The Men’s Book Club
Fiction: A young man struggles to keep control of a reading group in a small town.
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Brandon looked through the binoculars. Thirty miles away on top of a mesa the color of blood and sunset was a lone figure leaning against an old and gnarled juniper tree. It was holding something skinny and rounded against its lap. A musical instrument maybe. The man on the mesa didn’t move. Hadn’t moved since Brandon first arrived in this little desert town. He wasn’t sure if it was a person because something about the lens of the binoculars cast shadows where there weren’t any. But Brandon wanted to believe it was a person. You had to believe in something out here.
Brandon lowered the binoculars as someone walked into the library parking lot. It was Keith. He flashed his garish smile and stared at Brandon with blue eyes so light and milky he almost looked blind. The hot, white sun beat down on them and Keith’s forehead shone with grease. Brandon took a deep breath. He didn’t want to unlock the door but he had to. Today was Thursday and he was in charge of the men’s book club.
To Brandon, Keith was the book club’s main problem. Keith never had anything to contribute because he never read the book all the way through. The book was always too long, he’d say. It felt like homework, he’d say. But he claimed to like listening to other people’s thoughts. Brandon gradually picked up that Keith was listening for an opening to play the clown, to interject with some quip that always derailed the conversation.
“I’m not gay, but I mean... there’s something kind of ho-mo-erotic about this, right?” He’d say it slowly, as if it were a word he’d just learned last week and was trying out for the first time. Keith would look around and nudge the person next to him, which was never Brandon. There might be a polite chuckle from his neighbor that Keith took as permission to continue.
“What?” he’d ask, looking around with a tooth-gap grin. “I’m just sayin’!”
Keith had a habit of laughing at his own jokes. He’d boom with laughter, beer belly shaking on his gorilla-like frame, and he’d spread his legs so wide they’d knock against the knees of the person sitting next to him. As he laughed, his gaze would land on Brandon, those starving dead blue eyes hungry for a reaction, searching and searching for something Brandon wouldn’t give him. Brandon would immediately look away. He hated looking at Keith. There was something dumbly monstrous about him, like the kids in high school who hid their stupidity by terrorizing the classroom with toilet humor. Brandon, ever the teacher’s pet, remembered how nervous kids like Keith made him and wished Keith would skulk back to the hole he crawled out of.
Although Brandon wanted to kick Keith out of the book club, Keith was the tipping point for the library’s gender quota initiative led by Mrs. Barrow, the librarian.
“86.2% of library checkouts are women. Where are the men who read?” she’d cried out in the monthly meeting, jowls quivering.
Brandon had raised his hand and said, “I mean, I do?” but immediately regretted it when lightning flashed in Mrs. Barrow’s eyes.
“Of course! Brandon! You will lead a book club. A men’s book club. Westerns, science fiction, fill it with whatever books the boys will read. We’ll do a photo op, put it on the city website. Men, five men, sitting in a circle and smiling. I can see it now. A good number, five.”
“But—”
“No butts! Only books. We need those numbers up!”
Brandon, a Los Angeles native, did not think he would end up in the desert town. This land of red mesas and violent purple skies. The land of addicts and trailer parks. Of Keith and strange shadows in the shape of men.
Brandon had come here to stay with his friend, Emily, who had become his not-quite girlfriend. They had played tennis together on the college intervarsity team. She had been studying to be a nurse. When she asked him what he was studying, he struggled to explain his graduate degree, only that it was something interdisciplinary at the crossroads of programming, linguistics, and literature. He had vague goals of working on natural language processing.
“You know, get LLMs to write books and stuff,” he’d said.
“Why would you want to do that?” she asked.
“Um,” he said.
They stayed in contact after she moved back to the desert town where she was from. She had a job at the regional hospital and a paid-off apartment waiting for her courtesy of her father, the hospital’s director. Meanwhile, Brandon continued failing his way out of his graduate program. He couldn’t tell his advisor what his thesis was about. He broke out in hives and barely ate. He couldn’t write a single line of Python or explain Bayesian inference and started getting butt acne. Academic probation came for him then and eventually Brandon took a leave of absence for “mental health reasons.”
Not wanting to face his immigrant parents who had been so proud of his blooming academic career, he’d told Emily about his predicament, who invited him to live with her rent-free. She would be working for her father for four years to pay him back her tuition fees, she’d told him begrudgingly. Brandon found it odd that her very wealthy father had made his daughter his indentured servant, but that wasn’t his problem. Brandon packed his things, moved, and took the first job he was offered as a library assistant.
