The Rest Is Illusion Read online

  His father had been so athletic when Dash was a child. He glided effortlessly to the finish line in cycling races and city marathons, but then the horrendous pain came one afternoon on the front porch.

  “Are you going to run with me this year, son?” Dale Yarnsbrook sat on the swing with a glass of ice water.

  “I’m planning to,” Dash replied, stretching his calves on the steps. He bent forward, giving his hamstrings a good stretch before his daily run.

  As Dashel focused his eyes on the ground below him, his shadow eclipsing the sun, he heard the crash of glass and liquid, and then the terrifying sound of his father’s body falling to the wood floor. Dash ran to his father but could only watch as his dad tried to make some noise, some wretched cry.

  “Mom!” Dash cried. “Mom! Help!”

  He’d watched the pain take over. The pain was so intense, his father’s artistic and lovely hands curled into fists of taut agony, his fingernails tearing into his palm flesh. It was terrifying to look at those hands. The memory of them still clung to Dashel. He saw them attached to his own arms as an adult, those hands that now dripped water from their tips in the fraternity shower room.

  Dash had eventually stopped pleading in quiet for a cure. Pleading and praying did nothing but consume him with worry and heavy want. Besides, his mother was doing enough begging to God for both of them. Her legs had given out when he told her of the news during the summer. She fell to the living room floor, having refused his request for her to have a seat. She searched desperately through the air between them, as if there were a fog she could not see through. She squinted harder for a more acceptable truth.

  A bead of water made a crooked creek down Dashel’s forehead, then turned to the edge of his eye and continued down. It was the closest thing to a tear he could shed for himself.

  A SHARP, cutting gust of wind shot at Dash as he made his way out of the fraternity. He’d bundled up in a thick beige turtleneck sweater his father had owned. He looked down at the concrete walkway. It was so bland and cold here. Getting colder, he had heard. A snowstorm was heading into the area. A strong one. It felt strange to have such heavy snow coming in the early days of spring. How was it possible that spring had arrived? It was so bitter and cold. It was still so mostly winter.

  “Dash!”

  He heard a loud call from across the road, which paralleled the walkway. It was Sarah. He stopped and smiled.

  Sarah ran across the road to him. She wore a long black peacoat and a thick pink scarf wrapped around her neck. The scarf trailed behind her like a flag as she hurried to Dashel’s side. A thick black beret covered her shoulder-length brown hair, and her black-rimmed glasses accentuated her blue eyes like lovely, small works of sapphire art meticulously framed. She returned his smile with a gleaming set of white teeth.

  “Let’s get breakfast. I’m starving!”

  She was a little out of breath from a combination of the chilled air and her sprint across the street. Dashel took her arm, and they walked to the Campus Center together, huddling like quaint lovers to stave off any gusts the day might throw at them.

  SARAH LOVED the feel of Dash against her as the cold pressed around them. To have Dash this close was a tease of what things might have been if certain bothersome chromosomes had not appeared in his gene pool. It felt at once comforting and maddening to be able to walk so snug with him down the sidewalk. Still, she wholeheartedly wrapped her arms around the pretense. She clung to his arm tightly and took in his scent, a fragrant essence of lemon he always seemed to exude, mixed with something saltier. It comforted her at times, the thought of the smell of him.

  She had first met him when they were assigned to the same peer advisor group as freshmen at Verona. She had been immediately attracted to him but did everything she could not to think about it. She was there to learn, her father had reproved her, not to cavort around with young men. Her discipline came as a help when later Dash told her he was gay.

  They had been watching Bottle Rocket in his room. Ashley was out for the night, and Sarah felt hopeful of her chances for the evening. Dashel had even snuggled up to her in the dark room, curling up beneath a heavy quilt.

  The moment was snapped in half, however, with one sentence from Dash.

  “Luke Wilson is so hot,” he said matter-of-factly.

  “W-what?” Sarah asked.

  “Luke Wilson,” Dash reiterated. “He’s hot.”

