With thirty curious, supportive eyes on him, Stephen paused. What came after Seamus died? The bus. He wasn’t about to tell that part. He mumbled a few words about living with the pain. The room thanked him. Jeremy in particular should be grateful, he thought, for how he’d redirected their energy — except from all the histories at the camp Jeremy had chosen Bruce’s. The self-calumny was baffling. In sobriety, we found we know how to instinctively handle situations that used to baffle us. Did Jeremy believe Stephen had invaded his meeting? He could be a loose cannon — a convicted sex offender, after all. Maybe Stephen was in danger. As the circle’s testimonies continued, his anxious mind drowned them out. By the end, he felt keyed up enough to rush to the guy in the pink tie, get his form signed ahead of Pam and Blake, and hit the road before anyone could speak his name.
3.
Like his neighbor in the woods, Jeremy visited no meeting twice. Like Stephen again he lay in wait for winter storms. It was a matter of aesthetic taste, the snow, and so was Jeremy’s behavior in the meetings, where no member had the right to stand in judgment, where most appeared as smugly pleased in their neutrality as the Honorable Diane Stokes had been at Jeremy’s sentencing. To put their objectivity to the test and then watch it evaporate satisfied him. He’d portrayed Bruce several times, honed the performance until it marshaled a real oppressive energy that peaked at the Unitarian church, where he might have emptied the gym if Stephen hadn’t destroyed the moment.
The sex rooms had few locations, so Jeremy often wound up at the more populous groups, as well as Crystal Meth Anonymous, Pills Anonymous, even Survivors of Incest Anonymous, channeling voices like Travis’s, the janitor who’d earned his living selling rohypnol that his brother smuggled in. Had he drugged girls himself? Travis said no, while Jeremy’s answer changed with the rooms’ moods. He tended to give his own name. If need be, he assigned himself an addiction to match the group, but his story’s spine was Travis’s roofies, Bruce’s boy, Allen’s girls, Patrick’s dancer, Gus’s gang bangs.
“I’m an addict,” he told an unusually diverse group at the Triangle Club the evening before the snow. “Growing up in Hiwassee, my cousin Garth and I were racing to see who’d get laid most. Same girl twice didn’t count, you had to get new girls. It’s a small town. Ladies got wind. Nothing we did up there was a crime, though; all Hiwassee could do was chase us down to Clayton.”
He kept ramping it up. They would hate him no matter what. They wanted him ashamed of loving Melissa, and if he could learn to feel shame over that, it might be a step toward turning the love into something else. Something positive. He had petitioned to move to Alaska, where it was dark all winter and snowed in July and he’d heard there were twelve men per woman. Of course his mother didn’t want him to go. The snow he awoke to on 1 December felt like a premonition to ignore her.
Five minutes down the slippery trail, ten to de-ice his windshield, twenty to creep toward I-75. An hour later, when he arrived downtown, inches of snow lay unblemished on the empty parking lot of the World of Coke, closed due to weather.
He walked six deserted blocks to a diner, where he bought the paper. Emotionlessly he read about the presidential primary. He’d backed away from caring about stuff like that. His candidates, like his teams, lost every time. That was the kind of guy he was. Most people had bad and good luck mixed together, but not Jeremy. He’d been accepted to Emory by accident, a mistake the school had cleared up weeks later. There was a fifty-fifty chance he had the Huntington’s gene. When he was ten, his class had flown to D.C., and he was the only boy without a window seat on either flight leg.
“You’ll get stranded,” said a waitress, slightly pretty, her hair the color they called dishwater. She had no supposed neutrality to put to a test; still, folks all reacted one way or the other, and Jeremy liked to know where he stood.
“Is there a school or church nearby?”
“Doubt it. We’re downtown. Why?”
“I’m twenty-five, my ex is twenty-two, and it was seven years ago.”
She tapped at her order pad as if waiting for the point.
“Have you heard of the Georgia Sex Offender Law?”
“Oh, okay,” she said.
“When Melissa’s dad found out, she was applying to this summer program at the University of Seville. He decided I must have brainwashed her into going there, because you know what Spain’s age of consent is?”
The waitress shook her head. “Thirteen,” Jeremy said, not to prove a point but to state a fact. If she thought he meant that it sounded nice, that age, she could join the queue. He paid and left. Walking on, he luxuriated in the cold. Drifts on the east side of the street came as high as his knees.
At Turner Field his mother phoned. “Jeremy, are you inside?”
“I’m at work in a warm building.”
“You’ll catch cold.”
“No smoke breaks, remember? I quit.”
“I’m immunocompromised, you know.”
“I know,” he said, lying down in the parking lot where the old stadium had been. His bed could be the former home plate, where Deion Sanders had once stood and batted a foul into Jeremy’s glove, back when his dad took him to games. Holding the phone steady with his shoulder, he moved his arms to make angel wings.
“Will you come by later to feed the birds?”
“If the weather lets up,” he replied. He lay under a soothingly gray sky, musing on Alaska. Talkeetna, to be specific. In a cold place people would know who he was. Men in Georgia looked at him and saw someone who wanted to sweat in Spain. Heat speeded up neurodegeneration, probably. It made cops restless. One sweltering June day a cop had asked if Jeremy wanted a Taser up his ass. Police in Talkeetna would be calmer, he thought, closing his eyes. For most people there was bad and good luck, mixed together, and he let himself hope his was just a longer pendulum, ready to swing back to carry him north on a surge of fortune. Sleep would test it. Freeze, or wake up in a white room with a nurse leaning in, and no guard hovering. “Nothing wrong with you except your mind,” she would say, and he would ask, “You mean the snow?” hoping for once somebody didn’t know.
As soon as he had shut his eyes, a policeman pulled up and offered to help.
“If you’re not a dick, don’t be a cop,” Jeremy said, and then of course he was raising his empty hands, getting patted down, explaining why he’d paused to rest and why his address was a public tract in Bartow County.
The cop relaxed. “Case you’re wondering,” he told Jeremy, “it shows on my screen what you did.”
“I wasn’t wondering.”
“I mean, my wife was sixteen when we first hooked up.”
“Mary was fourteen when she had Jesus,” Jeremy said, because the day a Georgia cop helped him would be the day he died.
“Does Acworth know about you all?”
“When it gets warm, those guys like to come play their games.”
“Doubt it helps, talking to them like that.”
“You’re right, Officer, I’ll try being nice.”
“I’ll give you some advice. A week or so, they’re gonna come shut that place down. You’d do well to have a new residence lined up.”
“Police put us there to start with.”