The Clasp (5 page)

Victor didn't have a car. That was another problem. After the romance of deciding to simply
walk out of college
wore off, the practical problems of meandering along the weed-and-litter-covered borders of highways sank in. Cars that seemed to come closer as they passed him, exhaust fumes, weird noises from the brush, roadkill. His destinations were narrowed to a gas station, a tanning salon, a BBQ joint called the Rib Cage (
The Rib Cage:
We're Always Open
), and the mall.

Any place that is not the site of one's anguish can function as a church, but the mall was more than an escape. The walls understood him. Let the a cappella groups and the mice have the campus chapel. The mall was full of real people living real lives like the ones he grew up with. This was who he was—a boy from the suburbs. College had spent four years confusing him, making him question himself, making him yearn for more, but the mall winked at him.

I see you
, said the candle kiosk,
I see your soul
.

He began walking there every morning. He made no purchases. He didn't like talking to anyone, and buying things usually required talking. Instead, he liked to watch the punk kids who misunderstood the meaning of the word defacing the pine needle garlands. Or to let his eyes linger on the girls who came to the
jewelry counter and sat fidgeting while they waited for a stranger to drive a needle through their earlobes. What kind of a person doesn't hold perfectly still while getting her flesh pierced? The kind of person who undergoes minor surgery at a store that sells gag vomit, he guessed.

One time he spotted Emily Cooper trying on shoes at Steve Madden, shoving her polished toes into boots and circling a bench.

Another time, Caroline picked him up on the side of the highway. She put her hazard lights on and leaned across the passenger seat. Victor could see down her shirt, past her bra to the little rolls over her jeans.

“Hey, little boy,” she said, putting on a Transylvanian accent, “vhant some candee?”

“Oh, hi.”

“Nice day for a stroll. Kind of.”

“Yeah, I guess so.”

“Where are you coming from at this hour?” She looked left and right over her shoulder for effect. “The Rib Cage?”

He scratched the back of his head. He didn't like stopping in the dry side-of-the-highway grass. The day before, he had come across a dead deer and had to sprint over its hooves, a knife between fingers.

“It's cold.” Caroline pushed a button beneath the steering wheel. “Get in.”

He pulled at the handle of her Jetta and moved a couple of empty potato chip bags aside. She was coming from Boston, where she had been for her grandmother's eightieth-birthday party. She called her grandmother Pup-Pup.

“What's your excuse?” She slapped her overhead mirror shut.

“Just taking the air.”

“On the side of the interstate? We live on a campus full of trees.”

Victor shrugged.

“Well, glad to see you out and about. We were worried you were going to give yourself a vitamin D deficiency.”

“Scurvy.”

“Whatever.”

The first time Victor stole something, it was the morning after the 100 Days Party. Held precisely one hundred days before graduation, the party demanded its attendees arrive dressed in the profession they saw themselves occupying as an adult. Half the men came dressed as pimps. Meanwhile, it seemed the nation's hospitals would no longer need to concern themselves with a slutty nurse shortage. Streeter Koehne came dressed as Jane Goodall and Sam Stein as her chimp. Kezia came as an embalmer.

She lowered her sunglasses. “I'm Karl Lagerfeld.”

She drank Jack Daniel's from a Diet Coke can and wore a white shirt unbuttoned to her navel. Glimpsing that particular sliver of flesh made Victor's heart stop. Boobs were great, sure. He had nothing but the deepest admiration for and fantasy life regarding Kezia's breasts. But the skin that covered her ribs and hips . . .

“How can you see in those things?” Victor touched her sunglasses.

“Stop, you'll smudge them.”

They didn't speak at all over Christmas break. He didn't want to call, couldn't bring himself to call. This was their first interaction since the night outside her dorm. She wasn't outright ignoring him, but she wasn't glad to see him either. He wanted to ask her if she would come outside and watch him smoke or do a lap around the party. Nathaniel came up and slung a tweed-covered arm around her, removed his pipe, and let his hand dangle.

“Tell me again.” He played with the lapel of her jacket. “Why
are you someone who already exists? You're not going to be a specific person that's already out there after we graduate. Unless you kill that person and wear his skin like a suit.”

“I don't plan on being a murderer when I grow up.”

“So then your outfit is kind of stupid.” Nathaniel had his hand on the nape of her neck now. “Cute, but stupid.”

“What about Streeter?” Kezia pouted. “Or Sam! Look at Sam!”

“Different,” said Nathaniel. “Sam actually
will
be an ape by this time next year.”

Sam, who had clearly put a dent in the bag of molly he brought with him, was sneaking up behind Olivia, pretending to consume bugs from her hair.

“‘Be yourself.'” Nathaniel put his weight on her shoulder. “‘Everyone else is already taken.' Oscar Wilde.”

