This is the next installment in a fiction series that began here.

“See, Evs, the point of a Yale degree isn’t to say you have a degree in economics or English or political science,” says Mark. “It’s to say you have a Yale degree. It’s all about finding your ticket, wherever it is you want to go. Same for any school like it. It’s the fast track to the top.”

Evan has just spent an entire day wandering Yale’s quads. He’s eaten up the university’s mystique, and felt the proper reverence for the great things that have been and will be done on this campus. In their more raw conversations over the past two years, Mark has conceded some discomfort at no longer being the big fish in the small pond. But as he holds court from the end of a dinner table in a modernist box of an apartment in downtown New Haven, Evan can’t help but think his best friend has found his kingdom here.

“So much for learning things because there’s actually value in learning them,” he sighs.

“We do that, too,” says the blonde Boston girl as she slops another helping of risotto on to Evan’s plate. “Well, some of us. But one of my professors literally wrote the book on gender theory.”

“No reason we can’t have it all,” says Mark as he flips his hair back out of his eyes. Evan thinks he looks preposterous in his pink button-down and the roguish new stubble adorning his cheeks, but here, surrounded by people who know nothing of their rapport, he can’t muster up his normal snarky retort. He instead makes a show of refilling his wine glass, and pours the rest of the bottle into those of his two neighbors around the table. The three of them toast to one another, and Evan lets the boozy warmth distract him from his best friend’s wanderings.

“I don’t know shit about wine, and I know this is good,” says Owen, an apartment-mate of Mark’s. He’s a fellow Minnesotan from a Twin Cities suburb Evan hadn’t heard of named Deephaven.

“Brought that one back from Sonoma when me and Evvy were out there last week. Wine Country was freaking awesome,” says Mark.

“You said you threw up in the cab,” says the tall, chiseled boy with salmon shorts and a hair parting that Moses would envy. Evan thinks this is the one Mark told him is a Vanderbilt descendant, though he loses track. He certainly has a noble air down to perfection as he leans up against the kitchen counter, safely removed from the peasants around the table.

“Not exactly Marky’s finest moment,” says Evan. The table cracks up at Mark’s expense, though he just grins shamelessly. When Evan tells this story to their high school friends, their immediate reaction is bemused horror at what the bill must have been, especially when they learn that Healdsburg is an hour’s drive from San Francisco. But here, no one even blinks at the thought.

“The two of you road tripped out there all the way from Minnesota?” the blonde asks.

“Yep! Badlands, Wyoming, three nights in Zion, Tahoe, then the Bay, all in ten days,” says Evan.

“We do a trip like that once a year,” Mark says. “Our little way to keep ourselves sane.”

“Shit, that’s awesome,” says Mark’s backup goalie, a bulky, affable, racially ambiguous New Jerseyan. “What was the best part?”

“Gotta be San Francisco,” says Mark. “Goddamn, the food, the wine, the girls…” Evan would have said Zion, but he’s too uptight about how that would play with this crowd. He did sneak out and watch the surfers on Ocean Beach the morning Mark was hung over after the visit to Sonoma, though, and that had been sublime.

“Best city on earth!” says the Salvadoran girl who Mark says comes from some politically powerful and potentially questionable family. “Maria and I were there for Pride Weekend last summer. It makes New York’s look like a county fair. Just a little slice of everyone there, together, all for unity…it’s what the future looks like.”

“Ugh. Cosmopolitan bullshit.” Mark adds a yawn for effect.

“You’re such a damn contrarian,” gripes the roommate, Owen. Evan had taken an immediate liking to Owen, as he’d welcomed in another Minnesotan and offered whispered agreement that the East Coast seemed so pretentious compared to modest and sensible Minnesota, where everyone enjoyed a pleasantly above average childhood that opened doors to the full range of possibilities. Then Evan had looked up Deephaven, and learned how much more above average some communities are than others.

“That’ll happen when you grow up in a place that’s whiter than all the snow that’s on the ground there all year,” the Salvadoran jabs, adding a none-too-subtle eyelash flutter at Mark. Yes, Evan thinks, she’s just his type: petite, precise on the details from her eyeliner to her heels, and clearly no rookie.

