Bunk

   Three weeks into camp and the transformation, Adam thinks, is almost complete. He’s learned to sail. He’s made the softball team. He’s shown a gratuitous, potentially alarming talent for riflery. He’s let nature have its way with his face, let the dark smudge grow unmolested over his upper lip, given up even trying to contain that kinky, chaotic insurgency, his hair. Have the others begun to notice? Has his disciplined investment in ironic detachment, his casual day-trading in witty offhand remarks, compounded to yield some measurable interest from his bunkmates? He thinks so. He believes his share value is on the rise. He’s tired of assessing his life his father’s way, like a dour economist, charting downward-trending patterns from a riot of indicators. He’s tired of eating at the losers’ table in the dining hall, talking about baseball players; tired of hanging back at the Friday night dances, feet chained to the floor, trying to look lofty and self-contained; tired of feigning sleep the moment Shay, their laconic, pony-tailed counselor, universally acknowledged to be the coolest zen master on the planet, sets down his Martin twelve-string guitar, clicks the case shut, and flips off the lights. He’s especially tired of lying like a stone in his elevated bunk, pretending to be more tired than he is, while other, hardier boys congregate on the floor of the cabin, playing poker with their stashes of care-package candy, swapping exaggerated tales of trespass and adventure.

That some of these tales might be true is a possibility Adam’s just begun to contemplate. A global economy in which Craig Warshofsky spends his Thursday afternoons huffing glue and fooling around with his step-sister, and Steven Preiss runs a brisk, lucrative hash trade at his Connecticut boarding school, and Reuven Firestone steals a hundred and forty-five dollars from his mother’s wallet and blows it all on pizza and arcade games…it may not be the world the Messiah promised, but to Adam it seems an attractive, wide-open playing field, with more opportunities for growth than fit comfortably in the netting of his baseball glove. Did Ben Krause actually seduce his grandfather’s care-giver with such thunderous success that she, a Filipina mother of two, was now converting to Judaism? It seems like a stretch. But who’s to say? Ben Krause is a good-looking guy, with measurable side-burns and several shapely, impeccably-defined muscle-groups as yet unvisited upon Adam’s own concave, Gumby-like frame. If the human body, as the philosophers claim, offers the best picture of the human soul, Ben Krause has soul up the wazoo. When Ben tells a tale, the other boys lean forward. When Ben favors a girl with his attention, one of her hands goes to her hair, the other dawdles at the base of her throat, as if fondling some invisible jewel. Just the sight of Ben yanking off his shirt in late-afternoon sunlight and plunging into the lake – the gold star of David gleaming on his chest like a medal – is an event. So who knows? Maybe he did seduce that care-giver. Maybe she is converting to Judaism. Why not? Who wouldn’t choose to be a Chosen Person, bound by an unbreakable covenant, singled out by G-d for some vast if unnamable purpose?

Lord knows Adam wouldn’t mind a little boost in that area himself. He’s not exactly killing it in the promised land at the moment. He’s ready to climb down from his elevated bunk and get in the game, down and dirty with the others. Maybe write a few adventure tales of his own.

But where to start?

True, at the last Friday night dance, he managed to cajole Wendy Weil, Our Lady of the Immaculate Shoulders, to slip away behind the Arts Building and endure a brief kiss under the halo of a sodium light. There lies a story, all right. Music pounding through the walls, stars wheeling overhead, the moist, minty vapor of Wendy’s breath sailing through the gaps in her orthodonture… it certainly felt like a romance waiting for its troubador. Of course a troubador might be tempted to elide a few details in the singing, and embellish a few others. A fact check of the night’s actual dialogue, for example, would make for minimal and disheartening reading. As for the choreography, such as it was, of the kiss itself, that wasn’t ideal either, landing as it did somewhere just to the left (Wendy’s famous shoulders having proved, in the flesh, a bit broader and fleshier than expected) of her actual mouth. Is it Adam’s fault he’s not yet attained his full height and reach? Christ, he’s just going into eighth grade; he hasn’t even taken Geometry yet.

Nonetheless a kiss, he tells himself, is still a kiss. Even if that kiss did not involve tongues, or in Wendy’s case, lips; even if that kiss had yet to be repeated or for that matter acknowledged by its recipient; even if that kiss now seems in retrospect less like a kiss and more like the wispy, impalpable residue of some dubious dream. It’s still a kiss. And if Wendy Weil disagrees, fine. She can tell her own stories. Who is Wendy Weil anyway? Not the Oracle of Delphi, not the arbiter of a man’s fate; just another snobby, freakishly broad-shouldered girl from Parsippany who thinks not shaving her legs and brushing with Dr Bronner’s is (as Ben Krause puts it) some kind of Marxist-Leninist political statement.

Adam nods sagely, a man of the world. As if he knows the first fucking thing about Marx or Lenin himself.

But Ben knows. Ben’s a knower. His parents are professors; they live in the city, take sabbaticals in Paris and Toyko, have grad students over for drinks. Ben gets the references. Ben groks the vocabulary. He’s the best tennis player in camp. He does Tai Chi. He speaks Japanese. He keeps his nails clipped, his bunk neat, his clothes folded crisply in thirds. After lunch, while Adam and the other boys lounge on their cots, writing letters home and leafing through comic books, Ben sits out on the cabin steps with Shay, speaking in low, conspiratorial murmurs of rock bands Adam’s never heard of, movies he hasn’t seen, books he hasn’t read. Adam can hardly bear to listen. How has he fallen so far behind? You can’t name a baseball stat he hasn’t memorized, a cop show whose theme song he can’t sing.

