stop from across the street. Or, that’s not quite right: he saw her approaching the subway stop from the same side of the street he was on; we think that’s how it went. Ollie was possessed by his failure to describe, and we have only his descriptions from which to concoct our own narrative. In any case as he approached the subway stop he saw a story in which he waited, waited for her, and descended with her, and rode the train uptown with her, where they both knew they both lived, and he found himself, standing there seeing this story, a little absurdly jealous of the boyfriend she knew he knew she had. He’d ossified into a cliche. Perhaps there was relief in that. It was exhausting, to be ruthlessly original. He stood frozen by the subway entrance, the cliched contretemps playing out in his head. He waited until she was safely underground. Then, looking straight ahead, he walked another block, went into a deli, and bought a pack of cigarettes. Instead of smoking one he thought of all the ways he could hurt her.

 

Perhaps we overstate.