The Sleepers
1.
An ancient fireplace, blackened by soot, held a fire-shaped plastic lamp that cast an unnatural glow on Anna and her friends as they talked and laughed and checked their phones. Anna was swiping at a dating app. A man in Decatur wanted to meet up. He seemed friendly, but Decatur was over an hour away, and was she really so desperate to be dating?
When she looked up from her phone, Anna noticed a former student, a handsome boy with wide shoulders and short hair of a blond so dark that it was almost gunmetal. He was sitting at the bar by himself, his head tilted back to watch a basketball game on a cheap flat-screen TV that hung above the shelves of liquor bottles. His name was Bryan, and he’d been in her freshman writing class the year before, which meant he should have been a sophomore, only nineteen or twenty, so Anna wondered how he got past the bouncer.
Anna’s friends too had noticed Bryan.
“Who’s he?” Nousha asked.
“Not one of ours,” Pam said, “that’s for sure.”
“Oh, I don’t know, I think he might be in comp lit.”
“Now that you mention it, I think he’s in my seminar.”
“The Age of Johnson?”
“He gave a paper on transimperial entanglement in The Vicar of Wakefield.”
“What breadth! To think his languages are Old Norse and Farsi...”
Pam and Nousha had these little routines they could slide into, but Anna didn’t like joking at the expense of undergrads, whom she tried to take seriously for the sake of her teaching. In the case of Bryan, however, she couldn’t blame them—the rounded shoulders, the upright neck, the smooth, unlined face, quick with a smile. When he used to approach her after class, to schedule meetings about his papers, she’d had to force herself to look into his eyes, which were a flat gray color she hadn’t seen before, without any marbling. The unusual eyes added to the equanimity he projected, and to his appearance of cool intelligence, and yet his papers had been dismal. She’d had to give him a bad grade.
Anna considered telling Nousha and Pam right away that Bryan was a former student, that she had met with him one-on-one, and that, in their meeting about his second paper, an odd moment had passed between them, a moment she hadn’t told anyone about, but she was feeling the three gin and tonics and decided to surprise them. She stood up and headed toward the bathroom, which was on the other side of the bar, and on her way she took a quick glance to make sure it was Bryan—it was, though he looked older, hunched over a beer and squinting at the TV. The sleeves of his tight navy sweater were pushed up, revealing thick forearms that ended in large, knuckly hands. She was close enough to touch his elbow, or would that be too intimate? Should she say his name instead? But she did nothing. She kept walking.
In the bathroom, she tried to buck herself up. Yes, she’d given him a bad grade, but the grade, a C, was higher than the D he’d deserved. His papers had begun in stiff imitation of her in-class examples but drifted into tangled rants about coal ash, fracking, for-profit landfills, wetland salinization, and on and on. In one, he’d spent two pages lambasting the tiny plastic balls in emulsifying face cream, which saturated the ocean and led, he claimed, to “an epidemic of crazy crabs and whatnot.” But in class he’d always looked thoughtful, his head a little higher than the rest, not only because he was tall but because he alone sat up straight, no matter how close they were to the end, no matter how rambling her monologue about topic sentences or proper citation or whatever essay they’d skimmed and failed to discuss. And when, infrequently, she risked a joke, he was the only student she could count on to laugh, which he did softly, almost demurely.
Bryan had such an aura of kindness that when, during their meeting about his second paper, he rested his hand on the back of hers, it felt natural. And when he said, “Thank you so much, I really appreciate this,” she decided he was simply a physically expressive person. So what if the feeling of his hand made blood surge into her face and ears? So what if, at the end of the semester, she couldn’t bring herself to give him a D? The D would have meant he had to take the class over again, and what if he got another D or, worse, an F, and wound up failing out of school and taking a menial job in whatever dreary suburb he came from and telling himself again and again that one day he’d take another stab at college? Anna hadn’t wanted to be the teacher who started him down that ignominious road. And for all of his outward naïveté, Bryan understood this, she sensed. He would be thankful for the break, and his kindly feelings for her would not have dimmed even now, a year later. So when she came out of the bathroom and headed toward her table, when she was about to pass the bar, Anna slowed down and watched Bryan’s face, brightened by the glow of the TV, until he noticed her.
“Miss Usitalo?” he said, smiling.
“Bryan?” she said, stopping and pretending to notice him.
He nodded brightly as if to say, Yes, it’s Bryan!
“Good to see you,” she said. “And please call me Anna. Class is over.”
