We made grilled cheese sandwiches in a skillet on the gas stove and then
set right down to the matter of polluting ourselves before we got too
sleepy. Traffic had been heavy on the way upstate, and we had arrived at
the cabin too late to cook a real dinner like adults. There were five us,
myself and the two couples: Kennedy/Corey and Siobhan/Ben. In the cavernous
great room, under an antler chandelier and the taxidermied busts of various
local fauna, we gathered to celebrate nothing in particular besides our
youth.

Kennedy’s family called it “The Cabin,” but it was cabin-like only insofar
as it was made of logs. It was huge, sectioned into two wings around the
vaulted central room, stately but still rustic, the kind of place that
American tycoons started building for themselves in the twenties so that
they might get out of the city to collude in peace. This one was built in
the fifties by Kennedy’s grandfather, whose bronze bust was said to exist
somewhere in the library of Columbia Business School, although we could
never find it. It was supposed to act as rally point for his family, which
at the time was rapidly multiplying and dispersing across the northeast.
Now that he was dead, the cabin served primarily as something for the
family to fight over. But one weekend every summer for the six years since
we had graduated from high school, Kennedy was given the keys and told to
have a good time with her friends, which meant us.

***

Although under-manned, we worked through the triathlon of our favorite
drinking games: beer pong, flip cup, and a card game of our own invention
called “Fuck Me? No Fuck YOU!” The girls took turns playing music from
their iPods; the males knew not to even try. During a lull in the energy,
pre-prepared joints appeared, lovingly rolled downstate in anticipation,
but I abstained, as I have to carefully monitor myself around that
particular drug if I don’t want to end up hiding under a blanket battling a
strain of despair that presents itself as a profound isolation from those
closest to me.

The joints killed the competitive spirit required to make drinking games
enjoyable, and soon we had re-arranged the furniture so that we could watch
decades-old VHS tapes on the ancient wood-panel television. The speakers on
the TV were fried, so we left the iPod blaring pop hits and tried to figure
out what was going on on the screen by the visuals alone.

“What’s the plot of this?” I asked Kennedy.

“There is no plot. They’re just cats.”

“Just cats?”

“Yeah, that sing and dance.”

“No. That can’t be it.”

“I think it’s based on like some TS Eliot poems.”

“What about the magic and shit?”

“One of them is magic.”

“I don’t believe what you’re telling me.”

“Magic cat, dude, believe it,” Ben said from the couch, poking a key into a
little baggie of white powder, which was something that he did that we
weren’t huge fans of except for the occasions that we were possessed of a
particularly wanton spirit, at which points he was a hero, soothsayer,
prophet.

***

Corey had been my best friend since we met during a water break at football
camp in eighth grade. He started dating Kennedy not long after that; they
weren’t quite each other’s first kiss, but it was close. They gave each
other their virginities, and besides one or two drunken collegiate
incidents the full details of which the rest of us never received, they had
remained, it seemed, faithful and in love. Now the inevitability of some
future marriage hung over them so thickly that it wasn’t even interesting
to talk about.

Siobhan was Kennedy’s best friend and former field hockey co-captain. She
had been dating Ben only about half as long as Kennedy had been dating
Corey, but long enough for Ben to have gone through the full cycle of
male-friend assimilation with Corey and I: wariness, ridicule, hazing, and
finally acceptance. Now it was hard to remember a time when we hadn’t
considered ourselves a squad.

At the moment, I had no real girlfriend, and my attempts invite one of the
two girls I had been texting to accompany me on a weekend retreat to a
picturesque lakeside cabin had rung baldly ulterior, but I didn’t feel
particularly awkward as fifth wheel. It simply wasn’t like that–we had all
been friends for so long.

***

While everyone was arguing over the name of the social studies teacher who
got in trouble for taking pictures of girls’ legs under their desks in
seventh grade, I went out to the back porch. The wind coming off the lake
was colder than I had packed for, but my nerves presented the sensation of
cold to me mostly as an abstract idea rather than something imperative.