“Not like there aren’t heaps of evidence showing that we’re not very good at getting along with each other,” says Mark. “It’s just humans being humans. Not that I won’t do my part to spread the love…”

“But you said you loved San Francisco…”

“Personally, yeah. I like nice things. But not everyone can afford nice things.”

“You’re saying only rich people can enjoy cities like that?” asks the Boston blonde.

“I mean, look at the evidence,” Mark shrugs. “The world’s splitting apart. Rural-urban divides, racial divides, American power in decline, grand narratives getting drowned out in endless noise…we’re not living at a happy time, kids. Doesn’t mean I won’t do what I can to fix it—”

“Speak for yourself,” laughs the backup goalie.

“—But I’m not gonna let myself get left behind, either. And if anyone in this room isn’t the same way, you’re either a saint or a goddamn hypocrite.”

The goalie nods in approval, while the Boston blonde frowns and looks to Evan for a response. He can only shrug; he’s long known Mark’s stand, and while he’d like to aspire to sainthood, he’ll concede that he is in no way ready to renounce any measure of material comfort to make a point. He’s just doing a much poorer job than his Yale economics major friend to make sure he actually attains that material comfort.

“Gotta take care of our own first,” says the goalie.

“There’s a lot we can do, though!” says the Salvadoran. “And have done…look at all the progress just in our lifetimes. We need people who can see everything that’s wrong with it but still go and fix it.” She gives Mark a significant look and plays with a stray strand of hair across her chest. Evan isn’t sure if she’s flattering him or really does think he has a political future. Both seem equally plausible.

“Yeah, we do,” says Mark. “We’re gonna rule all this someday. But for now, I’ll take my nice things. Me and Evs, we’re headed out to Nantucket tomorrow. My sister said no one has my dad’s first ex’s place for the weekend. She got it out of the pre-nup.” The group laughs, Evan again marvels at the collective lack of awe at this privilege, and how easily Mark speaks of his family’s wealth here in a way he never does in Minnesota.

“Awesome,” says the backup goalie. “That the half-sister you met up with last spring?”

“Yep, hadn’t seen her since I was ten. She’s the black sheep of the three my dad had with wife number one, so we actually hit it off. She can out-drink me, no problem.”

“I’m scared for my life. Or at least my liver,” Evan quips. “But hey, it’s worth it to live in that world for a weekend.” He’s not entirely sure he believes this, but it seems the appropriate thing to say.

“You take a cross-country road trip together, and now you’re out here visiting a week later, doing a romantic getaway to Nantucket?” asks Owen. “When’s the wedding?”

“Yeah, fun partying with you kids, but Evvy and me need some space to whisper our sweet nothings to each other on the beach for a couple days,” says Mark.

“Hard to time it otherwise with hockey,” Evan sighs.

“Evvy’s a walk-on for the Gophers. Gets decent minutes,” Mark explains. He shoots Evan a look that shows he’s annoyed he’s not playing along.

“Damn,” says the backup goalie, the one other person in the room who understands the reputation of the University of Minnesota’s hockey team. “You actually play?”

“Fourth line.”

“Dammit, take some credit, Evs,” Mark chides him. “He dressed way more games than a whole bunch of scholarship kids last season. Shameful they haven’t given him a ride with the way he works. I keep telling him to transfer out this way, but…”

Evan shrugs again, at a loss for words. He’s a Minnesotan to the core. He wants to tell them that Duluth is his own little slice of heaven, the Lake Superior Riviera, with air-conditioned summers and magically crisp autumns and open skating rinks all winter long. If only they’d come to visit, they’d understand.

“We need people like Evan who stay loyal to Minny,” says Owen. “Can’t drain out all the talent, no?”

“I know, I know,” Mark concedes. “Someone’s gotta fight the noble fight against people who never want to change…”

“Duluth’s actually pretty far to the left,” Evan says by way of explanation to anyone who might assume it’s full of rednecks or whatever else it is Coastal people think of small Midwestern cities.

“In a stupid, backwards way that never lets anything new happen,” Mark retorts. “That part’s got nothing to do with politics.”

“You’re really selling them all on Duluth, bro.”

“Reality is reality. I don’t have any gods. Did good things for me and I can always go home there, but c’mon, man, you know it’s not my future.”