Brandon and Emily first spent time together in the kitchen, then in the living room, then in her bedroom: sleeping together happened naturally and without any sense of commitment. It was convenient for both of them. They knew each other well enough and fucked to pass their time in purgatory. For Brandon, Emily symbolized a more purposeful time when he had been moving toward something grander in life. The future locked inside his past was a store of limitless potential, and by fucking Emily, he kept some imaginary, more successful version of himself alive. Brandon would have felt guilty for this if Emily wasn’t also using him to escape from the dismal reality of her hometown. Eager to get away from themselves and their lives, they fed greedily on each other’s bodies.
Four people had responded to the book club ad. There was Eduardo, the rotund pool man with an impressively black and bushy mustache. Peter, the retired woodshop instructor with skin like crumpled paper. There was Grant, a tall, lanky bartender from the bar on the far end of town. Brandon had never heard of the bar. “Trust me, it exists,” Grant threatened in a gravelly voice. Finally, there was Keith, the unemployed son of one of Mrs. Barrow’s friends. Keith wasn’t much of a reader, Mrs. Barrow’s friend warned, but Mrs. Barrow told her it wouldn’t be a problem.
Brandon had been careful with the book selection. He had been dragging his feet on the task until he started thinking about the books he wished he’d read when he was younger. Books about desert wanderers in search of missing poets, terrorists shooting up stock exchanges, libraries with infinite shelves, the inadequacies of language. Brainstorming the book list became an exciting exercise and he began seeing the book club as an opportunity to bring some real culture to the town.
He had asked Emily what he should teach. “You’re not teaching,” she’d said. “It’s a book club.” She recommended some recent science fiction that had been on the New York Times Best Seller list, but Brandon balked at the suggestion. He knew these authors. They were all hacks. Anything that made it onto a bestseller list was for people without taste.
“But people don’t want to read hard things. You need to ease them in,” Emily said. “No one’s going to read some postmodern masterpiece right off the bat.”
“I don’t want to underestimate them,” he said.
“The kind of person who would appreciate that doesn’t live here. You’re in meth head country. Half the town is addicted to something,” she said.
Her smugness grated on him but she was right, of course. Brandon took her suggestion. Partly. He chose an author from the list and went through their bibliography, selecting the work that sounded most intellectually appealing. For the first meeting of the men’s book club, they would discuss the most underrated book of the most popular science fiction author in America. They would learn something, Brandon was sure.
That night, Brandon and Emily fucked for the first time in a week. Recently, the hospital requested that Emily take on more night shifts, leaving her tired and distracted. She had lain there while Brandon humped her without conviction, as if he were masturbating instead of having sex with a real person. He finished and rolled off of her and she fell asleep almost immediately, leaving Brandon alone in the quiet. He stared at the ceiling, trying to sleep. The window was open and the sounds of the town drifted into their room. Someone shut a trash can lid and a cat yowled. A car revved its motor from somewhere on the highway. Then he heard music, a trumpet playing. It played music he’d never heard before and he listened carefully. They were notes in a minor key but there was no sadness or evil in it. It wasn’t jazz or anything he’d ever heard. He imagined the man on top of the mesa playing his strange instrument, the huge shadow of cliffs thrown in relief against the starlit sky, and he got the sense the mesa was alive, inert but alive the way a cave is. The mesa was an extension of the man somehow, a piece of associative dream logic ambling into his half-asleep brain. The trumpet didn’t stop. It played and played something that was not evil nor sad until Brandon fell asleep.
In the center of the library, they sat in five metal chairs arranged in a circle under a dim, humming bulb. Mrs. Barrow didn’t like leaving the lights on after closing hours. The solution was to swat a tiny trapdoor on the ceiling with a broom, where a light bulb dangling from a thin wire would fall out. The emergency light, she’d said. For snacks and refreshments, she had left several impossibly small bags of corn chips and some sodas on the table. There were three two-liter bottles of a green soda, an orange soda, and a black soda. There were no cups.
“So what did you guys think about the book?” Brandon said.
“I liked it,” said Grant, the bartender. “I liked the spaceship.” He was referring to the space station that the protagonist was stranded on.
“I didn’t get what he was doing up there, though, the whole middle part. I mean, why didn’t he just call for help when he realized things were going sideways?”
Eduardo, the pool man, leaned back in the metal chair, arms folded, nodding. He was either falling asleep or thinking something profound. The bulb’s bright light couldn’t penetrate his black mustache and his skin looked extraordinarily bronze, like a fine sculpture in a museum. A faint scent of sunscreen emanated from his body.
