—Do you remember what songs he taught Charlie? Any in particular you can remember?
—Some. I suppose you want to hear him.
—Hear him?
Oh yes, Chester wants to hear him. The sequence is hard to untangle. We go inside. I’m sitting on a stool, watching the dust dance in the lamplight. The small room is dense with darkness. I am on the porch, under the screaming insects. I am out by the car.
I go inside.
ANOTHER NIGHT. In another motel, indistinguishable from the last, we lie on a bed looking at our phones. The TV in the room seems like an old model. Rounded tube, wooden housing, a rabbit-ear antenna sitting on top. It is showing a musical. Men in blackface makeup are singing on a riverboat. In spats and tail coats they twirl around. By the bed is a slot which takes quarters. You put in a coin and the mattress vibrates.
You put in a coin now. Long ago, you put in a coin. We shared a joint in the bathroom, blowing the smoke into the air vent.
—So in the morning, you’re turning back.
—Maybe. I don’t know. Is that what I did before? I don’t know what’s waiting for me in the city. I walk around and there’s always some guy with one hand on his junk yelling at me like he literally owns the sidewalk I am walking on and because I won’t talk to him I’m a bitch and a whore. These guys watching me. And it’s not just guys. I mean, they could be young or old, male, female. But they’re all the same. They—none of them—shit, it’s not easy to talk about this. What I’m saying is it’s never white people.
She exhaled deeply.
—I’m not a racist, Seth. I swear I’m not.
—Of course not. Racists aren’t like—I mean, I know you’re cool. You know you’re cool.
For a while she talked about healing, a medical NGO she’d volunteered with in Africa. The people were so poor. The little children sang a song to her outside their tin-roofed school. The truth, she said, was that no one knew how to fix anything. People had all kinds of theories but in the end that’s all they were.
—But it’s as if they’re in communication. The, uh, non-whites. I know how that sounds. I don’t mean that. It’s hard to explain. It’s like they all have the same information about me. Like they’ve formed some kind of opinion and I can’t do anything to change their minds.
—You feel judged.
—Right. And I resent that. It’s grotesque, actually. They don’t know me. They don’t know what I’ve been through. I don’t want to feel like this, Seth. Six months ago I was alive. I can’t even remember what that was like, to be honest with you. Every day I feel less and less connected.
—What are we going to do?
—About what?
—All of it. Us.
She looked around sadly.
—You’re too timid to even ask me why we’re renting a double room in a shitty place like this, but you’re all like “us” as if me and you are a thing?
She went outside for a cigarette, closing the door to show that I was not invited to follow. I sat on the edge of the bed, my knees grazing the bulky air conditioner under the window. I felt shriveled, shrunken into myself.
She came back in and sat down on the bed.
—I can’t sleep in places like this unless someone’s in the room. That’s all. You seemed pretty harmless so I thought it was OK. But you turned out to be a very tense person. You are not relaxing to be around.
She came back in. She sat down beside me. She had always been coming back in, sitting down, again and again, forever coming back in and sitting down. She spoke to me and it was as if she spoke in my voice. She said she knew what I wanted. She said she’d seen how I looked at her. I don’t want you, she said, but it’s the quickest way to end it. Sometimes you’re with a guy and you know you’re the only door he’ll leave through.
—Do you understand, Seth?
I squinted at the TV screen, pretending I hadn’t heard.
—Take what you want.
She sat down on the bed beside me, again and again, and she leaned over and kissed me and we began to kiss deeper and suddenly everything happened always and forever and I was hearing Leonie Wallace gasp, licking Leonie Wallace’s nipples, the areolae of Leonie Wallace’s nipples, which turned out to be wide and brown, and I was brushing my face against a down of hair, smelling Leonie Wallace’s smell, my cheeks slick against Leonie Wallace’s wet thighs, seeing Leonie Wallace looking up, looking me straight in the eye as she sucked me. Choose a picture on your hard drive. Jerk off to Leonie Wallace, jerk off to me and Leonie Wallace.
We were doing it with Carter, of course. He was in there with us, in us. Inside our movements, in the angles between our bodies. Afterwards Leonie took a shower, locking herself in the bathroom for over half an hour. When she came out, she was dressed in sweat pants and a flannel shirt. She fussed with her luggage, then got in to bed, slipped on an eye-mask and switched off her bedside light. During all this routine, she never once looked at me. I was left there, naked in the reek of her, my body bathed in the major glow of the TV and the minor glow of my phone, a rhombus of light on the bed illuminating a snail trail of semen that ran down my thigh. I was thinking, did that happen? That may not have happened.
MISS ALBERTA’S SHACK EXPANDS. Its tiny confines are a great shadowed concourse that I am watching her cross. She moves continuously but makes no headway, shuffling her old bones in place like a deck of cards. It is infinite, this moment, Miss Alberta always receding into the darkness, into the shadows. The slow scrape of her shoe on the boards.
In her hand, as she turns, is a record. And I know I am slipping into darkness, but I am powerless to stop it. Oh God, says Chester, and there is something repulsively sexual in his tone. Oh God, he says, it’s true.
I want to get further away, but I can’t move. I am falling down into starless desolation and I cannot lift myself up off the stool.
—He went to Jackson. Mr. Speir made him an appointment.