  Though her heart was broken, she held tight to him and finished out the film. She tried to ignore the notion she had just been a key player in a scene that had been happening for years and years between gay men and their lovelorn best gal pals. She tried desperately not to see herself as a cliché.

  She was angry with him for being gay for some time. But he was so charmingly nonchalant about it, she found it impossible to show her anger outright. After a week or so, Sarah accepted things while Dashel kept his distance. All she was to have with Dashel was a close friendship.

  She sighed as they walked to the Campus Center. Her affection for him had not waned, only evolved into a more useful stage of love.

  “Are you okay?” Dash asked, sensing her mood.

  “I’m good… just fine.”

  She wondered if he could sense the lie. She breathed in his lemon scent again. So clean. He smelled young and vibrant and full of immeasurable grand accomplishments, things he would do, things that would make the world rounder and fuller than it had ever been. His life was blessed. Not blessed in the way of material wealth; that’s not how Sarah, the rich Baptist minister’s daughter, thought of it. Dash was blessed in the way of living and decency. Honesty. The kind of blessed existence that did not require dealing with monetary fortunes or misfortunes. His was a life, she thought, devoid of misplaced ambitions.

  Walking the sidewalks of Verona College snuggled tight on the shoulder of Dashel Yarnsbrook, Sarah felt free and collected. It was an oasis away from her father’s strict hand. She could try and regain part of herself here, the part she was never allowed to see back home.

  Inside the Campus Center, the cafeteria crowd was thinning out. Breakfast was not served after ten in the morning, and it was already nine thirty. As Dash and Sarah walked through the large double doors that led into the dining room, Sarah noticed Wilder sitting and smiling at a long table with a large group of athletes. Wilder’s newest pastime, Tony, was among them.

  Sarah felt her stomach turn. Early on, she had heard the rumors about Wilder, but they were only hearsay. She normally didn’t care for the gossip of others. But then Dash had told her something about Wilder that made her hate a human being for the first time in her life. She felt an uncontrollable animosity and repugnance toward Wilder whenever she saw him walk across the college lawn or pass her in a hallway. It was a chilled rage, as though it was on ice and waiting to come out in a shattering fit.

  Sarah and Dashel took their trays of food and sat at a small table. The expansive dining room windows stretched nearly from floor to ceiling and offered a panoramic view of the quad. Sarah hungrily devoured her bagel and cream cheese with blackberry jam but noticed Dash hardly touched his food.

  “Not hungry?” she asked, wondering if Wilder made him lose his appetite. She put down her bagel and wiped her mouth with a paper napkin.

  “No. Not so much this morning,” Dash replied. She thought his entire demeanor was tired and distant.

  “You’ve been working too hard on your Independent Study. You should take a break. Let’s go out this weekend,” she offered, smiling.

  He returned the smile and shrugged.

  “Fuck, Dash, live a little,” Sarah pushed a little more. “It’ll do you some good. You’re at least going to make an appearance at your own fraternity party, right?”

  He did not respond. She saw him glance over across the empty room to Wilder’s table, but he wasn’t really looking at Wilder. He seemed to be more interested in the guy sitting across from Wilder.

  Tony Votts.

  “T
ONY’S JUST a star!” Gabriel Herring sang loudly at the breakfast table. Diners at other tables turned their heads to the source of the outburst.

  “Shut up, Gabe,” Tony said, throwing a Cheerio at him.

  “Seriously, Wilder,” Gabriel continued. “One of his buddies from high school came to party with us one weekend and told us everything about Mr. Popularity here. Prom King, Best Liked, and Prettiest Eyes.”

  “I can’t say I remember you too well before this year,” Wilder said innocently.

  Tony eyed him with some suspicion.

  “Come on, Wilder,” one of the other guys chimed in. “He’s the quarterback!”

  “Yeah, but he didn’t always look like he does,” Gabriel jabbed playfully. “Up until last year, he had a few extra pounds on his frame.”

  That was true, but it had never surfaced as an issue for him. In fact, a little weight was considered necessary for his football career. Tony was never fat, but he wasn’t lean either. He had always been in that in-between area, which meant he could topple over in either direction at any moment. Still, the girls loved him, and he never had a problem getting a date.

