Jed Pemberton was a star left tackle for the New York Jets.  He was strictly the lumbering rather than the glamorous breed of football star.  This did not stop him from making nearly five million dollars a year.
Jed was born less than a week after me, in the same hospital, and we grew up living a few blocks away from one another.  Our parents developed close friendships, but our relationship was strictly limited to a familiar hug upon greeting and the occasional toss of the football, which would begin with Jed’s light teasing and end with me winded by the sharp corner of a pigskin to the lower bowel.
Throughout our childhood, Jed was more popular than I was, more appropriately demure and quiet than I was, and was definitely handsomer (though not by much—he had and has a fat brutish face that appeals only to those who have fond memories of their wartime drill sergeants).  But I was never jealous of him, nor did we cohabitate South Coral antagonistically.  This was mostly because I just didn’t know the guy very well—we traveled in different circles, went after different girls, etc.  But it was also because Jed, ironically given his incredible defensive talent, had a very warm and giving personality, so that the few times I spent extended periods of time with him during my childhood I came off with the impression that here was a guy whose appeal, if it wasn’t exactly my cup of tea, I could certainly understand.
Jed played for the Ohio State Buckeyes, dropped out of college midway through his junior year (after being shortlisted for Defensive Player of the Year and the Heisman), and was drafted by the Jets in the first round of the NFL Draft that offseason.  Aside from the very rare occasions when I saw him on television, I had not seen Jed or spoken to him on the telephone for four years.

Jed called me when I was deep into my fourth game of solitaire.  My parents were still out.
“You’re home, I hear,” he said cheerfully.
“You bet,” I said, feeling like an idiot.
“They’ve prepared quite a welcome for us in South Coral, huh?”
I was surprised.  “I haven’t seen it.”
“Neither have I.  I’m on a flight from Oakland.”
“They let you talk on the phone on the plane?”
Jed laughed.  “It’s the Jets private plane, Kyle.  With the team.  I don’t fly commercial.”
“Oh.  Ha ha.”  I actually said “Ha ha.”  Goddamn it.
“Anyway, I heard there’s dancing in the streets or something like that.  You with your parents?”
“No,” I said.  “They’re out somewhere.”
“Probably with mine.  I’ve tried calling them.  They always turn off their phones at lunch.”
“It’s four o’clock here,” I told him, then wondered why I’d said it.  I was still practically  shell-shocked I’d been stupid enough to assume Jed Pemberton was flying Delta back from his triumphant victory over the Raiders.
“Oh, yeah,” Jed replied, “well.  You should go out and see people.  There’s got to be something.  Like an ice sculpture of the three of us, or something.”
Or something.  “Yeah, maybe I will, Jed.”  I imagined I would find us in Deal Plaza, burning in effigy.
“Well, I’ll see you when I get there, huh?  Take it easy.”
“Yeah.  Take it easy.”  I got the guilty feeling I always get when I sense that my conversation partner has not gotten what they were gunning for in our tete-a-tete.
I hung up and played a few more moves.  I was not taking it easy.

At this point I figured it was only a matter of time before Effie showed up at the door and the holocaust would be complete, so when the doorbell rang my hackles were raised.  (One of my least favorite expressions, by the way—it sounds like it has something to do with a hairball.)  But it was just my parents, good old Steve and Linda Gilbert, their arms spread wide to receive me as if they were opening the door to find me on the stoop.
“Kyle!” my mother exclaimed, shoving good old Steve aside as she shouldered her way into the house to embrace me.  (Like Jed, my mother speaks in italics.)  “You told us your plane didn’t get in until seven!  We would have come to get you had we known!”
“We would have come had we known,” Steve repeated mindlessly, coming in the door and taking off his hat.  My father is not one to let a little thing like his son’s first stateside appearance in nearly a year disturb his schedule.  This is one of the many reasons why my father is my favorite person in the world.
“You said you were delayed six hours!” my mother insisted, as if there must have been some mistake.
“Yeah, Mom,” I said—please note, my first words in edgewise in nearly forty-five seconds.  “I thought I would be, but it turned out the flight was on time.  It was totally fine, I hired a limo.”
From the way my parents recoiled in unison, you would have thought I was announcing my imminent membership in the American Bund.  “A limo?!” my mother spat.  “When we were right here to get you?”
“We weren’t here,” my father retorted, clapping me on the shoulder by way of greeting before sitting down to take off his shoes.  “We were at the country club.”
“The country club?”  My turn for italics.  The South Coral Country Club has always represented, at least for my parents, the essence of goyische creep into even the most reliably Jewish exurbs.  “What were you doing there?”
“Well, that’s why I wish you’d told us, Kyle!” my mother echoed from the kitchen—in one of her frequent magic tricks, she had managed to transport herself there without me noticing.  I followed and saw that she was already making me dinner.  I sat down in defeat.  “You could have been at this wonderful holiday party that the town council threw in honor of your fellowship!”
“My fellowship?” I said in disbelief.  “How did they find out about it?”
“It wasn’t just about your fellowship,” my father, ever the pragmatist, clarified, as he swung into the kitchen himself.  “The Jets made the playoffs, and Effie just got that role playing Queen Elizabeth or some such thing.”
“Anna in The King and I,” my mother corrected.
By this point I was gripping the counter so hard my knuckles were turning white.  “Mom, I don’t understand,” I said.  (It was my habit to conduct my conversations solely with my mother even if my father was there—call me a masochist.)  “What is all this for?  Is it just because we’re all back for the holidays?  And if so, how did people get wind of that?”
“Well, it’s a small town,” my mother said, salting something into something else.  “Word gets around.”
“It’s not a small town,” my father and I said simultaneously, and he said, “We’ve got 10,000 people here now, Linda.”
“Yeah,” I agreed (with myself), “and if we’re so cosmopolitan, how come we’re celebrating the return of hometown heroes?  This isn’t a hick town, ma, one way or the other.  Don’t they have other things to do?”
“He’s always been too modest,” my mother said to no one in particular.  “You’re too modest!  People are excited to see you and Effie and Jed all back together again just like in high school.”
“I was never friends with Jed, mom, I tell you that all the time.”
“I wish you wouldn’t say that,” my father warned.  “George Pemberton and I go way back.  You and Jed are close family friends.  You would always play ball together.”
I felt a ghostly pain in my pancreas.  “Please don’t refer to it as ‘playing ball’ as if it’s something I’m really capable of doing, Dad; it sets an impossible precedent.”
“Well, it sounds good, anyway.”
“I don’t see why you’re so much against it, anyway, Kyle.”  My mother again, chopping.  “We so rarely get you back here, so what, so people are excited.  There are worse things.  How was Paris?”  The subject-changer extraordinaire back at work, not two minutes in the door. 
“It was really great.  You know that, you guys were only there a month ago.”
“Seems like longer,” my father said.  Every time my father goes to Europe, all he can talk about is how “we saved their asses” in World War II, even though he was born in 1954 and it was, as I am constantly telling him, in fact the Russians who saved the vast majority of “their asses.”
I said, “Beautiful.  Paris is beautiful in the snow.”  There was still no mention of my writing.  Could they tell I hadn’t gotten anything done or did they just not care?  Which was worse?
“Paris is always beautiful,” my mother said dismissively.
“No snow here yet—” My father trying to avoid talking more about Paris.
“I know—” Me trying to avoid talking about the weather.
And, mercifully, the doorbell.
I answered and, thank God Almighty, it was Effie, her skin shining in the lamppost-light, and she looked like an angel against the Christmas baubles on the house across the street.
“Hey, stranger,” she murmured, and I melted like so much nonexistent snow.