“I think the protagonist wanted to try surviving on his own,” said Peter, the retired professor. He gave a sheepish look to Brandon. “There was nothing left for him on earth. And back on earth, he thought he was a nobody. He wanted to try and prove something to himself, isn’t that right?” He looked at Brandon for some kind of confirmation that his opinion was correct, which somehow made Brandon respect him less. But Brandon could work with this.
“I think so,” Brandon said. “There’s definitely something existential going on there. I mean, he’s trying to find some meaning in his life, and somehow he thinks if he just overcomes this herculean task of surviving alone in space, he’ll get it.”
The men didn’t seem to know how to respond and they stewed in the silence, waiting for the next person to speak. Peter made a show of flipping through the book and Keith eagerly scanned everybody’s faces. Eduardo appeared to be asleep. Grant seemed to be watching Eduardo’s mustache with grave intent.
“Eduardo, what about you?” Brandon asked.
Eduardo sat up straight and yawned, emitting a fluttery, wet sound from his throat.
“Huh?” he asked. He smacked his tongue against the roof of his mouth and swallowed.
“What did you think about the book?”
“Oh, it was good, man. It was a good book.”
“What made it good?”
“Just good. The characters. The setting. The space station was real cool,” Eduardo said. “I wish the woman astronaut stayed longer. Something sexy about a woman in a space suit. Why’d she leave again?”
Keith sat up straight in his seat.
“She left because the space station was in danger of collapsing,” said Brandon. “The power grid on the station went out, which meant all the devices meant to counteract the difference in pressure would stop working eventually.”
“That’s about where I stopped reading,” Keith said to Eduardo. “Just lost interest after that.” He shook his head, resigned, as if he’d been diagnosed with an incurable cancer.
“Well, the female character was obviously meant to be a foil to the protagonist,” Peter said, once again looking at Brandon and only him. “She told him the rescue ship was coming and that he didn’t have to stay. In a way, it’s like she was saying she already accepted him…?” He trailed off.
“Well, we don’t know that,” growled Grant. “I thought it was kinda confusing the way the author wrote about it in the beginning. Like we weren’t supposed to be sure what their previous relationship was or something. And there was that whole scene where they were in the same sleeping pod but felt awkward about whatever happened.”
“How does sex work in outer space, by the way?” Keith asked, grinning. An opening. Peter glanced at Brandon in alarm and Grant’s face remained unchanged.
“If you pull out, does the cum just get everywhere?”
“Man, that is a great question,” Eduardo said, his lips peeling back into a toothy, perverted grin. Peter blushed. Grant put his hands together and rested them under his chin, his brow furrowed.
Brandon tried again. “What did you guys think when the protagonist said he didn’t want to go back with her—”
“I mean seriously,” Keith interrupted. “Sex would be so weird up there. Like if you’re fucking, do you have to strap yourself down to something so you don’t bump into the walls?”
Eduardo laughed and slapped his knee like an old black-and-white cartoon. “This guy,” he said. “This guy, man!”
“Imagine the cleanup. Cum. Everywhere. And no way to get the smell out either!” Keith said, almost shouting. The bulb above them trembled and warped the shadows on their faces. Keith’s forehead was slick with sebum. Peter looked at Brandon with an apologetic meekness that only filled him with disgust. Grant had his eyes closed and was whispering something to himself. Eduardo was now caught up in a fierce conversation with Keith about the technicalities of sex in zero gravity, both cackling over the best positions to fuck in, if it mattered that the woman was fat, if Eduardo liked thick girls and of course he did, he was Mexican, and Keith saying “me gusta tortas, me gusta tortas!”
Brandon felt sick and wanted to leave. He felt sick and wanted to die and wanted to take Keith with him. But this was his job. He was supposed to lead the men’s book club. Deflated, he stood up and walked to the table. “Soda, anyone?”
He looked around for cups. Then he remembered there weren’t any.
“Your expectations are way too high,” Emily said.
Brandon fingered a pair of binoculars, a gift to Emily from Emily’s father who birdwatched in his free time. Brandon zoomed in on her face. He couldn’t help zooming into the individual pores on her nose. She had a blackhead that was begging to be squeezed out.
“You’re not going to change anybody’s life. This is something to do to pass the time, that’s all this is,” she said.
As Emily spoke, Brandon caught glimpses of something pale and yellow lodged behind her uvula.
“Tonsil stones.”
“What?”
“You’ve got tonsil stones.”
