I sprawled on a pale Florida beach while Connor read and the sun undulated hideously above the ocean. This was two languid, expectant days into our vacation. All we’d done was eat, drink, get stoned, and say nothing.

I felt like I was failing some kind of test. 

“Great sunset,” he said.

I told him: “The natural world is incapable of beauty.”

I told him only concepts could be beautiful, because they were invisible.

“What makes you say this sand is beautiful?” I gave him a pointed look and added an addendum about the distant crests of water, the gangly palms. The reason he found them stunning, I thought, was the learned appeal of their aesthetic.“It’s a cop-out,” I said.  “A cliché.”

I was a bit drunk.

Connor was dressed in all black, his Levi’s cuffed above his plump calves, tortoiseshell Ray-Bans slung low on his nose. Even on the beach, he wore socks and shoes—white, logo-less tubes and Vans. Connor’s feet were disgusting: red and puffy and riddled with corns. We sipped from paper cups of Rosé. The bottle, which Connor’s parents had left in the fridge from their last visit to the beach house, was propped against our books, sweating. 

“Also,” I said, “Mark Rothko is a terrible painter.”  

“Rothko is good as hell.”

Connor was grotesquely pale, like milk or heavily processed sliced bread. In terms of bone structure, if you were into that type of thing, he was very handsome.

I said, “You’re a bourgeoisie revisionist and I’m a revolutionary materialist. We are at an impasse. You’re canceled.”

Connor gripped the pointed logos embossed on the joints of his glasses, shook his head,  and looked morosely at his feet. 

“Capiche?”

“I don’t get the Italian bit,” he said.

Connor wasn’t fat, but if you took in any aspect of him individually, like a director doing a tight shot, the fullness of that one particular part would lead you to think the rest of him would, if you saw it, be fat.  

“It’s a good bit,” I said.

He squinted into the distance like I imagined women did in literature when waiting for a

man coming home on a ship from somewhere beyond the horizon.“I just forgot how to breathe,” he said. “And then I remembered how stoned I am.”

◆

Since our arrival, we’d been consuming edibles with prescriptive efficiency. I’d flown the caramel candies with me from California, where I’d procured them legally from a sleek establishment that stocked nearly every cannabinoid known to man. Connor, in trade, had smuggled two small squares of paper that were drenched in LSD and that we were saving for some as yet undecided occasion.

We retreated to a bar that overlooked the water. A spring training baseball game played on the flat-screen TV.

Connor silently thought about whatever it was Connor thought about and I thought about Connor.

I used to know what he was thinking about. We’d been a duo.  We’d lashed our lives together into a sexless, lonely marriage. We’d lived together, dined together, done drugs together.

That had been at an elite, gratuitously expensive university in Northern California. I left with oceanic debt and a decent vocabulary. My senior thesis, which turned out to be both practically useless and intellectually flaccid, still sat open on my computer, ready to be excerpted for my delayed application to some undecided graduate program.

Connor said, “The thing about baseball players is that I can never tell if they’re fat.”

“They’re strong-fat.”

We watched the baseball players and I thought about how we used to watch our classmates. We stayed up late analyzing them like rich, impenetrable texts. We inhaled films, novels, and inhalants. We were either ahead of the times, behind them, beside them, or around them. We were separate.

“Check this guy,” I said. A hulking first-baseman who resembled a shaved polar bear monopolized the screen. “You can tell from his traps that he’s buff fat. Not fat-fat.”

Connor scrolled Instagram.

“Do you see how the jersey almost hovers over his shoulders? It legit levitates. That’s how you can tell he’s buff. Also, hand size is how you can tell if someone is generally athletic.”A fried fish sandwich was placed in front of me and I took a large bite. When had the years happened.

When did Connor turn into the bland professional who sat next to me. In a few weeks he’d begin practicing law at Bordeaux and Carlson. As I understood it, they participated in the mergers of immense financial conglomerates. Connor, however, referred to it simply as “doing deals.” I sensed he neither liked nor disdained the idea of doing deals. To him it was mechanical, like breathing.