I leaned over the railing and watched how the moon played in the ripples of
the black water, a dancing web of light, and tried to convince myself that
the mathematical secrets of the universe were revealing themselves to me,
in the way that the elements interacted as a network of impulses; moon,
light, water, wind, etc. Oscillations and vibrations and feedback loops and
whatever, all fully determined. I realized that I was quite drunk.

After a few minutes, Siobhan followed me outside.

“Dude, what are you doing out here?” she said.

“Isn’t this nice?” I said, and swept my hand over the lake, meaning
everything.

“Yeah. Absolutely.”

She had two beers in her hand and gave me one. I drained the one that I had
brought with me.

Siobhan worked for an investment bank downtown in some capacity that I
would never understand, conjuring wealth out of three computer monitors at
once. She had made more money in the first year out of college than I could
ever hope to make in any year, doing anything. For my part, I had completed
an internship at an indie record label that hadn’t turned into a job, sold
a few book reviews to non-prestigious websites for two-digit checks, and
did some work as a production assistant, getting coffee for bad actors on
shows that nobody watched. Saved on my hard drive, I had written one-third
of a novel based on the missing years of Jesus Christ that I was sure was
quite terrible.

“Do you want to come back inside?” she said. “It’s cold out here.”

“Do you want to stay out here and huddle for warmth?” I said, playing it
cheekily, which I knew that I could get away with even though it was fairly
out of bounds. I had always had a bit of a thing for Siobhan, I should
admit, which I felt bad about given my friendship with Ben but what can you
do.

“The idea is to all have fun together,” she said.

I didn’t respond and we just stood there together for a moment, looking out
over the water, even though there wasn’t much to look at in the dark. Out
in the middle of the lake something jumped out and flopped over, a single
little splash.

“Do you know that nobody knows what Jesus was up to from the age of twelve
to thirty?” I said. “One minute he’s just a little kid following his dad
around, next he’s a full-grown man out in the desert talking to a snake.”

I could tell by her face that she didn’t really know what to do with me,
which was understandable.

“Come on, inside, you weirdo,” she said, and even grabbed my elbow.

Inside, things had been turned up a notch, cans abandoned for shot glasses,
and I hustled to catch up. Eventually we dispensed with the glasses and
just passed the bottle around, laughing at the contorted faces we made
after taking swigs. We argued about bullshit for fun, ate from bags of
pretzels. Eventually the playlist ended and the couples went to bed. I saw
that there were still a few inches of vodka in one of the bottles so I
tried to stay up by myself until it was gone, for completeness sake.

***

I looked up and realized that I hadn’t only looked up, but woken up. I was
alone in the main room, and the skylights were still fully dark. The house
was quiet except for the sound of the lake lapping against the deck
outside.

There were many beds available in the house, but I just stretched out on
the couch, pulled a crocheted blanket over me as best I could, and tried to
go back to sleep before my hangover came fully into bloom. In my
half-dreams, I watched people from my past walk into the room and speak in
tongues towards my supine body.

After some time, I heard a sound from out on the gravel driveway through
the door, which had been left open except for the screen. Something large
moving around. Definitely not a dream. I heard it a second time.

I craned my neck up from the couch to see if anyone would appear, but
nobody did, and then I heard the sound again, pushing through the gravel. I
decided that I better get up and check quickly, otherwise I would just lay
there and convince myself that it was a bear that was going to come in and
kill us all, even though I thought I remembered someone saying that they
didn’t get bears around here. I threw off the blanket and swung my feet to
the floor.

There was a small closet overflowing with sports equipment by the door, and
I grabbed a golf club to arm myself. I pushed through the door, turned onto
the gravel, and found myself five feet away from a whitetail buck, taller
than I was. I could tell at a glance that its antlers had more points than
any of the racks hanging up inside; fourteen at least. It was huge in a way
that felt more than physical; it was elemental, something I had no right to
be so close to.