Emily breathed into her hand and sniffed, then crinkled her nose.
“Look, I’m not trying to change anybody’s life. I’m just doing my job,” Brandon said. “I care about doing it well.”
“Oh, that’s a lie. You don’t care about this job.”
“Please don’t tell me what I think or what I feel.” He fingered the dial of the binoculars until it clicked. He turned the dial the other direction and it clicked again.
“Stop that,” Emily said, taking the binoculars out of his hands.
Brandon sighed. “They didn’t know how to talk about the book. It was like pulling teeth.”
“They couldn’t talk about it the way you wanted to, you mean,” she said.
“Absolutely miserable time.” He sighed again, heavier.
Every night at the hospital, Emily saw people on the brink of death. She saw children mangled in car crashes and mothers missing limbs. She saw men writhing on the floor from opioid withdrawal. Then she came home to mopey, wayward Brandon.
Brandon could sense Emily’s impatience with him and his problems. But didn’t Brandon have the right to be angry about his life, too? Even if everything, at the end of the day, was a consequence of his own actions, why did that mean he couldn’t be frustrated about it? Brandon knew that something buried in this line of thought actively prevented them from being a real couple. He didn’t know—was scared to know—what this something was, but like a cursed talisman, it exerted its wretched influence over his relationship with Emily, the book club, and the long, roundabout trajectory his life had taken.
“Stop trying to change other people. You have to meet them where they are,” Emily said.
“Okay.”
“You’re trying to change them because your own life isn’t working. Tell me I’m wrong,” Emily said.
“Okay, okay,” he said, taking the binoculars back. “You’re right.”
“You’re not listening. Whatever is going on in your head, you need to deal with it. You can’t keep going like this. How will you ever go back to school? How will you ever start a career or—”
“Do you call moving back to bum fuck methville ‘starting a career?’” Brandon snapped. “Is letting daddy control you even though you’re an adult ‘starting a career?’ That’s how you want me to deal with my problems, right? Pretend that living with a bunch of fent zombies in the desert doesn’t bother me so I don’t have to feel guilty about everything daddy gave me?”
Emily looked at him, stunned. She stood up and walked to the kitchen and filled a glass with water. She drank in large, relaxed gulps. The silence between them stretched and stretched until finally Emily said, “I think you’re ready to go back to school.”
“Sorry,” Brandon mumbled.
Emily continued staring at him and he didn’t know what to do with himself so he put on his shoes and went outside with the binoculars in hand.
The sun was setting and the weather had begun to cool. He didn’t know where he was walking. But he was in the desert and the mythology of deserts demanded he walk so he walked. The desert was for encountering the desolation of a life. The desert laid waste to history with rock and heat, flood and dust. Here, one is allowed to forget their name, Brandon told himself.
The sand and rock crunched beneath his feet. The dust whirled upward and sand crunched between his teeth. He spat. Every direction looked the same. The giant, lumbering mesas in the distance oriented him. And yet he was unnerved by the mesas, by their prehistoric scale. He imagined megaforest tree stumps or the fossilized feet of giants amputated at the ankles. No matter how much he walked, they stayed in the same place, stayed the same massive size. He imagined walking towards them and frightened himself with the sensation of being towered over by a living-dead thing, the feet of an ancient bog mummy felled where the sea used to be, preserved by the passage of time and some dark desert folklore.
The sky was vast and total. Brandon felt it would swallow him whole if he didn’t keep moving. He kept his eyes trained on the mesas. He ran his eyes up and down until he found the familiar black mound at the edge of one of the cliffs, then put the binoculars up to his face. He had never seen the copse of juniper trees from this angle before, their twisted roots crushed into the rocks and leaves black in the strange light. He found the man on the mesa, saw that twisted, blurred shadow leaning against the tree holding the instrument or what looked like an instrument in its lap. He felt if he looked long enough, the features of the man’s face would emerge, so he watched the amorphous shadow for a minute, then ten minutes, then an hour. The face stayed muddled.
Brandon’s phone rang.
“Brandon! How is the book club going?” Mrs. Barrow’s voice sounded grainy and far away.
“It’s going fine, Mrs. Barrow. Thanks for asking.”
“Brandon, you are a saint. Remember, Brandon. You are educating these men. They need your guidance whether they know it or not—”
He hung up and texted her that he’d lost reception.