“Okay, Anna.” He made an awkward move forward, as if he was going to shake her hand, then seemed to think better of it and retreated on his stool. There was an empty stool next to him, which made her wonder if he was waiting for someone.
“Who’s playing?” she asked.
He happily named the two college teams that were playing and explained what was at stake in the game. Then he added, quickly, “How about you? What are you up to?”
“Just having a drink with some friends.” She indicated Nousha and Pam, who’d been watching her talk to him, but when he turned to see them, they looked down at their phones.
Bryan asked what kind of drinks they were drinking, and for a moment Anna thought he might buy them a round and come over, but instead he talked about the beer he had in front of him, which was from North Carolina and had a name that sounded like a variety of weed. This led him to the subject of brewing and how difficult it was nowadays, what with the challenge of filtering microplastics from the water. Anna wondered if microplastics were like emulsifying face-cream balls. To change the subject, she asked how his semester was going.
Bryan fiddled with the glass of yellow beer in front of him, and Anna wished she hadn’t asked. She wished she’d allowed him the dignity of an adult conversation without holding him to her own standards, which were pegged to scholastic achievement in a way she knew was self-serving. Bryan breathed heavily through his nose without looking at her, as if mustering the right euphemism for his situation, and Anna found herself touching his forearm, which hung by his wrist from the shiny wooden bar. Bryan looked at her hand, and Anna wondered if he was thinking about their second meeting, how he’d rested his hand on hers, how something irreversible had been exchanged between them in that moment, like a breath-quickening jolt of—what? Chemistry? Electricity? Chemistry connoted ease in conversation, whereas electricity had a more sexual tinge, implying the titillated surface of the skin. Whatever it was, Anna had sensed that Bryan felt it too, and that he may have understood it better than she; he seemed like a person who’d had many partners.
“I’m at Pinewood,” Bryan said.
“Oh.” Anna had expected worse news. Pinewood Tech was a community college on the outskirts of town. She knew grad students who taught classes there for extra money. “How is it?”
“It’s alright. The teachers there aren’t very good, though. I’m taking a writing class and the teacher is real boring.”
Anna wondered why he was taking another writing class, since he’d passed hers. “What does the teacher make you write about?”
Bryan took another sip of beer, a bigger one this time. “Newspaper articles,” he said, “like what we did in your class, except the ones he gives us are lame. He doesn’t meet with us either, so I don’t know if I’m doing it right. Say”—he looked at her hopefully—“do you think you could help me? With my paper?”
“Of course,” Anna said, trying not to sound too eager. She was glad for an excuse to see him again, and meeting about a paper was more appropriate than meeting for coffee or a drink—than a date, in other words. She didn’t want to be a teacher who dated former students, no matter how handsome, and yet a different part of her mind was at that very moment showing her Bryan, shirtless, pinning her by her wrists to her own bed as she writhed beneath him. Flustered, she told Bryan, the actual blood-and-flesh Bryan sitting in front of her, that she should get back to her friends. “Email when you’re ready to meet,” she said.
Back at the table, Nousha and Pam eyed her wordlessly. Her plan had been to shrug and tell them he was a stranger who must have liked her looks, but, still flustered, she told them the truth.
“A student?” Pam repeated, incredulous.
“None of mine look like that,” Nousha said.
“I mean he looks kind of old,” Pam said, “doesn’t he?”
“Maybe,” Anna said. “I guess I never noticed.” This was a lie. She’d noticed on the first day of class that Bryan seemed older than the other students, despite his boyish good looks. At the time she’d attributed it to his equanimity and posture.
“Maybe he’s a special student,” Pam said.
“He’s special all right,” Nousha said.
“I had a thirty-something guy in one of my writing sections last semester,” Pam said. “He was in prison.”
“During class? That must have been awkward.”
“Before class, like he got his GED there. He wrote a paper about it. The peer-review process was very delicate.”
“How was the paper?” Anna asked, to steer conversation away from Bryan. But as Pam described the paper, which was about the importance and complexity of marking time in prison, Anna was thinking about Bryan’s soft hands and full, almost feminine lips.
Anna spent the rest of the night trying not to look at Bryan. She didn’t want to catch his eye and make a weird face that would ruin what had been, by her standards, a smooth interaction. But at midnight, when Pam and Nousha were ready to leave, Anna risked a glance at the stool where Bryan had been sitting and saw that it was shared by a purple-haired girl and a boy with a barcode tattooed across the back of his neck. Their shoulders were shaking as though they were giggling at a shared joke. The boy had his hand on the girl’s thigh.