Oil saturated the batter. On the plate sat a small paper cup of tartar sauce. It was the type of cup only used for viscous condiments—wrinkled sides that grow translucent from the fats. Our overpriced Coronas stewed on the bar top, stuffed with floating, rumpled limes.

The conversation in my life stopped and was replaced with talking. The space between me and everyone else expanded. My friendships veered toward convenience—bland common interests like darts or watching the Dodgers.

And whatever strange passage I’d gone through, even Connor seemed unable to navigate it. He was talking to a person so divorced from the actual me as to make me terrified of the me that existed in his head. And I figured he probably felt the same way about the way I talked to him, too. The endless compounding of inferences, assumptions, extrapolations. There didn’t seem to be any alternative. No direct way of knowing anyone or anything. It was all externality. 

“Yo,” Connor said. “Dude. Fuck.”

He showed me his phone. There was a video playing, posted by an account called Carowitch666. In it, this girl we went to college with, Carolyn Schmidt, lounged on a beach that was unmistakably the beach Connor and I had been on just an hour or so before.

“God she’s the worst,” he said.

“Dude, you’ve gotta dm her.”

“I’m absolutely not dm’ing Carolyn Schmidt.”

“You should.”

“Dm her yourself.”

I would’ve, but Carolyn Schmidt didn’t follow me and I didn’t follow her either. Her account was private. I’d requested permission from her once. It was either ignored or rejected.

Connor returned his phone to his pocket and asked an irrelevant question about the game.

“Insane,” I said. “Carolyn Schmidt.”

◆

That night, we tracked her whereabouts while lounging on an L-shaped couch and drinking Connor’s father’s bourbon.

She and her companion, who looked so uninteresting it was almost riveting, went to an Italian restaurant. She posted a picture of her veal scallopini captioned: “Aries season bb.”At an outlandishly pulsating and scarcely attended nightclub, he filmed as she gyrated (ironically) to songs by Pitbull and Flo Rida and sipped from tall, neon drinks.

Connor said, “I can’t imagine anything more insufferable than this.” 

I’d once been on a dark dancefloor with Carolyn Schmidt, moving to a song that, at the time, people liked both ironically and un-ironically. It wasn’t a new song, but it wasn’t old enough to be retro either. It had come out in our teens. It was a long song by a band everyone had also decided was insufferable. You had to wait like five full minutes just for the bass to kick in. The whole time Carolyn Schmidt and I were inches from each other. I could see the pores dotting her bare face spewing out sweat. But we never touched. When the song ended, she grazed her fingers across my shoulders and said, “Bye, bye.” She was the type of person always grazing shoulders with her fingers. The type of person who said, “Bye, bye.”

“Do you think she remembers us?” I asked.

“I’m not sure if remembering, generally speaking, is her thing.”

Carolyn Schmidt’s thing had been being beautiful, impeccably hip, and performatively promiscuous. As far as the promiscuity went, I think it’s important to add that it never involved anyone I knew. It was possible she never even slept with anyone at our school. She trysted, instead, with the drummers of touring bands, venture capitalists, a noted feminist journalist, and, according to rumor, a visiting lecturer in a made-up discipline called Symbolic Systems. Being around her peripherally, it felt like she was both constantly fucking and entirely chaste.

This exact quality was what made some people hate Carolyn Schmidt. I disagreed. There was something sad about her. And while I recognized, too, there was something sad about most people, especially people who don’t seem sad, I felt that Carolyn and I were the same type of sad. She was from Indiana.

◆

I woke up early, but Connor had already left for a run. I put on a pot of coffee. While it dripped into the clear jug, I removed my shirt and attempted to complete some exercises that I hoped might reshape me.

I held myself in a plank for twenty seconds. I gritted through two sets of five pushups. I attempted to knot myself into some leg stretches.

I stood with my hands hooked behind my head, gazing around the living room, which pulsated.

Connor’s parents were new money mid-western mega-church goers and, even by that standard, the house was impressively garish. I stood under an eight-pronged crystal chandelier. The walls were painted a shade of grey meant to appear wood-like. The marble floor was so polished it reflected the ceiling. There were extensive gold accents. Various bowls of non-functional orbs. It amused me that this style was common among people of faith, as it verged on the look you might expect for a house used to film particularly gaudy porn.

