The Brooklyn Rail

“They were easy to ignore.” The narrator of Tate Gieselmann’s story “Prey” dismisses his two high friends in the same way that a discerning reader might auto-reject a story about white-male freestyle rappers on an acid trip in California. To do so, in this case, would be a mistake. Gieselmann does something in this story that is on a short list of my favorite things great literature can do: handle a memory with care. Even when the memory is the fictional narrator’s rather than the author’s, the care is evident. Like a smooth, blue-flecked skipping stone turned over in the hand, each detail of this specific place and these specific people has been worn by reflection and recollection, resulting in a solid whole. This attention—in the Simone Weil sense of bringing all of one’s faculties to the moment with meditative intensity—is uncommon in a literary landscape where memory often serves as the prelude to grand pronouncement or fantastical adventure. It’s rare for writers to treat memories as things in themselves; Stuart Dybek and Justin Taylor are two contemporary authors who consistently afford memory with the attention I think it demands. Tate Gieselmann may soon be in that company.

*

In the backseat of the rented Corolla, I accepted two tabs from Kyle’s outstretched hand while wondering how to avoid taking the acid. The blotter paper he brought was printed with a graphic of a smiling bear, maybe a Care Bear? The tabs in my hand depicted the bear’s feet, cartoon cylinders without toes. Ethan sped us through a redwood forest. We were headed toward the ocean.

I could say I wasn’t in the mood, that I would prefer to hike without hallucinating, but that would let Ethan know something was wrong. I liked taking drugs. It would be weird if I abstained. It might even prompt him to ask, “You good?”, though it probably wouldn’t, we never discussed our feelings. Ethan wouldn’t ask. But Kyle was in life coach training, had in fact been begging to coach my life, so he might ask, and while I could simply say, “Yeah, bruh,” he might follow up with, “For real?” and I would have to mumble through an awkward conversation about feelings, goals, and optimization. Kyle was still twisted around in the passenger seat to face me, smiling like he’d never known grief, waiting for me to ingest the crazy paper. I tucked the tabs into my palm’s deepest crease and mimed tossing them into my open mouth. When he turned forward, I shoved the drugs into my pants pocket.

“Each tab’s 50 ug,” he explained to Ethan. “Two should be pretty potent, but I’m down for potent.”

Ethan asked, “What does ug stand for? Ultra gram?”

“Unlimited gram,” I said, then remembered I was supposed to be talking like I had tabs in my mouth.

Ethan rapped, “Unlimited on the ‘Gram,/ I’m different with the grams,/ selling cocaine to kids,/ get a bitch pregnant, then scram.”

Kyle stuck tabs under his tongue and gestured for Ethan to do the same. “We want to all peak at the same time,” he said, mush-mouthed.

“I might only take one,” Ethan said.

“Take one, and you can take another later,” I said, while pressing my tongue against the floor of my mouth. In the last two days, my feelings toward Ethan had completely transformed, from trust to suspicion, from appreciation to resentment. Now, just looking at him pissed me off. I had spent the two-hour ride from SF fantasizing about freak car accidents that killed the driver but left his two passengers unscathed.

Kyle told Ethan we had to let our bloodstreams absorb the tabs for at least twenty minutes. We worked our tongues around our closed mouths. In the sudden quiet I heard the Corolla’s tires spin and its chassis groan. Then Ethan played a song and the car noise was replaced by a plangent 808 beat and the sound of Ethan, rapping along with “Thought it Was A Drought,” by Future.

We met in our college hip-hop club. Once a week for four years, we crowded around a Bluetooth speaker by the student union, freestyling over DJ Premier and Pete Rock instrumentals. I’m embarrassed by it now, but honestly, I loved spending those hours in public view, showing off what at that point was my biggest talent.

Kyle was tall with a thin face and large, flat ears that his wavy blonde hair never fully hid. Both his parents were psychiatrists. Unlike me and Ethan, he never took rapping seriously, probably because he wasn’t very good. An Eastern Religions major, he rambled off-beat about meditation and decalcifying his pineal gland.

I thought his third eye shit was corny, and rap’s typical subjects (selling drugs and fucking women, or, excuse me, bitches) seemed off-limits, so I rapped about how good I was at rapping, using my English-major vocabulary to keep the freestyle going; I could flow indefinitely without missing a rhyme.

Ethan and I came from similar backgrounds, but he didn’t share my scruples about forbidden subjects. When he rapped, he was a pimp, he was a drug dealer, even if he was a skinny, 5’7” Jewish kid from the DMV with lawyer parents. He was the first person I met in the hip-hop club who was better than me. Yes, he landed on beat, but it was more about his—I’m not sure there’s a better word—swag. He stood in our circle as if he were its center. As if spotlighted on stage with a mic in hand rather than on campus with an iPhone. The confidence he exuded made you forget to question the whole white-kids-rapping enterprise.

Ethan was one of my best friends, but he kept a lot hidden. All I knew about his family life was that it was bad. When I started dating Cleo, he told me they’d made out at a party during sophomore year. Other than that, I only knew boring college details, like what classes he took or what parties he went to.