Victor couldn't compete with this floppy-haired Bartlett's on legs. He liked to think that if Nathaniel had any conception of his feelings for Kezia, he would lay off. But Nathaniel was too much of a good-time guy to discuss it with, even if Victor wanted to discuss it. Which he did not.

“I'm going to head out, you guys.”

“It's not even midnight,” Nathaniel offered in tepid protest, shaking powder from Kezia's hair. “You really do smell like a baby stripper.”

“How would
you
know?” She put her hand on her hip, widening her shirt gap.

As Victor left, out of the corner of his eye, he watched Nathaniel preparing to give her a piggyback ride. He could probably sleep with her tonight and they'd both think of it as a friendly series of nude niceties and go right back to being friends. Robots.

He couldn't sleep. He tried to will himself into a state of unconsciousness, punishing his body with mummified stillness. He masturbated, but not like he meant it. At 8:35 a.m. he got up to take a piss and then that was that. He was up.

By 9:00 he found himself on the familiar route. By 10:00, security had opened the entrance. Inside, at a couple of the higher-end stores, teenage girls squatted down and fiddled with locks at the base of glass doors. Victor could see their thongs, hear the sound of metal reverberating within layers of glass. Toward the end of the corridor was a store called Modern Man. It sold solar-powered remote-control chargers, circulation-enhancing socks, and digital coin sorters. Victor nodded at a sales associate who chatted on the phone and didn't seem to sense anything abnormal about Victor's presence.
I could rob this guy blind
, thought Victor. He ran his fingers along the glass shelves with casual inquisitiveness. The sales associate didn't look up.

“Because it's not my problem,” he said into the phone.

Then he said it again and again, like conversational sandbags.

“Because it's not my problem. Because it's not my problem. Because it's not my problem. You tell her I said. Because—no, because it's not my problem.”

The guy brushed past Victor on the way to the stockroom. Had Victor been in a different frame of mind, he would have passed this off as idiocy. Behavior to be judged but not punished. Instead he took it personally. Victor wasn't a threat to the store. He wasn't a threat to anyone. Just look at him. Were those pajama pants? Why yes, yes they were. He circled around the display cases, letting himself get a static shock when he touched their edges. This place that had been a source of such comfort for so many months was turning on him, making him feel as good as invisible. On a shelf in front of him were a series of Italian nesting cups and a jump drive that had a digital display of the Dow Jones.

Victor was afraid of breaking the cups.

He had never shoplifted before, having either not considered it or considered it the purview of teenagers and celebrities. Yet he knew what to do as if he had done it a thousand times before. Prepare a response if caught. Pretend the object is something you have lost. You think, “Oh,
there
that is,” and put it in your pocket where it belongs. You are not taking it, so much as taking it back. It was always yours. Then you walk out the same way you walked in.

By the time Victor got back to campus, the plug portion of the jump drive had imbedded in his palm. Victor dropped it in his desk drawer.

The only time he confronted it again was when Caroline insisted on bringing him soup after he came down with the flu. She lived for this kind of Florence Nightingale crap. She never struck Victor as particularly nurturing but she wanted credit for the act. She sat at the edge of his mattress, struggling to cross her legs, resting the back of her hand on his forehead as if trying to convince them both they were in another century. When she tried to take his temperature in a more technologically advanced fashion, Victor feverishly gestured at his desk, thinking a thermometer might be lurking in there. Caroline crammed the jump drive into his mouth.

He clamped down, but things were going to get suspicious when it didn't produce a reading.

She twisted it around. “This is a weird-looking thermometer.”

“It's not.” He coughed. “It's not a thermometer.”

“Huh?” She leaned on the open drawer. “Oh my gosh, what
is
all this stuff?”

She picked through his stash, which had become just varied enough to be suspicious. There was a church key, some magnetic
“chip clips,” a nose-hair trimmer, gel insoles, a portable can opener, a collapsible tire pump, a chrome tape dispenser, a neoprene eyeglass case, and a set of Chinese reflexology balls.

He knew the shame of the drawer, the possibility of repercussions, should hit him hard, but the fever gave him a woozy layer of remove so that even when she made eye contact with a couple of price tags, he remained calm. Nothing to see here, folks! Just a man and his portable can opener.

“You boys and your toys.” She pushed the drawer closed.

Eventually Caroline left and Victor stopped sweating, cooling down in his sleep. He had the kind of epic dreams made possible only by total exhaustion. He woke up starving—for food and for community. In the dining hall, next to the fro-yo machine, he apologized to Kezia and she to him.

“So we're okay?” she asked.

He said that yes, they were. He tried to mean it. It seemed to everyone that he would come around, fall in line, meld back into the larger whole just as Olivia had done the year prior. That he could teach himself to be less hurt, to be less publicly aggrieved, to not rock the boat before it set sail into the real world, leaving the more unsavory events of college in its wake. He would try.