“I could go back, but I wouldn’t live outside the Twin Cities metro,” says Owen.

“What is there beyond that?” the Salvadoran asks. “I mean, I saw the pictures of Mark’s dad’s place, but that can’t be normal…”

“Rural flyover country’s basically a third-world country,” says the Alleged Vanderbilt. “We just don’t see it that way because we’re so used to seeing America as all the same.”

“Guess that makes me a refugee or something,” Evan grumbles.

“You sort of are,” says the Alleged Vanderbilt. “You might have more stuff than a starving Mexican, but the culture’s all gone to shit out there. Bunch of single moms cuz their trashy men hopped themselves up on meth or shot themselves, all the factory jobs are gone so they’re just being sad nurses cleaning up the dying old people and hoping their kids don’t do drugs or knock up their girlfriends in high school. And we’re surprised when they vote for big, tough men they think are gonna tell them like it is and keep them safe.”

Evan, the son of a single mother who very much fits this description yet remains a bleeding heart liberal, struggles to resist his urge to throw a punch. He gives Mark a significant look, and Mark gives him a little nod.

“Careful now, Evvy’s doing field work on Elis in their natural habitat. He’s gonna think all those stereotypes are right.”

“Don’t lump Minnesota in with the rest,” says Owen, rising to the occasion like any good Minnesotan. “It’s like the last hope for the American Dream. Maybe you won’t get rich, but you can still get yourself a nice house with a decent public school and have a nice spot on a lake for a weekend.”

“It got us here,” says Evan. “Wouldn’t trade my high school time for the world. I just hope that path’s still there for my kids, too.”

“To Minnesota!” says the Salvadoran. “To finding the spot on a lake in all our lives.” Those who still have some wine left drain their glasses.

“Alright, cool talk. We actually going to do something tonight?” asks the Boston girl.

“Yeah, enough of this wine shit, get out the Natties,” says the Alleged Vanderbilt. Owen heads for the beer fridge and begins handing out cans.

“Make sure Evvy gets a Narragansett, he’s gotta have the best we’ve got,” says Mark.

“Yeah, sure. Hang on, bathroom.” Evan scrutinizes the tall can Owen hands him and heads for the toilet to collect himself.

Well, there you go, he thinks. There’s the Ivy League at full blast. Sheer cognitive dissonance: Mark’s friends show flashes of brilliance and lulls of stunning ignorance, both deserving of their status and perfect exhibits of how status can make people blind. One or two of them probably have secret burdens, secret traumas they’re hiding from him. Most do, in one way or another, especially those who come into Mark’s orbits. But they are still people from a different world who enjoy perks Evan never had, and the Alleged Vanderbilt’s jab about third-world countries cut closer than he’d care to admit. He wasn’t poor by any measure growing up, though they had downsized after his father died since his mother couldn’t bear the mortgage on the old house by herself. Still, he thought he’d done enough to become the inheritor of a promise, one his mother had made explicit: if he carried himself correctly and kept up his work rate, he’d have all the support he needed. But here in New Haven, he’s learned he never had a prayer of making it to the top. He’s been lied to. The class and power that some of Mark’s friends radiate—and even Mark, when in their company—terrify him, though he’s almost more annoyed by the Owens of the world who can’t even recognize their own good fortune.

He doesn’t like this judgmental person he’s become on this trip. He gazes at himself in the mirror, his face still boyish, especially with his hair fanning out beneath his cap with the Gophers’ 1970s hockey logo. He feels like a boy among men. But when else will he ever have a chance to pretend he’s an Ivy League student, however fleeting it may be? When else will he be able to get what this means for Mark—Mark, who’s doing everything in his power to make Evan at ease here? He owes it to him to make this work. He cracks the beer, slams a sip, and marches back out into the incipient party.