The book club was not going fine. They had read a book about a man surviving an apocalypse alone, a classic western that ended with a shootout where everyone died, a thriller about a spy who fell in love with the person she was supposed to assassinate. They were interesting books propelled by plot and neat endings. Some even had lessons. But discussion did not improve. Eduardo slept. Peter would meekly offer an opinion and await Brandon’s approval. Sometimes Grant would say something that pierced the entire group with its level of insight, but mostly he stayed quiet, his brow heavy. Meanwhile, Keith would wait, leaning forward in the small metal chair, his body cocked like a shotgun, until there was a moment he could blow the conversation apart. Something vaguely sexual would come up and then the typical antics began. Keith would fire the first shot at Eduardo, and Eduardo’s perverted laugh would mark the beginning of the end. The discussion would unravel until everyone tacitly agreed that the book club was over. Then they would go their separate ways. Everyone drove home except Keith. Brandon once thought of offering him a ride but decided not to. He wanted Keith to suffer in some small way. He wanted to punish him.
One day after the book club, Brandon watched Keith walk off toward home when a strange thought crossed his mind. Brandon waited several minutes until Keith was out of sight. Then he began to walk. He was barely aware of what he was doing as he followed Keith a quarter mile behind. Keith walked leisurely, his hands in his jacket pockets. Keith did not look at the desert or the mesas. Keith in his red jacket was a drop of blood on the horizon. Brandon didn’t know why he was stalking Keith but the act made him feel alive, wonderfully so. Twenty minutes into the walk, Keith turned into the trailer park. Brandon hid behind an empty and dilapidated trailer. He didn’t see which trailer Keith entered so he waited. It nourished some hideous thing in him to know where Keith lived, to intrude on the sacred territory of home. The mesas glowed red in the setting sun. He didn’t have his binoculars but he knew the man on the mesa was there, watching him. An uneasiness overtook him and Brandon almost skittered off when he heard a door open. Keith was holding a long black gun case and exiting the trailer park. A gun owner, then.
Keith got back on the empty road and Brandon followed him out of the trailer park a few minutes later. Keith swung the gun case back and forth in rhythm to his own steps, walking towards the abandoned train depot at the western edge of town. The night seemed to chase them west as the sun dipped below the rocky horizon and pulled the light down with it. The dark, jagged energy of the desert gathered in Brandon’s body with each step and he understood in a quiet way that did not involve words or thoughts that soon he would cross a threshold he could not return from.
Brandon had never been at the train depot before. Here, several dozen tracks lay parallel to each other before a single track emerged at the very end of the train yard and disappeared into the desert. Keith was standing on the train tracks in front of a platform and had set his gun case down on the platform itself, his back turned to Brandon. He was assembling the gun. Brandon crept behind one of the abandoned cars.
A sharp sound startled Brandon. Do. Then another. Re. Then the rest. Mi, fa, so, la, ti, do. Keith was playing a loud and brassy scale. Brandon peeked behind the boxcar. It was a trumpet. Keith went up and down the scales and stopped. He spat and picked at some dead skin on his lip. Then he began playing a song, the music Brandon had heard at night. The notes were sharp and cold yet mysterious. It was a song but not the kind that made you want to dance or kiss your girlfriend. It was a song that asked you to sit still so you could understand it. Keith stood on the platform, his eyes closed, channeling the song through him. Keith did not look like a monster. Brandon could not imagine that this was the same person destroying his book club, the same man that said ho-mo-erotic with a forehead slick with grease. No, the man in front of him looked otherworldly, his face quiet and attuned to something deep, a shaman talking to the desert with his music.
When the sky had finally darkened into that deep desert purple, Brandon crept out of the train yard and back to his car at the library. There were no streetlights on that stretch of road and in the darkness Brandon sensed a presence, perhaps a set of eyes trained on him or someone walking across the street and keeping pace. He wondered if the man on the mesa was still there leaning against his tree or if he’d somehow clawed his way down from those towering red rocks. The darkness seemed to cave in on him then and Brandon broke into a sprint. When Brandon got home and finally caught his breath, Keith still hadn’t stopped playing.
Brandon never saw Emily at home anymore. One day, he received a text from her.
i’m moving out
when?
end of month. my dad needs the apartment back
where are you going?
i’m leaving. you were right, i can leave anytime
does that mean we’re done?
He didn’t expect a response. He didn’t need her, at least not today. Today, they would be discussing Moby-Dick. He had convinced the book club two weeks ago that they should read something with substance, something that carried the weight of history. Pitched that way, the men had liked the idea. He doubted that anybody had finished the book, but that didn’t matter. Brandon knew his life here was rapidly coming to an end, and not knowing what was coming next, he might as well enjoy himself. He would talk about Father Mapple’s sermon, Captain Ahab as Faustian figure, the moral ambiguity symbolized by the whale’s whiteness, all of it, even if no one was listening.