Effie Hester was and is (God, I’m already tired of that turn of phrase) the greatest Broadway performer of her generation.  This was already abundantly clear by freshman year of high school, when she was picked over about two hundred established seniors to play Eliza Doolittle in the school’s production of My Fair Lady and turned in a performance that, had she seen it, would have made Dame Julie Andrews quit the business.  By the time she graduated the theatrical program at Carnegie Mellon and moved to New York, the world got wind of her talent, and over the past half-decade she had accrued enough starring roles in musical comedies to doubly dumbfound that same Andrews.  She was now set to star in a revival of The King and I that the critics were awaiting with the same baited breath as the audience of teenyboppers who watched the Beatles play Ed Sullivan.  If the Class of 2005 holds any real allure today, it is because not of me or Jed, but Effie Hester.
Effie’s mother and my mother met in grade school in Philadelphia and have been inseparable since that time.  As a happy consequence of this, Effie and I have been lifelong friends and confidants, sharing our budding genius (such as mine was) and our mutual hatred of South Coral, New Jersey, always aware that from the roof of the Mountain View Hotel we could see, glittering in the sunlight, the godly façade of Manhattan.  We have been friends through thick and thin, through cattle calls and rejection notices, and there is probably no one on Earth I trust as much as she, or she as me.
As a side note, I have been pretty much from the point of consciousness obsessively and desperately in love with her.

And now she was home, and so was I.
Effie had over the years established herself as an almost mythic presence in my mind.  I knew every curving, sloping inch of her long, slender body and the pale, moonlike beauty of her face.  I knew -- or I imagined I did -- what she would say in any given situation, what she'd find funny; what would render her speechless, what would get her talking.  Her image was indelibly burnt onto my brain, and her figure was silhouetted so perfectly against the snow almost convinced me that I was dreaming, until she broke my delirium to quip, “Are you going to invite me in, or would you prefer me freeze-dried?”
I rattled off some line in response (witty banter, what fun) and let her in.
“Before Steve and Linda gang-rush me, what news from Paris?” she whispered, leaning  in.
“Nothing doing,” I replied reluctantly, also hushed.
“Came up empty, huh?” she said, almost impressed.  “I would think in a city like that—”
Steve and Linda gang-rushed her, and there were squeals of joy all around.  By my last count my parents had had lunch or dinner with Effie nearly thirty times since I had left for Paris.  I had seen her only once in that time, via Skype, and I was too weakened by her presence even to muster smug brotherhood.
After the joyous reunion was complete, my parents stepped back to observe us together.  Even my father seemed more interested than usual.
“Effie and Kyle, together again back home,” my mother managed almost in a whimper.  I sensed that she was about to cry and jumped in quickly.
“Mom, it’s not as if we haven’t seen each other in all this time.”  I was trying to laugh it off, but there was something significant about another meeting in the same living room where we had avoided so many dinner parties.
“Yeah, Linda,” Effie snorted, nudging me playfully (human contact—Holy Christ!).  “We’re lunch buddies, the two of us, or were anyway, back before this guy got too good for New York.”
“Never!” I cried in defense of the city where I had known Effie best, where we had spent our unimpeded time together.  I crossed my heart in mock solemnity. “I’m a New Yorker, always.”
This hurt my deeply New Jerseyan parents a little.  My mother changed the subject. 
We had dinner.  Jed showed up halfway through, red-faced from the cold.  My parents—my mother, really—were nearly apoplectic with joy.  I think in her mind Linda saw the crowds of this “small town” gathering at her windows, struggling to catch tiny glimpses of the conversation between these South Coral luminaries, which included the following sparkling epigrams:

• “Kyle, you’re looking great!  You must have lost fifteen pounds or something.”
• “Effie, you were phenomenal in that rap show.”
• “Still no snow here; crazy, right?”
• “Look at Kyle, isn’t it adorable how he squirms when we confront him with his accomplishments?”  (I only heard “adorable.”)
And, finally:
• “Please pass the salt.”

Five bucks a pop if you can attribute those, by the way.
Jed left fairly early because he still hadn’t seen his parents—I’m guessing he fabricated my same flight delay excuse to get some of that Linda Gilbert cooking.  (Can the Jets plane be delayed?  I really have to learn about sports at some point.)  Through complex maneuvering, I managed to get my parents to retire to bed, and finally—finally—it was me and Effie, and we could talk.
Or rather, I could.  It seemed that my muteness from before the dinner had been replaced with a lubricated loquacity that, in my mind, probably erased any pre-fellowship memory Effie had of me having anything resembling wit.
“I couldn’t do it, you know?  Oh, I did everything you’re supposed to do; I wandered the streets, I read Proust and Les Mis and Catcher in the Rye again for good measure, I even went to Shakespeare & Company, it must have been once a day I went to Shakespeare & Company, all the good it did.  Ten months in that city, that beautiful, inspirational city, and I couldn’t write word one!  Relaxation, exertion—nothing helped.  I was even thinking for a while of reading the Bible, but it turned out my insurance didn’t cover it.  Can you imagine?”
“Poor Kyle, his genius took a little break,” laughed Effie, leaning back against the window in the living room; God, she was beautiful, how much longer could I keep this up?  “Did you ever consider that you were lucky your genius can take a break?  If I got singer’s block, I’d be relegated straight to bell-ringing for the Salvation Army.”
“Believe me,” I said, “those guys in the Salvation Army are beloved compared to authors who miss their deadlines.  You forget I got a pretty hefty advance in January.  I’ve got to write a novel by April.”
“What a coincidence, I’ve got to memorize ‘Hello, Young Lovers’ by April.  Shall we work together?  You do half of mine and I do half of yours?”
“I wish.”  I collapsed sideways onto the couch.  “If I could act like you can act, Effie, if I was as gorgeous as you are, imagine what I could do!  All my material pre-written, like walking into a room to find out someone’s already taken the candy from the baby.”
“Oh, that’s not reductive.”
“Don’t get sarcastic with me,” I begged, sarcastically, as I draped myself across the couch, brushing her arm (more human contact—I was beginning to catalogue it).  “You’re all I’ve got here.”
“I know!” she said.  “Did you hear the response we’re getting here?”
“Jed told me to begin with.  Then my parents tell me they threw a party for us at the country club.  And we weren’t even there; it was like a tribute.  Can you imagine?  Twenty years ago only Jed’s family would have been let in there.  Now they’re throwing the Jews parties.”
“Someone has to,” she cracked.  She was on a roll tonight.
“All for me, a hack who lives in Paris and doesn’t even like Bruce Springsteen.”
“We’re South Coral’s favorite sons and daughters, I guess,” Effie rationalized.  “I mean, can you name one other famous person from this town?”
I admitted that I couldn’t.
“And in all our interviews, all we talk about is how far we’ve come and how we’re never going back, though not in so many words, I guess.  So maybe they feel like they’ve won a victory.”
It was funny to think of our return here as a victory, though I supposed it was, in a way, for everyone.
At that moment, I noticed something out the window, and I leaned in close to her, smelling her perfume (sharp and memorable, like her).  "Look," I whispered.  "It's snowing."
And it was, a light dusting, the first snow of the year back home.  Backlit by the Christmas lights of the Evanstons across the street, it was beautiful like snow had never been before.  And Effie was looking with me, her eyes frozen to the window.  A moment of complete silence, and we were sharing it.  We didn't look away for a long time, and at first I thought we were sharing something real and significant, but then I thought, Maybe she thinks if she looks away first, it'll hurt my feelings, make me feel like a little boy marveling at the ingredients of his day off from school.  So all I could think about, as I stared out the window with Effie, was, Is she humoring me?  Is everyone humoring me?  Am I just a mass of insecurities that people are treating like a person out of a misguided sense of pity?  What do my parents think of me?  What does Jed think of me?  Most importantly, what does she think of me, and could she ever look at me the way I'm looking at her right now?  All while Elm Street out there looked like a scene out of White Christmas.
And then she looked away, and I looked away, and I looked back at her.  And I didn't feel so bad, somehow.

