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listens: muted horns, strings, tapped blocks, sleigh bells, a linear vocal line lightly harmonized in thirds until, three-quarters of the way through, the music becomes vertical rather than horizontal, as the voices pile up in a series of increasingly complicated harmonies in a refrain—God only knows what I’d be without you—repeated and repeated and repeated, with a frightening emphasis on the word “what,” until the voices fade out, having absolutely nowhere to go. This is the song, Nathaniel knows, in which Brian Wilson handed over his heart to God and simultaneously lost his mind. The song is Brian Wilson’s favorite, the one he sold his soul for. After “God Only Knows” there were other songs, certainly, “Good Vibrations” and the rest of them, but the spirit had abandoned him: addressed not to a California girl, a sun-bleached surfer-chick, the refrain had been spoken to his own spirit, his genius, which, in one of those ironies of which life is so fond, left him there and then.

“Okay, I’ll talk to you,” Nathaniel says, turning the volume down, and both Coolberg and Theresa sigh with relief.

“So. How did you like the gods?” Coolberg asks.

“Would you stop with this talk about the gods, please? They were roaring,” he replies. “Anyway, what difference does it make?”

“Oh, hypothetically, it doesn’t make—”

“‘Hypothetically.’ That’s an interesting word, considering what we just did. Hypothetically, I could have just died. Hypothetically, you could have just witnessed my drowning. Both of you. You’re really hypothetical, Coolberg. I’ve noticed that.”

“But we’re students. With students, everything is hypothetical. Besides, we didn’t witness your drowning. We tried to—” Theresa begins.

“And if you had seen me go,” Nathaniel continues, “if I had disappeared, what then?”

“Oh, that’s easy,” Coolberg says from the backseat. “If we had seen you go, we would have been very sad. We would have presented the world with the grim face of tragedy.” His elegiac tone of voice seems distant, avuncular, ironic.

“Sad? Jesus. That’s not much,” Nathaniel says. They drive for another ten minutes until they enter the outskirts of Buffalo. As if he had been thinking about word choices all that time, Nathaniel says, finally, “‘Sad’ isn’t much of anything. I hate that word.”

“But there’s more,” Coolberg continues. “I wasn’t finished. You should let me finish. If you had disappeared, if you had died, we would have…we would have become you. We would have taken you on. We would have turned into you.” He waits. “You would have lived in us.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Nathaniel says. “Theresa, do you know what he’s talking about?” Theresa shakes her head. “See? Theresa doesn’t know either.”

“When a person dies,” Coolberg says, “the survivors take on the features of the deceased. The most eccentric traits are acquired first—tics, stuttering, shakes of the head. That’s how grieving works. The living reimagine themselves as the one who has gone missing. I would have taken you over. That’s what we would have done. I guarantee it.”

“Speak for yourself,” Theresa says.

“Oh, I never do that.” Coolberg laughs.

14

FOR THE NEXT TWO MONTHS, as Buffalo descends into winter, Nathaniel often finds himself in one of two sets of arms: Theresa’s or Jamie’s. He does not, for now, think of himself as a hypocrite or a two-timer.

His love for Theresa happens to be contaminated by his doubts about her vaguely empty character. Still, he can’t resist her nervous wit, or her catlike purring when they make love, or the sheer force of her physical attractions—her narrow waist, her perfect breasts, the knowing smile. As for Jamie, he has never been involved with a lesbian cabdriver before. Who has? The relationship, such as it is, follows no logic. The outcome is predictable. The situation bubbles on its surface with a comic pathos they both recognize: Please kiss me typically followed by Do I have to? Well, all women feign indifference, he believes. That’s their scene. Courtly love requires that men must be educated through rejection, patience, and