2.
The Learning Center café was empty except for an animated group speaking what sounded to Anna like Portuguese. She was sitting at a table in the center of the vast room, its wooden ceiling crisscrossed by beams that made her think of the overturned hull of a ship. She wanted coffee but was afraid a full cup would make it hard to get away.
When Bryan had emailed, the day after seeing her at the bar, Anna had given him her usual office hours, which she held at the Learning Center instead of in the shared basement office she’d been assigned when she started teaching, but Bryan wrote back that he had a job and couldn’t meet during the day, and when was the latest she could meet? Anna stayed up late most nights, reading or grading, so she could have met him any time, but in pedagogy class she’d been told it was best not to meet students in the evening, lest they get the wrong idea.
Bryan came through the open double doors wearing a faded jean jacket over the same tight sweater he’d been wearing at the bar. He saw her and smiled, and she started to rise in her chair but forced herself to sit back down—he wasn’t the Queen of England. As he came toward her, pulling off his jacket, she could see that the surface of his sweater was pilled, and that the whole thing was twisting to one side.
“It’s weird here at night,” he said.
“It’s only six thirty,” she said, defensively. “Did you bring your paper?”
“Do you want coffee?”
“No thanks.”
“Come on, I know you like coffee.” He pantomimed swigging from the giant plastic travel mug she brought every day to class. “It’s the least I can do, since you’re meeting with me. You’re not even my teacher anymore!”
“Okay, but just a small.”
Bryan went to the counter, where a student worker, her hair tucked up in an oversized baseball cap that said Learning Center, was staring down at her phone. Bryan smiled and made chitchat with the worker, his peer, who seemed to straighten on her stool before busying herself with his drink order.
Watching them, Anna got a feeling she’d been getting more and more, which was something like envy—not envy of their youth (she wasn’t much older) but of the possibilities that still lay before them. By entering grad school, a decision she’d made lightly, for lack of a better idea, Anna had foreclosed so many possible futures for herself. What those futures might have been, she wasn’t sure, but her fantasies tended toward graduate work in other disciplines or maybe something cross-disciplinary that would have encouraged her to read modern fiction, watch movies, think about art—something like American Studies, or maybe Women’s and Gender Studies. She had a friend in college who’d majored in Women’s Studies and gone on to law school and was now, it seemed to Anna, fully and admirably adult.
Bryan came back with two small coffees, both black. Anna wondered how he knew she liked hers black, since the travel mug she brought to class had a lid. Bryan sat down, sipped his own coffee, and said, “My paper’s short. Don’t be mad. I had a hard time getting started.”
“Why would I be mad? Let me see the assignment sheet.”
He took another sip. “I forgot it.”
“Well, what’s the assignment?”
“It’s confusing.”
“Give me the gist.”
He thought for a moment. “It’s about writing a critique of a newspaper article.”
“So you said. Did you bring the article?”
“I forgot.” He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a folded sheet of paper, which he slid across the table to her. His hand nearly covered it, so to take it required her to brush her hand against his, which caused the year-old feeling of his heavy hand on top of hers to flash in whatever part of her brain felt and cataloged such things. Chemistry, electricity. She unfolded the paper to see three quarters of a page of handwritten text. Bryan’s handwriting was surprisingly neat, with each little letter taking up almost exactly the same amount of space as the last, but there wasn’t a date or a title or paragraph breaks, just a solid block of writing, which made the whole thing look even shorter than it was.
“I told you I had a hard time getting started,” he said. “Don’t laugh, okay?”
“This is a good start,” she said, even though the text began with a wooden description of what was to come: This paper will be about the article ‘New Hope For Black Stick Creek Boys’ from the Banner-Gazette. The author was Greg Kurzman. The first few sentences summarized the article. Each began with the word then. The next few sentences put forth a tangled idea about how members of the tribe were poor and the children were worse off than anyone because children have to eat more to be healthy and have jobs. It was confusing, and Anna couldn’t tell if the idea was Bryan’s or a bastardization of Greg Kurzman’s. But what came next had nothing to do with Greg Kurzman: Of course, the main problem confronting Black Stick Creek boys is the fact that they’re zombies. They have weird skin and stuff, which makes it hard to get jobs or have girlfriends. And they follow people moaning and try to make them their slaves.