The next morning was the coldest day in the history of South Coral.  The windchill was sixteen below, but, true to form, the town was up and at 'em by six AM, morning commuters trudging down the street with the resigned goodwill of unwilling soldiers going to fight a popular war.  Elm was dusted with snow and frozen where the melted runoff had made an ill-fated run for the gutters.  The trees looked brittle.  The windows were so fogged they might as well have been frozen solid.  I had to get outside.
Effie had made her escape shortly after the snow stopped.  The brief excitement of returning home, tempered as it was by the reality of South Coral falling short of my romanticized expectations, was falling away even further after yet another Effie-adjacent experience had led to nothing.  I was flooded with the disappointment that inevitably entered the room whenever Effie left, like Superman changing into his street clothes and reappearing, unsure why the party has suddenly been drained of vitality.
I considered my options.  There was Jed, but that was probably silly.  The topics the two of us could cover in a one-on-one conversation had been exhausted the night before.  My parents were soon to wake up, but I wasn't sure I could handle the barrage of flattery and French toast from my mother, nor the awkward silence and occasional manly camaraderie from my father.  Going over to Effie's would seem presumptuous--what we had, I'd found, could be spoiled by overexposure.
So what was left?  Solitaire and the oppressive expanse of the empty page in my typewriter.  Because that had worked so well yesterday.
Within minutes I was ready to go, in my Parisian overcoat and my father's Russian bomber hat with the side-flaps.  The coat was thick enough that I could ram into the door sideways and barge it open like a human battering ram.
Not thick enough--within seconds I was freezing.  A layer of ice, coated with the dusting of snow from the previous night, had replaced asphalt as the default surface of the street.  I slipped slightly, then, like a cat-burglar, found my footing on a strip of snow and marched ahead.
Deal Plaza was a conglomeration of stores and restaurants at the end of Elm Street that functioned as the Times Square of South Coral.  It was constantly flooded with teenagers during the school day and, at night, thrill-seeking adults who had neither the time nor the inclination to make the trek to Manhattan.  It had always been, at least for Effie and myself, the manifestation of our failure to escape the doldrums of suburbia.  Upon seeing it for the first time in almost a year I was immediately stricken with the accumulated hatred for the state of New Jersey that had been bubbling within my breast for twenty-eight years.
A ghost town.  Even the train station was empty.  Instinctively, I made the left onto West Avenue and towards the bookstore, where I had spent many lonely afternoons feeling sorry for myself and trying to force my way through Adventures of Augie March.  Through the fogged windows I saw that they had changed their hours and didn't open until later.  It was also a Barnes and Noble.
Peering in disgust through the glass at my old familiar haunt, now bordered in greens and oranges to signify its new corporate allegiances, I was suddenly stopped dead when, in the corner, my eyes happened upon a sign bearing the logo of my least popular book of stories.  The rest of the sign was obscured behind an armchair, and no matter how I shifted or contorted, I could not see the rest of it.  But I had to know--what did it mean?  What was my book doing on a window display?
Suddenly I was in a panic.  Had Effie been right?  Were we really hometown heroes?  Was I going to have to go door to goddamn door, thanking every resident for the invaluable good they'd done my career just by being around?  Would there be--God forbid--more c***tail parties at the country club?  To think, I'd come home from Paris looking for peace!
In the midst of my burgeoning quarter-life crisis a familiar sedan pulled into the parking lot behind the bookstore, and I dashed through the alleyway to meet it.  Mr. Azalea, the owner of the shop for going on thirty years, was already emerging.  I called out, "Mr. A, can you--" and immediately slipped on a murderous patch of black ice, crashing heavily to the asphalt and splitting my forehead open.

I have always despised, in any writing, the interminable cliche of the protagonist suffering an accident which renders him unconscious, then awakening in a hospital surrounded by friends and family.  Nonetheless, this is exactly what happened to me on that December morning.
My mother, naturally, held the spot closest to my bed, for it was even more important than my feelings that the world know how good a mother she really was.  My father sat on a chair in the corner.  And at the foot of the bed there stood Effie, Jed, the Pembertons and the Hesters, accompanied by approximately thirty people none of whom I had ever seen before in my life.
Linda yelped with glee to see my eyes opening and leaned in closer.  "He's awake!" she shrieked unnecessarily, for most of the room had gathered in tight already.  I tried, as I have many times when my mother has screamed in my supine face, to turn over and cover my head with the pillow, only to find that I was restrained--effectively tied to the bed. 
"What the hell is going on?" I murmured.  I sounded weak and effete, and cursed Effie for seeing me like this.
"Mr. Azalea found you bleeding in the parking lot in Deal Plaza," my father answered, almost chiding.  "What the hell were you doing out in that weather?"
I tried to say, "What were you doing out?," but my mother interrupted, "Don't you dare speak to him like that when he's in this condition!"  My father shrugged.
Effie and Jed asked "Are you all right?" almost simultaneously, then looked at each other and smiled sheepishly.  I wanted to punch Jed in his fat face.
"I feel a little hazy," I said.
"Everyone's been asking," Jed almost laughed, gesturing toward the peanut gallery in what now seemed to be the cavernous hotel room.
Those aforementioned thirty people had been completely silent so far, but stared at me, fascinated, with a look uncomfortably redolent of Kathy Bates in Misery, creeping up to James Caan's bed with a book awaiting an autograph.  "Hello, all!" I called to them, desperately trying to manufacture good humor and wit.  "Get out of my room, please!"
My mother set about busily clearing the room of South Coralites.  I refocused my attention on Jed and Effie's respective parents, to whom I was now being exposed, in my somewhat weakened state, for the first time in over five years.  I quickly distinguished them by my mental shorthand--George Pemberton, cheery in comparison to my father but still relatively stolid; his wife Jeannie, shockingly tiny and a terrible cook; Ira Hester, a booking agent for several late-night talk shows who never hesitated to tell you about it; and Wanda Hester, who looked almost exactly like Effie and had served, in my long-past childhood, as an occasional substitute in my more lurid fantasies.  (What do you want?)
"George, Ira, Wanda, Jeannie," I said, nodding at each of them jokingly.  "So I'm still functioning."
"Almost," Ira said, "I'm George," then laughed heartily.  Wanda slapped his shoulder.
"Mom," I called, ignoring that egregious joke.  "Why am I tied down?"
"You hurt yourself, dear," she called helpfully, closing the door.
"So you can't roll around and stuff," Jed said, punching me on the shoulder.
Yes, as it turned out, my forehead had split open down to the skull, and I was confined to the hospital bed for the remainder of the day, then my bed at home for the next week, and I was not to strain myself unduly for close to eight weeks.  This was repeated in various moods of affability by both the nurse, who kept circling through to ensure that my head remained attached to my neck, and by my visiting party, who evidently felt I would feel more comfortable if they made out that this whole affair was some sort of great joke.
If you'll pardon me for reusing a device, here are some samples of the conversation that followed:
• "Guess it can't be helped--he always was a slippery fella." -- George Pemberton
• "So many people came around.  Looks like you're more popular crippled than walking." -- Jed Pemberton
• "You should have seen Mr. A.  You could have knocked him over with a patch of black ice." -- Effie
• "Well, looks like it's time to split." -- Ira Hester, followed by general laughter
All while my mother and father looked on with an odd mixture of pity and pride.
After a while they were all gone, filing out with the precision of an army regiment, long before visiting hours were over.  My parents were of course the last to leave, and then only reluctantly, but they informed me they had "an appointment" and had to get going.  I reflected briefly that during the time I had been home, my parents had probably been out of the house more than they had during the last year.
And I was alone and had all the time in the world to reflect on the poster I'd seen in Mr. Azalea's office.  South Coral was conspiring against me somehow, I was sure of it.  First this town-wide Class of '05 obsession, now this injury--all so I would stay here, all because, instead of returning to my apartment in New York from my fellowship, I had come straight to suburban New Jersey, the better to collect the pieces of my uninteresting life and display them in some sort of macabre Cornell box.
But why was I back here in the first place?  The cajoling of my mother--"Come home for Hannukah.  Your fellowship will be over.  We'll have dinners.  It'll be nice"--then the follow-up phone calls--"Jed says they're sure the Jets will make the playoffs this year.  So maybe he'll come home too.  He can come over.  You'll see him;" "Guess what?  Effie's coming home too!  Isn't that great!  So we can get the old Three Musketeers together again!" and I was walking down the Rue de Rivoli, my phone to my ear, nodding pacifically as if I was in the kitchen listen to my mother's cretinous outpourings, and my face went blank when I heard that name, and I went back to my room and looked at my clothes and thought What will I wear, and though it was only October I went online and booked a flight back to JFK right then, and--yes.  It was my mother.  If I was going to figure out what was going on here, my starting point would be Linda Gilbert.  I would start right away.