My parents only owned a singular home, not gaudy, but not desitute either. It was a home in the flats of the valley packed with stuff–books, records, tchotchkes, and lamps–the ephemera of a theater teacher and an office administrator who’d done everything right, yet still produced a profitless child. 

I diluted my coffee with cream until it turned the color of sand, then stirred in some sugar. I reapplied my shirt and took my mug outside.

The community was quiet. The house existed amongst a cluster of nearly identical houses situated lazily around a swimming pool and a jacuzzi, connected by a network of lush lawns and stone pathways.

Connor texted me to meet him at the tennis club to eat.

We had eggs Benedict beside a lawn humid with light. The muffins were chalky and a plasticine film formed atop the hollandaise.

“Why do rich people love horrible shit,” I said.

“I’ve literally been wondering that my entire life.” He reorganized the food on his plate. “But also … this isn’t rich rich. This is like cosplay rich.”

“Go on.”

“Like Dale Watterhouse. Dale Watterhouse was rich rich.”

“I fucking hated that guy.”

“I see him sometimes. We worked on a deal together. He’s actually not that bad.”

We consumed two ten milligram edibles each and washed them down with mimosas.

“Dale Watterhouse took his jet to Hawaii for a weekend.”

“Vile,” he said. “But probably fun.”

When the check arrived, Connor placed the bill on his mother’s account.

◆

I brought a collection of very short stories with me to the beach. A slim paperback, barely one hundred pages. My progress was glacial.

Connor toted a two-volume compendium of theory by Deleuze and Guattari that he read robotically, daubing his index finger with spittle to turn the pages. He paused approximately every ten minutes to input a scribbled note in his black lined journal or to photograph a passage with his phone.

It took me a full hour to finish one two-page story. Stringing one sentence to the next seemed impossible. In the spaces between the lines my mind went somewhere else, somewhere lost, and I couldn’t scroll it back. I shut the book, looked around, and tried to regather myself by listening to the rush of the tide.

“Deleuze and Guattari sounds like a comedy duo with a show in Vegas,” I said. “Or like an odd couple buddy movie.”

“Reading.” Connor said without looking up.

“Like Sigfried and Roy. Hall and Oates. Starsky and Hutch.”

I liked Deleuze and Guattari. At least the idea of them. Specifically, the idea of being known as a pair. Two names that pointed to a shared thing. The Coen Brothers. That was another good example. I found filmmakers fascinating. I loved how they could marshal whole swaths of people—crew, actors, executives, etc.—to manifest an invisible idea. Movies seemed, to me, to appear out of nowhere. Once they were finished, the assembly of them became inscrutable, the component parts vanished. That got ruined if I ever watched footage from behind the scenes. Saw the actors cast against a green screen or surrounded by sound and lighting equipment. Suddenly, in these cases, the falsity of it all became unbearable. I found myself scanning films for traces of artifice, hard to find mistakes, accidents in the production or continuity. It was a bit like how my vacation was being ruined by the specter of Carolyn Schmidt. I kept looking for her in shadows and around corners. I felt this was why I couldn’t focus, and although that didn’t really make sense, it held the vibration of a real truth.  

I slogged my way through three stories, only a dozen or pages. The sun was apexing. Our sunscreen, which we re-slathered incrementally, liquified and stained our perspiration a semen-ish white.

Connor placed his parted book on his towel. I tucked my flimsy paperback under my leg. I asked to see Connor’s phone.

In Carolyn Schmidt’s most recent story, she and the companion walked down a section of beach that passably resembled the area we were occupying. She wore a ripped, oversized t-shirt with heavy metal font. She had wild, half-blonde hair. Was the guy her boyfriend? I didn’t remember her having a brother, but I could’ve been wrong.

He was radiantly pale and wearing a trucker hat. He filmed himself and then her. She laughed, tossing her head back, restructuring her hair.

“The guy looks like you,” I said.

“No way. His face is so long.”

“We actually should hit them up.”

“Fuck that.”

“Then why even follow her?”