In her pedagogy class, Anna had read about students whose incoherent writing reflected incoherent thoughts, students who couldn’t string together two sentences even in speech. Bryan wasn’t one of those (at one of their meetings, he’d pointed to a sentence and said, “This part’s like the other part, right?”), but she wondered if he had trouble separating reality from fantasy, or maybe he was just trying to make her laugh?
Carefully she said, “This zombie stuff is pretty funny, Bryan, but was it really in Kurzman’s article?”
“Zombies are a real problem nowadays. I figured that would be the stakes of the paper. You know, like, why am I writing this particular paper?”
That was a question Anna liked to ask her students, to keep them from writing about uninteresting topics like dorm life and dining hall food. She said, “Zombies might be a problem, but the plight of the Black Stick Creek boys, surely that’s enough of a problem to justify a paper, right?”
“Oh yeah, definitely. The Black Stick Creek were massacred.”
“Pardon?”
“A long time ago. When they killed all the Indians.”
“When who killed the Indians?”
“White people. The ones that survived were marched to Oklahoma.” Bryan eyed her. “Miss Usitalo—”
“Anna.”
“Are you from around here?”
“No.” Anna had grown up in the Woodlands, a suburb of Houston, though she didn’t consider herself to be from the Woodlands, or from Houston or from anywhere else. “But I know about the Trail of Tears, Bryan.”
“It’s just that most people around here learn about the Black Stick Creek in school, along with the other Creek. Sometimes they’re called Muscogee. There’s also the Cherokee. You’ve heard of them, right?”
“Of course. But, you know, we had our own tribes in Texas.”
“The Caddo and Kiowa.”
“That’s right.”
“The Kiowa hid out in Palo Duro Canyon and were massacred.”
“Right. Of course.” Anna felt herself projecting the same knowing, impatient confidence she did in classes and conversations with other grad students when she was pretending to have read something she hadn’t. In truth all she knew about Indigenous Americans was whatever mention was made in literature from her area (American realism, naturalism, and local color) as well as from a summer camp she’d gone to as a girl. The cabins at the camp had been named for tribes, but the only name she remembered was that of her own cabin, Uinta. They were the Uintas. Their counselor, a fat college girl who smoked cigarettes on the cement step outside the cabin door when she thought the Uintas were asleep, told Anna she didn’t have team spirit.
“In your paper you should stick to the article,” Anna said, staring at the crumpled sheet on the table and feeling like a haggard old teacher, and not a very good one. Across the room, the people speaking Portuguese had risen and were putting on their coats. “What’s your critique? Tell me in your own words, right off the top of your head.”
Bryan opened his mouth but didn’t say anything.
Anna said, “Do you think the article is effective or ineffective?”
“Effective,” he said.
“Why?”
“Because it’s true.”
“Come on, Bryan.”
“What?”
“Be serious.”
“I am.”
“Bryan—”
“Ineffective.”
“What?”
“Maybe the article was ineffective? Do you think that’s what I should go with?”
“Well you didn’t bring the fucking article, so I don’t know.”
Bryan cocked back his head, and the blank expression on his face called attention to its unusual smoothness. Or maybe smooth wasn’t the right word, because smooth implied softness, whereas Bryan’s cheeks, though hairless, looked hard as a mask.
“Sorry,” Anna muttered, lowering her eyes from Bryan’s. She carefully refolded the paper and set it on the table. The moment she did, Bryan brought his hand down on hers, and she, startled, pulled her hand into her lap, where she rubbed it with the other. “Bryan...”
“What, it’s okay when I’m your student but not now?”
“It isn’t ever okay.”
“Then I guess I should just leave, huh?” He pushed back his chair.
“Don’t—I mean, what about your paper?” But she didn’t care about the paper. She was glad to have her suspicion about the first touch confirmed: that he was attracted to her, not just thankful for her help. “Aren’t we here to meet about your paper?” Shut up about the goddamned paper. But what else could she say? What the hell was she doing?
“There isn’t a paper,” he said.
“Pardon?”
“I don’t go to Pinewood. I made it up so you’d meet with me.”
“Meet with you?” She felt her face getting warm. “Meet with you about what? Why do you want to meet with me if you don’t have a paper?”
“Why are you embarrassing me?”
The last few Portuguese speakers glanced at Bryan on their way out the door.
Anna knew why Bryan did it, and she knew she wanted to see him not to help with his paper but to find out what would have happened if she’d encouraged him, before; if she’d put her other hand on top of his and told him they should take a walk; if, walking one of the paths that cut through the woods next to campus, they’d stopped in the cold, in the dark, and kissed. But now it was too late. He was tugging on his coat, looking angry, and she was struck anew by the size of his body. There was latent menace in such a body, though he’d never been anything but gentle around her.
