Two months into freshman year he had committed to not speaking in almost all situations. He felt ashamed and nervous around anyone who’d known him when he was popular and unself-conscious. When he heard laughter, before he could think or feel anything, his heart would already be beating like he’d sprinted twenty yards. As the beating slowly normalized he’d think of how his heart, unlike him, was safely contained, away from the world, behind bone and inside skin, held by muscles and arteries in its place, carefully off-center, as if to artfully assert itself as source and creator, having grown the chest to hide in and to muffle and absorb — and, later, after innovating the brain and face and limbs, to convert into productive behavior — its uncontrollable, indefensible, unexplainable, embarrassing squeezing of itself. To avoid awkwardness, and in respect of his apparent aversion to speaking, Paul’s classmates stopped including him in conversations. The rare times he spoke — in classes where no one knew him, or when, without knowing why, for one to forty minutes, he’d become aggressively confident and spontaneous as he’d been in elementary/middle school, about which his friends poignantly would always seem genuinely excited — he’d feel “out of character,” indicating he’d completed a transformation and was now, in a humorlessly surreal way, exactly what he didn’t want to be and wished he wasn’t.
He ate lunch alone, on benches far from the cafeteria, listening to music — his sort of refuge that was like a tunneling in his desolation toward a greater desolation, further from others and himself, closer to the shared source of everything — with portable CD players and earphones, feeling sorry for himself, or vaguely but deeply humbled, though mostly just silent and doomed. Sometimes, thinking of how among fifteen hundred classmates only two others, that he’d noticed, were as socially inept as he — a male in his grade, an obese male one grade lower — Paul would feel a blandly otherworldly excitement, like he must be in some bizarre and extended dream, or lost in the offscreen world of some fictional movie set in an adjacent county.
In Paul’s sophomore or junior year he began to believe the only solution to his anxiety, low self-esteem, view of himself as unattractive, etc. would be for his mother to begin disciplining him on her own volition, without his prompting, as an unpredictable — and, maybe, to counter the previous fourteen or fifteen years of “overprotectiveness,” unfair — entity, convincingly not unconditionally supportive. His mother would need to create rules and punishments exceeding Paul’s expectations, to a degree that Paul would no longer feel in control. To do this, Paul believed, his mother would need to anticipate and preempt anything he might have considered, factoring in that — because Paul was thinking about this almost every day, and between the two of them was the source of this belief — he probably already expected, or had imagined, any rule or punishment she would be willing to instate or inflict, therefore she would need to consider rules and punishments that she would not think of herself as willing to instate or inflict. Paul tried to convey this in crying, shouting fights with his mother lasting up to four hours, sometimes five days a week. There was an inherent desperation to these fights, in that each time Paul, in frustration, told his mother how she could have punished him, in whatever previous situation, to make him feel not in control — to, he believed, help solve his social and psychological problems — it became complicatedly more difficult, in Paul’s view, for his mother to successfully preempt his expectations the next time. Paul cried and shouted more than his mother, who only shouted maybe once or twice. Paul would scream if his mother was downstairs while he was upstairs, in his room, where some nights he would throw his electric pencil sharpener and textbooks — and, once, a six-inch cymbal — at his walls, creating holes, resulting in punishments, but never exceeding what, by imagining their possibilities, he’d already rendered unsurprising, predictable. The intensity of these fights maybe contributed to Paul’s lungs collapsing spontaneously three times his senior year, when he was absent forty-seven days and in hospitals for around four weeks.
One night, standing in the doorway of his parents’ bedroom, when his father was on a months-long business trip, crying while shouting at his mother, who was supine in bed, in the dark, Paul heard her softly and steadily crying, with her blanket up to her chin in a way that seemed child-like. Paul stopped shouting and stood sobbing quietly, dimly aware, as his face twitched and trembled, that he felt intensely embarrassed of himself from the perspective of any person, except his mother, he had ever met. He said he didn’t know what he was talking about, or what he should do, that he was sorry and didn’t want to complain or blame other people anymore, and felt an ambiguous relief, to have reached the end of a thing without resolution and, having tried hard, feeling allowed — and ready — to resign. He didn’t stop blaming his mother, after that, but gradually they fought less — and, after each fight, when he would revert to his belief about discipline, he would apologize and reiterate he didn’t want to blame anyone or complain — and, by the last month of senior year, had mostly stopped fighting.
