I found her near a large boulder and took her back to the hut. When we got inside, I told her everything Brian had told me. She looked at me, her eyes death-empty.

“Why didn’t you tell me you lived with him for a year?” I yelled.

“Well, you haven’t been honest with me either. You didn’t tell me that your uncle is Terry Dean!”

“Why would I? I never met him! It was a long time ago. I was minus two years old when he died. What I want to know is, why didn’t you tell me that you knew about my uncle?”

“Look. Let’s be honest with each other from now on,” she said.

“Yes, let’s.”

“Scrupulously honest.”

“We’ll tell each other everything.”

The door was wide open. Neither of us stepped through it. It was the time to ask questions and answer them, like two informants who’d just discovered that each had made separate immunity deals with the public prosecutor.

“I’m going to have a shower,” she said.

I watched her walk across the room, and when she bent over to pick up a towel from the floor, I noticed how the back of her jeans curved away from her body, like an evil grin.

VI

After this incident I got into the bad habit of treating her with courtesy and respect. Courtesy and respect are advisable when addressing a judge right before he sentences you, but in a relationship they signify discomfort. And I was uncomfortable because she still hadn’t gotten over Brian. This was not baseless paranoia, either. She had started comparing me to him, unfavorably. For instance, she said I wasn’t as romantic as Brian, just because I’d once said in an intimate moment, “I love you with all of my brain.” Is it my fault she didn’t understand how the heart has stolen credit from the head, that wild passionate feelings actually come from the ancient limbic system in the brain, and that I was just trying to avoid referring to the heart as the actual storehouse of all my feelings when it is, after all, only a soggy, bloody pump and filter system? Is it my fault people can’t enjoy a symbol without turning it into a literal fact? Which is why, by the way, you should never waste your time giving the human race an allegorical tale- in less than one generation they’ll turn it into historical data, complete with eyewitnesses.

Oh, and then there was the jar.

I was at her place, in her bedroom. We’d just had sex very quietly because her mother was in the next room. I enjoyed doing it quietly because when you can make all the noise you like you sort of go faster. Silent sex makes you slow down.

Afterward, when I was fishing on the floor for all the coins that had fallen from my jeans pockets, I saw the jar underneath her bed, mustard-sized, with a misty liquid floating in it, like cloudy water from a Mexican tap. Removing the lid, I sniffed tentatively, irrationally expecting the odor of sour milk. It smelled of nothing at all. I turned and watched her thin body settle on the bed. “Don’t spill it,” she said, before giving me another in a long dynasty of perfect smiles.

I dipped my finger in the jar, whipped it out, and licked it.

Salty.

I thought I knew what that meant. But could it really mean what I thought it meant? Was I actually, in reality, holding a jar of tears? Her tears?

“Tears, huh?” I said, as though everybody I knew collected their own tears, as if the whole world did nothing but forge monuments to their own sadness. I could imagine her pressing the little jar against her cheek, when the inaugural tear looked like the first raindrop sliding down a windowpane.

“What’s it for?” I asked.

“Nothing.”

“What do you mean, nothing?”

“I just collect my tears, that’s all.”

“Come on. There’s something more.”

“There’s not. Don’t you believe me?”

“Absolutely not.”

She stared at me a moment. “OK- I’ll tell you, but I don’t want you to take it the wrong way.”

“OK.”

“Promise you won’t take it the wrong way?”

“That’s a hard promise to make. How will I know if I’m taking it the wrong way?”

“I’ll tell you.”

“OK.”

“OK. I’m collecting my tears because…I’m going to make Brian drink them,” she said.

I gritted my teeth and looked out the window. Outside, the drooping autumn trees looked like golden brown shrugs. “You’re still in love with him!” I shouted.

“Jasper!” she screamed. “You’re taking it the wrong way!”

About two weeks later she heaped another insult on top of the last one. We were in my hut, making love, making a hell of a racket this time, and as if going out of her way to confirm my worst suspicions, right in the middle of it she called out his name. “Brian!” she moaned breathlessly.

“Where?” I asked, startled, and started looking around the room for him.

“What are you doing?”

I stopped when I realized my stupid error. She gave me a look that deftly combined tenderness with revulsion. To this day the memory of that look still visits me like a Jehovah’s Witness, uninvited and tireless.

She climbed naked out of bed and made herself a cup of tea, grimacing with guilt.

“I’m sorry,” she said, her voice shaking.

“I don’t think you should close your eyes during sex anymore.”

“Hmm.”

“I want you to look at me the whole time. OK?”

“You don’t have any milk,” she said, squatting in front of the bar fridge.

“Yes, I do.”

“It’s lumpy.”

“But it’s still milk.”

She hadn’t finished sighing when I went out of the hut and walked in the darkness to Dad’s house. We were always breaking into each other’s houses to steal milk. It has to be said: I was the better thief. He would always come in while I was sleeping, but because he was paranoid about sell-by dates, I would awake to the sound of thunderous sniffing.

The night was the kind of thick, all-encompassing black that renders concepts such as north, south, east, and west unusable. After I’d stumbled over tree stumps and been slapped in the face by thorny branches, the lights of Dad’s house welcomed me and depressed me at the same time; they meant he was awake and I’d get stuck talking, that is, listening to him. I groaned. I was aware of our growing estrangement. It had started after I quit school and gradually worsened. I’m not sure why, but he’d unexpectedly resorted to normal parenting, especially in the use of emotional blackmail. He even once said the phrase “After all I’ve done for you.” Then he listed all that he’d done for me. It sounded like a lot, but many were small sacrifices such as “bought butter even though I like margarine.”

The truth was, I could no longer stand him: his unrelenting negativity, his negligence of both our lives, his inhuman reverence for books over people, his fanatical love for hating society, his inauthentic love for me, his unhealthy obsession with making my life as unpleasant as his. It occurred to me that he hadn’t made my life distressing as an afterthought, either, but had gone about dismantling me laboriously, as if he were being paid overtime to do it. He had a concrete pylon for a head, and I just couldn’t take it anymore. It seems to me you should be able to look at the people in your life and say “I owe you my survival” and “You owe me your survival,” and if you can’t say that, then what the hell are you doing with them? As it stood, I could only look at my father and think, “Well, I survived in spite of your meddling, you son of a bitch.”

The light was on in his living room. I peered through the window. Dad was reading the newspaper and crying.

“What’s the matter?” I asked, opening the sliding doors.

“What are you doing in here?”

“Stealing milk.”

“Well, steal your own milk!” he said.

I walked in and tore the newspaper out of his hands. It was one of the daily tabloids. Dad got up and went into the next room. I looked closer at the newspaper. The story Dad had been reading was about Frankie Hollow, the recently murdered rock star who, coming home from a tour, had been confronted by a crazed fan who shot him twice in the chest, once in the head, and once “for good luck.” Every single day since then the story had managed to make the front page, despite there being no additional facts after day one. Some days the papers included interviews with people who didn’t know anything and who in the course of the interview revealed nothing. Then they squeezed every last drop of blood out of the story by digging up the dead star’s past, and when there was absolutely, positively nothing left to report, they reported some more. I thought: Who prints this toe jam? And then I thought: Why is Dad crying over this celebrity death? I stood there with a thousand belittling phrases swimming in my head, trying to decide if I should lay the boot in. I decided against it; death is death, and mourning is mourning, and even if people choose to shed tears over the loss of a popular stranger, you can’t mock a sad heart.