I’ve never seen him sweat.
My father speaks like someone who has never been entirely comfortable with the English language, although he is a native speaker. He halts. He backtracks. He changes tenses then returns to the original. This is when he speaks at all, which is rare. Where possible, he communicates with nods, shrugs, wordless grunts, and clucks of his tongue, expressing a bewildering range of opinions, requests, and answers without ever resorting to the spoken word.
His breath always smells of beer, but he never seems drunk.
Mr. Danforth’s office is walled in bookcases, stocked with the sort of jacketless volumes you expect to find at library sales or in library-themed novelty restaurants. Evan has confirmed for me that the books were chosen by an interior decorator for “texture and color palette.” Mr. Danforth has read none of them.
His desk is a massive slab of granite on steel scaffolding. Two large computer monitors sit atop it, and Mr. Danforth sits behind it, gesturing us over to him as he rises.
“My new toy,” he says. “Just came today. Want to see it?”
Behind his desk, built into a nook carved out of one of the bookcases, is Mr. Danforth’s gun rack.
Gun display is more accurate. It’s a walnut-framed glass door with four rifles mounted vertically against felt. There is also a large Magnum and a smallish Colt—Evan’s mom’s pistol. A girly gun, Mr. Danforth once called it.
Mr. Danforth is the sort of man who, if we lived in Britain, would mount a horse and terrify foxes with the strength of firearms, trained hunting dogs, and the backup of four other armed men. But we live in Brookdale, in Maryland, in the United States, and so instead he fancies himself a “sportsman shooter.” He spends more time oiling and cleaning his weapons than actually firing them. Writing his annual dues check to the National Rifle Association makes him feel authentic and über-Republican.
There’s a fifth rifle now. Mr. Danforth unlocks the cabinet as Evan stutter-stops on the far side of his dad’s desk. “Dad, uh—”
“Wait’ll you see it. Absolutely beautiful.”
“Dad, we—”
“Just a second…” He fiddles with the handle to the cabinet, swings it open. I catch a whiff of gun oil. Mr. Danforth lifts out the new rifle, a truly handsome piece of equipment, its stock nearly matching the grain of the cabinet itself.
“Paid extra for the French walnut,” Mr. Danforth says, tapping the stock. He has the rifle aimed carefully at the ceiling, holding it so we can drink in its steely length. “Cooper M52. You know how they say, ‘They don’t make ’em like they used to’? Well, at Cooper, they do. This thing is gorgeous, isn’t it?” He hefts it, beaming. “Isn’t it beautiful? You can really do some damage with this baby.”
“Dad!” Evan explodes. “I don’t care. We don’t care.”
“What?” Mr. Danforth’s lip curls in that way it does when he’s been deprived or overruled. And then, as though he’s wiped a patch of condensation from glass and can finally see the other side, he realizes and seems suddenly, enormously embarrassed to be standing in front of me, rhapsodizing and ejaculating over his latest death-dealing acquisition. “Oh…” he says. Nothing more. Just Oh.
The truth is, it doesn’t matter. The truth is, it was ten years ago, and I didn’t know Evan or his family then, and it’s my history, not theirs. The truth is, I didn’t wield a hunting rifle that day. The truth is, nothing anyone does or says can change what already happened. The truth is, guns are part of the world, of Brookdale, of life, and I can’t, won’t, and don’t fall to pieces every time I see one. The truth is, I don’t care about his guns.
The truth is also, though, that Evan’s dad is—politely speaking—something of an asshole, and I don’t like him. I don’t like the way he talks through his teeth half the time. I don’t like the way even his jeans—on the rare occasion he wears them—have creases in them, and you know he and his wife have never touched an iron in their lives, so who put those creases there? I don’t like the gold Apple Watch he wears—matching his sons’—or the way his hair is too perfect.
So I jam my hands into my pockets and make a show of turning slightly away, a vampire repulsed by the sight of a mirror or a cross. I mumble something under my breath, not meant to be heard, going more for a tone of barely concealed anguish.
A human being would apologize. Would at least put the rifle away. But Mr. Danforth lacks the basic human firmware required for apologies. He rooted out those files and deleted them years ago. Being rich means never having to say you’re sorry. He’s out of practice, and so he just stands there, gaping slightly, while Evan heaves out an exasperated huff and glares up at the ceiling.
I’m glad Mr. Danforth doesn’t know how to apologize. Because if he knew how, he would, and if he did, then the only decent thing to do would be to accept it. And that lets him off the hook.
Since he can’t apologize, I get to keep the emotional high ground. Studiously avoiding even a glance in his direction, I turn and—stoop-shouldered, wounded—slouch from the office without a word.
“Sorry my dad’s such an asshole,” Evan says a little while later. We’re setting up camp in his bedroom—sleeping bags on the floor, stack of Blu-rays nearby, pizza boxes still warm from the delivery guy. We’ll stay up all night and gorge ourselves, beginning with prosaic chain pizza and working our way up to our combinations of grotesque snacks pilfered from the kitchen.
“It’s forgotten,” I say, and it pretty much is. I’m much more focused on the night to come. I need rituals, traditions like this one. Dr. Kennedy used to tell me that getting through life—especially after “a trauma like yours”—is sort of like swinging through the jungle on vines like Tarzan. (So many kids my age wouldn’t have understood the reference. He would have had to reexplain, most likely with Spider-Man. But my life has consisted of a long series of unbroken strings of time alone in my room, with nothing to do but read, lest I think too much. I’ve been reading Burroughs and Wylie and other classic pulps since I was ten.)
Each time you start to lose momentum, Dr. Kennedy would say, you look ahead to the next vine. And you jump for it, Sebastian. You don’t think about it; you don’t worry about it. You jump and you trust that you have the strength and the momentum to grasp that next vine.
Every time I leap, I think this is the time my reach exceeds my grasp, this is the time my fingers will close on nothing but empty air, and I will plummet into the green and the death of the jungle.
I’m wrong every time.
So far. Anytime you swing with the apes, the plunge is only a finger’s-length away.
“What ancient mess are you inflicting on me first?” Evan asks. We tossed a coin to decide who picks the first movie to watch.
“Tron.”