The Art of Fielding_ A Novel - Chad Harbach [169]
68
Henry was standing in Pella and Noelle and Courtney’s kitchen, washing the dishes, drinking the first cup from a pot of coffee he’d made. He’d started drinking coffee since he’d been here. It was something to do. When he’d finished the dishes—there were just a few glasses and mugs; Pella ate at work, and Noelle and Courtney subsisted on red wine and Red Bull—he sprayed down the sink with a bleachy cleanser and wiped it with a sponge. Through the window the late-afternoon light was dimming steadily but still more gold than tea colored. This was the fragile hour of the day when he felt okay. The hour when he got out of bed and, if he sensed that Noelle and Courtney weren’t home, out of Pella’s room entirely.
He wrung out the sponge, propped it on the sink’s back. Only a few minutes left before the light would fade. If he’d begun his day earlier—at eight, say, or even ten or noon—he might have felt all right today. It would be smart to get up early tomorrow. Tomorrow I’ll get up early, he thought, and then smiled to himself, because the coffee was making him feel okay, and because he’d promised himself the same thing yesterday and the day before and the day before that, so that it had become a private running joke.
He cleaned the coagulated orange soap out of the little crown top of the dish-soap bottle. When Noelle and Courtney were home, or when he sensed they might be home, he stayed in Pella’s room, lying low, peeing in a Gatorade bottle. Pella didn’t seem to mind. Not about the pee—she didn’t know about that—but about his presence in general. She seemed okay with it. He thought of the Odyssey, which he’d half read in Professor Eglantine’s class—Ulysses trapped on Calypso’s island, wasting time, but he was no Ulysses, had no Ithaca to get home to, even though his beard had come in darker and fuller than he’d expected, a harsh brown beard that after a month or two would be the sort you might see on a statue of Ulysses, or that you did see on the statue of Melville that stood in the corner of the Small Quad, peering out to sea.
He opened the pantry out of boredom. There wasn’t much there. Olive oil, salt and pepper, girlie protein bars in pastel foil. Protein-enhanced whole-wheat vermicelli. Four-packs of sugar-free Red Bull. A can of black beans. There used to be two cans of black beans: in his first days here, when he was still adapting to his lack of appetite, he’d eaten the other can. He’d also eaten a girlie protein bar. Once he’d even tried to cook vermicelli on the stove. He’d never cooked pasta before, and the job was made more difficult by the fact that he had to keep running to the living room window to make sure that Courtney and Noelle weren’t about to come in and catch him stealing their food. He didn’t boil enough water; then he put in way too much vermicelli; then he cooked it way too long. The water evaporated from the pot, and the pasta sat there in a dull lump like an animal’s brain. Now he preferred not eating. Not because not eating meant not stealing, not because not eating meant not cooking, but just because.
I should stop drinking coffee too, he thought. He’d almost thought give up coffee, but that was a misleading phrase. There seemed to be meaning in it, meaning that didn’t exist. When you gave something up, who or what did you give it up to? Giving something up implied that your sacrifice made sense, and Henry knew that this was untrue. The days did not accumulate and turn into something better than days, no matter how well you used them. The days could not be used. He did not have a plan. He’d stopped playing baseball and eating beans and now he would stop drinking coffee. That was all.
The front door opened.
Henry froze, listened to his heart. He was a rat or a roach in this house—owned the place when he was alone, roamed the rooms like a roach god, and then scurried to safety when one of the humans walked in. Now he was trapped. He grabbed a pot he’d already washed, sudsed the sponge, and