“Honestly, she represents my least favorite parts of culture in a distilled way that I find sort of satisfying. In the way that things that make you instantly angry are satisfying. Which sounds mean and dismissive. But whatever.”

What parts of culture did I represent then? Was I unsatisfying? 

“You should’ve dm’d her yesterday. Now it would be weird anyway.”

◆

That night, while Connor slept, I spent a solid hour to hour and a half Googling Carolyn Schmidt.

I didn’t find much: a private Twitter, private LinkedIn, private Pinterest, no Facebook. Undeterred, I put some serious time into imagining Carolyn Schmidt was my girlfriend.

The relationship wouldn’t be a normal relationship. It wouldn’t be like what other people did: forming common, convenient bonds. My relationship, the one I imagined with Carolyn Schmidt, would be profound and singular. We would know each other in the deepest ways possible. Ways beyond language.

I couldn’t imagine what this would actually look like, because the idea was incredibly stupid, so instead of focusing on being with Carolyn Schmidt, I imagined myself seeing Connor again and telling him about dating her, how in love we were, seeing him be impressed.

We placed our towels in our usual spot. I opened my stories. Connor opened his Deleuze and Guattari. I stared at the page. The edible morphed an anxious, sludgy feeling around me, and I wondered if Connor hadn’t said anything to Carolyn Schmidt not because of some abstract dislike of her, but because of a concrete embarrassment of me.

Connor was taking one of his pauses. He scribbled in his notebook, his back bent forward, the pale, hairless flesh at his sides curled into taught tubes.

“Why are you doing that?” I said.

“Doing what?”

“Taking notes.”

“If I don’t write my thoughts down, I forget them.”

“But why does that matter?” I said. “It’s not like there’s a test on this. You’re not writing an essay on Deleuze and Guattari.”

“I may want to come back to this.”

I told him that didn’t make sense. What would he come back to it for? It seemed silly to pretend that reading Deleuze and Guattari had some kind of practical application.

“Deleuze and Guattari do not, as far as I know, do deals.”

“I read Deleuze and Guattari because I find their writing and thinking interesting,” Connor said.

He picked the book back up, but set it down almost instantly. He pawed at the front cover and massaged elements of his face and just looked out to somewhere.

We didn’t talk on our walk back to the house.

Connor flopped on the sofa and turned on the TV. I asked if he wanted to do anything.

“No.”

“What are you thinking for dinner?”

“I’m not really hungry.”

I looked at my wobbled reflection in the marble. Connor’s phone was on his stomach. It was sleek and black. Uncased, without buttons. It vibrated. He picked it up and typed something.

On the coffee table in front of us, amongst the detritus of books and envelopes and various home theater remotes, was my mug from the morning. The cream had reasserted itself to the surface and collected in a few wispy swirls. I fingered the parenthetical of fat that hung over my waistline. 

Connor had placed Deleuze and Guattari on the table and I picked the book up and flipped to a few random pages. “What,” I said. “In a concrete sense. Do you like about this.”

Connor kneaded a throw pillow.

I picked up a grapefruit sized rope orb from a leather bowl and attempted to toss it to myself in a way that looked dismissive and stoic.

He said, “While I get theory is useless or whatever…reading is the only thing I do that has had any lasting positive impact on my life. Like just because I’m not a grad student talking about soft power and trying to look smart doesn’t mean I can’t try to restore some appreciation for humanity.”

He stood up and paced around the living area.

“Yeah, I think that’s dumb,” I told him. “I guess I just think that’s kind of dumb.”

Connor said, “Unhand the orb. You’re going to break something.”

I was having a bit of fun with the orb. I tossed it up and caught it. I palmed it like a basketball.  “You know what we should do? Let’s dm Carolyn Schmidt.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“Let’s do a deal, I’ll unhand the orb if you admit doing deals is a scam. Let’s get rich bro. Fuck it!”

“I’m sorry that I haven’t moralized wasting my life like you, clearly, have,” he said. “And sure. Maybe you have to pretend if you ever want to get anything done. But sometimes it feels good to get things done.”

I un-handed the orb, feebly, into the folds of the sofa.

“You’re full of shit.”

“No one is making you stay at my house.”

“It’s your parent’s house.”