“I’m sorry,” he said fiercely.
“Don’t be sorry,” she said.
“Sometimes...” He trailed off, and the big body seemed to sag.
“What is it, Bryan?”
“Sometimes I feel like a—like an alien, you know? Like people don’t understand me.”
“Lots of young people feel that way.”
“Young people? Don’t patronize me.”
“Sorry, I just mean—”
“I’m older than you think. I’m not the kind of person you think I am.”
“I’m so sorry.” Anna felt the urge to stand up and take his hand in hers, to feel again whatever had connected them before—chemistry and electricity no longer sufficed; those easy words didn’t capture the peculiarity of the connection, or its lasting power; no, there was a warmth to it, a frothy feeling that suffused her from the inside—but before she could act, Bryan had taken his jean jacket from the back of his chair and snatched his bogus paper off the table.
“Maybe I’ll see you,” he said, and she watched him go.
Left alone, Anna wondered if the student worker, the girl, had been watching. Of course she had. She might be watching still. So Anna, not wanting to look upset, took out her phone. She’d been messaging the man from Decatur, who was a consultant. He’d grown up in Connecticut and had come to Atlanta for business school. In one of his photos, he was flanked by two male friends holding long plastic tubes of a green-colored drink. Though the shortest, he was in all other respects the most handsome of the three.
With a breath of courage, Anna typed that she would like to meet up at your convenience, but she didn’t press send. And she was still staring at the blinking cursor when, minutes later, a text from Bryan appeared. He apologized for getting worked up, as he put it. He went on:
I really do appreciate your time, and I know it wasn’t right to lie about being at school just to see you. That was way inappropriate, like a trick almost. Honestly I guess I just like you and wanted to see you and hang out or whatever. I know it’s crazy but I’m older than you think, so it isn’t too weird. Feel like a movie?
Anna did feel like going to a movie with Bryan, but why? Just because he was handsome? The man in Decatur was handsome. The man in Decatur was thirty and had a career and claimed interests such as jogging and reading for pleasure.
Sounds good, she typed, and named a movie she knew was playing downtown. The movie was foreign and purported to be strange, but if Bryan couldn’t handle such a movie, then they wouldn’t go out again. That’s what Anna told herself.
3.
On the screen, in muted black and white, a handsome mustachioed man was telling a younger man that he too had known the torment of unrequited lust, but the only stirring he felt anymore, he said, was of nostalgia. Or that’s the gist Anna got from the oddly worded subtitles. The man was speaking Serbo-Croatian. He and the younger man were sitting on some rocks in front of the brick facade of a ruined warehouse or factory, and above them its glassless windows framed bright squares of sky.
“Nostalgia,” repeated the younger man, the hero of the film, which was called Pragovi, or The Sleepers, “for your life? For the world as it was?”
The mustachioed man shook his head. He had lusterless skin the color of ash. “For the other world,” he said.
Both men sat in silence, blinking.
Anna was embarrassed by such silences, and by the cryptic dialogue and cacophonous cello music deployed seemingly at random. But Bryan, hunched forward on his seat, seemed to hang onto every word.
“Whether heaven or hell,” the mustachioed man was saying, “I do not know, but the warmth of it, and the darkness, was like a type of womb.”
“Like a sensory deprivation tank?” the young man ventured.
The mustachioed man looked up, allowing a close-up of his grimly handsome face. “A wartime experiment in Srebrenica,” he said at length. “The water was salty, and the room was so dark that I might have fallen asleep but for the electrodes. As it was I began after four or five hours to hallucinate. Snakes and scorpions, monkeys with frog faces. Cockroach men whose chitinous shells faintly shimmered. Whatever they were, I saw them all again, in the other world, as though they’d been waiting there for me. But in the other world they were transformed into beings of light, trembling and tender fingered.” He paused as though considering the trembling tender-fingered beings, whatever they were (Anna couldn’t picture it), then turned to the young man and said, “Why, do you think, was I not allowed to stay?”
“Nearly all of the dead have been rejected from their graves,” the young man said matter-of-factly. Then the mustachioed man improbably began to kiss him. The noisy kiss made Anna wonder if she and Bryan might soon be kissing like that, and to wonder that, watching this, caused her to see herself as a middle-aged dead man returned from the grave to seduce someone young and alive. The young man pulled up the mustachioed man’s shirt, revealing several dark unhealed wounds. Just as the man’s skin wasn’t pink or tan but gray, his wounds weren’t red but black, like dog lips, and of course the young man started kissing them.