But what is Soul on Ice? Who are The Mothers of Invention? Where is Zabriskie Point? What does Naked Lunch even mean?

His own soul feels a little frozen at this point too. But he’s thawing it out. Turning up the heat.

Lately he’s made it his business to insinuate himself, little by little, into the ambit of Ben Krause’s affections. He’s working the whole skill-set. A few half-hours lazily tossing around the frisbee after dinner. A couple of jaded remarks. The occasional shared eye-roll in the face of some clueless bit of idiocy. Look, it’s not rocket science, it doesn’t exactly require a PhD in Particle Physics to figure out the launch codes for male friendship. They’re simple creatures. That Ben Kraus is a knower makes it that much simpler. Because the nice thing about knowers is that they recognize another knower when they see one. And clearly Adam contains a vast, uncharted reservoir of knowing. A whole sunken continent of knowing, just waiting to be discovered, to be brought to the surface by another bolder, more intrepid knower. It’s the oldest story in the world. Socrates and Plato. Emerson and Thoreau. Lennon and McCartney. Castro and Guevara.

Say certain rumors were to reach the rebel camp, detailing the existence of certain special goods – trays of cheesecake, say – infused with certain potent, not entirely legal (let alone kosher) ingredients, hidden away in cold storage. Say all access to these goods was restricted to the ruling elite, who regarded the walk-in at the back of the dining hall and everything in it with their usual blithe, greedy entitlement. Say a headstrong young man in a baseball cap stole away one night, under cover of darkness, to launch a raid on these special goods, striking a blow against corruption. Surely his loyal friend would not just lie there on his bunk, pretending to sleep? Surely he’d volunteer to go along, sneak down from the highlands side by side to liberate the people’s treasures from the clutches of a decadent aristocracy? Yeah, that would be a story. And even if the operation failed or went astray; even if all that awaited them in back of the dining hall were a couple of sullen kitchen boys in filthy aprons, smoking weed by the rumbling dishwashers… the kitchen boys nodding when he and Ben arrive, unsurprised, as if they’d been expected…the floor still wet, reeking of ammonia…the mop-swirls like the palm-print of some wayward giant… the slow, dreamy arabesques of smoke overhead, like genies freed from their bottles…well, that would be a story too. Possibly even a better one, a more allegorical one. Not all uprisings succeed. Not all dreams deliver on their promise. And if, when the joint got passed Adam’s way, he betrayed his lack of experience somehow, inhaled too much, or not enough, or the wrong way, doubled over coughing while the others enjoyed a laugh at his expense, sure, that would be humiliating, but it too might make a better story in the end. God, he hopes so. Because it’s already clear there will be no shortage of humiliations ahead.

Yo, take it easy, the kitchen boys would laugh, not realizing they have in fact identified Adam’s most precocious talent: for not taking things easily at all. Let the others take it easy. If he’s going to take things, he’s going to take them hard.

And he’s going to hang onto them too. Because as it happens, he and Ben Krause never do go raid the dining hall that night. In the end, he performs none of the actions he’s been thinking about undertaking, lying up there in his elevated bunk. In the end he does nothing. Eventually the boys on the floor grow tired of playing cards, climb into their own beds, and fall asleep. There’s the occasional groan or snore, a little gasp of night-breath arrested in the throat. Then the cabin goes quiet. Even Adam’s brain, relieved of its burdens of consciousness, settles down for the night at last. Maybe this is the Promised Land, he half-thinks foggily, as he too plunges into sleep.

If so, his residency there does not last long. At some point the depths of sleep ebb away, and he’s left in the shallows, aware of some new, liquid presence nearby, some current of movement that’s more like the absence of movement – an unnatural stillness, a suspended breath. His eyes flutter open. Across the cabin, in the bunk where Ben Krause sleeps, something larger than Ben Krause has come to rest, some phantom or specter comprised of Ben Krause and (Adam doesn’t dare sit up to look) someone else, a large, long-haired figure who appears to be holding Ben Krause from behind, cradling him calmly, as a counselor (and indeed he does look a little like Shay) might comfort a homesick camper. It’s a sweet sight. But is it real, or a dream? And why has Adam’s blood turned cold, the short hairs prickling on the back of his neck? Why, when Shay or whoever it is bends to whisper in Ben’s ear, does Adam literally turn away, unable or unwilling to hear whatever arcane secret, whatever compressed koan of night-knowledge was being conveyed? He’ll never grow up. The indicators are all too clear. He’ll spend his life hiding in the dark, eyes half-closed, wondering what’s going on over there, what’s the plot of that puppet play in the shadows. Why won’t he sit up and look at it directly? You can’t be a knower if you don’t want to know.

And alas, that appears to be his fate. Not to know but to wonder. Not to report but to invent. Not to act but to think. The trends of his life, its prospects for growth, are depressingly clear. It doesn’t matter how many stories he goes on to tell: he will never be the protagonist of any of them.