Connor shut off the TV and went to his bedroom.

I started to feel bad—both about Connor and myself. Although I found the foundational premise of his outlook flawed, I envied that he could open himself up to things in a way that allowed him to convince himself that they were revelatory, even if he’d forsaken his education to become cravenly profit-driven and stupid.

I’d once wanted to achieve things, too. But that all felt so sticky and absurd. My own life was childish and achievement was childish, too. It created new expectations, new things to achieve. An endless carrot/stick chase.

It was a comfortable house. Designed to be lived in in a way that felt at once practical and lavish. Inside it, you felt like a king. Maybe not the king of England, or any rich and powerful place, but the king of something. 

I would go out of my way, I decided, to compliment Connor. Being a sycophant could be oddly liberating. If I found myself getting distracted or anxious or sad, I would just say something that I knew Connor would like. This is how I would save the trip and our friendship.

I got up and knocked on his door. There wasn’t an answer, but I went in anyway. It was a large bedroom with a connected master-bath, a vaulted ceiling. The lights were off and Connor was seated in bed, propped up against the headboard. He had his computer open on his lap. He was shirtless, legs under the sheet. His horrible feet stuck out the back. 

He was right, this wasn’t rich rich. It all looked cheap.

Whatever it was he was doing, he was doing it intently. The electric light illuminated his face. His typing clacked rhythmically. I shut the door behind me and he removed his headphones.

“An apology?” he said.

I said, “I wish I could still engage genuinely with content. I hate that my brain is destroyed.”

After a pause.

“Honestly it’s weird. I thought we’d always be doing the same things. I thought things would happen to me. And that sort of pisses me off, because college, even though it also sucked, was like the happiest I’ve ever been. Does that make sense?”

I told him, “If everyone agrees academia is morally bankrupt and media is morally bankrupt and art is morally bankrupt, in a way it’s more genuine to do something so explicitly morally bankrupt…and, really, if money is the force of morality, by making it, maybe someday you might be able to actually do something good.”

He shut his computer, departed the bed, and crossed the room toward me. “You sound like an Atlantic Op ed,” he said. “But thank you. I think.”

I was struck by how old he seemed. Faint wrinkles collected near the corners of his eyes; his body already exhibited signs of the stretched, taut skin of middle-aged people clinging to their youths. The Connor in my memories was so slack, slopped into ill-fitting chairs, always a part of him dangling.

“Alternative plan,” I said. “Want to get extremely high?”

◆

We decided it would be a good idea to take the LSD and eat dinner at a men’s leisure clothing store that also housed an overpriced restaurant.

On the walk there, we meticulously chewed the specks of paper before swallowing them. I told Connor about how this was a fantastic idea. How nothing could possibly go wrong and that I was grateful he’d taken me along on the trip.

“Which trip?” Connor said, sticking out his tongue before swallowing the tab.

We were seated near a duo outfitted in the store’s clothes singing Beach Boys covers over a backing track that played from a set of portable speakers. Around us, flocks of suburban-looking men cradled black plastic disks with blinking red lights as they browsed the racks of pastel button-down shirts printed with palm trees, coconuts, cresting waves.

Connor slathered a complementary roll of bread with a proprietary sweet butter as the singers broke into an out-of-pitch rendition of “Kokomo.”

“Yo,” I said. “Not gonna lie. This honey butter legit whips full ass.”

I found the butter cloying.

He said, “It’s been so long since I’ve tripped. ”

We drank overly sweet, theoretically “tropical,” cocktails and shared a mildly rancid seafood appetizer. By the time my entree—a limpid ribeye dusted with coffee—arrived, the drug was beginning to set in and I wasn’t hungry. Nothing was particularly visual yet, besides a general, undulatory largesse around the edges of things. The large objects swayed slightly. I felt peeled pleasantly away from language.

I poked the heel of the steak with my knife and it oozed a brownish grease.

“Dude,” I said.

He pointed at the steak.“Damn.”

Later, we stood out on the sidewalk across from a Prada outlet and watched the people walking by. Connor’s face hung in a dumb, toothless smile and I was reminded of why I liked him. He was miserable, like me, and this made us kindred.

