The Vanishing Point Read online

  Of course.

  She’s a very nice girl, Julian, but is this what you want?

  He had only nodded. The question seemed impossible to answer.

  He tried to be a good husband—even the word tried felt worn, like the heaviest of suitcases. But his wife sometimes made him feel bad. Like he was just another task she had to deal with, like clearing the table or washing the dishes.

  The thing with Vera just kind of started. She was young and wanted to move up at work. That’s what he liked about her. She understood the principle of a means to an end. She was calm. Easy. They’d spend an afternoon in bed. Sometimes they’d just lie there, talking. He didn’t think there was anything wrong with it. And for a couple of hours, he’d feel almost free.

  Once, his therapist asked if he felt responsible for Theo’s addiction. He said no, no, he didn’t. But now, in retrospect, maybe he did.

  What was the word she’d used? Present. Was he present in his son’s life?

  I tried to be, he said weakly. I did what I could.

  Did you?

  His therapist didn’t believe him. She cocked her head to one side, gazing at him like he was some sort of sociopath, waiting for him to admit to something.

  In truth, he didn’t know why Theo went off course. So many kids had—it was a national crisis. He resented his therapist’s insinuation that it was his fault. Maybe he hadn’t been the best father in the world, but he’d been there as much as he could. Julian didn’t know where to assign the blame, but he’d get this feeling in his chest when he thought about it, like a burning there, like a fire you couldn’t put out.

  They had their outings. She wanted him to attend Theo’s soccer games whenever he could. It’s a dad thing, she’d say. But it wasn’t easy with his schedule. It meant catching an early train. He was out there busting his butt for her, entertaining multimillion-dollar clients, and she’d complain if he couldn’t get home for a stupid soccer game. Like she was setting him up, you know? Already assigning the blame for all the ways that Theo might fail.

  So, he’d get the early train—for her—and drive to the school and jog from the parking lot to the farthest field, where the seventh graders played, and he usually found Theo sitting on the bench. Basically, the coach was an asshole. It was no secret that Theo wasn’t the most athletic kid, but how was he supposed to get any better if he never got to play? Obviously, the score of the game was more important to the coach than the experience the kids were having. In Theo’s case, he was learning more about what he lacked, how he had failed at being a normal boy—whatever the hell that was—and it pissed Julian off because there wasn’t a thing he could do about it.

  He’d sit there in the bleachers with the other parents. Not his favorite people. In an effort to be inclusive, one of the mothers told him she’d hired a fitness tutor for her son, suggesting that Theo might also benefit. It was totally worth the two hundred dollars an hour, she told Julian. Another woman had the gall to suggest taking Theo to a nutritionist. They were seeing great results in their overweight daughter by giving her these special milkshakes so she could skip meals.

  He found it all very sad. In Theo’s defense, he told the same woman he was taking Theo out for burgers and fries after the game.

  He doesn’t even like sports, Julian said. Why are we making him play?

  It’s a school requirement, Magda told him. And he’s burning calories. We both know he needs that.

  It was a Greek diner in town, but they served everything, and the food was good. Julian let him order whatever he wanted, usually a burger and onion rings and a shake. Let him enjoy himself, he thought.

  Afterward they’d drive home, not talking very much. He felt like it was okay with Theo, like they didn’t need to talk. Instead, Theo would sit back and look out the window, and when they pulled into the driveway, he always said, Thanks, Dad, before getting out of the car and going inside to find his mother.

  First question out of her mouth when they were alone: What did you two talk about? And he’d feel the heat rising up his neck. Women don’t seem to understand that men don’t require conversation like they do. It’s just not important. He and Theo had had a perfectly good time without uttering a single goddamn word.

  He couldn’t really blame the university. But maybe a smaller campus, in a more rural area, would have been better for Theo. Still, it was hard to know, because he was kind of a quiet kid. In truth, they knew him only peripherally. Theo was a thinker, an observer—he didn’t necessarily jump into things. He’d stand back and watch for a while before he decided to take part. So this heroin thing had really thrown them.

  It occurred to Julian that in other areas of his life Theo was still sitting on that bench. It wasn’t his grades that were the problem—he was a good student, especially in math. But ask him how to think, how he felt about all the bad things going on in the world, and he’d just shrug and stare into the stupid game on his iPhone, frantically exercising his thumbs. Julian had hoped college would change that. In all those classes they made them take, you’d think he would wake up and figure things out. But Julian hadn’t seen much evidence of that. He was still kind of a big, clumsy kid, kind of a dreamer. Julian had to wonder who he took after. Someone on her side, he decided. Some aberrant limb on the family tree.

  Theo

  Two parallel lines that never meet. It was sort of an elegant proposition. This was his freshman math tutorial, eight a.m. Monday morning, sixteen of them around a table and the old geezer who looked like an ostrich with a name Theo couldn’t pronounce. He actually liked the class, and he was a little obsessed with Euclid and his parallel postulate. It was like this girl he always saw on the path, walking in the same direction at the same speed, both of them with their hands in their pockets and their heads down, looking at the pavement and the grass and the wet leaves instead of at each other. But he could feel something between them. He could feel how very alike they were. Her name, he had learned, was Lucia, Loo-chia.

