Our Infinite Sadness

Voyeur

How Ben made it home after the beach party, he had no idea, not until Sunday morning when he awoke in his own bed before dawn and shuffled downstairs to catch his father on the way out the door, to yet another weekend fishing expedition. Charlie would never have allowed Ben to attempt to drive himself home in the pickup truck. He only learned over breakfast that Jacob himself had driven the truck home as a favor to Charlie, and then Charlie had taken Jacob all the way back home.

Ben apologized for the inconvenience.

Charlie wouldn't hear of it. "Hah," he bellowed, "you just forget it. That was a good time last night. A real good time. Best party in years."

Ben heartily agreed.

He watched Charlie head out with two tackle boxes and a pair of rubber waders over his arm.

Ben stared emptily out of the dusty, rain-flecked window long after Charlie departed.

Over breakfast he ruminated on Jacob's storytelling yesterday, and the most welcome shift that had occurred in his recurring dreams of Edythe, and the wildly divergent theories for her supernormal traits, laid bare in the stark light of day for consideration. Vampire or angel?

He resisted the urge to consult Google. He had already been down that route over the Era of Silence, and the results had been laughable. In the course of his surfing he had only found one or two accounts of good vampires, most notably a small enclave in Italy that for whatever reason allegedly had been deified as saints, sometime in the early Renaissance. The folklore of Jacob's tribe had thin historical support, indeed, and in any event Jacob had painted them as parasitical fiends.

Besides, weren't vampires supposed to burn to cinders in the sunlight? The whole whirling distraction had become absurd, and for all of its mystery, superfluous. Vampire? Angel? Maybe a bit of both. Who could say?

Ben stood by the conviction that he had settled on last night: that the difference between the two ultimately came down to distinctions of cultural perspective. Jacob considered the Cullens and saw pagan fables that pitted lupine shapeshifters against icy apex predators. Ben examined the same phenomena and perceived Biblical visitations by the angel Gabriel. Either way, it made no difference, because he simply couldn't fear Edythe. Not after the extraordinary phenomena he had experienced. Not after seeing her beaming, transcendent smile at the emergency room drop-off circle, shortly after she had flown across the parking lot on invisible wings to shield him from a falling tree.

He did his morning calisthenics and weight training alone that morning, confining himself to resistance exercises. He stayed off the bench press, for lack of a spotter.

Then he headed upstairs to sort himself out for the day, and in the course of setting out jeans and an old sweatshirt, he decided that his bedroom smelt cloying and rank. He suspected the reason. Having as he did the absence of a sex life, vivid dreams and their concomitant emissions had been a constant plague through adolescence, though lately the embarrassing trait had been diminishing. Last night's dream at the campfire had stayed with him all night with vivid clarity, and like the nightmares he had experienced early on, this dream had recurred all night in an endlessly repetitive cycle.

He dumped his sheets and blankets into the laundry. Then he flipped the mattress and let it fall to the box spring with a resounding crash. The obverse was bright white with sharp blue piping. He cursed to himself with the realization that this was the first time the mattress had been turned in seventeen years.

Ben sat at his desk, and the Macbook remained closed. Instead, with a pensive sigh, he dug into his wallet and found the painstakingly folded sheet bearing the letters that he and Edythe had exchanged that day in Bio Lab. He opened the wrinkled sheet and set it on the desk surface, his question mark and Edythe's iota reply.