Instead of bolting, it stared right at me, unsurprised. I found myself to
be frozen in place with the golf club held out in front of me like a pike.
I didn’t know if I should be scared or not. The antler points looked
murderous but I couldn’t remember ever hearing about someone being taken
out by a deer.

Then I saw why it hadn’t run. Its right front leg was badly broken; the
hoof dangled in the air, held on to the rest of the leg by only a tangle of
bloody fur and flesh. It must have happened recently, maybe even that
night. And now that I saw it, I smelled it.

“Jeez,” I said aloud, my breath condensing. “That’s not good.”

A cloud bank rolled away from over the moon and the deer was lit in the
reflection coming off of the lake. It breathed laboriously, and flecks of
moisture spumed from its mouth with each exhalation. Slowly, appearing for
a moment almost animatronic, it looked out over the water, and then back at
me. It seemed somehow inquisitive.

“What?” I said.

It remained statue-still for another few seconds and then, moving on three
legs with an undignified awkwardness, it lurched down the waterline towards
the boathouse. I stood there and watched it disappear into the woods. I
tried to listen to it move through the brush but the sound was masked by
the wind in the trees.

For a moment, I stood there in the odd solitude, and realized that I had
just experienced a notable event. I am a special person and that was a
special thing that happened for me and me only, I thought, and will never
happen again, which was cool, even though it was sad. I peed against the
side of the house and went back inside to get a glass of water.

***

We spent the morning earning health and wellness credits that we would be
able to cash in later for more self-harm. The girls strapped their iPods to
their upper arms and went for a long jog through the lakeside trails, while
the males dragged a rusty bench press out from the garage into the sun in
order to lift weights and work on our tans. Then we all went for a brief
swim that we convinced ourselves was aerobically rewarding.

When the girls got back, sweaty and attractive, we piled with our coolers
into the faster of the two boats, a sleek twenty-five foot sport boat with
red racing stripes, and pushed off to go fuck around on the water. Kennedy
found her father’s white captain’s hat (which he wore constantly when he
was up at the cabin, under the guise of irony, although he clearly adored
it) and cocked it rakishly on her brow over her large insectile sunglasses.
She gunned the throttle as soon we were clear of the moorings, the engine
roared, and the prow lifted tumescently out of the water as the boat took
off.

Kennedy piloted us from the cabin’s notch of shoreline out to where the
lake really opened up. There was a fair amount of traffic on the water, and
she passed the other boats a bit too close, I thought. We lowered our beers
and offered collegial waves when police boats trolled by. Paddleboats heavy
with tourists (of course, we weren’t tourists) patrolled the shallow waters
around the big hotel. Parasailers under colorful canopies moved silently
through the sky a million miles away.

The weather was perfect, which we remarked on ceaselessly in that way that
never bothers anyone caught in the trance of a beautiful day. It was hot
enough to feel compelled to take your shirt off, but not oppressive, and
even the bright noonday sun seemed somehow unthreatening. A few puffy
clouds, so small-looking in the bowl of the sky, cast massive shadows that
moved over the green and orange face of the mountains that ringed the lake.

“I love this day,” Siobhan said.

“What?” Kennedy yelled over the roar of the V-12.

“This day!”

Kennedy smiled and nodded. Simple ideas presented themselves to me: the
maddening beauty of the female body, the indispensability of alcohol, the
pleasure of maritime recreation, the absolute necessity of huge amounts of
money.

We dropped anchor in a sheltered little area in between a small island and
the shoreline and argued about the proper name for such a place. Isthmus?
Lagoon?

Ben stood up on the prow and shotgunned a beer and threw the can into the
water.

“Hey!” I said, and jumped in the water to fish it out. It floated away from
me for a few strokes.

“Don’t be a shit,” I said when I hauled myself dripping back into the boat
and threw the can at his feet with maybe a little too much force.