I was home the next morning, as promised, and my parents were once again out on the town almost as soon as they'd gotten me in the door, my father throwing me a resigned shrug as they climbed into the car and drove away.  I hadn't had time to interrogate my mother, though I did my best, calling from the back seat halfheartedly, "So how was your evening?" and getting back an "Oh, same as always," which of course did nothing for me.
I was alone in the house again, and I had now exhausted all my South Coral options aside from finally facing my goddamn ironic hipster typewriter up on the third floor.
I went upstairs, typed the words, "Leroy arrived wearing a thick bandage," then played ten rounds of solitaire and took a nap.

I woke up outside of time, with that peculiar groggy feeling one gets after a snooze that takes up most of the day, my teeth aching from being clenched and ground for seven hours.  I have always been a heavy and an unhealthy sleeper.
The first thing I did was go to the bathroom to look at myself in the mirror, something I hadn't done since before the accident.  Like Leroy, I was wearing a thick bandage that covered most of the left side of my head.  There was a bruise above my left eye that spilled upward and disappeared under the expanse of gauze.  I looked like a cartoon character and I felt like a hangover had been compacted to the size of a ball-peen hammer and collided with my forehead.
I took too much pain medication and stumbled downstairs.  In the living room were my parents, Jed and Effie, and one of the unfamiliar people who had crowded into my hospital room the previous day.
Jed had his arm around Effie.
I corrected my walk so as to appear marginally less drunk and knocked wittily on the wall by the door.  "Good evening, friends," I sang, and barged in to flop down on the couch on Effie's other side.  Jed carefully removed his arm so as not to hit me in the head by accident.  I grinned widely at him.
"How you feelin'?" my father asked.
"Fine," I lied.  Then, of the stranger, "Who's this lovely gentleman?"  I was going too hard with the joviality.  Tone it down, Gilbert.
My mother looked shocked.  "You don't remember Todd Wilshire?" she asked.
"Nope," I replied cheerily.  I got up and shook his hand.  "Pleasure to meet you."
Todd Wilshire was a weedy little ferret of a man with the seemingly permanent notion that someone was shining a flashlight in his eyes.  He averted your gaze even if you were two inches away, as I was.  He grinned painfully at the ground as I retreated to my seat, revealing little dolphin-like teeth with at least an inch between each molar.  When I was already almost seated again, he murmured, "I went to school with you guys."
"Oh," I said.  "Were you a grade behind or something?"
"No," Jed said, seemingly averting his gaze as well.  "Class of '05, just like us."
I chuckled.  "Here for the reunion, huh?"
Everyone in the room looked at the ground.  There was a long and uncomfortable moment of silence.
Todd slapped his knees.  "Well, I gotta go," he said, and stood up abruptly.  As if pulled by strings, everyone else in the room got up too, smiling widely at him.
"So sorry to hear that," my mother said, rushing to the front door and opening it even as she spoke.  "But Kyle does need his rest."
"I don't need rest," I said weakly, shrugging to emphasize how little I cared.  "I'm rested.  I'm fully rested."
"He has to go, Kyle," my father growled, and shook Todd's hand as he curled his way around the corner to the door.
Effie and Jed had already sat down again next to me, as if relieved.
"Nice to see you again, Kyle," came Todd's voice from the porch, and my mother shut the door.
"I've never met that guy before in my life," I insisted.
Simultaneously, everyone in the room said, "Huh."

Later it was my mother and me in the kitchen.  She was washing dishes.  Jed and Effie were off to their respective families.  My father was asleep.
"Ma."  I would start it off.  "When I was in Deal Plaza yesterday, I was trying to go to the bookstore."
"Oh, really?"  She turned around for a moment as she transferred the salad bowl to the drying rack.  "I suppose it does make sense, seeing as Mr. Azalea found you in the parking lot.  Whatever for?"
"Well, I was just thinking about us coming back, you know?  And how I figured everything would be different?"
"And was it?"
"Yeah, as a matter of fact."
"How's that?"  Patronizing, like she was talking to a child.
I was already exasperated.  "Mom, I saw a poster for Raging Primitives in the window at the bookstore," I blurted.  She looked at me like I was crazy.  "You're going to say, 'So what?'  But Mr. Azalea doesn't stock my books, Mom.  It's not like I haven't been back here.  I've been to the bookstore.  I was there in January.  He's never stocked any of my work before."
My mother scoffed.  "Doesn't stock your work?  What are you talking about?  He's your biggest fan."
"Don't lie to me, Mom."  I was really angry now, and scared, too, somehow, like someone's shadow was looming over me.  Now it was my turn for italics again.  "Mom, what is going on here?  You guys are out all the time all of a sudden -- You're never out.  You were at the country club -- You would never go to the country club.  This poster in the bookstore.  Those people in my hospital room.  Todd, whoever the hell he is.  I know he never went to South Coral High.  You and Dad and Jed and Effie all seem to know what's going on, but people have been looking at me weird since I got home, and I have no idea what it means!"
My mother slammed a wooden spoon down in the sink.  I started.
"Don't you dare talk to your mother that way!" she snarled.  She starting approaching me threateningly, and I backed up against the counter, even more frightened.  "Now, Kyle, I know you have a head injury, but there is only so much paranoia and anger I will take in my house!    We're never out?  Mr. Azalea doesn't stock your books?  How would you know?  You're never here."
"Mom -- " I was instinctually on the defensive, but she held up her hand and stopped me.
"As for Todd and those people in your room, it so happens that you have a number of fans in this town, including Mr. Azalea, who are interested in you, your work, and your welfare.  Admittedly, some of them have never met you, which explains their devotion to you, I think, but if you're going to be such a crab, there's not much they can do about that, is there?  Now I want you to go upstairs and take your medication before I regret inviting you home for what was supposed to be a wonderful week!"
"Mom," I whined, "You can't tell me to go to my room.  I'm twenty-eight years old."
"You're in my house, you have a medical condition, and you're behaving like a mental patient," countered my mother, "so I think I can do or not do just about whatever I please.  Now unless you're going to help me wash the dishes, go to your room."
I went upstairs.  She didn't fool me for a second.

