Our Infinite Sadness

Nascence

Ben faced remarkably light interrogation when he traipsed into the kitchen and found Charlie busy at the skillet, stacks of fish at his side, the vicinity a riotous mess, with Harry Clearwater's Fish Fry dusting every surface.

"You know you're only cooking for two, right?"

"Hah! More for us, more for us."

At some point Charlie assured Ben that he didn't need to know everything little thing. Sure, someone had dropped him off in a car that he didn't recognize. He didn't need to know.

"Renée's gonna be tickled," Charlie assured him, "to hear you been out with friends two days in a row. Just what she wanted. Just what we all wanted, after what happened down in Phoenix on your last day."

"Nothing happened in Phoenix, Dad."

"Okay, okay. I get it. Need your space. We don't gotta talk about it."

Ben let it drop and stuffed himself with fried fish. He watched for bones. Charlie went out to the deep freeze for another stack. Ben had to order him back, to stop cooking fish, to start working on the immense pile he'd already prepared. Charlie insisted the stack wouldn't be enough. Ben told him with all respect that he was nuts.

"They're not gonna eat themselves," Charlie grumbled, but he relented.

"By the way, I have a friend coming over in an hour. Aaron Weber."

Charlie had no interest in why they had a visitor coming. He only wanted to know if the Weber kid would be wanting fish.

"No. I'm giving him dancing lessons. He'll need to be ambulatory."

_____

Edythe didn't need to be in his bedroom to watch over him. She could keep vigil from out in the woods. She could sit under her mossy log, six miles out, and hear his heart without difficulty. Yet there she perched upon his mother's rocking chair, to watch over him and earnestly wish that she could hear his dreams.

She told herself that she needed to burn herself with thirst for his honey-freesia-primrose scent, to acclimate herself for their day tomorrow in school, that she had to train herself to disregard his scent, for his safety, that she must strive to prevent her thirst and bloodlust from being a barrier between them. Yet she knew that she was kidding herself, that the purported need for desensitization had nothing to do with her presence that night upon the rocking chair. Besides, proximity to his scent did not desensitize her. Quite the opposite. His presence inflamed her desire, increased her attraction to him, awakened needs that she didn't understand. Her drives had become a big muddle, a tempest of competing and incomprehensible desires, thirst being just one, an apocryphal footnote as compared to the new imperatives that commanded her attention and set her entire body to trembling. It seemed at times that her thirst was being subsumed gradually by these new and more powerful desires, drives that she did not even have names for, compulsions that beckoned Edythe with innermost promises of ecstasy.

Ben's dreams carried him up and down over precipitous swells, an ocean of turmoil, the water's edge depthless to a thousand leagues, the narrow pearl strand out of reach, the word that he dare not utter, lest reality unravel, dissipate, and disperse to half-forgotten vestiges of memory.

Somehow Edythe came to be kneeling at his bedside.

She placed her head on his pillow, almost close enough for their noses to touch. She wanted so badly to close that distance. He had touched her face with his hand today, his warm rough palm, and the warmth that had coursed through her tasted so sweet that she longed to press her cheek to his face, for just one moment, to relive and preserve forever that tender eternity. They had no peace. His closed eyes twitched restlessly as she watched from inches away, and he whispered her name over and over, plaintive, beseeching.