  “He always had the prettiest girl, according to his buddy,” Gabriel informed Wilder.

  “Yeah, but here all I got is you,” Tony joked. The guys at the table broke into laughter.

  Tony’s humor and good nature had won him many male admirers. They followed him like devoted hounds. He didn’t mind it, but occasionally he would get annoyed by the lack of privacy and his followers’ eternal voyeurism into his life. It had caused him to become very guarded at a young age. Even a quasipublic figure had certain things he didn’t want anyone to see or know.

  Since he was a boy, he had certain urges. The call of difference. When he felt his blood warm and his penis stiffen, the thought of a full-breasted beauty never did it. Instead, it was always a male model in an underwear ad or an extended shower scene in a sports movie. But he always hid his feelings from everyone, careful not to linger on such images when he was surrounded by others who might see him. He would do as his buddies and fellow ballplayers would do. He would do as his parents and coaches expected him to do. When he was older, he would marry and learn to love his wife, and they would raise children together. He would be happy with that life because that was the life everyone required of him. A life that had already been laid out for him. His desires for other men, for their sheer maleness, would dissipate in time. He assured himself it was so. But there was always a tickling in the back of his mind. A whispering question that taunted him. And if it never goes away? If this feeling never dissipates? What then?

  “Well, you got that hot body now, Big Daddy,” Gabriel joked back. “I’ll be your bitch.”

  More laughter from the football herd.

  Over the past summer, before his senior year at Verona College, Tony had thrown himself into a heavy fitness regimen. He began eating healthy, taking supplements, and reading the right articles in the right fitness magazines. His parents and friends were under the assumption he had become interested in someone. A new girl. Their conclusion was only half true. He had become interested in someone, but he was no girl.

  Tony had been working out on his first day back home from Verona. He was doing pull-ups, and in walked a young man, maybe a little older than Tony, who took his breath away. He was ripped and tanned and strong, with a cocky walk and strut that left Tony dazed. His hand almost instinctively went to his crotch to make sure he was wearing the right underwear and not something that would show to the rest of the gym his excitement at seeing the muscle boy.

  Tony never missed a day’s workout after that, but he cared less about his own routine than he did about seeing his Adonis. To watch him bend and do his squats, or see the veins protrude shockingly and grotesquely from his neck and arms. It was a crush and nothing more, though. A strong lusting thing that grabbed at Tony’s impulses in the night and wouldn’t let him sleep until he had some release.

  The feelings lessened after he returned to Verona. He was too busy with other tasks to think about naked muscle boys doing squats, but Tony liked what he saw in the mirror. He liked, too, the way certain guys in his fraternity stole admiring glances at him, looking carefully and quickly so they would not be caught.

  “Naw, you just love me for my Corvette, Gabe,” Tony winked.

  “It’s true. That shiny red Corvette, it’s a sweet ride, but not as sweet as you.”

  “Whoa!” the guys all yelled in unison.

  Wilder grinned at the show of masculine baiting.

  On more than one occasion, Tony had strolled out onto the front lawn of the frat with a sense of purpose to wash his prized red Corvette. He had worked hard for everything in his life. Unlike many families at Verona College, his was not wealthy. He worked to put himself through school, taking out loan upon loan and pushing himself to be the best at his sport to obtain a scholarship. And he had paid for his own Corvette, finally getting the money together the previous winter. He drove it back to campus after winter break with a ridiculous grin on his face.

  Tony glanced at the window table where Dashel sat with Sarah Coheen. Dash had been staring. Tony nodded politely. As soon as Dash saw Tony looking at him, he shot his attention back to Sarah like a scared rabbit looking for shelter from a hunting dog.

  “What was he looking at?” Gabriel asked.

  Tony shrugged. “Well, you guys are a little loud. Maybe he’s annoyed.”

  “Well, fuck him!” one of the heavier guys bellowed. “Damn queer!”

  “Hey!” Tony chided. “Dash is cool. He gets your ass out of trouble whenever you mess up something in the house, doesn’t he? Just lay off him, okay?”

