Adeleine had known—or had told herself in the beginning—that it must be wrong to adore someone who spent his time tending an artificial happiness, but the way he blossomed when drugged blinded her. He would release the caged-in quiet that was synonymous with his sobriety and flow, describing all the parts of her he admired, wrapping every limb of his too-thin body around hers, telling her stories of the little boy he’d been, speaking with conviction of the life he could imagine for them. They would make a home in the country, grow their own beets and cucumbers, call to silver dogs who swam across rivers, watch their children as they napped in the garden. He would shiver as he fell asleep sometimes, and though she had understood this as a consequence of the narcotics, she relished the opportunity to meet his repeated request: “Keep me warm,” he would whisper, “please will you keep me warm?”
They had still managed some kind of domestic cycle, kept eggs in the refrigerator most weeks, pulled the hand-knit afghan up in neat corners after they had drunk in enough sleep, left handwritten notes of private amusements on the counter, tenderly passed the soap and shampoo in the shower. There were five good months, in which he flickered but remained recognizable, and Adeleine continued to defer practical questions to some later point, a milestone that she felt she would recognize once it arrived. One night she stayed late at work and came home to find him particularly soft, particularly cold. “It’s you,” he had said, blinking as slowly as the lone traffic lights that hung over intersections in the small town she came from. “Come sleep with me.” He had held her that night with more vigor, as though making a point, and in the morning wasn’t sleeping in bed or sighing in the shower or smoking on the fire escape.
She had waited two weeks, skulking about the apartment, trying to catch his shadow around a corner, although after the first she had filed a police report and spent scrambled hours on the telephone with friends who had no answers. After a month his phone was shut off, and the social pages on the Internet he had passively monitored grew graffitied with confused mourning, the pitch of the posts becoming panicked: Where are you we love you Please just come home Please just say you’re okay. And then, after his vanishing had settled, pieces of eulogy—I’ll always miss you man, you lit up everything Sweet dreams baby We always knew you belonged to somewhere else—and she had stopped checking them. She couldn’t spend another hour scrolling through the images of him she had long since memorized, hoping they might deliver a message, or respond to the digital sympathies bestowed on her by friends and acquaintances. The distance between their bland online attempts at condolence and their averted glances when she ran into them in person—as though grief and abandonment were an airborne contagion—was too great for her to reconcile. She had deleted as much evidence of herself on the Internet as was possible, wiped her laptop’s hard drive clean, and placed it one night on a bench at the West 4th Street subway station. Dressed in whites and blues, quiet and pale, she had caught the first train that heaved into the tunnel and had begun, in her own fashion, to recede.
AS A CHILD, Thomas had looked forward to the science fair all year, to the long tumble of the day when his project put the clumsy baking soda volcanoes, the childishly lettered diagrams, to shame. He had labored on his poster board endlessly, trained his hand to produce letters in shining replica of the fonts he’d found in a large, musty book in his parents’ suburban garage. The experiments themselves were often abstract in nature: “The Effects of Weather on the Mood of Ms. Kalsie’s Third Grade” (age eight), “The Behaviors of Songbirds in the Presence of Different Members of My Family” (age ten).
Thomas tracked instances of laughter and found that the females in Ms. Kalsie’s third grade experienced a twelve percent decrease in glee for recess during periods of rain, while the same cold months saw a thirty-one percent decline in male enjoyment. He hid a tape recorder in the trees of the backyard and made his brother, mother, and father sit outside alone on rotation in the afternoons, and reported that the robins seemed far less likely to croon with his brother Jarrod around. “The birds just don’t find Jarrod inspiring or deserving,” he explained to his family. “It’s science.”
Throughout childhood and into adolescence, Thomas approached most human interactions imagining himself as the scientist studying them. He found many rituals strange, so he absorbed the information carefully, tried to map precisely what the different kinds of burning silences his father sent towards his mother at the dinner table meant. Two beats of quiet—one Mississippi, two Mississippi—after she laughed, for instance, meant “not funny,” while three beats after she’d told a story meant “not important.” At junior high, he watched the patterns of body language in both sexes and came to find their predictability amusing: a girl, when approached by a boy considered attractive, almost infallibly placed a thumb in her jeans belt loop and tucked her hair behind her ear.