“No,” Paul answered. “I’m honestly not.”
He is though, of course. Not unreasonably so. At least he doesn’t think unreasonably so. Wasn’t anyone who was or had ever been in love terrified, at least to some tiny degree, of love deciding to take its business elsewhere? And wasn’t that partly the thrill of it all? Knowing that you were sharing something vulnerable that required your protection? So, okay, yes—he’s worried that Mark will leave him. But somehow admitting that would feel like losing.
There are also the more complicated concerns: the pins and needles of Mark’s own unhappiness. These are the actual reasons (as opposed to half-assed academic ones) behind why he finds Alcott Cotwald’s theories so compelling. There are the ways in which Paul isn’t satisfying him, and the ways in which he never actually could. There are the worries that Paul mulls over during long showers, the questions that he doesn’t ask because the last thing he wants are answers.
“We’d have rules,” Mark reiterated. “There would be boundaries. Things that we were both comfortable with.”
“Like what?”
Mark dashed salt onto the frittata.
“I don’t know, we’d have to talk about it, I suppose.”
“Well, can you give me an example?”
He rested both of his elbows on the counter. “Like, you’d always be safe. Condoms would be a must. And … what else. Oh, here’s one—if there’s a chance that someone might become something else, then it’s probably not a good idea.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Sure you do.”
Paul thought. “You mean if there’s a chance that, like, a guest star might become a series regular who, a year in, snags his own prime-time spin-off.”
Mark cracked open a bottle of beer.
“I’ve never thought about it in such sitcom-ish language before, but sure.”
“And the chance that, despite our best efforts, that will always remain a possibility doesn’t scare you.”
Mark blinked. “No.”
And maybe he was right, Paul thought. Maybe it was as simple as Mark was making it out to be: fuck around, get their rocks off, congratulate each other with high-fives, and then kiss and say their I-love-yous before they shut off the lamps each night. It sounded so easy when Mark painted it as a hypothetical. But therein lay the problem, Paul realized: he couldn’t exist in hypotheticals. He never could. Not as a kid, and certainly not now. Mark did it masterfully; he constructed a future within a vacuum, something smooth and motionless, like a slab of ancient obsidian. Paul’s future, meanwhile, bore a tangle of implications. A litany of how abouts and yeah, but what ifs. And each time he addressed one of those imagined scenarios—each time he took a sword to its head—three more terrible possibilities would appear in its place.
“Hey, I love you, okay?”
Mark said that to him this morning, before he set off on the ten-block walk west toward Penn’s campus.
Paul was standing in the kitchen, eating a slice of reheated frittata, and Mark hugged him from behind.
“I love you, and I’m not going anywhere.”
“Love you, too,” Paul said. “This thing’s delicious.” He’d been staring out the window, watching a squirrel navigate a space between two rain gutters.
“I’m glad you like it.”
Mark kissed his cheek. He smelled like patchouli and mint.
“You feeling okay about last night?”
Paul nodded.
“Good.” Mark mussed his hair. “I’m going to be late, but have a great day. And don’t think about all this too much, okay?”
“Okay.”
“You promise?”
Now Paul’s mouth was full, but he managed a yup.
It was a lie, obviously. Paul knew it was a lie, and Mark must have, as well; there’s no way that Paul wasn’t—isn’t—going to spend some part of every moment of today considering and reconsidering the conversation he and Mark had last night. He’s obsessive; he obsesses. It’s what he does; it’s how he survives. It’s a trait that he’s always had a keen sense of, but that he’s just now getting around to self-diagnosing.
The unshackling of denial for a set of new chains is liberating.
*
Goulding launches his clipboard toward a lamppost. It’s an impressive throw—perfectly aimed, and with startling velocity—a particle-board Frisbee, which collides with the post and shatters into five jagged pieces.
“PAUL!”
The Nissan’s stopped at an angle, and the driver’s-side door swings on its hinges. Erwing’s on all fours, dry heaving onto the pavement. Next to him lies a female mannequin—this one full-grown and voluptuous, with hips and tits that remind Paul of the dolls he and his sisters used to play with. Her blond hair is a rat’s nest of knots, but otherwise her plastic form is intact.
“For fuck’s sake, Paul!” Goulding yells. On the opposite side of Route 7, two mothers in athletic shoes stop pushing their strollers for long enough to gawk. “What kind of pansy-ass throw was that?! I’ve seen eight-year-old girls who can throw a softball twice as hard!”
Marcia kneels down beside Erwing, asking a series of post-round questions.
Paul clenches his teeth until his jaw flexes. Enamel grinds against enamel. He marches forward, takes hold of the mannequin’s stiff wrist, and drags her back to the pile of bruised, naked bodies between him and Goulding.
“You’ve got one more shot at this,” the doctor says. He’s collected the scraps of his clipboard, and he uses one of them to point at Paul. “You hear me? One. More. Shot. You screw it up this time, and it’s answering phones and taking lunch orders for the next year.”
The Nissan’s door slams shut. Paul reaches for a shoebox-sized baby with blue, lidless eyes. He rolls his shoulder in its socket, loosening the screaming muscle.
He grips the baby’s neck and thinks back to the doctor’s question from last month: whether Paul wants to help, or whether he wants to be helped. It was a glib, condescending thing to ask—but then, glib and condescending don’t necessarily render a question untrue or inaccurate. Sure, Paul isn’t slipping on a pair of gloves each time he has to shake someone’s hand, but is he really that far off? His obsessions don’t manifest themselves physically, but they certainly lay other species of snares and traps in hidden corners of his mind. They lasso him and hogtie him and yank him away from logic and rational thinking. They spin him into vortexes where one thought grapples with another, which grapples with another, which grapples with another, until it’s three o’clock in the morning and all he can think about is all the problems he’s still left unexamined.
What’s your anxiety level? he asks himself. Off the fucking charts.
“Remember, Paul,” Goulding’s voice growls two feet behind him. “You fuck this up one more time…”
The Nissan’s halfway around the parking lot. Goulding breathes audibly, his nostrils flaring. Paul plants his heels and begins to sweat.