I waited until they had fallen asleep and left the house surreptitiously.  The cold was painful and intense.  I had remembered to dress in layers tonight, and I clutched them carefully around me as I tiptoed down the un-iced gutter the four or five blocks to Bluefin Avenue, the walk with which I had become all to familiar over the painful years.  On the way to Effie's house the trees were New York in miniature, reaching into the thinning air, grasping at something they could never hope to achieve, green in the summer and deep chocolate brown in the winter -- a Candyland of my imagination.  On the way back they were drooping reminders of my failure, dead on arrival.  Something worthless this way comes.
The house was enormous (Tonight Show money) and painted a deep silver gray like the chrome of an untainted car bumper.  The windows were all lit -- the Hesters had always been a more nocturnal family than mine.  I stopped for a moment at the bottom of the walk and stared up at the forbidding facade, sighing deeply.  I put my hands on my hips, looked up at Effie's room on the second floor, and sighed again.  (This was my usual routine upon approaching 941 Bluefin, almost like a hex I performed on myself.)
I knocked.  Wanda answered almost immediately.  In the bright fluorescent light of the entryway she looked unconscionably old.
"Hi, Mrs. Hester," I said, quietly.  "Is Effie home?"
Wanda looked nervously at my bandage, which was beginning to slip down over my eye.  "Should you be out of the house, Kyle?" she asked by way of greeting.
"Oh, it's not that serious," I said, trying to sound cheerful, "the doctors let me go fairly early.  If I take my medication I should be fine.  Is Effie home?"
"Yes," she said, warily.
There was a long pause.  "May I see her?" I followed up, losing confidence quickly.
"She's upstairs," said Wanda.  Like her daughter, she had a knack for avoiding the question.
"So may I see her?"  I wasn't leaving.  I had to see her.
Wanda opened the door very slowly, and the creaking hinges marked my entry, as they had so many times before, to the Hester mansion.  The dog that had bludgeoned its way past its divider and to the door to bark at my arrival was long-dead now, but the house still smelled like it, or maybe it had smelled like the house -- I have a way of conflating these things.  Either the house or the dog, then, smelled of ancient wood and coal-burning fires, cool, clean air, and a slight tinge of mildew.  It was a stench my mother, with her nose as sharp as her insults, always resented, but I loved it; the instant it entered my nostrils something in my bloodstream told me Effie wasn't far away.
Sure enough, there she was, descending the staircase, and God, how glad I was to see her out of the oppressive company of Jed and our parents and that semi-schizoid Todd Wilshire.  In her space, in her light, she was a star in more ways than one -- how was it that hair so black could shine so brightly at ten at night in the dead of winter?
From behind the balustrade she called, "Kyle!  Are you out of your mind?"
Yes, I thought dreamily as I watched her scamper down the steps and to my side, I must be.  Wanda had disappeared mysteriously -- another of her talents -- and Effie and I were alone at last.
I don't know exactly how to articulate how simultaneously strenuous and wonderful it is to be alone with someone you've loved your whole life and who will never love you back.  Every second the pressure is on: What will you say next?  Do I shift the focus back to her?  How?  How do you make yourself a sufficiently interesting conversationalist so that she won't lose interest and stare off into space as you talk at her?  You are too quick to laugh at her jokes, and sometimes they aren't even jokes.  You don't even care what she's saying, though of course you love the sound of her voice.  You stare at her creamy skin and her soft red lips and you think, How could I be here, actually talking to someone so beautiful?  Why does she even deign to listen to me? You are fascinated by her, and she is repulsed by you -- you can tell.
The cosmic horror of this situation is only truly revealed to you if you, like me, are best friends with the girl, and are party to her relationships with other men more attractive than you are.  Then you'll see what she looks like when she flirts -- the object of your affection in a conversation she actually wants to be in.  Then she'll pull the same tricks you pulled on her; the carefully calculated contact between her elbow and his, the flirty laugh, the encouragements: "You're so good at this, Brent," and, like a voyeur, you put yourself in his place, until he speaks and you're drawn out of it.  S***, you think, I almost forgot.  Back to your own life, so disappointingly empty of her and full of you.
All of these dispiriting thoughts flew through my head as I watched Effie descend the staircase and stand several feet away from me, looking at my forehead worriedly, perhaps because I couldn't help thinking that if, say, Brent were in my position there would be at least some Florence Nightingale-esque physical contact involved.
"Kyle," Effie whispered, "you should go home.  It's dangerous for someone in your condition to be -- did you drive here?"
"What?  No."
"Come in here," she said, gesturing toward me as she flipped on the light in the expansive living room.  A fire was dying in the grate.
We sat down on the couch.  She got right to the point.  "What was up with you tonight, at your house?"
"I don't want to talk about that," I said, right now, I added mentally.  "I don't want to talk about how weird everything is, for some reason.  I battled that out with my mom tonight, to no avail."
Effie looked confused.  "Then why are you here?"
I looked at her.  "I wanted to talk to you."
"What about?"  Almost disinterested.  There was that feeling again, that I hadn't really felt since I'd talked to Jed on the phone: I'm disappointing them.  I'm boring them.
I leaned in.  Effie leaned back, almost instantaneously.  I shot upright, shocked and embarrassed.  "Effie," I said, "you're rehearsing right now, aren't you?"
"Yeah," she replied, rubbing her arm.  "Through Christmas.  Why?"
"Why aren't you there?" I asked.  "What are you doing here?"
"I'm not gonna indulge your conspiracy theories, Kyle," Effie said forcefully, looking at the fire.  "It just so happened Mrs. Gilbert called my parents and we know all about how weird you've been acting."
I felt like I'd been slapped in the face.  "Effie," I almost begged, "I'm not accusing anyone.  I just wanted to talk to you.  My mom... Called here?"
"About an hour ago," she murmured, "which is why I was so worried to see you were out of the house.  We don't think it's safe for you to be out when you're feeling like this."
"Like what?"
"Paranoid."
Ah!  A shot through the heart.  Down to business.  "Why did you come home, Effie?"
"For the holidays, Kyle."
"Is that the only reason?"
"I mean... To see my family.  I guess."
"Did you come home to see me?"
She turned back to me, surprised.  "What?"
"Did you come home to see me?  Was I at all a part of the equation?"
"What do you mean?"
"You knew I would be home from Paris.  My mother must have told you."
"Yeah, I mean, I think.  So what?"
"So did you think about me?  At all?  When you said you would duck out of rehearsal to come back to South Coral for a week, Broadway rehearsal, Effie, did the thought of me being here even come up?"  I was angry now.  "Do you think about me at all?  Do you think about how I am?"
Effie was afraid.  She was scrunched up on her side of the couch.  "I didn't really think... When I came home... I honestly had no idea, Kyle..."
I grasped a pillow for support and choked it within an inch of its life.  "So I wasn't even a factor?  Did you even want to see me, or did you come to my house for my mother's cooking?"
"When I came over, I heard you were home.  Kyle, what do you -- "
I stood up.  I should have known how ridiculous an idea this was.  "Never mind," I practically spat down on her.  "I just wanted some closure on something."  And I clutched my coat -- still wrapped tight around me -- and stalked out the door, just as Todd had done last night.  How appropriate.

The next morning, for a change, my parents were home, making waffles in the kitchen.  Luckily my coat was in my room from the previous night, so I swallowed a handful of meds, dressed, called a car, and made a break out the front door quickly and quietly so my mother wouldn't hear.
The driver of the black car was named either Jean or Sean -- I couldn't quite catch it --  and was originally from Short Hills, a fact he seemed to think was endlessly fascinating.  During the drive to the Mountain View Hotel, I was treated to a number of quote-worthy gems about the birthplace of the American Jap, including but not limited to "You got some beautiful houses down here.  O'course, back in Short Hills the architecture is absolutely unbeatable", "You're a writer, huh?  I tell ya, back in Short Hills there are some people you could write about, I'm tellin' ya", and "Essex County is the absolute breadbasket of American can-do attitude."
We pulled up at the Mountain View at 8:30, and the lobby was quieter than I was used to.  I'd been to a few bar mitzvahs here back in the day, and I recalled that the view from the roof of the New York skyline was beautiful.  But more importantly, I knew that this was the only hotel at which one could plausibly stay if one had business to conduct in South Coral or the surrounding area.
The lobby was enormous, and like a detective I immediately began my analysis.  The cafe -- spacious but empty, empty of anyone who might recognize me and report back to my parents.  The bookstore -- an outpost of Mr. Azalea's flagship store back in Deal Plaza (now also augmented with Barnes and Noble displays), leather-bound novels lined up in the window like a Fifth Avenue Christmas display, closed now this early in the morning, empty too.  I approached, my feet scraping and seeming to echo out across the few early risers talking to the concierge to my left, and craned my neck the same way I had the previous day at another bookstore window, angling to see if Mr. Azalea indeed stocked my books at all his stores.  No.  No poster for Raging Primitives here.  Back to the entryway.  I was certain now that the flabby traveler with the Eagles jersey at the counter was staking me out as I was attempting to stake out Todd Wilshire.
I was consciously repressing the soporific effects of my medication now.  The sweat was pouring down my forehead like a waterfall, catching in my eyebrows and threatening to obscure my vision.  No!  Now was not the time to lose focus.  I steeled myself, repressed the ache in my forehead, and staggered forward to the front desk, where a family whose selective choices in personal hygiene marked them as visitors from the shore had finished their deliberate checkout process.
The front desk manager was a petite woman with a blond bun and a look on her face like she smelled something obscene.  The light behind her head was blinding after the dimness of South Coral in December, and I blinked several times to adjust.  She blinked back at me.  "Sir?"  S***!  Focus, Gilbert.
"Yes," I managed after a moment.  My mouth was like cotton.  Every side effect of my pain meds seemed to be hitting me simultaneously.  Maybe my mother had been right to be protective.  "I'm looking" -- pause here to swallow -- "for a friend of mine who's" -- heavy breathing -- "staying here, I think."
The manager looked at me strangely.  "Do you know his room number, Mr. Gilbert?"
"I know his name," I said, then froze.  "You know my name."
"Of course."  She was acting as if I was crazy not to expect immediate recognition from the front desk manager of a middling hotel in central Jersey.  "You're Kyle Gilbert, am I correct?"  As if she was just trying to clarify my information before she served my needs.
I reached across the counter and grabbed her lapels, bringing her name-tag into my blurred range vision.  "Sarah," I said, reading it quickly, "Sarah --"
She was struggling, starting to scream.  I felt as if my eyes had been dilated, I was focusing in on the pink spot at the back of her mouth.  My hearing died out for a moment, but not before I could hear, "How do you know my --" and her low-pitched shriek evolving into a wail that filled the lobby, that turned every head, including a burly man with shaggy dark hair who was now running over to the desk, who was grabbing me, no, no, no...
Now Jed had me on a fluffy pink chair at the cafe and was fanning me with his coat.  "Kyle," he was saying, calmly, as a crowd of miscellaneous hotel guests gathered in close, too close.  "Can you hear me, Kyle?"
I was totally awake now.  "Yes, Jedediah, I can hear you," I said, brushing off his arm and sitting up.  "Where's the desk girl?"
Jed chuckled nervously.  "Maybe another encounter with Sarah is not exactly what you need right now," he said.  He was right, of course he was right.  I could feel that time was no longer disjointed, that I was making decisions based more on logic than on fear; had I actually hired a car this morning?
"What are you doing here, Jed?" I asked, shaking myself out of my distraction.
"I was about to ask you the same thing."  Jed was looking at me like my father.  Maybe in all the goddamned collusion they were adopting each other's tics.
"I was looking for someone," I said.
"On the roof?" shot back Jed suspiciously.
"The roof?"
"Sarah said you were saying something about the roof, about remembering the roof."
I pooh-poohed this.  "I never said anything about the roof.  I was asking her how she could possibly know my name."
Jed gave me that same strange look.  "What do you mean, how could she know your name?"
"She called me Mr. Gilbert, right away."
"Is that why you grabbed her?"
"I grabbed her lapels," I was quick to correct.  "Because she was freaking me out."
"And because you're on medication," Jed reminded me.
"Yeah, maybe," I admitted.  "But things aren't right here, Jed."
Another crowd had begun to gather on the outskirts of the cafe.
"Get out of here," Jed snapped at them.  "Give him some space, for Christ's sake."
As they dispersed, I grabbed at Jed desperately.  "Jed," I begged, "do you know what's going on here?  Please explain what's going on."
Jed looked at me, seeming almost to pity me.  I was appealing to his better nature and once again he, like everyone else in this town all of a sudden, seemed to be taking the place of one of my parents.  What had I done wrong?
"Let's go up to the roof, after all," Jed said, smiling gently at me.  "Maybe you'll think more clearly up there."