Brandon waited in the parking lot, binoculars to his face. The man on the mesa seemed to be in a different position today. The man was standing and his body was twisting in a different direction, facing away from Brandon or toward him, he couldn’t tell. The instrument was no longer in the man’s lap and was instead dangling from his hands. Brandon contemplated what this could mean when he felt someone looking at him. He put his binoculars down and found Keith standing there, peculiar, looking at him with curiosity.
“How long have you been there?” asked Brandon.
There was a tiny, weighted pause before Keith answered, “It’s hot as hell today. You gonna let me in or what?”
Brandon opened the library door. Eduardo, Peter, and Grant arrived shortly after. Brandon swatted at the trapdoor on the ceiling and turned on the light.
“Well boys, we’ve reached the end of the book. Did you all like it?”
There were some quiet mm-hmms and yeahs.
“I wanted to start us off with a question that’s kind of ambiguous but should lead to a good conversation. My question is: what do you all think the whale represents?” Brandon asked.
The light bulb hummed. Eduardo looked up and closed his eyes, nodding in a show of contemplation. Peter opened his mouth to say something, but when Brandon looked at him, he shrunk back and opened his book instead to reread some lines. Grant, deep in thought, was massaging the cover of the book with his right palm in a sensual, rhythmic manner. Keith looked at the floor. There were no creases on the spine of Keith’s book.
“Let me try again. What do you guys think about the whale? Just in general,” Brandon asked.
“Big,” Grant said with wide eyes and a thousand-yard stare. “Very, very big.”
“He’s right,” Eduardo said without opening his eyes. “Whales are big. I’ve never seen one in real life though.”
Peter opened his mouth again, but then thought better of it. Brandon turned toward him and caught his eye and Peter winced as if he’d been caught doing something he shouldn’t have.
“Peter?” Brandon said. “Did you want to share?”
“Well, um. The book. You see, I didn’t, well.” Peter sighed. “I didn’t finish it. I was trying to think of something to say but I just couldn’t think of anything. I’m sorry. I know this is important to you.”
Brandon hated hearing that. “Peter, it’s fine. The whale. What did you think of the whale?”
“Well, Captain Ahab wants to catch the whale, right? For taking his leg.”
“Uh-huh.”
“And, well, the whale, Captain Ahab is obsessed with the whale for taking his leg, so it’s like he wants to kill the whale... to regain his humanity?”
“Yeah, I can see that,” said Brandon. “It’s like the whale represents something only Ahab can see and everyone else just has to go along with it. Everyone else’s humanity is intact except Ahab’s.”
The sound of Grant’s dry skin rubbing across the book’s matte cover filled the silence. Keith was tossing the book into the air to the rhythm of the rubbing. Brandon tried again.
“What did you guys think of the color of the whale? There’s that whole chapter devoted to whiteness. Did you guys read that chapter?”
Eduardo began to snore and Keith snickered. Peter avoided making eye contact with him and began picking at his shoelaces. Grant, still wide-eyed, had put down his book and was now running his hands through his hair, his hands strained into claws so that his nails scratched at his scalp.
“Well?” Brandon added, impatient.
Brandon didn’t know what to do. The silence was deafening. He tried not to think about graduate school, about his failed thesis, about Emily, about being in the middle of nowhere. He tried not to think about his parents bragging to their friends about his illustrious, nonexistent career. But he couldn’t stop thinking so he did what he did when he didn’t want to think, which was to read. Brandon flipped to chapter 42.
“Though in many natural objects,” he read aloud, “whiteness refiningly enhances beauty, as if imparting some special virtue of its own, as in marbles, japonicas, and pearls…”
The longer he read, the more the words took over his body. Grant mumbled something but Brandon continued louder, not wanting to stop. He didn’t want to stop imposing himself on the group. They signed up for the book club without realizing they would actually need to read. No matter. Brandon would read for them. He’d read until the end of time if he had to.
“Even the barbaric, grand old kings of Pegu placing the title ‘Lord of the White Elephants’ above all their other magniloquent ascriptions of dominion; and the modern kings of Siam unfurling the same snow-white quadruped in the royal standard...”
Grant mumbled something again and Eduardo let out another snore, but Brandon continued, forcing the words out of his esophagus and into the world. They would listen to him read and they would like it. Nobody would stop him, not anymore.