  “Well, there’s something going on with him anyway, Tony,” Gabriel interjected. “Have you seen the way he’s been moving around the house? Last night I passed by his room, and the door was wide open, and he was lying on the floor with his feet sticking out into the hall.”

  There was something going on with Dash. That was true. He seemed elsewhere, distracted. Even in the shower room, Tony had not gotten so much as a nod of recognition from him, though he’d been a little sleep-dazed himself. But Dash seemed totally lost in his own image in the mirror, like he was carrying on a silent conversation with what he saw.

  Dash had behaved oddly in other ways, too. In the hallways in the frat, there were times when it seemed Dash wanted to say something, to tell Tony something incredibly important. He would stop and his mouth would open, but then nothing. He would drop his glance and pass by.

  Tony relaxed around Dash, though he wasn’t sure why. Tony knew it was there in front of him if only he could see it more clearly. But that was all for the best anyway, Tony thought. Any relationship with Dash would need to remain distant. Dash was openly gay, and Tony couldn’t take the chance of getting too close to him.

  Tony swirled little loops in his lukewarm milk and soggy cereal, lamenting the phantom friendship he could never have with Dash.

  “So, how well do you know Dashel?” Wilder asked.

  “Not too well. He’s in my fraternity,” Tony said, taking in a spoonful of Cheerios. A stream of milk dribbled back into the bowl. He turned the question back on Wilder. “Didn’t you used to hang out with him?” he asked with his mouth full.

  Wilder shrugged. “A little,” he said unpleasantly. After a moment, he leaned in closer to Tony from across the dining table. “I could tell you a few things about him,” he said with a smirk.

  Tony detected something mean and spiteful in his voice. He swallowed another spoonful of cereal. “Secrets are best kept secrets,” Tony said, pushing away Wilder’s offer.

  He looked back down to his bowl. Tony still wasn’t sure about Wilder, still wasn’t comfortable with the way Wilder looked at him. The other guys seemed to like being around him, though. Especially Gabriel. Most of the guys took quickly to Wilder’s dirty humor, his obscene stories of some of the looser ladies on campus. But in Gabriel’s eyes in particular,
Tony could see hero worship for Wilder. Tony was amazed at how easily the strange young man worked his way into their breakfast routine.

  Tony narrowed his eyes, observing Wilder over his juice glass as he took a drink. So perfectly coifed, so elegant in his fine sweater and lustrous dark hair. Everything about him was jarringly neat. Nothing touched on his plate of food, and he’d spread the butter evenly and precisely on the toast.

  “I could tell you quite a few things,” Wilder said again, this time under his breath as he took a crunchy bite of his toast.

  “I WONDER what he’s saying,” Dash moaned to Sarah in a low tone. He’d bowed his head as if hiding. He had quickly looked back to her as Tony glanced at him. Dash was nervous. Fidgeting with the coarse napkin beside his plastic tray, his voice was shaky and fragile.

  “Honey….” Sarah took his hand. “Just try not to dwell on it. If there is such a thing as karma, Wilder will end up on the sharp end of a skewer one day.”

  Dash raised an eyebrow at her.

  “You’re right. He’d probably enjoy that.” She squeezed his hand.

  “The thing about Wilder is not so much what he did to me.” Dash paused and looked out the window onto the quad lawn, sided by large Georgian buildings. Just beyond the quad were the Point and the large tree still vivid in Dash’s dreams and nightmares. The old tree could not help him in those night visions and memories. The heat of humiliation swept across his face. “That was horrible, that night,” he said in a lost whisper.

  Promises of romance and a gleaming future. That’s what Wilder had spoken of when they met. “You’ll never be alone,” he’d said. And at last, Dash believed he’d found someone he could share his life with. Love wasn’t just an illusory thing.

  His eyes went glassy as marbles and he stared unblinking at the shapes outside. “But the thing that always hurt more was the fact that he pulled me in. I was suckered into thinking he liked me, that he was interested. He spent weeks last year trying to get my attention, and then I gave in against my better judgment.”