More than anything, he doesn’t want to sleep. He tries stupid things to keep himself awake. Singing at the top of his lungs. Attempting to perfect a handstand. Trying to remember all fifty states (he gets up to forty-seven, goes absolutely crazy trying to remember Vermont, gives up).
He gets colder as the night draws in again. He lights every lantern and makes his way upstairs to his parents’ bedroom to steal more blankets. He wraps them around himself and paces up and down the main room, trying to think of something, anything, to keep his mind occupied, to stave off both sleep and boredom.
And loneliness.
He stops in the middle of the main room, the blankets wrapped around him like robes.
The loneliness. In his accumulating exhaustion, the terrible loneliness of this place swamps him, just like the waves he drowned in.
No one here. No one at all besides him. No one.
Forever.
“Shit,” he says under his breath, starting to pace faster than ever. “Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit.”
He feels like he’s underwater again, fighting for breath. His throat chokes shut, just like it did as he was forced under yet another freezing wave. Fight it, he thinks, panicking. Fight it. Oh shit, oh shit –
He stops in the middle of the floor, only dimly aware that he’s letting out a slight moan. He even raises his head, like he’s reaching for air that’s getting farther and farther away.
“I can’t take this,” he whispers into the shadowy darkness above him. “I can’t take this. Not forever. Please –”
He flexes and unflexes his hands, pulling at the blankets that suddenly feel like they’re suffocating him, dragging him farther down. He lets them drop to the floor.
I can’t hold it back, he thinks. Please, I can’t hold it back –
And then he sees in the lantern lights that the blankets have swept the dust away in a pattern on the floor as he paced. The polished floorboards are actually glinting back at him slightly.
He nudges a bunched-up blanket with his foot, leaving a stripe of clean floor beneath it. He pushes it farther along the floor to the wall, wiping away more dust. He picks up the blanket. The underside is filthy, so he folds it to a cleaner side and pushes it along the wall to the hearth.
He looks back. A big stripe of the floor is now relatively clean.
He folds the blanket again and follows the wall around the room, then the floor around the settees, folding and refolding as necessary until he cleans almost the entire floor. He tosses the dirty blanket into the middle of the kitchen and picks up another, folding it into a square and wiping down the dining-room table, coughing some at the dust he churns up, but once again, the surface mostly shines back at him.
He wets the corner of a smaller blanket in the sink and scrubs away the heavier dirt on the dining table before moving to the inert television. Every time a blanket gets too dirty, he piles it in the kitchen and gets another. Soon enough, he’s upstairs in the linen cupboard, taking out painfully stiff towels and sheets and using them to wipe down the hearth and windowsills.
A kind of ecstatic trance overtakes him, his mind on nothing but his actions, which are manic, focused, seemingly unstoppable now that he’s set them in motion. He cleans off the bookcase shelves, the slats in the doors to the cubbyhole, the chairs around the dining-room table. He accidentally breaks a bulb in the overhead light as he tries to rid them of cobwebs, but he just wraps the glass in a blanket and adds it to the pile.
He wipes away the remaining dust from the mirror hanging over the settee. Dirt still clings to the glass, so he picks up one of his wetted rags and presses harder on the mirror, scrubbing away in repeated motions, trying to get it clean.
“Come on,” he says, hardly aware that he’s speaking aloud. “Come on.”
He steps back for a second from the effort and stands there panting. He raises his arm to go back to it –
And in the lantern light, he sees himself.
Sees his too-skinny face, his short cropped hair, sees the dark whiskers sprouting below his nose and under his chin, though not so much on his cheeks, where he’s despaired of ever being able to grow a beard.
Sees his eyes. Sees how they’re the eyes of someone being hunted. Or haunted.
And in the mirror, he sees the room behind him. A hundred times more livable than it was before he started on this frenzy, a frenzy he can’t really explain to himself.
But there it is. A clean or at least cleaner room. He’s even cleared the dust from the terrible, terrible painting of the dying horse. He looks at it now in reflection, its eyes wild, its tongue like a spike of terror.
And he remembers.
This cleaning. This straightening out of things. This frenzy of order.
He’s done it before. To his own bedroom back in America.
“No,” he says. “Oh, no.”
It was the last thing he did before he left his house.
The last thing he did before he went down to the beach.
The last thing he did before he died.
27
“Don’t you think I hate it, too?” Gudmund whispered fiercely. “Don’t you think it’s the last thing I want?”
“But you can’t,” Seth said. “You can’t just . . .”
He couldn’t say it. Couldn’t even say the word.
Leave.
Gudmund looked back nervously at his house from the driver’s seat of his car. Lights were on downstairs, and Seth knew Gudmund’s parents were up. They could discover he was gone at any moment.
Seth crossed his arms tightly against the cold. “Gudmund –”
“I finish out the year at Bethel Academy or they don’t pay for college, Sethy,” Gudmund practically pleaded. “They’re that freaked out about it.” He frowned, angry. “We can’t all have crazy liberal European parents –”
“They’re not that crazy liberal. They’ll barely even look at me now.”
“They barely looked at you before,” Gudmund said. Then he turned to Seth. “Sorry, you know what I mean.”
Seth said nothing.
“It doesn’t have to be forever,” Gudmund said. “We’ll meet up in college. We’ll find a way so that no one –”
But Seth was shaking his head.
“What?” Gudmund asked.
“I’m going to have to go to my dad’s college,” Seth said, still not looking up.
Gudmund made a surprised move in the driver’s seat. “What? But you said –”