The view was just as I remembered it from the last time I'd been here, which I guessed was the send-off party the Hesters had thrown before Effie had gone off to Carnegie Mellon.  I'd gravitated that night to the spot, squeezed between two potted plants, that offered the best view of the city.  The prospect of Effie's imminent departure had not agreed with me, and I was using the distant lights of Manhattan, a jazz piano solo played in stone across the sky, to ground me to some sense of reality.
I thought that night about how easily time slipped away, about how I considered myself a proactive person but had left by the wayside the primary objective of my young life, which was to tell Effie how I felt about her.  A succession of high school boyfriends, each burlier and more cheerful than the last, had filtered through her life as mine had remained pretty much empty but for my typewriter, and my jealousy and devotion had by eighteen worked themselves up to nearly atomic levels.  At the time she was single, and I had resolved that at her party that night I would finally approach her and say, almost offhandedly, "You know I love you, right?"  And she would say, "What?" and I would say, "Oh yeah.  I've loved you my whole life."  And then I would walk away, slowly and deliberately, disappearing into the crowd, and giving my character in the story of her life a sort of a comic gravitas, like Billy Crystal in When Harry Met Sally.  And maybe she wouldn't come after me right away.  Hell, maybe she wouldn't call me for months.  But that exit would work on her conscience, by God, and I was certain that at some point, at some time in the future, I would get a call and pick up the phone and say, with the same offhanded, uncaring tone, "Hello?"  And she would say, "Listen, Kyle, I... Well... You kinda threw me that night."
And I'd say (as I pumped my fist in the air), "What night?"
And she'd say, "At the party.  We haven't seen each other in a while, you know."
And I would take the sudden change in subject in stride, and as I imagined her milky white ear against the phone I'd answer, "That's true.  Are you going to be in New York anytime soon?  We could get together.  See a show."
And she'd say, "No, Kyle, that's not what I called about.  See, lately I've been thinking about you, you know, in general, you and me, and, you know, us..."
And the ball would be rolling.  And I would work my charming magic, as the quirky writer living in the big city (bigger than Pittsburgh, anyway), and I'd eventually swoop in and see her across the quad, and then -- wide shot as we slowly walked toward each other, grinning, and we'd walk hand in hand to her dorm room where she'd sit me down and say she'd always felt the same way about me, somehow.
That night, in the blazing hot New Jersey summer of 2005, I stared at Manhattan and never approached Effie at all, not even to wish her well.  I got in late and left early, and the whole time I was there, I stood breathing heavily in between the potted plants, obscured from the writhing teenagers goaded by the DJ into a state of primal insurgency, and hoped and prayed that someone -- it didn't even have to be Effie, just someone -- would come over to me and maybe compliment my work in the school lit journal, and say, "Hey, Kyle, how do you know Effie?"  And maybe I'd respond, "She's my best friend.  Best friend in the world."  Even though I knew that wasn't true.

Now the roof had been remodeled, and instead of the wide, flat desert it had been in my high school days, it was covered in topiary like a maze you might find out back at Downton Abbey.  The view of New York was gone.  I immediately sat down heavily on a green park bench.
Jed grabbed at me.  "Kyle, are you okay?"
I felt my head.  The bandages were so thick.  "Yeah, I'm fine," I said, "except I'm scared."
"Scared of what?"  Jed looked legitimately concerned now.
"Jed," I said quietly, "please tell me what's going on.  Why are my parents always out?  Why does everyone freak out every time they see me?  Why is my work suddenly stocked at Azalea's?  What are we doing home?" I turned to him, deadened, certain that I would get some sort of obfuscation as a response.
Instead he sighed and sat down on the bench next to me.  "You know, Gilbert," he said colloquially, as if he were about to throw his arm over my shoulder, "I always thought you had a thing with Effie at some point or another."
Normally I would perk up when someone suggested something like this.  Instead I just deflated a little.  "Jed," I said defeatedly, massaging my forehead, "you're asking me about high school?  I'm practically a virgin now."
Jed chuckled a little, then looked me dead in the eye.  "Did you have a thing for her, though?"
"Sure, why not?" I deflected.  "Everyone did, probably, at some point."
"But you guys have known each other your whole lives," he insisted, turning to look at me more closely.  It wasn't really an interrogation.  He seemed almost desperate.  What was he looking for?  "You never got close enough where maybe you imagined, in a real way -- "
"Jed," I interrupted, "all jokes aside, we're adults here.  I don't want to talk to you about Effie or high school or anything else.  Now, once and for all, I want to know -- "  Lightbulb.  "Actually, I want to know just one thing.  Who is Todd Wilshire?"
Jed looked surprised.  "That guy from the other day?  He was in our class.  I thought you said you didn't want to talk about high school."
I was ready for this.  "No, Jed," I croaked firmly.  "He wasn't in our class.  You wanna know how I know?  Because I found our yearbook last night, and I looked through it, and there's no Todd Wilshire in there.  I called my friend in Milwaukee from the Class of '04, and there's no Todd Wilshire in his class either.  There's a picture of the Class of '06 online at a banquet dinner from their graduation with every person named in the caption.  No Todd Wilshire.  There is a Todd Wilson."
Jed was quick to cover.  "That was probably him.  We probably just got his name wrong.  Misheard him or something."
I shook my head condescendingly.  "I thought you were better than that, Jed.  Todd Wilson is black, six-foot-two, and three hundred pounds.  He plays linebacker for the Saints."
Jed sank back onto the bench, turning pale.
Now it was my turn to lean forward --  the italics of body language.  "No Todd Wilshire in our class.  No Todd Wilshire at our school.  And I'm willing to bet something else.  That guy who was at my house?  His name is not Todd Wilshire.  So I'm gonna ask you one more time.  Who is he?"