It was nighttime, but the sun was out and the air was warm. It gave the occasion a sense of performance. Like it was only evening in concept, the structure of the day stripped from diurnal impulses and hooked instead to an ideated, ritualized notion of time. The grey sidewalk gum appeared to be respirating.

A sadness carved through me then at the silent speed of time. I could see myself three, five, ten years later, having assimilated this moment, the whole vacation, into a new set of halcyon days whose brightness contrasted whatever present anguish I was living. Had I ever been happy? Did things with Connor, or otherwise, ever, in the moment, feel good? A tattooed woman in a slinky dress swished past us. She was tailed by a guy wearing a slim button-down, frayed jean shorts, and sandals with bands of color that looked like a flag.

“Carowitch666,” Connor said.

We tailed them through the town as darkness fell. It was an ambient,  ambivalent following. Like we were very weak magnets, or a buoy that trundled in their wake.

Carolyn Schmidt and the man entered a bar with a theme of some kind. Palm trees were involved. A plastic toucan. We waited outside, twining the tall decorative grasses that sprung from a terracotta planter around our fingers, rupturing them, rubbing the damp green pus into our palms. 

Then we were on the beach, giggling like idiots. The sun was setting and the sand spread out before us was like the long swishing trail of a ball gown. Connor was stroking his phone against his face. He said the glass was amazing. He touched it to my face and it was.

◆

Within the community where Connor’s house was, a lizard stunned frozen on the stone path distracted us.

Connor said, “It looks prehistoric.”

The animal’s ridged skin released its bumps and they bubbled away.

“I’m tripping pretty hard,” I said.

“Yeah.”

We dunked our feet in a cool swimming pool, one of the many dotted through the community.

“It’s weird,” Connor said. “How water has a surface.”

“It’s crazy,” I said. “How you can just own a body of water. Like waking up each day being like ‘this is my body of water.’”

We passed through subsection after subsection, house after identical house. Until we again found Carolyn Schmidt. She and the guy were in the glow of a steel lamp, sprawled on a knoll a few yards up from the path, sipping from bottles of beer. Connor and I paused. Neither of us said anything. We were hidden by the darkness.

Carolyn lay in a knotted, bent way that looked uncomfortable. The man’s left arm weighed down on her shoulders, she sprawled across his knees and looked at the ground. The man whispered something in her ear. She tremored with laughter. He shut his eyes and lay back against the grass.

I found the experience of watching them quite moving. It was like those Andy Warhol films that are just a long shot of two people sitting on a hotel bed, or something like that. The transfixing mundanity of it all makes you feel like something must be about to happen.  

“Do you wanna go say what’s up?” Connor asked.

I knew that he meant it and that that meant he couldn’t possibly understand. The point wasn’t saying what’s up. It was talking about them. Arguing about it. Navigating around the idea of Carolyn Schmidt. She probably didn’t even remember us. 

“No,” I said. “It’s cool.”

◆

In the morning, I collected my stuff into my duffle and, without waking Connor, called a cab to the airport. I had a dull headache and an upset stomach.

I waited in the security line and had myself scanned and boarded my flights—Houston then Chicago then LAX.

It was late when I landed. I had received, at some point during the flight, a long text from Connor. It was the type of thing that could, more easily, have been sent as an email.

I read it walking through the mostly empty terminal. Gold light and sterile floors. A hospital odor.

He thanked me for coming out and said, “it was great hanging again. I’d missed you. Sorry I was out cold when you left.”

“Tbh I meant to bring this up during the trip but felt odd about it/didn’t find the right time,” he went on. “But anyway, it’d be great for you to come out to stay with me sometime in BK. Maybe think about a move? I’ve got an air-mattress for until you find something…”

I thought that sounded horrible and condescending, but I didn’t want to go home, either. 

I stood at baggage claim and watched the circling duffels still waiting unclaimed from an earlier flight. The sound of traffic came in from outside. The gasoline smell of the city. I wasn’t ready to slip back into the silence of my life. I missed Florida. The brightness of it. The elastic time. The talking. The water and the trees.

I opened Instagram and requested to follow Carolyn Schmidt. On the screen was an image of a lock.