“...And the great Austrian Empire, Caesarian, heir to overlording Rome, having for the imperial colour the same imperial hue…”
“Brandon,” Grant said.
“...And though this pre-eminence in it applies to the human race itself, giving the white man ideal mastership over every dusky tribe...”
“Brandon!” Grant slammed his hand against his book so hard that Eduardo woke up. Brandon looked up from his book.
“I want to talk about the cum chapter,” Grant said.
“What?” Brandon asked.
“The cum chapter. The chapter where they squeeze the whale cum.”
Keith shot up in his seat, his smile growing wide. “The what chapter?” Keith asked.
“The cum chapter. Chapter 94. Like, what the fuck was I reading?”
Keith opened his book and began flipping the pages, his finger tracing the words as he mouthed the words to himself. Brandon broke out in a sweat. He vaguely remembered that a chapter about whale sperm existed but couldn’t recall reading it at all. Brandon flipped through the edition in his hands. His version’s chapter 94 had nothing to do with whale sperm. He looked at the back of the book. It was an edition meant for teaching in high schools. He flipped to the foreword of the book. Several chapters have been removed to streamline the narrative such that students would not lose interest, wrote the foreword’s author. Some chapters have been removed for the sake of decency.
“Guys, listen to this,” Keith said.
Before Brandon could stop him, Keith started reading, his eyes greedy and devouring. “Squeeze! squeeze! squeeze! all the morning long; I squeezed that sperm till I myself almost melted into it. I squeezed that sperm till a strange sort of insanity came over me; and I found myself unwittingly squeezing my co-laborers’ hands in it, mistaking their hands for the gentle globules.”
Peter looked away, his face worried, whimpering something no one could hear.
“Such an abounding, affectionate, friendly, loving feeling did this avocation beget; that at last I was continually squeezing their hands, and looking up into their eyes sentimentally…”
Eduardo began to chuckle, not quite understanding the words but knowing that something funny was happening. Keith stood up, voice booming, and bumped his head against the bulb, throwing shadows across the room. The bulb swung and swung and shadows swam across their bodies and behind the chairs and through the aisles of endless books that nobody in this town ever read.
“As much as to say,—Oh! my dear fellow beings, why should we longer cherish any social acerbities, or know the slightest ill-humor or envy!” Keith roared. “Come; let us squeeze hands all round; nay, let us all squeeze ourselves into each other. Let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and sperm of kindness!”
Keith put down his book and panted, his huge chest rising and falling like a boulder. Peter blushed with embarrassment. Eduardo smiled with his mouth hanging open and Grant was staring at Keith, completely transfixed. Keith grabbed the light bulb to stop it from swinging. Then Grant began to clap.
“Good reading, Keith. Yeah, that chapter,” Grant said. “What the hell was this chapter about?”
“I don’t know, but Christ, this is gay,” Keith said, wagging his book toward Brandon. “Why’d you have us read such a gay book, Brandon?”
Brandon slumped back in his chair. “That’s it. We’re done. Everyone get the fuck out.”
The group turned to him. Keith sat down.
“You all heard me. Everybody out,” Brandon said.
The group looked at each other. They smiled nervously, unsure, until Brandon stood up and walked to the library entrance. He opened the door and held it for them. They understood he was serious and slowly they gathered their things and walked out single file. Once everybody had left, Brandon waited five minutes. Then he left the building and found himself moving in the direction of Keith. Besides walking, the other mythology of the desert was killing.
Under the reddening sky, Brandon stalked Keith from the library to the trailer park to the train depot, a white-hot rage boiling his body and blurring his vision. He thought about how he’d do it. A knife from home, maybe. But he didn’t have time and anyway, that would be too fast, too easy. Brandon didn’t want to let him off the hook like that. Keith, in particular, called for a long and slow bludgeoning. Blunt force. A prolonged pain. When they arrived at the train depot, Brandon hid behind the usual train car, listening closely to Keith assembling his trumpet. Keith played some scales, then began playing his cold and mysterious song. As Keith played, Brandon looked for a suitable rock. He weighed several rocks in his hand when he saw a rusted metal pipe, some piece of chewed-up train track. He picked it up and swung it as a test, then sat down and waited. By then the sun had disappeared and the sky menaced him with its nauseous purple-black hue. As Keith’s playing slowed, Brandon stood up. The song cut out without finishing.
“Come out, Brandon.”
Brandon froze, his heart thudding from the adrenaline.
“Come on. Show’s over.”
Brandon walked out from behind the train car, dragging the pipe across the rubble.