The night degenerates from there. The blonde repeatedly demands trips to the bars; how else will they show Evan New Haven at its finest? As Evan is the only 21-year-old in the crowd this is a questionable plan at best, but once the group achieves a collective volume of liquor, all practical concerns disappear. They head to the bar that is lax in its carding, but the Salvadoran girl’s foreign ID tips off the bouncers, and only Evan, the Alleged Vanderbilt, and Mark make it through. Evan mumbles something about the friends they’ve abandoned, but Mark has already ordered a round of tequila shots for the three of them, and Evan settles in at the bar, resigned to his fate. The Alleged Vanderbilt clearly has no interest in him at all, and while Mark steals Evan’s cap and starts reminiscing on their high school team’s greatest hits, he seems most interested in out-drinking the bulkier Alleged Vanderbilt. The two of them go back and forth, buying round after round. Evan feels guilty he never buys one himself, but this trip is taxing his shaky finances enough. He settles for doing what he can to keep pace, and tips some of the later beers down the toilet when he makes periodic bathroom runs.

The night drags on. Mark rhapsodizes over the Salvadoran girl, and the Alleged Vanderbilt offers Evan the blonde’s number (“didn’t you see how she was falling over you, bro?”), but Evan sighs and explains that he has a girlfriend back in Minneapolis. He usually enjoys playing counselor to Mark’s girl problems, but he’s no fan of this interloper in their relationship, much less one who keeps pressuring him to cheat on his girlfriend. Exhausted and drunk, Evan decides to cut off this conversation and guide his two compatriots on to the dance floor. The three of the cut a wide swath across the bar, and here Evan can play off of Mark, whose moves always make him the center of attention. Finally, he starts to feel like he fits in. But Mark never stops guzzling rum and cokes, and when he and the girl he’s grinding up against both collapse in a heap on the floor, Evan takes this as his cue to bring a long day to an end.

The walk back to Mark’s apartment takes at least double the time it should, as they meander lawns and stop twice to pee in bushes. Mark, his crisp shirt coated in the primordial ooze of the dance floor, is long beyond any semblance of coherence, and makes the occasional attempt to wander off toward some other bar. Once they finally reach the lobby of the apartment building, Evan has to coax him out of a confrontation with two students on their way back from the library who make the mistake of expressing strong opinions on postmodernism in front of him.

“Dammit, man, we’re done here,” Evan insists.

“You’re a beauty, Evs.” Mark tries to plant a kiss on Evan’s cheek, misses, and smacks his ear instead. “And fuck Jacques Derrida!” he yells after his studious peers.

“You should probably just go to bed.” It’s the only thing Evan can think to say. The Alleged Vanderbilt is giving him a side-eye as if to ask if there really is some substance to Mark and Evan’s homoerotic jokes, but Evan has no patience for that line of inquiry now. He bids the Alleged Vanderbilt a less-than-courteous good-night and steers Mark, who is still grumbling about the dangers of deconstructionism, into the next available elevator. Once in the apartment Evan pours them both glasses of water, but Mark ignores him and stumbles straight for his bedroom. If only he’d set up the air mattress in the common area, Evan thinks as he trails after his wasted friend.

“Dude. I’m gonna call Emilia,” Mark says, trying to fish his phone out of his pocket and take off his shirt at the same time.

“That’s probably a bad idea.”

“You saw her. She’s a goddess, Evs. A goddess.”

“Goddesses don’t think much of kids who are too drunk to take their clothes off right.”

“Shit. You’re right. Evs, I’m drunk.”

“I’d kinda noticed that.”

“I should sober up. Wanna order food?”

“No, I want to go to bed. And you should, too.”

“Fine. You’re the boss,” Mark slurs. He flops over on his bed and closes his eyes.

“You sure you’re okay?”

“I’m fucking fine.” Mark pulls the sheets over himself, pants still on, Evan’s hat slowly falling off his head and into the pillow. Evan sighs and fills another cup of water from the bathroom sink. He leaves it on the bedside table, but Mark has passed out already. He picks up Mark’s shirt and undershirt from the floor and tosses them toward the closet. He pulls the sheet back on his air mattress, but a sudden urge overtakes him. Enough of this, he grumbles, and slides his shoes back on. After ten days on the road with Mark a week ago and now two nights of this in New Haven, he needs some time to himself.

