The House of Water - 4. Over the Bridge

I am not alone, I am sure, when I say I have blown up moments into years and squeezed years into moments. My few moments with Other Michael, for example, I have replayed over and over in mind so much that, over the course of my life, I have likely dedicated at least a month of thought to the events of several hours. Contrariwise, my first year and a half at university exists as a dull gray gap in my memory. Rarely do images from my life at that university bubble up on their own. If I want, I can conjure up the classrooms and the professors and the faces of a few tolerable acquaintances well enough, but it feels like play-acting, as if someone else had been there all along.

When time passes so blandly, when every day is another interpretation of the same environment, one does take notice, even if taking notice doesn’t always lead to action. I did not have to wait for my experiences at university to congeal into memory before recognizing their vacuity. After three semesters and an unremarkable summer spent on the outskirts of a conservative social system where I was treated as both an outcast and an event, I started to panic. Soon I would turn twenty, and once I had done so, I feared, the type of love everyone around me seemed to experience, the type of love-story (and love, you will learn before my tale is out, has never been anything but a story which can only be either created or inhabited, never both), would become inaccessible to me. In the cardiac place where most carry memories, I would harbor a lack.

Over Winter Break my sophomore year, in order to prevent that yawning emptiness from becoming a fixture, I employed two strategies. The first was to try again—with greater maturity now, college knowledge and chest hair—to find someone in cyberspace. I put it to myself the same way I had the first time: I’ll find someone to love or at least someone to pass the time. To that end, I met a charming high school senior named Stephen. Back in the day, back in my day, I tell you, closet cases were diamonds in the rough. Stephen was funny, clever, passionate about his interests, and well-rounded: he taught himself banjo on the roof of his parents’ barn; he improvised stir-fry in an A-shirt while listening to Brand New. But he kept to himself before meeting me; he had not yet shared with anyone all that had to offer. We had several engrossing conversations online, and one night we had planned finally to speak over the telephone.

Before speaking to Stephen, however, I had also to enact my second strategy. I realized that my time with Other Michael had been the last time I felt the fullness I associated more often with my friends’ adolescent experiences. Those minutes under the bridge inaugurated the emptiness the memory of it would seek to fill. I decided, then, to revisit the bridge, to meet the eidolon of my former self who could not know that his dreams would breed symmetrical disappointments. I wanted to lay him to rest.

From memory I made the drive back to Clinton just before midnight, between Christmas and New Years. How different the same place can be from day to night, from spring to winter! It was hard for me to believe that from the snowy banks of that cold stream under the bridge once grew white flowers, and that the frozen earth there could have ever accommodated two bored adolescents learning their bodies on a Sunday.

I did not stop the car. I passed Other Michael’s house, wondering what should happen if I presented myself there at that hour, and drove slowly over the bridge. I do not know what encounter I expected in that place, whether or not I really expected to see my own ghost, but I did feel a pull as I passed over the bridge and into the town proper. A knot of hair moved; a drain opened.

I drove down several streets in town, past the rows of houses whose holiday lights and decorations were no less charming for having been halfhearted. All in all, I spent less than fifteen minutes in town, including the stop I made to that same gas station where I once mistook cola for a spiritual cleanser. What silly metaphors I operated upon back then, I thought, again buying a cola, cola is cola—college sure has sharpened my mind. You will forgive the false enlightenment of myself at nineteen—when young men become so fascinated with their own developing thoughts and abilities that they fail to put them in perspective with those of others.

That’s that, I told myself, beginning the drive back. I have put to rest that pleasurable accident; now I may move forward. I need not ever return here again. I wedged my cola between my thighs and turned up a copy of the soundtrack from The Lion King a friend had burnt for me. I turned my thoughts toward Stephen, who lived all the way in Maryland (but no matter), and waited for my cell phone (new from Christmas) to light up with his number.

*

Lost in thought about how my conversation with Stephen might go, I was startled when the phone actually did vibrate and light up.

“Hey,” I answered, reminding myself to sound confident, at ease.

On his end I heard shifting. “Hello,” he said.

“What have you been up to tonight?” I asked.

“Nothing. Nothing really,” he said. “Waiting, I suppose.” His voice was higher than I had expected. Online he seemed to have a masculine punch behind all of his sentences, and he still had it, I could tell, but it came through a softened filter.

“I got bored and went for a drive. To clear my head I guess.”

“How’d that work out?”

“Things don’t make any more sense than they did, but I did get to listen to music for two hours.”

“Like?”

“The Lion King.” I put a measured hesitation in my voice. I was playing “cute.”

“The Lion King? Gosh, I might have to rethink everything. All those conversations online turned out to be with some loser.”

“What do you know, high school? Shouldn’t you be in bed?”

“If that’s what you really want—.”

“Awe, don’t be that way,” I said.

“But I’m so impressionable.”

“We’ll make a man out of you yet.”

He laughed. “You’re full of shit.”

Stephen and I eased into conversation with each other. We covered again some of the things that we had talked about online, with the tacit understanding that to hear things spoken was so much different than to read them. We talked about Final Fantasy and Vans skate shoes, sushi and trampolines.

Two hours passed, during which I had gone through the Steak n Shake drive-through and eaten a Frisco Melt while Stephen told me about his friends and his parents. I got home and whispered into the phone as I walked past my parents’ room and into my own. We described our rooms to each other, compared twin beds.

I heard tiredness in his voice, which had the effect of foregrounding his softness again. I could not figure out which voice represented his core: the masculine sentences that went through the boyish filter, or the shy boy who spoke through a cool-guy persona. Or was he all of these things? Was the chimera a metaphor the Greeks used for a boy at seventeen?

“I want to keep talking to you,” he said. “But this bed. I’m going to pass out soon.”

“We should rap it up for tonight, yeah?”

“Maybe.”

“Will you call tomorrow? I have a feeling I’ll be thinking of you.”

“Well, I am a very busy guy—.”

“Fuck off.”

“It was really nice to hear your voice finally,” he said. “I’ll call you tomorrow night.”

“Good night,” I said. I had an image, then, that the hundreds of miles separating us were millimeters; he lay, not in some unknown bed, but in my own. His eyelids were heavy with fatigue and affection. I ran a hand over his forehead.

“Good night, Michael,” he said. I shut out the lamp, crawled under the covers with him, hung up the phone and he was gone.