The man who had been impersonating a family friend named Todd Wilshire, I found, was staying in room 303.  Jed was right behind me as I strode imperiously up to the thick wooden door of what was almost comically called the Lilac Suite, which I assumed referred to the Febreeze scent required to mask the smell of the exhaust from the adjacent parking lot.
Knock, knock.  Gentle but firm.  And the door opened.
There was the weedy little bastard with his teeth each a foot apart from each other like some kind of underdeveloped toddler.  When he saw me he jerked backward like he'd walked into a bar.  Jed held up his hand.
"Calm down, Ted," he said, "it's time, anyway."
"But it's not finished," said Ted Mint, backing, terrified, into an open drawer.  "It's not ready.  We weren't going to -- "
"Listen, Ted," I said coolly, "you got your equipment in there?"
"What equipment?" said Mint immediately, before backpedalling, "No, it's not in here.  I don't know what you're talking about."
"Show it to him," Jed said resignedly.  "Ted, you know we have to do this."  And we elbowed our way past the squirming coward into the Lilac Suite.
After finagling and some near-physical intimidation techniques by both Jed and myself, I was set up in the far corner by the window at Mint's laptop watching a whirl of activity on the screen.  Mint was hunched awkwardly over me with his fingers flying over the keys, launching a series of editing and screening software.  Jed was sitting on the bed, his head practically in his hands.
Mint, finishing, backed away.  "It's not finished yet," he cautioned, "so don't... Just don't judge it in this form."
"I'll do my best to stay neutral," I snapped sarcastically, then turned my attention to the screen.
Black screen at first.  Then a voice up in the background -- my mother's voice.
"He was always a quiet boy."  The jig was up.  "He never had very many friends.  He was busy with other things."
Other interviews: my teachers, my family.  Long, Ken Burns-style tracking shots of pictures of my house and high school.  Then, finally, home video of me, as a four-year-old on my birthday, practically rolling with ecstasy among the books I'd gotten as gifts.  Fade to black, up title:
The Raging Primitive: The Return of Kyle Gilbert.
The reality of the situation began to dawn on me, horror filling the room slowly like molasses, as the documentary unfolded predictably before me on Steve Mint's laptop screen.  All the notes were hit, the expected stories explored: my solitary childhood, my explosion onto the scene in college, the publication of my novels and stories, the awards, the prestige, and all the while I was a mysterious loner, almost antagonistically refusing to let my family, my friends, anybody into my life.  To Mint's viewers I would seem a cross between Salinger and Nicholson from The Shining.
It was funny; I had expected something like this -- the facts of my case were so unique and odd that I figured my burgeoning fame had to be involved somehow.  But it still managed to shock me when the documentary, which had previously been dedicated to pictures and home video, transitioned into a real bona fide motion picture upon the arrival of Effie Hester to South Coral.
Effie had not previously been a character in Raging Primitive: The Return of Kyle Gilbert (a name of characteristic Hollywood pith), so her arrival jolted me slightly, and I broke from my furious reverie to snap back towards Jed, who was now supine on the bed.  Mint, I saw, was hiding in the corner, practically biting his nails.
Back to the screen.  Effie reunites with her family.  Background on Effie.  Interviews with the Hesters and the Gilbert parents about her astounding success, beauty, and charm.  Easy contrast to me.  We were so close as children, practically inseparable.  How sweet.  And yet he hasn't spoken to her in months.  What could be coming over him?
Surprise!  Here comes NFL superstar Jed Pemberton.  You mean to tell me he's friends with the elusive, monstrous Kyle Gilbert too?  (I could just imagine my mother watching this documentary, her running commentary drowning out key details in a crowded movie theater.)  Background on Jed.  Interviews with Hesters, Gilberts, and dry, stolid Pembertons about his amazing rise.  Goddamn, these kids are practically the Royal Tenenbaums!  More easy contrast to me as the handsome Jed worries about how I'm doing, about my new novel, about my (apparently nonexistent) love life.
The suspense was building.  I could hardly wait to see how it ends.
And then -- there I was.  A shot of my parents entering the house to find me already there, seemingly filmed from the bushes out front with a handheld camera.  Some more shots of me later on in the window with Effie.  They were filming that?  Shots of me on the street stumbling toward Deal Plaza.  A shot of me -- unbelievably -- unconscious in a hospital bed!  My mother, my mother, I should have suspected.  How could I have missed this?!  How could I not have known?!
All the while the message was hammered home -- I was selfish, I was uncommunicative, I was socially awkward, I was a classical eccentric genius, gifting great work to the wider world but hurting the denizens of his own, smaller universe.  How original.
Hidden cameras places I never would have suspected they'd be.   Every nook and cranny of our house, with a particular focus on our bright and open dining room.  The Pembertons' dank parlor, in case I ever visited (fat chance).  The Hesters' living room, where my late-night conversation with Effie is featured.
I turned to Mint, eyes welling with tears.  "You edit fast," I managed to spit at him, refusing to allow this to spill over and destroy me.
Now the story was starting to trail off, and I could tell something big was coming.  There was starting to be a lot of focus on Effie and Jed.  Backstories, occasionally intersecting lives.  Then that night I came down and found "Todd" in the living room -- How fast he must have hidden his camera! -- we see my two friends on the couch in my house with their arms around each other and and and and and
A world seemed to separate me from the screen at the moment Jed's lips touched Effie's.  The ground under my feet burst into flames and crumbled when they announced, totally unexpected, apropos of nothing both narratively and logically, that they were to be married in the fall of next year.
There were twenty minutes left in the movie.
My eyes suddenly streamed with tears.  I turned around slowly, as if I knew that upon finishing my rotation I would be looking into the barrel of a gun.  Mint was looking at me hopefully, his eyes asking, "Do you like it?"  And I realized the most horrible thing about this whole situation -- Ted Mint, that loathsome beetle, that scuttling creature of the lower reaches of the earth, was a fan.  He loved my work.  He wanted me to love his.  And at that moment I decided that I was going to leave South Coral today and never return.
I stood, slowly.  Jed was still spreadeagled on the bed, the balls of his hands pressed to his eyes.  A colossus fallen.
I looked over him disgustedly.  "Jed," I said, quietly.
He removed his hands and looked up at me balefully, like a misbehaved dog.
"You asked me before if I ever had a thing for Effie."  This was it.  I was going to say it out loud.  "Well, I did.  And I do.  I've been in love with her my whole life."
Jed sat up.  I left the room.

Jean/Sean was waiting for me outside the doors.  He hadn't gone far.  On the way back to Elm Street I made two stops -- one at Azalea's, one at the country club.
The gist of the signs and decorations at both places was that the production of Raging Primitive, occurring as it was in a small city which saw little tourist traffic, was making the city a boatload of money.  (The sale of related merchandise -- my books, Effie's cast albums, Jed's memorabilia -- was making us a pretty penny as well, but somehow I was past caring.)  From Mr. Azalea himself and from various pamphlets at the country club I learned that the pivotal scene of the film was to be Effie and Jed revealing their approaching marriage and by extension their relationship to me in front of my parents, and that the eventual goal -- or so I gleaned from the townspeople's almost salivating euphemistic excitement -- was that I was to break down on film, giving Ted Mint, my parents, and the entire town a satisfying ending.
The movie was inexpertly made on a small budget, and in the grand scheme of things it probably meant nothing.  But to the people in my hometown, the people among whom I had grown up, it was absolutely enormous.  And I think one way or the other it would have felt that way to me, too.
So home it was, to our small house on the border of the nice and the not-so-nice parts of town, and goodbye, Sean/Jean, and goodbye, everything.
My parents were out -- surprise, surprise.  I suppose they hadn't even thought to wonder where I was except to vaguely hope that I was all right so that the film might be finished and their perceived celebrity might be ensured.  Sorry, folks.
Into the living room.  I sat down at the window, picked up a thick pillow, and screamed into it, relieving, if only briefly, the thick pressure pushing in through my ears.  Another scream.  "AAAIIIIIGH!"  I was somehow incapable of putting my troubles in a wider perspective, as I usually did.  South Coral was suddenly my whole world, or, more accurately, a prison, and I the sole resident in solitary.
Up the stairs quickly and nimbly to the attic and my room.  Luckily I had chosen, as I usually did on vacation (Ha!) to live out of my suitcase, and I had only to messily shove my scattered clothes and current reading material into it, then to go for my typewriter --
The sentence "Leroy arrived wearing a thick bandage" stood out, black against white, on the typewriter paper, stark and certain in this atmosphere of sudden chaos.  I dropped my suitcase on the bed and sank, almost weakly, into my desk chair, and stared at the paper.  Then I picked up my French deck of cards and played solitaire.