Anna glanced at Bryan, who was literally stroking his chin as though contemplating the unusual love act or some other aspect of the increasingly obscure film. The only other people in the theater were a seventyish couple who sometimes whispered, and Anna wondered if they, like Bryan, were rapt, and why wasn’t she?
The sex, when it came, was tastefully done, with cutaways to rubble and leafless trees and a large bird flying between abandoned buildings.
The war-crimes tribunal, when it came, was conducted entirely by, and for, morose grayish undead people like the handsome mustachioed man, whose name was Ljubo. Ljubo sat in the witness box, manacled, his head hanging. Anna couldn’t tell if he was really on trial or only playing the part of someone on trial, like something from Brecht, but then he raised his bound hands with an anguished grunt and began chewing the meat of his own forearm. Everyone watched him do this. The young man cried out from the back of the courtroom and was shushed. The judge banged his gavel, the courtroom slowly faded, and the director’s name appeared.
“What the fuck,” Anna whispered.
Bryan leaned back for the first time in an hour. “I know, right?”
“I’m so sorry.”
“What for?”
Anna gestured at the screen, where crunchy looking Serbo-Croatian names were materializing and dissolving.
Bryan turned to her, confused. “Sorry? It was amazing.”
“But what was the outcome of the tribunal?”
“Doesn’t matter. The tribunal was enacted by the revenants as a cleansing ritual.”
“Revenants?”
“Zombies.”
“Then why was the young guy—”
“Janko.”
“Why was Janko so upset?”
“He was alive. He didn’t understand.”
“But if he was alive, why was he there?”
“He was born during the conflict, so he had a psychic connection to the dead. That, and he loved his uncle Ljubo.”
“Ljubo was his uncle?”
By now they were walking through the lobby, which had been a tobacco warehouse and still bore a trace of the sweet, leathery smell. The seventyish man was waiting by the bathroom for his wife.
Anna resisted the urge to point out that Janko had been making out with Uncle Ljubo. She didn’t think of herself as someone who pointed out the obvious, and Bryan’s reverent opinion of the film made her wonder if he would find the complaint bourgeois, which, before that night, wasn’t something she would have guessed Bryan ever found anything.
“I had no idea there were movies like that,” Bryan said.
“Gay zombie movies?”
“I’d like to learn more about that director.”
Anna wondered if Bryan’s enthusiasm was for show, if he wanted to impress her. But then he was looking at his phone and saying, “Huh. It’s his first movie. He’s only thirty. Wow! Do you think he’s, like, a genius?”
“I really have no idea,” Anna said.
Outside the theater, Bryan continued commenting about Pragovi while Anna, worried her lack of opinion might show some defect of taste, did her best to respond. The night was cold and clear, and the few street lamps made the quiet downtown look like an Edward Hopper painting. They passed an empty parking lot, a law office, an old tire shop converted into a pizza parlor. They passed a bank whose colonnaded portico gave shelter to a person sleeping in a fetal position. When they were about to pass a bar she liked, Anna suggested they go in to get out of the cold.
Inside the bar, which was empty except for a few couples at mismatched tables, Bryan opened his wallet to show his ID to the bouncer, who nodded. Anna got ready to produce her own ID, but the bouncer didn’t ask for it. They headed for the counter, where Bryan ordered a beer and Anna ordered a bourbon and ginger. While they waited, Anna noticed that Bryan was still holding his ID.
“Bryan,” Anna said, “how old are you?”
Bryan glanced at the ID in his hand, as though to verify his own age. “Twenty-three,” he said, and handed her his ID, which wasn’t a driver’s license but something called an Official Georgia Identification Card. Looking at his birthday, Anna did the math quickly: he was twenty-three, almost twenty-four. His height was listed as 6′3″ and his weight as 190. Hair BRO, eyes GRY. The date of issue was four years ago, but in the photo he didn’t look any younger. Even his haircut was the same, buzzed close on the sides and slightly longer on top.
After the bartender served them, Bryan paid in cash, and he and Anna carried their glasses to a little table in the corner.
“Thanks for the drink,” Anna said, raising the glass to her lips. The spicy ginger ale fizzed into her nose.
“I owe you for the movie,” Bryan said, and sipped his beer. Behind him, on the wood-paneled wall, an impressionistic painting of John F. Kennedy shaking hands with Martin Luther King, Jr., hung above a greasy popcorn machine half full of pale yellow popcorn.