  He would daydream about her in class and end up missing large chunks of important information. You could see the treetops through the window and the gray clouds. He admired his professor’s dedication, and he could picture old Euclid in his toga and sandals, writing down his postulates by candlelight, and it occurred to him that people didn’t actually sit around thinking or postulating anymore and maybe that was the problem, because now you had Google, which was super-convenient, but trying to think on your own, say, as a social imperative, as part of some essential discourse, was a lost fucking art.

  Freshman year was all about getting his bearings. His roommate was from Lebanon, and they got along all right, except Ferez was tidier than Theo and it sometimes caused problems. On Ferez’s side, you could see the floor, and his desk was strategically organized, but on Theo’s side, the floor was like a sea of dirty clothes, and his desk was covered with papers he was currently or had at some point been working on and empty bottles of Lifewtr and Gatorade and crumpled-up bags of chips and books he was supposed to be reading for class.

  He felt kind of down.

  There were a lot of people at the school, and basically, outside of his classes, which were tepidly interesting, it was like being back in high school, only nobody was telling you what to do, plus the campus was kind of strange, and he walked around sometimes feeling like he was in a science-fiction movie or a bad film based on a Kafka novel, where things were recognizable but not actually real. The sky was usually gray or maybe white and often it rained, and all that September it was muggy and annoying.

  He worried about his mother. He knew how alone she was. Not really because of Julian and all his bullshit. It was something else. Like a howl trapped inside her. She wouldn’t let it out. They never talked about it. But you could see her loneliness. He tried to call her every day, and she always put on her happy voice for him, which he definitely appreciated, but nothing really seemed the same anymore.

  He had a few friends, nobody special. He preferred to b
e alone. He spent most of his time in the library. It was nice, because you saw people but you didn’t have to talk to them. He would simply nod and settle into his favorite carrel near the art books, and once in a while, when he was too bored to study, he’d pull one out and flip through it.

  Meanwhile. The world was ending.

  It was all anybody talked about. The melting planet, the dying polar bears, the rising oceans. There was scientific evidence! There were pictures! There was proof! And yet people still didn’t get it. They couldn’t seem to process it. Like you still saw all the wrong stuff in the trash, and you heard stories about the plastic bags on the bottom of the ocean, and that was just really depressing. Because at some point you come to the conclusion that nobody really cares. They’re still going to use plastic bags and dump their trash wherever it’s convenient, and he read somewhere that the recycling plants were just a big scam and threw everything out anyway, so why even bother?

  He worried about these things.

  He worried about the corruption in Washington, the so-called civic leaders championing the tenets of democracy! Marching down the slippery marble hallways, making deals. Your elected representatives at work! Theo understood his ambivalence toward others as a result of the pervasive deception of the times. He was unable to trust that they or anybody else, for that matter, really gave a shit, and therefore he trusted nobody. And everything was just kind of dead to him, kind of pointless, but when people asked him how he was, he automatically replied, It’s all good. Even though it wasn’t all good, not at all, and he doubted anyone else thought so either. Life was like this big covert operation, and nobody could say the truth, because if you did, like if you admitted to how fucked-up everything was, you’d have to fucking deal with it.

  And then one day, by pure chance, he intersected with Lucia on the path outside the campus center. They started walking together, their shoulders almost touching.

  She was an English major from the city, a dark-haired girl who didn’t shave her pits and her hair was very thick under there, thicker even than his, and her pubes were really thick, too, like the back of a small furry animal, and honestly at first he was a little afraid of it. It doesn’t bite, she said. But I can wax it off if you want.

  They would lie next to each other on her bed, reading this book Nausea out loud because she was a little dyslexic and it helped her understand it better, and she thought its author, Sartre, was a genius. From what he gathered, it was about a guy whose life made him feel really sick, and the idea of existence and whatever the hell it meant. Her room was next to the lounge, where some of the gamers played from dawn to dusk, and you could hear the sound of the world destructing, the explosions, the gunshots, the menace and wrath of aliens, and the sound thundered right through the wall and made the bed vibrate. They had a lot of sex. They had sex to the screams of people running from burning buildings. They had sex to the sounds of submachine guns and the cries of people getting shot. Sex had become his version of an antidote for all the fucked-up things going on, and for a few nearly perfect seconds he could totally disappear. Her smell drove him crazy, the hairy underarms, the oils she dabbed behind her ears, always with this thoughtful expression on her face, a drop of some exotic potion on her fingertip like something out of Shakespeare, and he’d marvel at her routine of beautification as she stood before the mirror, gazing at herself or posing for a selfie to post on Instagram.

  Lucia, he would say. Loo-chia.

  She had a casual beauty, like a hostess at a restaurant, a girl who shrugged her shoulders, noncommittal, as if you didn’t actually matter to her. Like if she never saw you again, it wouldn’t faze her. A lot of the girls were like this. He figured it was because they didn’t want to get dumped or screwed over. He liked to watch her read in the library, when they’d sit across from each other at one of the tables, and her lips were moving ever so slightly, like someone praying.