“You don’t be a fucking shit, dude,” he said. His voice had an edge to it
that I recognized, and I realized what he had probably been doing on his
four or five trips down into the cabin.

“Oh yeah, you litter, you’re cool,” I said. I didn’t know why I was so mad.

“Are you being serious right now?” he said. “It’s a can.”

“It’s not a can. I mean it is—but it’s the principle.”

“What are you, Smoky the fucking Bear?”

“Guys, stop it,” Kennedy said. “This is my favorite place. I don’t want
anyone to fight. Everyone’s supposed to have a nice time.”

“We’re not fighting,” Ben said. He looked at me. Kennedy was too. And
Siobhan.

“Yeah, no, I’m fine,” I said.

Ben went to the bow of the boat and jackknifed into the water.

“Smokey the Bear never said anything about littering,” I said aloud, to
nobody.

***

The sun went down. We had all burned the fuck out of ourselves, but that
was part of the whole deal. We ordered pizzas from town. Coolers were
re-armed.

Siobhan and I lay in the hammocks on the deck with a case of beers between
us. She had one foot hanging off of her hammock so that she could rock
herself. A moment ago the others had been out here too but something had
carried them inside, and now I enjoyed their warm absence-but-nearness,
listening to their muffled conversation and the clinking of glass from the
kitchen, in an adjacent universe. I was looking up at the stars, and I
assumed that she was too. It never gets old for me, how bright the night
sky is the further you get away from people.

“Stars are crazy,” Siobhan said upwards into the night, after who knows how
long.

“I know, right?” I said.

She was silent but after another minute she hit me with this:

“Do you ever find it comforting to know that you’re going to die?”

This meant that she was in a recognizable stage of her drunkenness.

“Only when I’m screwing up particularly bad,” I said.

“I said that to Ben once and he said I was being morbid. I didn’t mean it
like that, though. It’s just like, when I get up here, in nature and stuff,
I’m more okay with being a teeny tiny little thing.”

“Yeah,” I said, and then, after a silence. “Do you think Ben does too much
coke?”

Siobhan looked at me to speak but then Kennedy leaned her face against the
screen door with a tray in her hands.

“Who ordered the tequilas? We found my Mom’s. The good stuff.”

Inside, she had already set up a little bowl of salt and beautiful
sliced-up limes.

I proceeded to overdo it pretty bad, even though I caught myself while I
was doing it. I had a moment where I wondered, is this fun?

I decided that it was.

***

My first thought when my eyes opened was “oh no,” because I had some grainy
memory of trying to kiss Siobhan, but there was a good chance that that had
been a dream. Anyway I realized that the circumstances were probably such
that I wouldn’t have to bring it up or apologize to anyone, and I calmed
back down. Plausible self-deniability, the gift of the blackout, was
intact.

I had, it appeared, chosen the hammock as my bed, and my watch said five am,
which is right in the middle of the window that my body tends to reboot
itself after that kind of abuse. It was cold as hell and I was shivering.
My tongue knocked around in my mouth like a stone and I desperately had to
pee.

I laid my penis over the railing of the deck and released a tributary
stream down into the lake. High up on the dark mountainside above the
opposite shore there were three different campfires burning, miles apart,
and I imagined a little scene for each of them: Earthy newlyweds sleep
intertwined under an angled blue tarp, rise occasionally to stoke the
flames. A father starts a fire under a skillet for breakfast, ham and eggs,
coffee in a tin pot, and watches his two sons asleep in matching super-hero
sleeping bags. Iroquois sitting silently and looking down scornfully at me
from four hundred years ago, when this land was still theirs and they had
some beautiful name for it, I’m sure.

The duration of my urination began to impress me, but I felt that if I
didn’t sit back down I was going to boot, so I cut it off early and went
inside. I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that hammocks are bad for the
spins.