On one of Paul’s last days of high school he and Lori were both getting rides home from Hunter, who due to a difficulty in refusing requests from people who could see him — in elementary/middle school, whenever a mutual friend rang his doorbell, he and Paul would pretend no one was home— sometimes spent ninety minutes driving classmates home after school. The past eight years, since Lori kissed Paul on the cheek, they’d spoken maybe three times (the day after they rollerbladed together she had begun hanging out with a boy with a “rattail” hairstyle), and the most intimate Paul had been with another girl was a ten-minute conversation, at an “away” high school football game, with another percussionist.
Lori repeatedly asked Paul why he wouldn’t speak and, not receiving an answer, began provoking Paul to “say anything,” seeming as committed to eliciting a response as Paul was to not responding. Lori was loudly asking, with genuine and undistracted and bemused curiosity, which Paul felt affection toward and admired, as he stared away from her, out his window, why he couldn’t speak — and if he could just “make any noise”—when Hunter, who’d been talking to someone in the front passenger seat, sort of forced Lori to stop by aggressively asking about her current boyfriend. As he had consistently, the past eight to ten years, Paul felt endeared by Hunter, who used to be an equal, but now — and for the past three or four years — was like an overworked stepfather or sensitive uncle to Paul, the mentally disabled stepson or silent, troubling nephew.
Paul hadn’t seen Laura since she slept over, five days ago, when he brought a mix CD and Ambien to her room, which was more than half occupied by a full-size bed. She offered him red wine she was drinking from a wineglass and typed “sex tiger woods” into Google and clicked dlisted.com. Adjacent to a photo of Tiger Woods, smiling on a golf course, were blocks of text, in which “Ambien sex haze” was in bold around ten times.
Laura typed “ambient” into Google.
“No,” said Paul grinning. “That’s the music, delete the t.”
Laura laughed and typed “ambien and alcohol and klonopin and” and grinned at Paul and, though she had a Klonopin prescription, Paul knew, and was probably on Klonopin, said “just kidding” and deleted all but “ambien and alcohol.” Every result, it seemed, warned strongly against combining Ambien and alcohol, but Laura said she drank “a lot,” so it would be okay. Paul crawled onto her bed and touched her cat Jeffrey and, after a vague amount of time, became aware of a slight blurriness to his vision, like he was seeing from two perspectives in time, milliseconds apart, and that he felt vaguely sleepy and not nervous. He asked if Laura could turn off the light, which seemed uncomfortably bright. He felt confused, to some degree, by everything, but at a delay, as if continuously realizing past confusions, which could no longer be resolved, so were not problems. They seemed to be watching a foreign movie off her computer, then Paul noticed the light was on and that they were lying against a mound of blankets, kissing lazily, with eyes closed and long pauses, maybe sometimes asleep. He became aware of his mix CD, of some of his favorite songs, sounding unpleasantly, almost nightmarishly, noise-like. Paul realized they were trying to undo his belt and weakly imagined what would happen if his jeans were removed and heard Laura say “we just met” from what seemed like a nearby, inaccessible distance and wondered if he was asleep, or dreaming, but knew he was awake, because he was moving physically. He was trying to remove Laura’s clothing. He felt like he was trying to remove the surface of a glass bottle by pawing at it with oven mitts. He expressed confusion and Laura said “it’s just a skirt. . and tights” and stopped moving completely, it seemed, as Paul continued touching her strange outfit with hands that felt glossy and fingerless, suspecting at one point, with some sarcasm, that she was wearing a corset.