  Around that time, he started hanging out with Carmine, from his creative-writing class. Carmine was an Albany boy, with dark hair and bright black eyes that knew you, and he wore this St. Christopher medal that he’d tug on and slide back and forth on its chain when he made comments in class about somebody’s poem or story. For some reason Theo trusted him. One night, Carmine brought him home to the house where he’d grown up. This was downtown somewhere, a row house in a long line of them, each painted a different flavor, lemon-yellow, mint-green, pumpkin-orange. Theirs was chocolate, with heavy drapes covering the windows. But inside was all this fancy furniture, like crazy ornate chairs and a marble coffee table with gold curlicue legs. The house smelled of whatever his mother was cooking, eggplant parmesan and spaghetti carbonara, and she served everything on these thick white plates, and everyone had a napkin made of cloth. She lit candles, too, like they were celebrating something, only it was just an ordinary day. His mother spoke mostly Italian. She was a seamstress and had this sewing machine set up in her basement, and people from all over brought her their clothes. Carmine’s father was a mechanic. In his spare time, he was fixing up this old Jaguar in his garage. That’s all he wanted to do. Practically every time Theo saw this guy, he was on his back on one of those little carts that slide under your car.

  Carmine had a kind of bounce to his step and walked around in a long black coat he’d picked up somewhere, and he had a Keats fixation. Out of nowhere, he’d start reciting some random poem he’d memorized, some ode to this or that, his voice booming. They’d smoke a little weed and get lost in this used bookstore downtown that had these narrow passageways that wound around like a maze through towering stacks. He always felt like he’d entered the Matrix, like you were leaving the real world behind for this other one, and all you had to do was read to understand your purpose in life, to know whatever the hell it all meant. Somewhere in those cryptic lines you found the answer. It was just sitting there, waiting for you to wake the fuck up.

  He went home for Columbus Day weekend. Within seconds of his stepping into the kitchen from the garage and setting down his bag, it was pretty obvious that his parents were having difficulties. They were basically ignoring each other and fixating on Theo, firing all these questions at him, like how was he sleeping at night and did his roommate snore or how was the food and what exactly did they serve and were there a lot of drugs in the dorms and how were the kids and were any of them nice and did people clean up after themselves and had he made any friends. With all this attention, he found himself sitting a little taller and trying to sound articulate about his quote, unquote college experience and how enthralling it was, which was basically total crap, and in reality he was pretty uncertain how he felt about it all and wasn’t actually making real and true friends that, like, you wanted to keep for the rest of your life, and he had absolutely no idea where he stood gradewise. Coming home was really stressful, he decided, and probably not worth the effort for any of them. For his mom, who had troubled to make a nice dinner—chicken and rice and roasted vegetables, and they all drank some pretty decent wine—and his father, who had to sit there listening and looking interested when in fact his mind was obviously elsewhere. Later that night, he smoked a joint out his window, remembering all the times his mother drove him to school and played her Cat Stevens or Don McLean or Neil Young CDs, all the same songs she’d listened to growing up, and they’d end up singing together the whole time.

  Funny, the things you remember.

  The next morning, his father woke him early to help clean out the gutters. They hauled out the ladder from the garage and brought it around to the back of the house, and Julian told him to climb up to the top while he stood at the bottom with his hands on the sides, securing it. Theo liked doing things for Julian because afterward Julian was always a little nicer to him and almost seemed proud of him.

  From the top of the ladder you could see the Hudson. A long, brown barge, slow as a caterpillar, was making its way upriver. Once he’d cleared out all the leaves, he climbed back down, and they moved the ladder to the other si
de, and he climbed up again and did the same thing. At his parents’ window, he could see his mother lying on the bed on her side with her hands pressed under her cheek. She was just lying there, staring across the room. Despair was the word that came to mind. He knocked on the window, and she looked caught. She rose and came toward him, making an effort to smile, and put her hand on the glass like in those prison movies, and he put his up to meet hers, and they stayed like that for a couple seconds with their hands on the glass, almost touching.

  Later that afternoon he went for a run. The streets were empty. He felt like the last man on earth after the Apocalypse, when everybody else was dead. Sometimes he’d feel like crying and have to tell himself to man up and not be such a loser.

  It occurred to him that there were things about his parents he didn’t know and would never know. He supposed they were private. He didn’t like to think about it.

  Ever since he was little, he could sense when something bad was about to happen. It was like he could hear on a whole different frequency. Like in the movie version of his life, he’d be the guy with super hearing who knows danger is closer than anyone else realizes. When he was little, he’d be up all night, worrying about the sounds he heard, like a car slowly passing the house, its radio thumping, or the creepy swaying of his window shade, or the breathing sound coming from his closet. He’d hear his mother walking around, doing mother things, watching TV, talking on the phone, and he’d finally fall asleep, and in the morning, there’d be the sunshine and breakfast and his mother’s smile, and everything seemed all right again. But when night fell, it started all over, this routine terror, the thing out there that wanted him.