2.
Stephen had been a partner at a respectable firm downtown until one morning in 2007 when he brewed coffee in the nude as a school bus stopped outside his townhouse. There were cell-phone photos of him by the wide-open front window, empty coffee pot in hand. One mother claimed that he must have planned it that way: “Don’t you brew coffee in your kitchen? Where the coffee pot plugs in?” Although the judge handed down a suspended sentence, the registry meant eviction from Midtown. When he showed up at camp, the others wondered if he was hiding a worse crime—“Exposure? Lame,” they said — but he didn’t care what monsters thought. He spent days in his new office and evenings in his tent, reading. He did nothing else. In October he read the last three volumes of Proust; in November, much of Thomas Hardy. Thanks to the court-ordered drug tests, he could focus again.
One night after a rain, Bruce, the stout video editor who was always grinning, stuck his head into Stephen’s tent and said, “Which ones you done with?”
“Which European modernists?”
“For the fire,” Bruce said, climbing through the half-open zipper to kneel by a stack of tomes. “The Magic Mountain. The Man Without Qualities.”
“Touch one and I’ll shoot you.”
“How can you not have qualities?” Bruce continued down the row. “The Naked and the Dead. That’s your memoir, I guess. Who’s the dead?”
From his legal briefcase Stephen pulled out the S&W Model 625 he’d carried since law school without ever firing. “No trespassing.”
“Felons can’t own firearms.”
He aimed the revolver. “Planning to go tell?”
“Fine, keep your books, crazy. Guess there won’t be a fire.”
“I guess not.” If he’d never hit it off with his neighbors at the townhouse, he wouldn’t make friends here. The camp wasn’t permanent, not for Stephen. Once things died down, he would get his name expunged. Meanwhile he kept his distance, worked long hours in his new office in the strip mall, dined alone in bars, read himself to sleep, until the night the temperature fell to fifteen.
He lay alone shivering for hours before Gus, the bucktoothed, scrawny driver, called, “We know you’re up.”
Wrapped in his sleeping bag, Stephen walked out and took a seat at the fire. Bruce passed the vodka. Stephen drank and listened to a debate about Michael Vick, the quarterback charged with running a dog-fighting ring.
“Asshole should rot in jail and never play,” Gus said, staring at the glowing end of the branch he held. “This was our year.”
“Naw, Falcons don’t got a year,” Bruce said.
“Law should keep him a fifth-mile from vets and pet stores.”
“In college,” said Allen, the salesman, “I intercepted his touchdown pass.”
“Could you get him free?” asked Jeremy, a blond kid cute enough that Stephen sometimes forgot to ignore him along with the others.
“I couldn’t get myself free,” Stephen said, glad for the excuse to stare. It wasn’t just that Jeremy was cute; he seemed a reasonable human being. There were three tiers: the ones like him and Jeremy who’d been criminally maligned; the ones like Patrick who belonged in the camp; and the rest, who should never have been paroled.
“So you defended yourself?”
“Not the best idea,” Stephen admitted. The other partners had been shunning him by then. “Judge disliked me.”
“Vick’s judge hates Vick,” Jeremy said. His blond beard stubble glowed in the firelight, tempting Stephen to touch it. “You eat meat?”
“Cooking some?” He wondered if they were progressing toward something.
“No. They do worse to pigs than dogs. I say lock up pig farmers, let Vick go.”
“I hope he comes and lives here after parole,” Gus said.
Allen shook his head. “The blacks have got their own camp, across town.”
Watching his frosty breath mingle with the smoke, Stephen wondered if his neighbors were joking. Didn’t they realize that Vick, after serving his time, could live where he pleased? He supposed he didn’t care. Embers rose into a starless sky and he wished a winter storm would bear down, trapping him at work to save him from a night here, but there wasn’t one snowflake, and by next day’s close of business he was choosing a recovery meeting from the list to fulfill his weekly mandate.
“My name’s Pam, and I’m a sex addict,” said a woman with vibrantly black curls, across the circle from Stephen in the church gym. “Over time I lost interest in dealings that didn’t involve sex. My family, even my dear kitty-cats bored me.” The group thanked her. The vaguer a story, the more likely its teller had come for a signed note. Vera was taking it day by day; Blake was trying not to play games. Churches didn’t have gyms, Stephen decided. It was a former school, a place twice forbidden, so that he imagined a double gnat line surrounding it. That was his name for the circles ordaining where he could and couldn’t live. The real gnat line ran horizontally across the state, near Macon. “Folks is different below it,” Patrick had said, but the only difference was the gnat problem.
Stephen wasn’t listening. Clockwise around the circle he studied faces: a dead ringer for Lee Harvey Oswald, an exterminator in a pink tie, and then none other than Jeremy, the cute one from camp, in his World of Coke shirt.
“I’m Jeremy,” Jeremy said, his glazed eyes staring at the one called Vera, “and I’m addicted to booze, sex, various drugs. Down in Savannah when I was in high school, this fellow Kevin smashes into my mom. He doesn’t have insurance, so he begs her not to report it, he’ll pay cash. Mom agrees, but her back starts to hurt. Pretty soon she’s walking stooped over. Three weeks later, Kevin hasn’t paid a cent, her car won’t run, pain gets worse, she’s a hunchback by the time I go to Kevin’s.”
Jeremy swallowed and took a breath. “Kevin tells me his dad just died and he’ll pay next Friday. Okay, but I see this brand-new electric guitar in his back seat. Another week. Mom’s in agony. I drive back and damned if Kevin’s car hasn’t been fixed up like new. So I bang on the door and this kid wearing Mickey Mouse ears peeks through the blinds.”
As soon as Stephen heard Mickey Mouse ears, he knew Jeremy wasn’t speaking as himself, but as Bruce, the wisecracking video editor from camp.
“Door’s hollow. I bust through. Kid runs to his room. Next thing, he’s got this cigarette lighter and he’s burning my arm. That was what flipped the switch. I grab it and burn him back and say okay, here’s what’s coming.”
Stephen shifted in his seat. He knew what was coming. Having researched his neighbors on LexisNexis, he couldn’t listen, but he couldn’t block out the words. Please, he wanted to scream. Maybe Jeremy heard him somehow in his mind, because he turned and noticed Stephen.
He paused his story. “I can’t sit here and nod,” said a guy in Army camouflage.
“We’d like you to leave,” Vera said, folding her hands.
“First I need a form signed,” Jeremy said.
“Actually I’ll be the one leaving,” said the Army guy, and he did, followed by two women. It seemed like the group might break apart, until Stephen heard himself speak his own name.
“I used to get shitfaced and invite guys over,” he said, feeling the tension begin to resolve around him and in his own shoulders. “Anyone willing to come. If I had a partner, I cheated. If he said no don’t, you’re the one I love, I dumped him. The only ones I wanted to stay were trying to escape, like my last boyfriend, this kid from NA whose arms bent way back like Gumby. He was trying to quit. I did everything in my power to keep him high so we could just fuck fuck fuck fuck until he leapt off Stone Mountain.”