job and tidied his facial hair into the outline of a beard, bought some colorful shirts, a pair of baggy overalls.
“But do you know what I’m talking about?” Will said.
A city of smokestacks loomed in the screen’s background. Will played best when using Sumo Wrestler, but he was no match for either Dorian or the system whatever fighter he chose, or whichever buttons he pressed in whatever order—a strategy that made Will’s character flip or whip out power chops that he couldn’t repeat. Anyway, those moves were always blocked and used against him. Kung Fu Master caught his Sumo Wrestler’s fist, spun him around, lifted him, and slammed him down to the pavement. Will tried to roll back onto his feet, but Kung Fu Master’s jackhammer leg stomped his head into a puddle of pixels the colors of blood and bone.
“You never answered me about the mattresses,” Dorian said.
“We already talked about that. I’m not in.”
“I don’t know what you’re afraid of,” he said.
“Getting arrested,” Will said. “Going to jail.”
There was a knock on the door.
“No one’s going to jail.” Dorian answered the door. It was pizza from down the street. He gave the delivery kid a little plastic baggie as payment.
“Was that ecstasy?”
“Why?” Dorian said. “Do you want to buy some?”
The next round had begun.
Puddles froze into sheets of white ice. Take-out containers cluttered the kitchen area. Dorian slept on the futon. Will played the new video games. When Dorian woke up, he watched Will lose a boxing match. Will offered the control.
“I’m going to start charging rent on games,” Dorian said. He took the control. “What happened to that girl you were seeing?”
“We’re taking a break,” Will said.
“She got any friends?”
“I’ll ask if she knows anyone.”
“I have a girl,” Dorian said. “That’s why I’m out all the time. I just want to know if she’s a loner like you.”
Later, Dorian went out, and Will played until level five. Then he walked around Carla’s block a bunch of times. He wasn’t dressed for the cold. He went home and lost three rounds of solitaire. He put the cards in order. He dialed Rebecca and hung up on the first ring.
Then he put the ecstasy he’d bought from Dorian in his pocket and went out.
When she was sleeping, Carla’s cheeks twitched as though tiny shocks were crawling under her skin. The sky was pink and blue. Will lit a cigarette and held it close to the sliver in the car window. A breeze sucked the smoke into the cold.
Dorian sat on their concrete step with one hand in his pocket, the other holding a cigarette.
“What are you doing out here?” Will said. The owner of the smoke shop rolled the shield from his window.
Doran pointed to Salty’s. “What is that place?”
“I don’t know,” Will said. “No one knows what it is. Are you going inside?”
“I’m waiting here a minute,” Dorian said.
Will went into their apartment and microwaved instant coffee. Dorian disappeared from the step.
It was the Christmas season, a Saturday night. People got off from their jobs and kids got off from school. They needed something to do. There was a disc jockey. There were bowling prizes to hand out. A blizzard had begun. Three inches already covered the ground. Will gave out red strike tickets and picked up dead wood while pop blared through the speakers and high school kids posed and joked in the arcade room.
Then he saw Rebecca in lane three with the father of the kid, but no kid. The kid was probably home with a babysitter. Rebecca wore the blue jeans Will had bought her for her birthday two years earlier. She still fit inside them. She dropped a gutter ball, shrugged, and turned around. Her teammates cheered her. She smiled at them.
Carla slept with the light on. She had snuck Will through the basement bedroom window. The room was warmed by an electric heater, but so dank the pink drywall had spots of mold that split and puckered the paint like wet, parting lips. She slept naked under a blue comforter, her hair spread out across her pillow. She smelled of cigarettes, but she was young, and the broken tooth was farther back in her mouth where he couldn’t see.
On the floor Will found his pants next to her blue apron, his shirt under the bed.
The world had turned to white and gray. The water was dark in the creek and the bay, the bay lined with large chunks of ice the color of the moon. Glassy ice floated in the water, spreading out from the shore of Mastic Beach to the shore of Fire Island. The horizon blended with a gray windy sky that thrust against the trees. Streets flooded with slush a shade of blue he’d seen only in dreams.
He was bundled in layers that restricted movement and saw the world through the fuzzy slit of a scarf wrapped up to his eyes, a hat pulled over his brow. There were no other people. The houses had been vacated with the flood warning. Forward through slush, Ducky Lane turned into a dirt road where the creek met the bay, where houses were built on stilts in case something like this storm should happen. Private docks lining the mouth of the bay had been uprooted, and they jutted out of the water obtusely, crooked planks and railings covered in gleaming ice. This wasn’t the flimsy snow of past winters. It wasn’t smeared into grime on the side of the road. This snow had taken control.
The bay had swallowed Ducky Lane where it curved out of the creek and became Riviera Drive, so Will walked through backyards where the slush came up to his knees. The cold water stung his legs. He passed under the homes on stilts, treaded through a flooded field of cattails, and emerged on Cranberry Drive into more slush, a half-mile from his apartment. Snow flew sideways under the yellow streetlights like flecks of gold and blew off branches in chunks the size of bowling balls. Then the wind died. Will was inside a void, insulated with cotton, sterilized by the cold. It was a space with neither time nor memory. A space to empty himself into, but there was nobody there to listen. He wanted to be home and warm. He imagined living with Carla on a bed under blankets with all this snow outside turning everything into white plush.
At the apartment, Dorian’s stuff was packed by the door. His friend with the van had already picked up the futon. He was moving out, going half/half on a new place with someone named Grady.
Carla disappeared the next day. She wasn’t working at the drugstore. At her house, her mother told Will not to come looking anymore. It took two more weeks to find out that she was back in rehab. He rode the public bus across Suffolk County to the mall and then walked down backstreets and through woods to the fence that divided Madonna Heights from the rest of the world. The snow in the woods was still untouched. When Will stepped on its icy crust, it held his weight for a moment before breaking through to soft snow underneath. The sun was going down. He crouched against the fence and looked at the glowing windows of the stout, unfriendly building. His fingers were numb from the cold, from holding a cigarette. He wondered if the boys Carla talked about would show up, the ones who loitered along the fence. Maybe it was a summer thing for them. Maybe they grew out of it.