Just as he locates Mark’s keys, though, Owen stumbles back in through the door with a girl Evan does not recognize. He tucks himself in a closet while Owen and the girl make a scene of turning on the TV and attempting to cook omelets, but when she runs to the bathroom and he announces his intent to search his bedroom for condoms, Evan slips past them and out the door. He shivers when he heads outside; a chill breeze has picked up, and he notices how cold it is now that he’s not occupied with guiding Mark home. If only he’d brought his sweatshirt. Nah, he’ll endure.

Evan quickens his pace, his longer strides stomping out his bitterness. Mark has play-acted as his guide here, and he always regales him of the joys of pushing life to its limits and staying there. But yet it always ends up like this, with Mark plowing straight over those limits and devolving into an incoherent blackout, his ambitions with girls thwarted by his own excess. Once again, he is left guiding this stumbling drunk home, his own happy state wasted by a need to babysit. So much for his brilliant guide.

Perhaps tomorrow Evan should demand that he be the one who goes overboard, and make Mark be the responsible one who takes care of him. It would only be fair. But somehow he’s not sure he’s capable of this sort of honesty. And, once the surge subsides, he admits he needs this version of Mark in his life, both to drive him from his comfort zone and serve as a foil. Mark has pushed him to enjoy life in a way he never could have without him. Yet he can’t escape a sense that it doesn’t have to be this way, perhaps some vague guilt that his own adventures enable Mark’s descents into a semi-regular stupor.

He worries too much, another voice tells himself. He’s making Mark sound like an alcoholic, but just a week before the two of them had spent three days in Zion without any drinks, and they’d had that magical chat over beers at Tahoe before they’d gone out with the snowboard bums and come home back to their tent in a sloppy but satisfied state. Only here and in Wine Country had Mark truly gone over the edge. Still, his traveling buddy’s flaw is undeniable: what pushes this kid whose intellect surpasses that of anyone Evan has ever known to abandon it all? Is he just hard-wired that way? This is too simplistic, though there may be a hint of that, and Mark certainly went through enough as a child to drive him to the bottle. But this version of Mark doesn’t come out when he’s down on himself. On the contrary, it’s his moments of joy that seem to invite his excess.

Evan tries to make his way back toward Yale’s aesthetically pleasing quads, but the streets that would carry him there still have some late-night life to them. He’d rather avoid unnecessary human contact. He wants to escape for himself for a bit, reflect on the jumble of America he’s seen over the past two weeks, wonder how well Mark’s famously bulletproof fake ID will hold up on their trip to Nantucket. But he can’t take his mind off his wasted friend: this, he thinks, is the natural outflow of a philosophy of life with no limits, of belief only in one’s own ambition. Mark will claim there’s more to it, but the nihilism beneath is undeniable, and it’s slowly poisoning him. This is why he believes the way he does, Evan pontificates to the audience in his mind, murmuring beatitudes to himself that he’s only right in all he does.

It’s all an insidious lie, though. He’s no saint. He’s enabled Mark and countless others for years now, and has no intent of giving up his own love for that game anytime soon. He’s just the lucky one who knows when to stop. Nor would his sexual ethics earn him much respect from the conservative Christians he reads on occasion, those loyal men and women of faith whose commitment he admires but cannot bring himself to copy. He believes what they say about the power of a steady family and a supportive congregation, but for all that respect he’s never felt a need to apologize for his many years of love-making with Bridget. His appetite, while perhaps more healthily channeled, is no less intense than Mark’s. And when he does toe the line from time to time, he always had the ability to recognize it and admit it and confess, often without any lasting pain. He has cycle of purification down, something so smooth that it sounds more like a mechanized filtration system than a soul-cleansing human ritual. Is his own success a standard too impossible for others to meet? It would certainly soothe his ego to think so.

He’s reducing the source of his desires to his sex drive, and this seems wrong. Human triumph, he would like to think, comes from transcending those basest instincts. This is something that people of faith know well, and the reason he will always respect them more than he does Mark, no matter how well he seems to be pushing his way into a select circles here, always worming his way into the front row at guest lectures or sneaking into donor events to shake hands and flash that winning smile. He loves watching Mark in his pursuit, can’t help but root for him, but he could never do it himself. Unlike Mark’s passel of cocky friends, he’s not so pretentious as to think he can rule the world. But he can make things right in his own little slice of it, and that he will. He needs to purge away that ambition, free his soul of that impatience, and accept himself as he was meant to be.