“How did you know I was there?”
“You learn when things don’t feel right around here,” Keith said. “What’s that in your hand? Some sort of pipe?”
“Yeah. A pipe. Piece of train track, I think.”
“Jesus.” Keith shook his head. “You’ve got a big problem with me, Brandon. A big, big problem. And if you don’t deal with your problems, they cause other problems, you know what I mean? So tell me what your problem is.”
“You ruined the book club,” said Brandon.
“No I didn’t. You were the one who told everyone to get out. We just listened,” Keith said.
“You’ve been ruining it. All your stupid jokes. How you never read the book. What the hell is wrong with you.”
“I did this as a favor for my mom and Mrs. Barrow. Now I got some crazy kid from wherever the fuck threatening to kill me.”
Brandon walked closer and lifted the pipe. “I don’t get why you won’t own up to it. You’re the worst kind of person. The kind of person that doesn’t realize other people exist.”
Keith braced his body as Brandon approached. “Back off, brother. I’m warning you.”
“You’re the worst kind of person because you don’t even know that you’re being the worst.”
“Get back. Now.”
“You walk through life with your stupid smile and say stupid things and everyone laughs. Then people like me pick up the pieces. Guys like you piss me off. You piss me the fuck off, man.”
“Last warning.”
“Fuck you, Keith.”
Brandon lunged at Keith and swung and the top half of the rusty metal pipe shattered against the train platform that Keith had been standing in front of. The pipe was knocked out of his hand and he caught a brief image of Keith flying upwards toward him before a fist landed against his face. Brandon skidded across scree and rock and bits of metal before coming to a full stop. His ears rang as blood trickled into them. He lay there trying to collect himself, panting.
“You’re a pussy, you know that?” said Keith.
Brandon’s vision was hazy and the sky was not yet completely dark but already the Pleiades shimmered above him. Brandon tried to blink the haziness away. He groaned, then groaned again.
Keith stood above Brandon and spat on him, then offered Brandon his hand. “How you feeling, champ?” Keith asked. “Did you get it all out of you?”
Brandon took his hand and wobbled onto his legs. Keith led him by the arm toward the train platform and Brandon leaned against it. He held his cheek with his hand.
“It hurts,” Brandon said.
“No shit. I punched you in the face,” Keith said. “I won’t go to your book club anymore. It’s not worth the trouble. I don’t like people following me and it’s fucked that you’ve been following me for this long. I should’ve done something about it a long time ago.”
They stood there a while, letting their nerves calm. The night settled on them.
“You play every night,” Brandon said, rubbing his bruised jaw. “I hear you before I sleep.”
“I’ve been doing it every night since high school band ended.”
“I’ve never heard anyone play songs like that. Where’d you learn them?”
“I don’t know. I don’t learn them from anywhere. They just come to me when I’m out here. There’s no sheet music or anything. I just play.”
“That’s incredible. You’re a talented musician, Keith.”
“That’s the nicest thing you’ve said since you met me. Now why’s that?”
Brandon shrugged. Keith shook his hand out and winced, then picked up his trumpet.
“You interrupted me.”
Keith picked up his song from the middle. The notes were in that same minor scale and sounded cold and not vulgar. The trumpet shone in the fading light and a peace had once again washed over Keith’s face. Brandon wanted something to shift in him, wanted to believe that the music was cleansing him and exorcising the wicked spirit that haunted his life. But nothing of the sort happened. Mostly, Brandon was the same, except that his face ached and that blood was now trickling down his pants from his torn-up back. An immense exhaustion overtook him then. Keith finished his song.
“Pretty,” Brandon said. “Does it have a name?”
Keith didn’t bother answering him and they stood there in the looming quiet. Keith turned toward the desert.
“Have you seen the man on the mesa?” Keith asked.
“I knew someone was up there.”
“You were looking at him earlier today, weren’t you. What did you see?”
“I saw him standing. Usually he’s sitting, but he was standing today,” Brandon said.
“He does that sometimes, yeah.”
“Does he have a face?”
“I’ve never seen it myself. I learned to stop looking for it,” Keith said. A strange, cool wind moaned across the field of rock and sand beyond the train tracks. Brandon’s vision cleared and the bright stars illuminated the vast landscape and suddenly he knew he no longer hated Keith.
“He’s been watching over me since I was a kid,” Keith said.
“The man on the mesa?”
“Yeah.”
“Maybe he’s watching over me, too,” Brandon said, joking.
“No,” Keith said, rubbing his chin. “No, he’s not.”
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