Ben was sleeping on one of the couches. I lay down on the other and tried
to go back to sleep, but it was difficult. My mind had awoken and decided
that it would rather attempt to pessimistically predict the course of the
rest of my life.

***

I ducked and dropped my beer from my non-pitching hand because I thought
the Wiffle ball was coming right for me, but it never hit an apex. It just
stayed on a straight line over my head, still going upwards.

“Should I call in the reliever?” Corey yelled to me from his one-man
outfield, as he watched the ball sail over the boathouse and into the
trees.

“Still got it,” said Ben, and passed the bat to Siobhan as he began his
trot around our makeshift bases (two tennis rackets and a Mets cap).

Corey jogged over to where the ball had disappeared. He paused before the
treeline, staring, and then shouted to us. He had found something.

***

The buck was only a yard or two into the brush. It lay with its legs folded
under itself, like an animal at the manger in Bethlehem, only with the
addition of a festering wound. It had gotten worse, of course. The hoof had
now completely fallen away, and the rot had moved up almost to the
shoulder. I couldn’t tell if its bleating was a normal deer sound, or something more plaintive.

“Wow,” said Ben. “Look at that. How many points? Twelve?”

“It’ll die with its leg like that,” said Corey.

“No shit,” said Ben.

The girls caught up and quickly assessed the situation. Kennedy started to
cry immediately.

“Do you really have to kill it?” asked Siobhan.

“Well, none of us had said that yet, honey,” said Ben.

***

One of Kennedy’s uncles had taken the rifles away on a hunting trip and
failed to return them, and so the only weapon left on the rack above the
fireplace was an old over-under shotgun. Shells were right there on the
mantle, which was probably unwise.

When we got back to the buck (without Kennedy and Siobhan, who in keeping
with the Eisenhower-era aesthetic of the cabin were happy to agree that
this was a man’s task), it had dragged itself a few feet deeper into the
brush. It sensed our nearness and resumed its bleating as we approached.

“I think I’ve got to stop pretending that this doesn’t bother me,” said
Corey.

“He’s in a lot of pain, Corey,” I said.

“I’m not against it in principle. I just think I’ll go stand over there, if
that’s okay. Don’t tell Kennedy.”

Ben and I stood regarding the animal. He was holding the gun.

“Sad,” he said, standing still, looking at it. I had the thought that he
was trying to get something out of this, which I didn’t like.

“Yeah. Here, I’ll do it,” I said, and took the gun from his hands. As I
walked towards the buck I realized that maybe I shouldn’t be buzzed for
this, but now I was moving as if on rails.

The buck tried to stand as I got closer but only made it a few inches off
the ground before falling back down. From a foot away, I leveled the barrel
at its head and pulled the trigger. An invisible fist-sized ball of pure
violence stove in the skull and bits of matter flew outwards and upwards,
some of which landed on me. The report came back twice from the far shore
of the lake. The buck fell onto its side and spasmed a few times, like a
dog running in a dream, and then began to curl in on itself.

“Fuuuck,” Ben said, “That was loud.”

Corey walked back around from behind the boathouse and looked at the
animal, which kicked once more, and then was still.

Ben leaned over and touched the antlers, shook them slightly like one tests
a ladder before climbing it. “What’s the morality of taking the antlers,
when it just fell into our laps like this?” he said.

***

Kennedy made a phone call to some neighbors who lived up here year-round,
and within the hour we were sitting at the kitchen table and watching
through the bay window as two men gutted the buck. She had offered them the
antlers, hide, and meat–so basically everything– if they would just get
it out of the yard. The amount of viscera that they lifted out, like a
magic trick, bloody entrails dangling like festoons, was unbelievable. They
loaded the carcass into the back of their pick-up truck and drove off,
honking twice in farewell.

“To Bucky,” Ben said, lifting his Bloody Mary, “May he frolic forever in
deer heaven.”

“Stop it!” Siobhan said, laughing.