He stops before a colonial era Methodist church and searches the façade for answers. Simple and austere, just as he likes it, with some Gothic hints of mystery in the spires towering above it all. This is a worthy hall to seek absolution, or at the very least an understanding. He tries the door, but it won’t budge. Figures, he muses: he’s always been curious, but never can make his way in.

God has not been easy to find lately. Evan believes with all his might, knows there is something out there, but could never concede to Mark the degree of doubt that lingers beyond that. He plays up platitudes of leaps of faith, resorts to Pascal’s wager and other such half-assed attempts to impose rationality on something whose sole purpose is to supersede it. He joins his mother at church when he goes home, and feels right in doing so, but it rarely comes off as more than a pleasant but formless nostalgia. Too many of his mother’s fellow Congregationalists are vapid moralists, or instead seem to be social justice fighters at prayer, a cause he supports but finds oddly empty: where’s the need for God in all these appeals to love and community? He vaguely suspects a church more devoted to ritual and liturgy might speak to his fondness for beauty and order, but that level of investment seems a bridge too far, the sort of leap taken by some struggling person facing an existential crisis. For all he’s been through, he isn’t that.

Why not? he asks himself. He has a right to be, after his childhood was wrenched from him by his father. He certainly could have in those early years, but he had enough good friends and hockey to distract him, and then along came Bridget, whose steadfastness ever since has gifted him with an idyllic second family. Evan musters up some pride: he had conquered that fear that he could never make things normal again, won over a girlfriend’s skeptical parents, and through it gained access to her family, which so often met that ideal he had lost. Evan laughs, knowing his mother was over at his girlfriend’s parents’ house for dinner tonight, bonding as their children travel the world. What more can he ask for?

Evan finds a late night taqueria and decides to grab a bite. He settles into line behind a troupe of wasted lesbians and spends a moment pondering Mark’s sloppy kiss before zoning back in. Whatever it was meant to be, there is no future there, and they both know it. Instead, he’s pulled in by the eyes of haunted exhaustion in the girl behind the counter. He chances a smile as he requests his tacos, wonders if she’s American or Mexican by birth, what stories she might have to tell. She’s probably his age, though looks far more tired than he can ever remember being. She has a cross on her necklace; perhaps she could teach something to a white bread Minnesota boy about her faith. Or maybe it’s just for show, a gaudy gift from a boyfriend or a standard she holds up for herself but never meets. He’d like to imagine it’s the former.

Maybe the party in front of him isn’t all lesbians, despite all appearances: one is eyeballing him as he leans up against the condiment counter and awaits his order. He’d like to think he’s just their type: attractive in a conventional and athletic way, but his Minnesota wardrobe plays down any hint of pretension, and his scraggly hair suggests a hint of rebellion. If he had a little more energy he’d summon up some game, but he’s still absorbed by the girl behind the counter, and this seems a pointless exercise for any number of reasons. But no, she turns away: no doubt he’s just being a stupid horny boy, starved after two weeks on the road. His taco inexplicably comes before those of the young women, and he offers the girl behind the counter an apologetic look as they start to hassle her for it. Evan hurries toward the door. A hasty retreat, exactly what he deserves for thinking those thoughts. He misses Bridget.

Two blocks along, Evan finds a quiet set of steps where he settles in to wolf down his late-night meal. Never has he felt this far from home. He’s always had a little wanderlust, an instinct spurred along by his mother, a yoga dabbler who could be drawn in by any product or menu item that had some foreign-sounding adjective slapped on the front of it. Part of him wonders how she ever married such a staid, pure Minnesotan as his father, but beneath her occasional flightiness is a profound dedication to order, and he cannot picture her raising a child outside of the careful world she’d built for Evan—carefully crafted until his father’s suicide ruined it all.

Not that it had been all happy and carefree. Evan, ever precocious and timid, was much more his mother’s son. Did his father resent this? The question hadn’t occurred to him before. He can certainly see how, in her self-absorption, his mother would have missed his father’s warning signs. He’d been a sensitive child, in retrospect can now see the dark cloud hanging over his father, but couldn’t quite put two and two together at that age. His father had no one to turn to. How Evan wishes he could have been that person.