“Twenty-three, huh,” Anna said. “Did you start at junior college?”
“No, I’m what’s called a special student.”
Anna thought of Pam’s ex-convict, and of the older students who stood out, for their slowness and uncertainty, within the rush of undergrads in the halls of her building before and after class periods.
“This isn’t my first try at college, let’s just say.”
“I see. What’s your major?”
“Landscape architecture. Don’t look so surprised.”
“I’m not. But do they offer that at Pinewood?”
“Oh, yeah. For sure.”
That didn’t sound right to Anna.
“But I’d like to transfer again,” Bryan went on. “I don’t know if I can, though. I have this learning difference.”
“Usually I’m told that sort of thing.”
“It was up to me whether to tell or not. In Digital Graphics I told the TA because I knew I’d need extra time for tests, but in your class we wrote the papers at home. I considered it, but you were kind of intimidating.”
“But we met one-on-one. Why didn’t you tell me then?”
“By then it was too late. I’m supposed to say it on the first day. That way people don’t just say it after they bomb a test or whatever.” Bryan looked down at his beer, which he held with both hands as though it were a mug of tea he hoped would warm him. “I guess you wanna know what the difference is, huh?”
For a confused moment Anna thought he meant the difference between him and her, a difference that, though less obvious than she’d thought (age, interest in foreign film), was beginning to seem vast in other ways—ways suggested by Bryan’s odd expressions and gestures, his abruptness, his ability to sit so still for long periods. But he meant the learning difference. Anna said, “If it isn’t too personal.”
“It’s kind of like trauma,” Bryan said.
Did he mean violence? Physical abuse?
“I was in an accident.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“It was a long time ago. In most ways I’m normal. There’s just this memory thing, like holding different stuff in my head at once. And some of my bones got pretty messed up, so I have these plates under my skin.”
“Like, metal plates?”
“Plastic. Nobody uses metal anymore, not even for skull injuries. I got a bunch of these plates when I was a kid, only I didn’t heal as quickly as they expected, so when I got older and grew, the plates had to get replaced by bigger plates. Not all of them, though. Some got taken away. But there’s still a few here and there.”
As Bryan spoke, Anna found herself eyeing his neck. It looked strong but flat, not ropy. Was there a plate underneath the skin?
Bryan smiled. “Wanna feel one?”
She did.
He rolled up his left sleeve and laid his forearm across the table in front of her, exposing the pale, almost silvery flesh of its underside. There were none of the bulging veins Anna might have expected in the forearm of a person so fit and muscular. Tentatively, she extended two fingers and traced them along the surface of the forearm, only to discover it felt less like flesh than like a tabletop. She pressed. The flesh didn’t give. But when she moved her fingers in circles, the skin scooted around like a loose-fitting sock.
“There’s plastic under there?” Anna asked, withdrawing her hand.
“Yep,” Bryan said.
“I never would have guessed, from the outside.”
“The skin is all healed. The accident was a long time ago, like I said.”
Anna resisted the urge to ask about the accident. Though she liked Bryan and suspected he would tell her about it, she wasn’t ready to hear him open up in that way; she knew where such openings might lead.
“Did you miss a lot of school? After the accident?”
“Only a year, but I was already old for my grade, so I was almost twenty when I graduated high school.” Bryan looked up at her, and Anna got a strangely vivid picture in her mind of him in the passenger seat of a car, glancing nervously at the parent or friend behind the wheel. A nighttime highway. Raining. No, snowing. One of those flurries where the fallen snow seems to float on the frozen ground, making the pavement extra slick.
“People died,” Bryan said.
“I’m so sorry,” Anna said again, but what else was there to say? She sipped the last of her drink, and Bryan lowered his eyes to his beer, unnaturally still, as though by moving he might draw unwanted attention.
People died. The more Anna thought about it, the stranger the statement became. If Bryan meant someone specific, wouldn’t he have said “my dad died,” or “my friend died,” or “Carl, the guy who drove me to school, died”?
“People sometimes say, like, now he’s at peace, you know?”
Anna nodded.
“With a dead person, I mean. But what if they never have peace? What if they keep wandering? Keep coming back? War-crimes tribunals and whatnot, that’s for the living. A sensemaking process.”
Was he talking about the car accident, or the Bosnian genocide? Anna thought about Bryan’s papers, his fixation on the dangers of technology and on historical massacres. She wondered if his accident, whatever it was, made him feel closer to death.