When I was three games in Effie arrived.  She stood at the door for a moment and I had to consciously keep myself from ogling her openly as her form sloped through my doorway, the way I'd seen it and dreamed of it so many times before.  She was wearing all black -- a perfect color for her -- and she was staring at me.  I couldn't see her expression because I was glaring at the deck hard enough to burn a hole in it.  I forced myself to match suits busily.
"Hey, Kyle," she said.
"Where are the cameras?" I asked, dead calm.  No outbursts, Gilbert.  Careful placement.  Ten on jack, jack on queen.
"No cameras," she said, just as calmly.  "Just here to see you."
"That's a change," I shot back.  There was an anger and a loss of control in my stomach.  I felt as if someone had dropped a trapdoor out from under me.  A long quiet.  I looked up at my typewriter briefly.  Leroy arrived wearing a thick bandage.
"Kyle."
Back to the cards.  "Hmm?"
"You saw the documentary."
"That's true," I nodded, holding back tears.  I felt another scream coming.  I swallowed.  "You talked to Jed?"
Effie nodded awkwardly, looking down.  "I talked to Jed."
"I wasn't crazy after all then, was I?"  I still hadn't made eye contact with her, but I was sneaking glances at her beautiful long fingers out of the corner of my eye.
"No, Kyle," she answered, "you weren't crazy.  I'm sorry."
"You're sorry."
"Yes, Kyle.  We never meant to hurt you."
Two on three, three on four.  "That's rich."
A finger on my chin.  She was lifting my face.  I looked into her dark eyes.  "We never meant to hurt you, Kyle.  I mean it."
Falling, falling.  There was no end in sight.  I bit my lip and stared at her.  Finally I said, "Everyone I've ever trusted has turned out to be an asshole."
Effie nodded sadly.  "That's generally true for everyone."
"Why is that?" I asked.  My eyes welling now.  Embarrassing.
Effie sat down on my bed.  Another dream coming true too late.  "You're thinking about it wrong," she said.  "You can't shut yourself down just because everyone's terrible."
"Seems like a pretty good reason to me," I snorted, turning back toward my typewriter.
"But if you do that, how are you any better than them?" she asked.
I whirled.  "I'm better than you," I snarled, "I'm better than all of you, who would use me as a story, my life!  My whole existence is a joke to you people, you, my mother, Jed, people with whom I've spent my whole life ingratiating myself!  I am not a factor in your story, Effie, or Jed's, or the story of South Coral, whatever the hell that is.  You people are the antagonists in mine!"
She had stood up and backed toward the door.  I stood, too, scattering my cards.  "How dare you insult me after everything you've done!  After making me a jester, a side character, in your little courtship with goddamn Jed!  And of course you pick Jed, you always have to be sleeping with someone, and you've never had any imagination in that sense, have you?"  I realized I was getting to my point.  "You never THINK, Effie!  And neither does Jed, and neither do any of our parents!  You all do what seems like the right thing to you, even if you're wrong!  And then you won't admit it.  And meanwhile I'm left up here in my room alone, going over everything over and over again, thinking, Did I do something wrong?  And you can call me obsessive or weird or self-involved, but at least I'm thinking.  Even though I'm alone."
I staggered forward toward her.  Here it is -- the breaking point.  "Why won't you love me?"
Effie was shocked.  "What?"
"Why won't you love me?" I begged, hunched over, practically on my knees.  "I love you so much.  I deserve you.  I deserve you, don't you understand?  I have given so much of myself.  Why don't you love me back?"
Effie looked at me for a moment.  "Is it true, Kyle?"
I was breathing heavily, heaving like a cartoon character.  "Is what true, Effie?"
She looked almost confused.  "Are you in love with me?"
Without missing a beat -- Billy Crystal would be proud -- I answered, "Desperately and unceasingly.  Now get the hell out of my house."
And I practically shoved her out of the room and slammed the door.

The door no longer locked, but I shoved a chair up under the knob and refused to allow my parents in when they returned, a few hours later.  Linda and Steve kept banging on the door and begging me to let them speak to me, that they had heard what Jed had showed me but it wasn't what it seemed, blah, blah, blah, but eventually they gave up and went to bed.  Good riddance.  I would have left right away -- the renter in my apartment in New York had been gone for a few days -- but instead I stayed up all night.  I had packed my cards away after Effie left and I wrote about poor Leroy for twelve hours.
It was funny -- that schmuck Leroy with the thick bandage on his head was very familiar.  He was successful, likable, deep-thinking, quick-witted, and under siege from a sea of ex-friends and petulant relatives.  Despite his genuine attempts to invite people into his life, he was either left alone or taken advantage of at every turn.  And in the end, he left home for a better life in a new place, where none of those who had held him back could ever reach him again.
I liked this story a lot.  Of course, I was never going to show it to anyone, but I liked it a lot.
I called the black car company at four in the morning, when my parents were long abed.  I went out onto the curb in the dead of night, dim streetlamp the only illumination.  My large suitcase, full of the clothes I hadn't sent ahead in a cargo plane from Paris, rested atop my smaller typewriter bag on the curb.  It was a still night, more cool than cold, and I took a minute to look around and take in South Coral for what I had by now convinced myself would be the last time.  From the top of the hill at my end of Elm facing south I could see much of the town, and I saw suddenly that it was so small, so impermanent, endless blocks of endless houses that were really nothing more than extensions of my own.  In every house lived a family, and in every family there was someone who felt they didn't belong, and at a point in the life of every such person there was a moment where they realized they were more than the sum of their insecurities.  And it didn't make me feel any less alone, but it was pleasing to see my situation for what it was.
The black car, driven by a small Russian woman with a shawl, pulled up at a little before five.  Snow dusted down through the dead, twisted trees as I strugglingly loaded my baggage into the trunk and relaxed in.  The Russian looked back at me without saying anything.  "69th and Amsterdam," I said, "New York," and those words filled me with an incredible solidity that drove out the pressure in my ears.
We drove down Main toward the Parkway, and as we approached North Ridge Terrace I looked down at my right hand and saw that the draft of the short story, which I had forgotten, was clutched tightly in my hand.  And being an old hat at asking black car drivers to make a quick detour, I did just that once again and we headed for a stopover at the Mountain View Hotel.
The lobby was dimmed; the sun had not yet risen.  As I made my way past the front desk the night shift clerk called out, "Excuse me, Mr. Gilbert, what are you doing?"  I didn't even look at her and made my way straight to the elevators back behind Azalea's outpost, where the poster for The Raging Primitive had somehow found its way into the window display overnight.
The roof was beautiful at night, even with the oppressive topiary rendering the view of the city less staggering that it had once been.  I gravitated automatically back to the spot between the two plants where I could best see the city that I now recognized instinctually as my home -- something I'd chosen, not something that had chosen me.
I remembered so many moments on this roof, looking at that city.  Parties thrown by people who didn't want me there.  Time to be alone after my grandmother, my best friend for most of my childhood, passed away at seventy after being struck by a bus.  The day before I was to enter freshman year, watching the towers burn and hearing the wails from the ground ten stories up.  And upon thinking on my state of mind in all these times of chaos and change, I remembered that in each moment, all the most significant moments of my life, I had been thinking mostly if not only of Effie.  She, or rather, her ethereal dream-self, had followed me, dogged my footsteps, since my childhood.  She had affected my work, my relationships, my approach to everyday life, to survival.  And she had never given me anything but disdain in return.  I had been right, in my outburst back in my room.  Effie was the villain of my life.
And yet I wanted her.  Now as then I wanted her.  I had spent so much of my life wanting, wanting, wanting, when everyone else just had.  How was that fair?
I tore my story into tiny shreds and threw them off the roof.  Then I headed for the elevators and reality.