It strikes him suddenly that, unlike ever-questioning Mark, he’s never really asked why. He wonders what went through his father’s mind, certainly, and wishes he’d had the power break his fall, been given some insight into the sickness that plagued the man so that he could have expended every ounce of his energy into saving him. Easy to say now, he thinks, but he does like to believe he could have done so, and even if he couldn’t, would have been able to make peace knowing he did all he could.

This is his style, he thinks to himself, a smile growing on his face. He is comfortable in reality, knows his limits, all guided by his faith. Faith in what? It almost doesn’t even matter since it just works for him, day in and day out, the lows never too low.

He wishes he could talk to his dad again, yes. He knows he carries some part of him inside him. He will never know what could have been. And yet, there it is: from the start, he’s managed to accept that nothing he can do can change what is done, and that it is his solemn task to take tragedy and turn it into something that can empower him. It seems almost cold. He can picture himself trying to explain this to his mother or Bridget and coming off as robotic, the self-improvement machine moving on with no need for pity. Perhaps this is why he can’t say a word about it.

He is fine. And yet he isn’t: a well-adjusted person, he figures, would have crashed in bed alongside Mark when they got back from the bar. He’s not quite sure if an unburdened Evan would have no inhibitions in joining Mark in drunken oblivion, or if he’s just hard-wired to know his limits and would have settled for closing his eyes and dozing off, content to keep watch over his friend. It takes a different form, but he’s just as much of a seeker as Mark is. He must chase meaning in an entirely different way, must not make unending demands of a distant and unknowable force, but instead lose all his fighting instincts and become one with it.

Satisfied, Evan hops to his feet and trots back toward his home for the night, though he wishes he had a chance to better prove his freedom from the conformity around him. A long-dormant longing stirs up within him: he wonders if he can track down a surfboard on Nantucket and sneak out some morning before Mark wakes, ride the waves and purify properly, with a rush of fear that his normal cycle of highs and lows has dulled into nothing. He’d spent some time learning up on the waves when Mark was passed out in San Francisco. As quickly as it came, though, it fades: he has a duty to his friend, and above all he senses that the time for reckless rushes is past. Is this the wisdom of a man who’s now seen all that those adrenaline surges have to offer and is ready to move on? Or just a meek kid giving up on his one outlet for greatness?

He isn’t young anymore, whatever his mother may say. He has two years of college left, and with Bridget a year ahead of him and safely en route to her nursing degree, adulthood will be upon him before he knows it. His mother can’t stop dropping wedding venue hints, and, at Mark’s behest, he even has a list of Duluth employment connections that he’ll need to start exploring sooner or later. All he’s ever wanted to happen should come to pass.

Why, then, all this uncertainty? He is nothing if not committed, but commitment, he now realizes, exacts a toll. He glides into the atrium of the apartment building, eyeballs its angular modern furniture with skepticism, and jabs repeatedly at the elevator button. This stage in life feels like it only brings the closure of doors, and he isn’t sure he likes this. Maybe he hasn’t ventured far enough outward. Maybe he’s too quick to commit himself to Bridget, and she’s just a safety blanket for a scared kid who’d had his life torn apart. There’s a much larger world beyond good old Duluth, and everything that once seemed large there is now small.

Evan slumps into the side of the elevator, runs a hand through his thick mess of hair, and gazes at himself in its mirrored walls. Sorry, Mark, he thinks to himself: this is who he is, and no matter how hard his friend pushes him to make the world his toy and nothing else, he can’t quite follow him to the edge. He needs his moments like this, his time with just him and God, wherever he is, when he can lose his soul. It’s a side not even Bridget is allowed to see. He needs his secrets, his own little war to win, to prove his worth to himself and his maker alone.

Maybe not quite alone, Evan thinks as he swings open the bedroom door and wanders past the bed. He has one person in his life who he can talk to about this and who just might get it. He smiles down at Mark, his mouth agape and breathing heavily in the exact same position Evan had left him when he set out. Nantucket will give him a chance to articulate all these convoluted thoughts, and even if they don’t quite get there, the search will be worth his time. As long as he has a fellow traveler, he can go to bed content.

This series continues here.