They grew up on the same street, their houses kitty-corner, James McManus in a cedar-sided rancher, Christopher Oleander in a big blue split-level. In the winter, the children on the block built fortresses and had snowball fights. When the snow withered and the gaze of the sun returned to the mountains after four long months, they rolled nets into the road and pooled their mismatched pads, sticks and balls to play street hockey. James and Christopher didn’t speak much and they never called on one another to play, only met in the street when the natural leader of the neighborhood, Jon Bowen, thundered his hard little fists on their respective front doors. When Chris ran for valedictorian in senior year, Jim voted for him, and at the party that Saturday after Hannah Branson was announced winner, Jim offered Chris a belt of cinnamon whiskey in the light of roaring pallet fire. They got along but existed in different, parallel worlds, adjacent but misaligned like their childhood homes, Chris being athletic, the son of a veterinarian, driven and ambitious, Jim being the runtish son of a millwright with a disabled wife, bookish, creative, devoid of purpose or direction. For decades that accumulated like cards landing atop one another beneath a dealer’s hand, this was the extent of their knowledge of one another and the full breadth of their interactions.
At twenty-two, Jim took a job in a publishing house and an apartment in a decaying art deco building downtown, where decrepit, vacuous office spaces were being hastily converted into fever dream apartments full of tall, narrow windows at the end of crooked hallways, the ceilings always impossibly high and the leering walls always stone, steel or cheap upholstery like papery skin stretched hastily over a bulging, bestial skeleton. He spent his days trapped in a windowless office with other ‘starters’, as the senior employees called them, mostly drinking 50 cent coffee from Chinese bakeries and glossing over the awful tomes of liberalized Social Darwinism that seemed to flood even the most artfully inclined publishing houses in the post-9/11 world. It was as he listlessly made his way across the business district around noon, his brief case haphazardly allowed to bang against his knees as he walked, his long khaki coat billowing in the confused wind, that Jim came upon Chris.
At the intersection of Dumas and Regina, under a sea of suspended streetcar wiring and blinking spotlights, people rushed from every sidewalk in every direction, moving radially like a rush of water let loose as a general crossing signal flared and red lights kept all four sides at bay, cars spewing exhaust in place like dogs panting at the end of taut chains. It was climbing onto a median in the center of Dumas East, near a streetcar stop, that they came face to face and both stopped abruptly, hands frozen at their sides and faces devoid of expression. They were dressed nearly identically: immaculate but no doubt second-hand khaki trench coats, wool trousers and cotton shirts gently striped in soft, amicable colors, no ties. Jim wore black leather Doc Marten dress shoes; Chris wore brown.
“Veterinarian school? I thought you didn’t want to be like your old man?” Jim asked, his head jolting this way and that as he twisted and swiveled his body like a boxer, letting a man with groceries slip by on his left, making space for a woman carrying tubes of blueprints over her shoulder to slip between them.
Chris smiled a crooked, halfway smile, glancing over his shoulder and shifting his lower jaw sideways as he did.
“I changed my mind, I guess,” he said, shrugging.
Jim couldn’t remember how the conversation ended, only that they were like flotsam on the current of a tumbling creek over a crowded riverbed, the water surging round stones and logs, the intensity of the flow greatly increased by its cluttered obstacles and narrow courses forward. As suddenly as they had appeared and as abruptly as it had begun it was over and they were gone like the little blinking man-shapes in the crossing signals, replaced by descending numerals. What Jim did remember was the way they sunk their fists into the pockets of their coats and pulled their canvas garbs round themselves, long tails drawn together like curtains of a stage, movements as perfectly mirrored as their generic yuppie clothes. When he arrived home that evening, his gothic and purgatorial building still in the stiff autumn evening, Jim stood before his full-length mirror and scrutinized himself. He turned round and round, watching his trench coat whicker and whirl. The following Sunday he bought two suits, one cotton and one wool. The next morning, as wet and black a November Monday as had ever been, he wore a solid shirt and steel-blue tie, no overcoat save for a windbreaker that stopped mid-thigh.
Garnett Oleander died suddenly, a stroke washing over his brain as he stood above a pregnant greyhound. The last thing he experienced before the feeling fled from his fingertips and he fell backwards into a warm, infinite darkness, gone before his body hit the ground, was her trembling ribcage rising in hitches with her nervous breath, so near beneath her thin, rubbery skin and sueded fur.
Chris had never meant to take over the family practice but he had never meant to become a veterinarian either, and, wondering with frantic, sudden realization just what he had ever meant to do, he returned home to mind at least what was already on the books for the next three months.
It was May. On his second Saturday home, he endeavored to hike Mount Silver. The temperature hardly scaled above room level, but the rainforest spring was tremendously humid and as Chris hiked sweat sprung from the pores of his brow and rolled past his eyes, their salt stinging his retinas from proximity alone. As he began to draw nearer the alpine and the thick bunches of towering ferns all around him were gradually replaced by magenta mountain roses and springy little elevation pines, he pulled his t-shirt from his back and resolved to walk bare-chested, unmindful of the blackflies trailing him like a comet’s tail. He felt incredibly exposed beneath the walls of gigantic evergreens, staring through breaks in the foliage at the valleys and rivers spread across the gnarled, rolling landscape below, the way he used to feel standing nude by the window in his twenty-eighth floor apartment, watching the cabs and pedestrians jostle so far beneath him.
It was standing like this, hands on his sides, bare back facing the trail as he peered between cedar fronds at the raveled blue scar that was the Silver River lying curled on the valley floor like drifting smoke, that he heard the shuffle and gasp of an approaching body navigating its way down the rocky, deracinated slope.
Chris turned just as Jim raised his head and tucked his dirty-blonde curtains of hair behind either ear, and as they stood frozen a moment just as they had within the assailing racket of the intersection at Regina and Dumas, they were both struck by the great, terrifying silence that environed them. In place of the words neither managed to utter in those first few agonizing moments nothing rushed to fill the vacuum but the vacant sound of the wind in the firs and, somewhere very, very far off, perhaps fifteen miles at that elevation, the call of a hawk. Besides those things, less than sounds, the shadows of sounds, there was nothing save for the shifting of their sneakers on the gravel-scrambled trail and the quivering huff of their breath, issued in stuttered, broken pants.
When they spoke there was small talk but both remained dazed and so the conversation was like a fistfight, choreographed by instinct, brilliant and brief like the flash-crack of lightning, and then suddenly it was over and neither could quite recall its details.
They exchanged positions, Chris shifting to head up the trail and Jim sidling to continue his descent. Just as they were beginning away from one another, Chris spun back and spoke without thinking.
“Hey, I—uh,” he started.
“Yeah?” Jim asked, turning back to Chris so quickly rocks spun from beneath his heels.
“I…” Chris began again before pausing, then finishing all at once. “Do you want to grab a beer sometime, since we’re both around?”
“Yes,” Jim had answered, seemingly before Chris had even finished.
“Perfect,” Chris said with a nod and a smile sudden and radiant like a spotlight flicked on in darkness.
Chris’s smile was like a revelation to Jim, something hidden made known, and later, when they spoke for first time, truly spoke, that was a revelation too, secret knowledge unveiled like a gift. And when they finally touched they came together as pollen meeting on a wet dawn breeze, rising like a long breath, full of certain promise.