“Poor guy got totally JFK’d,” Ben continued.

I made more Bloody Marys.

***

There was only one other time that I had ever killed anything larger than a
bug. My freshman year of college, I had seen a small yellow bird with a
black stripe slowly flopping over on the sidewalk, clearly dying, and in a
fleeting moment of what I considered manfully clear-eyed assessment of the
bird’s fate, I crushed it under my boot heel as an act of mercy. I couldn’t
believe how little resistance its body gave, like an empty eggshell. I felt
good about my decision for all of about two minutes and then got back to my
dorm room and fell immediately into a deep depression, not so much upset
with what I had done but with the way that things were and would be
forever. I also probably just really missed home.

And now I had killed a big warm mammal. I was convinced that I could still
smell something about it, either the rot from the leg wound or the miasma
that sprang from the wound that I gave it, even after I took my first real
shower in 48 hours and made sure to get some soap up my nostrils. The image
of the buck spasming, in particular, kept coming back to me. I was amazed
by how much a thing could move, how long it took a life to admit that it
was truly time to go, even after its brains were blown out.

***

Later, when I found a moment to get her alone, I pulled Siobhan into the
butler’s pantry that joined the kitchen to the main room.

“I want to tell you something.”

“Okaaayyy,” Siobhan said, looking weirded out.

“That deer? Buck, I mean. I saw it last night. It was out on the gravel and
it woke me up and I went out and it was just standing there, looking at
me.”

“What? Why are you telling me this now?”

“Don’t you think that’s weird?”

“I guess. Not really. You saw the same deer twice. Its leg was broken. It’s
not like it was going anywhere.”

I realized that she was probably right. What was I even trying to say?

I leaned in to kiss her. She kissed me back for one half second, I was sure
of it, but then pushed me away.

“You need to stop with this,” she said.

***

Later, around midnight, I found myself in the lake. There was only a slight
chop on the surface but I could feel with my legs that more complicated
hydrodynamics were happening underneath, swirls of warm and cool. The moon
was full and I had cans of beer in both pockets of my swim trunks. The lake
bottom was covered in rocks, or not rocks really but huge boulders, so that
finding and keeping purchase with your feet on the peak or sharp edge of
the next hidden enormity required balance and taxed the muscles of the
core. Fifty yards behind me, my friends stood on the porch around the
grill, reheating some of the burgers from hours before. Occasionally a boat
would pass by, its running lights like spirits chasing each other across
the water, and when I submerged my head I could hear the sound of the their
propellers from incredible distances, a throaty hum that seemed to come
from everywhere.

I had made my way out to where I could just barely stand with my head above
water on one particular boulder, the moon-lit chop slapping my upturned
face. Beyond this point my toes felt nothing but cold current and I
imagined that it dropped down steeply to a billion feet.

I’ll be honest: I was looking for some kind of metaphor. Something I could
write about or turn into art. And why not? All the elements were there: the
darkness both above and below me, the cold, the solitude, the Majesty of
the Great Outdoors, the moon that could be described, depending on your
mood, as doleful or ominous or just big. It was the perfect setting to have
a deep thought and just think the shit out of it, to reinforce my own
cherished notion that I was the kind of person for whom these settings are
important and deeply informative, who can mine them bare. And I had killed
something! I should have at least been feeling some feelings about that.

Nothing happened. I just stood there getting colder, my fingers pruning, my
friends calling to me with rising concern to come back in. But I could have
stayed in there all night; I could have lived my whole life in there.

Of course, Kennedy would soon shatter Corey’s heart by leaving him for
someone she had met while coaching at a lacrosse camp. Of course, I would
sleep with Siobhan and regret it deeply, even though we’d get away with it.
Of course we would never again return to the cabin, and of course we were,
right then, standing at the end of things. At the time, though, it felt
like a beginning, and it didn’t seem at all ridiculous to hope that
everything would work out just fine.