At the Bottom of Everything(3)

I’d gotten used to treating my apartment, in my Claire days, as not much more than a place to keep my clothes and pick up the mail, but suddenly I was spending my nights drinking beer with Joel on the futon, watching Craig Ferguson. “Are you gonna be OK?” he sometimes said.

“I don’t know.”

“Ah, come on, you are.”

I knew Joel from college too—he’d been the guy in my freshman dorm who knew where in Philadelphia to buy good weed—but now we seemed to have not much more reason to live together than any two people standing in line together at the bank.

One night, while I was lying with my cheek pressed against the rug between the coffee table and the TV, thinking for whole minutes about things like whether I should roll over to reach for my water glass, I called Claire twenty-three times. At first I had urgent things to say, things I was sure would change her mind, but after half a dozen calls I couldn’t remember what they were, and if she’d picked up I would just have had to groan, like a cow whose legs have given out. Another night I stood outside her building saying her name, first in an embarrassed bark, then louder and louder until I was bawling on U Street, promising myself that I would never again feel anything except sympathy for the people I saw ranting in front of the White House. I was going to tell her about my childhood, tell her about Thomas, about Mira Batra; I was going to split my life open and spill it onto her front steps like a full-to-bursting bag of coffee grounds and orange rinds.

This happened to be the fall of 2008, a few weeks before the election, when everyone in D.C., and maybe everyone in the country, had been gripped by a brain fever that was making them email each other poll results and interview clips and enormous heartfelt diatribes about how normally they don’t get involved in politics but now, with the stakes so high … For me all that was like the Traffic and Weather Together updates on AM radio. The only headlines I cared about, and I cared about them so much that I would run from the apartment door to my computer without taking my coat off, were Claire’s Facebook updates, which she hadn’t yet blocked me from seeing.

So fun running into you guys last night! We should grab a drink!





Hahaha tell B I miss her please, OK?





Anybody else starting to crave chili? Mmmm.

Each of these, next to a stamp-sized picture of Claire smiling in the white snow hat she’d once sat holding on my bed, made me feel like one of the stockbrokers in the pictures on all the newsstands. DOW DROPS 777 POINTS, WORST SINCE DEPRESSION.

Who is B?

Where was Claire when she ran into people last night?

Doesn’t that “Mmmm” sound like someone who’s got a new boyfriend?

These questions gripped me for some of the least happy hours I’d spent since high school, slouching in the filth of my bedroom, clicking and clicking, unable to summon the energy even to turn on the lights. The way I remember it, I spent those months half sick, unshaven, shuffling along windtunnel streets with my hands buried in pocket-nests of disintegrating Kleenex. Suffering impairs judgment; there should be flashing lights, a surgeon general’s warning, celebrity-sponsored ad campaigns.





I say that Thomas was the smartest boy at my new school, but I want to make clear just what I mean by that.

When I was twelve my mom remarried and we moved from Baltimore to a suburb just outside D.C., so in seventh grade I started at Dupont Prep, where everybody seemed to come with a title as much a part of them as a last name. Teddy Minor: best athlete. Jason Vorsheck: best musician. Vanessa Stoyke: best writer.

Thomas’s title was the most impressive but also the hardest to pin down. Because there were definitely kids who were smarter in the sense of doing better on math tests—there were boys who were essentially human computers, humming autistically away while they filled out problem sets meant for college students. And there were kids who had a practical supercompetence that Thomas never came close to—they were on the robotics team, they fixed the A/V system, they wore T-shirts with Nietzsche quotes.

But all of those people’s intelligence had something glitchy about it, something vulnerable and freakish; what set Thomas apart, I think, was that he somehow managed, in his hundred-pound body and New Balance sneakers, to give the impression of being wise. Teachers talked to him about things they would never have talked to the rest of us about—their sick parents, their boredom with Jacob Have I Loved, their hopes of writing a screenplay. If the discussion in an English class or a grade-wide meeting got especially tense or complicated, you could always count on Thomas, raising his hand so slightly that it was almost as if he were apologizing for it, to say something that would work like a sudden gush of cold water on a burn. “I wonder if Amelia’s and Harold’s arguments are actually variations on the same point …” “This may be very similar to what David was saying earlier, but if what we’re really talking about is whether some people at Dupont feel excluded from the bulk of the student body, then I think …”