Bryan said, “You know what was weird, though?”
“About what?”
“The movie. I mean it was awesome, don’t get me wrong, but the dead were too coherent.”
“What do you mean?”
“The stuff Ljubo said. The way he was talking.”
“Ljubo was the uncle?”
Bryan nodded. “He was just lurching around like a living person, talking to his nephew and whatnot, making out. But death would have clouded his mind, more like a dream. And his experience of time would have been very different.”
Had Bryan died? Had he floated above his hospital bed for a few moments, after the accident, like the people who claim to have seen tunnels and bright lights?
“That’s just my opinion,” Bryan said, as though he’d taken Anna’s silence for doubt. And of course she did doubt that he’d died, actually died, but couldn’t he have had such a strange experience, during the accident or its aftermath in the hospital, that he had no choice but to ascribe it to death? To having glimpsed the dreamy death world he described?
“Interesting,” Anna said cautiously. “One of the pleasures of a film like Pragovi is to discuss the artist’s choices, and to challenge some of them.”
“Exactly! I knew you’d understand.”
Anna was thankful to have such lingo on hand, as a person who led discussions of difficult texts. And as she listened to Bryan go on about Pragovi, she felt the same satisfaction she felt in class on the rare occasion an articulate student took the stage, so to speak, and she could withdraw into the role of facilitator. But wrapped up in her satisfaction was the feeling of unfolding warmth she remembered from the Learning Center café, a feeling that, later on, would be hard to disentangle from the effects of drinking alcohol.
The same warm feeling would suffuse her patchy memory of what happened next: walking with Bryan past the dark, dilapidated mansions of her neighborhood, past parked cars and the trunks of giant street trees, Bryan’s body looming much larger now that they were next to each other and on the move, and in the shadow of the possibility that soon they would be touching. Sometimes he sighed, as if the cool night air were delicious to him. Sometimes his body, walking, rocked toward hers. When they got to the little path that led to her door, she didn’t know what to do.
“This is me,” she said lamely.
Bryan squinted at the large wooden house. “What do you do with all that space?”
“It’s divided into apartments. I live in the top one.”
“Cool. Can your neighbors hear you?”
Did he mean during sex? “I don’t—” she stammered, “I don’t know about that.” She hadn’t had a friend over in weeks, let alone a lover. She rarely talked on the phone. She played her records at a respectfully low volume. The neighbors might have thought her apartment was empty, though often as not she was in her oatmeal-colored lounge chair reading examples of American realism, naturalism, and local color as well as articles and book-length studies of the subject. She shoved her hand into her bag to get her keys. The whole thing was stupid. What was she doing? What if her downstairs neighbor, the ecology postdoc, saw them standing there? He and his boyfriend stayed up all night listening to beepy electronic music and taking periodic rips from their lamp-sized bong.
Rooting around inside her bag, trying not to look at Bryan, she felt her phone and thought of the man in Decatur. Meet up at your convenience. It sounded so paltry now, and why wouldn’t it? Its intended recipient existed for her inside a phone, whereas beside her, looming over her, stood a man whose force of life seemed to have spread, vapor-like, into the air all around her, and through her nose and mouth into her very body, which was trembling. She dropped her bag, which landed on the ground with a thud. When she looked up, Bryan’s wide face seemed closer, though he hadn’t moved, and his big gray eyes seemed to glow through the dark space between their bodies. What she felt in that moment should have embarrassed her, she understood—like something from a teen movie, or one of those paranormal romances with sexy brooding vampires—but she surrendered to it and watched her hands venture into that same dark space. She shut her eyes as her hands came to rest on the rough, pilled sweater. There was a barbershop smell—aftershave? She made a guttural noise as she straightened to bring her lips up to his, which were softer than she expected, but colder. Reaching around his waist, drawing him closer, she let her hands climb under his sweater and up his back, where smooth muscles spread from his spine, and she thought about his forearm and the weird, almost sickening feeling of the skin there. She wondered where the other plates were, and if soon she would be touching them.
Bradley Bazzle's second story collection, In the Shadow of the Architect, is forthcoming from the University of Wisconsin Press. He is also the author of Fathers of Cambodian Time-Travel Science (C&R) and the novel Trash Mountain (Red Hen). His stories appear in the Colorado Review, Epoch, Gettysburg Review, The Missouri Review, New England Review, New Letters, and elsewhere. He lives with his wife and daughter in Athens, Georgia, where he teaches improvisation.