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IV. Suburbs of the Fourth Circle
Noah knew that the Sun would find nothing sympathetic about his depression, no common ground with a young man who wanted to sleep when it wanted nothing more than to rise. On this day he continued his losing battle, shutting his eyes tight, about to put the covers over his head again. But it was no use. The big, bright octopus reached one of its tentacles through his window and yanked him into consciousness. He squinted, but the light lurked behind his eyelids, too. The violent sun had come, tentacles of luminescence, painful eagerness and all and it had to take Noah with it into a day he was sure he’d be disappointed by. He practically fell out of bed instead of rising. The sun had not jarred awake his legs or his sense of equilibrium, only his heavy eyes and sluggish, disappointed brain. He chose one of five white dress shirts and one of five pairs of black slacks to show the rest of the waking world, which would be gathered in the kitchen to remind him of his grim little life.
The kitchen was an Ikea catalog still, empty save trendy, white Nordic furniture with unpronounceable names. It didn’t quite surprise him that at this time of day it was empty. Independence and social Darwinism reigned supreme in his family, nobody self sufficient dealt with anyone else. The only person who got any company was his sister, Caroline, who had always been sickly. CFS and anemia led her to more parental doting than either of her brothers got. But, then it was ingrained in them early that everybody does their own thing. If it hadn’t been for the houses of friends, he might very well have grown up thinking that a family was an assembly of people with completely divergent motives who shared an address and a series of genetic coincidences.
Kyle was probably smoking up. His mother was probably getting coffee as an excuse to avoid her sickly adult daughter, likely with a “friend” whose reputation she would decimate as soon as she was with another “friend”, and there was no doubt his father was working, though he wondered how often his father “worked”. They were off adding quotation marks to words that actually meant things to others. So, like many afternoons, it was just he and Caroline, and Caroline was awake about three hours a day. He walked out to get the mail, hoping there’d be something that could get him out of here. He’d had enough of his mother’s gossip, Caroline’ s tragedy, Kyle’s blaring TV and the ten-foot cloud of leave-me-the-fuck-alone that followed his father like a loyal little dog.
The sky was blank blue monotony like the eyes of the suburban blondes that walked around the mall. It looked dull and unreceptive and distant, doing nothing while the fluffy white clouds rolled across it. It was a bright, sunny day that wanted nothing more from itself than the chance for children to bike down the road and old people to nap on their porch. Nobody around him was going anywhere else. The bassethound next door stretched on its stoop, birds chittered their contentment, the soccer mom across the street returned from the grocery store the same time she always did; every life confirmed a happy stasis.
As he approached the mailbox, he knew that he would find not a generous yellow envelope, but one as tiny and bland as his town and his life. The envelope was filled with implied snickering as it told him that he was going about as far as his sister was.
“Stay in town”, they’d told him as Caroline got sicker, “we might need you around until we can adjust to this.” So, he went to the community college and got his As in their meager science classes in hopes of getting into a grad program somewhere good. As of yet, he hadn’t found a good grad program that agreed it had been a sensible plan. At this point, he was dead certain it hadn’t been. He had loved science because of the vastness of it, the all-encompassing nature of the thing. Having grown up in a paper bag of a town, he was excited by chemistry, the knowledge that the same elements that made up the French Riviera and the Galapagos Islands were around him. It was in his teen years and his time in community college, the only thing that kept him going. It was a lot less consolation in his twenties. In this little town, notions of vastness were tiny in their implications. “Far” was the Wal-Mart a mile and a half outside town, his younger brother’s surprising “B” average was unlimited potential.
In the end, he found himself back in his little beige sepulcher of a room, with his books and his darkness, the closest thing at this point to where he must have belonged. He looked up at the ceiling and thought about how it was his sky. No blue, no brightness, eternal beige. Above the ceiling no heaven and no space, only roof. He stared into the TV, considered turning it on and hesitated. He would not be like his brother who used it as just another drug, who shoveled it into his brain. He wouldn’t copy another’s suburban boredom. He might as well just listen and think about where he would go now, since nowhere wasn’t really an option.
“Fuck,” he said to himself, “If I could be a junkie like Kyle or a vegetable like Caroline, I’d be all set. All in all, they’ve got it fucking made.”
“Shit, shit, shit!” came the scream from across the hall, “stupid goddamn mud!”
Noah got up and followed the yelling, wondering what it was about, since it hadn’t rained for three weeks. He knocked on the bathroom door three times and there was no response. Pressing his ear to it, he heard running water and then the sound of his younger brother giggling like a little girl.
“Kyle? You okay, Kyle?”
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