Playworld

by Adam Ross

His complexion, always red, now appeared closer to boiled.

My father gathered me into his arms and carried me down the length of the hallway to our decimated apartment. I remember my feeling of utter surrender during that seemingly endless walk. The sensation of flying—of being held aloft—with the hallway floor far below. Of dried tears staining my cheeks. The girth of my father’s neck, which I clutched now. And the strangest sense that the smallest space—not even a unit of measure I could name—had opened up between my thoughts and my face; and the conviction that, so long as I hid behind this mask, I’d be safe.

“There’s not a person in the world who’s yet been able to entirely fulfill another’s needs,”

Fall in full swing now, the trees in Lincoln Towers’ green space shed their leaves; beneath awnings, the heat lamps shined on passing pedestrians and conferred on them an orange rotisserie glow. With November’s approach, there was an entirely different quality to the light that on overcast days imparted to the sky a color closer to granite, to the Hudson an even more forbidding opacity, a solidity, as if ore might be transmuted to liquid not by heat but rather cold.

It was all more Apollonian than Dionysian, and it exemplified the distinctly Neverland quality to how we partied.

Roy also had an impressive bookshelf; however, his was tall and narrow and organized, so far as I could tell, by genre, blocks of science fiction and fantasy, none of which I had read (The Man in the High Castle, A Canticle for Leibowitz, a ton of Carlos Castaneda). Included among these was a cluster of Stephen King, Tolkien, the Dune trilogy, these giving on to Slaughterhouse-Five, Catch-22, The Crying of Lot 49, plus Franny and Zooey, Nine Stories, and The Catcher in the Rye. Such a library shamed me. These books were like tickets for entry to a club to which it seemed I was somehow not intelligent enough to be admitted, that demanded concentration I did not seem to have at my disposal. My mother looked up at me from such books and then back to the page. I felt this lack. This failure.

“It’s my understanding,” he said, “you boys have a matter to resolve.” “We do?” Pilchard asked. “Oh yes,” Tanner said, as if Pilchard’s father had sued his family too. He was a big believer in blind loyalty, especially if it ended in violence.

On that ride, I occasionally thought about what we did to Pilchard. My guilt had far more to do with our intent, which was to weaponize our city like a gun. It was also that I simply went along with things. As to my shame, that was retroactive, it was in hindsight. For what could we know, then, really, living in our tiny world on that infinite little island? And how lucky we were, as we grew older, to begin to unlearn such things—but not yet, not then. I am no apologist—“We were boys”—I grant no pardons. Our education was spatial. Racial. Tribal. Urban. American. But mostly—and this is the most important thing—it was dominated by Kepplemen, over whom we were each failing to gain leverage. And who wore the costume of love. And who was, day in and day out, teaching us fury, aggression, complicity, desperation, exploitation, and, most of all, silence.

it had begun to snow. I caught a glimpse of it as I passed the front hallway, headed toward my locker—it was one of those heavy snows slowly falling on a windless day, good packing snow, gentling to the ground in the afternoon’s peculiar silence, the flakes laying hands on each other and padding the already-evacuated school’s stillness, as if it were an extra layer of insulation.

It was one of the vertiginous aspects of my father’s character that his bad mood in our presence could be immediately eradicated by the appearance of someone he worked with. Whether his mood sank again upon their departure was always a possibility.

“I walk the golf course every Christmas Day. I’ve been doing it since I was seven. It’s my tradition. I try to leave at the same time every year and think about how my life is different.”

The Reagan Administration We are at a turning point in our history. There are two paths to choose. One is a path I’ve warned about tonight, the path that leads to fragmentation and self-interest. Down that road lies a mistaken idea of freedom, the right to grasp for ourselves some advantage over others. That path would be one of constant conflict between narrow interests ending in chaos and immobility. It is a certain route to failure. —Jimmy Carter, “Crisis of Confidence” speech, 1979

There was a bit of a delay waiting for Jill Clayburgh to take her place along with Shelley Duvall. The makeup lady appeared and touched up both women’s faces. Like nearly all film actors I’d ever met, there was something outsized about the features of each woman. Clayburgh’s mouth was disproportionately wide. While Duvall, thin as a needlefish, was as tall-necked as Alice after eating the caterpillar’s mushroom.

But having felt the flash of him and confusing, as Elliott liked to say, her hope with her evidence, she’d meet his gaze full-on.

Her brother, Amanda remarked, was, in temperament, exactly like her mother, blunt at his worst, honest to a fault at his best.

The information pouring from his mouth ran off the roof of Shel’s mind like rain.

Dad continued to watch the road, nodding several times to himself, and then he reached over to place his hand on my knee and patted it. He turned to smile at me, weakly this time, though I couldn’t help it: I looked at his teeth. “You never marry the great love of your life,” he said.

When Mom first came to New York, she’d been an instruction model for Joseph Pilates. In her bathroom, she kept a framed picture of herself assisting him in his studio. In it, she was hanging bow-bent backward beneath a set of parallel bars while Pilates spotted her. The German’s hair was as white as his turtleneck, his eyes as black as the Speedo he was wearing.

The house was so old it was almost never completely silent, which was a way, I thought, that such places made you feel a bit less lonely.

The show had the quality of all mediocre art: my attention slipped right off it.

It was one of those September afternoons in New York when the passenger plane banking west—a white crucifix against that endless lapis lazuli—leaves no contrail. Weather so perfect you believe certain states of being, like happiness, might be eternal.

That beautiful, blessed, first short week of classes, we grieved summer’s loss and begged its forgiveness, having taken it for granted.

“Never mistake your own perceptiveness for self-awareness,” he’d once told me, in those fervent couple of years I saw him again when I returned from school, “because one is an entirely different mode of knowledge than the other.”

I have always judged the long-term health of any relationship by the speed with which one member will publicly throw the other under a bus. Brian glanced at her; his smile, which had, up until that point, light in it, hardened.