We’d gone to school on the East Coast, but three years after graduation, we’d all moved to San Francisco. Kyle sold CRM software for a startup. Ethan landed an 18-month design contract with Apple. I roasted coffee in a dusty Oakland warehouse, filling 2500 lb-capacity bags called “Super Sacks,” batch by 90-pound batch. Our company’s biggest client was an almond milk brand that sold ready-to-drink iced lattes in CVS. Everything in that fucking warehouse was heavy. The roaster door alone weighed fifty pounds. Months of repetitive lifting had damaged my lower back. I had vague dreams of ‘being an artist’ but the furthest I got was uploading songs I made with Ethan to our shared Soundcloud. Artists needed free time, which was why I didn’t have a degree-appropriate job, though Ethan seemingly balanced career and artistic work with no problem. He and Kyle both made more than triple what I did.

Even then I sensed that our group’s friendship was held together by fraying threads of nostalgia and sentimentality. We’d stayed close because we all lived in a new city and didn’t know anybody else. We drank beers on Ethan’s balcony and said nothing about nothing until it was time to freestyle.

Since my breakup with Cleo, I’d been living with roastery coworkers in an Oakland punk house. They, like me, thought little of money or career shit. I began spending more time with them and less with Ethan and Kyle. When Ethan hit me up to plan this trip, I hadn’t seen him in three weeks. I knew he’d been hanging with Cleo (they were both designers, I told myself, perhaps naively), but I didn’t know how much. Then Cleo told me everything.

We parked by the ocean and crossed Highway 1 on foot. A dirt trail led us up the Sonoma Coast hillside, which was carpeted with dry grasses and gray-green chaparral. The clouds roiled close overhead. It was a beautiful hike, but I didn’t notice, the same way I didn’t see the ocean behind me. I tore open a banana and threw the peel off-trail, where it landed, awkwardly visible, on a bush. I worried myself immobile over whether to retrieve it. My friends bounded ahead, energized by their expectation, while my own expectations (friends discovering I lied about taking acid, or, I hurt Ethan like he hurt me, or, I cry) made me anxious. I needed to chill. I only had to make it through the hike, plus one night at an Airbnb, then tomorrow’s drive home. After, if I didn’t want to, I never had to see Ethan again.

I can say this now, because of therapy: I was a fantastic represser. One of the best. I put my swole repressive muscles to work, shrinking my rage until I could almost forget it was there.

“I think I feel something!” Ethan yelled.

Kyle called back to me. “How about you?”

“Great,” I lied. “A little lightheaded.” It was too early to be feeling much. As we descended into a valley, I stepped over a mole burrow. There were claw marks at its entrance, as if the burrower had been dragged out. Twenty feet from the trail, two crows picked at a small carcass. There was no way, right?

Ahead, Ethan cleaned his shoes with a fir branch. The trail had scuffed and dirtied his knockoff Yeezys. I remember when they arrived from China. He rotated them under my gaze and said, “Nobody can tell they’re fake.” We could tell.

As I approached, I could see Kyle had shifted into life coach mode, standing there with his arms folded, tucking his chin between thumb and forefinger. Kyle had always been on some woo-woo shit, but moving unleashed a new enthusiasm for mindfulness and personal growth. Nobody in the Bay tells you when you’re being corny. He had joined a men's group dedicated to “Unpacking the Trauma of Masculinity,” and the organizer, a Hare Krishna named David, suggested Kyle take a life coaching course. Now, instead of rapping about his pineal gland, Kyle rapped about breaking down the taboos around heterosexual, male-on-male love. A positive development in a vacuum, but it was fucking corny. Not that I ever told him.

He asked Ethan, “Does your job leech energy from the rest of your life?”

Ethan replied, “Some days, I work from the minute I wake up to right before I go to bed. Fourteen hours.”

“How does that make you feel?”

“I hate it, of course. But there’s another part of me that loves how consuming it is. It’s lowkey transcendent. Like freestyling. You forget yourself.”

“Locking in, padlock style,” I said.

“They lock me in the padded cell,/ straightjacket I’m in hell,/ straight macking on the bitches/ but I’m stacking up the L’s.”

I replied, “Straight like a laser,/ whiskey no chaser,/ sharper than a razor,/ you’re all about the paper.” As I rapped my stupid lines, I remembered I was mad. I said, “I’m gonna go sit on that rock.”

“Cool,” Kyle said, “It’s lunchtime, anyway.”

I scrambled across the valley floor to a roaster-sized boulder. The crows were flying now, appearing and disappearing in the fog; my so-called friends, sitting beside the path, were no more than shadows holding sandwiches. Once I’d climbed up, I eased into a backache-relieving squat. I kind of wished I had taken the acid. It wasn’t too late, but it felt like it was. Story of my life.

Back then, I took LSD at least once a month. Since I’d left my parents’ Lutheran church, the only spiritual experiences I’d had were on psychedelics. I no longer intellectually believed in god, but an acid high overwhelmed my brain, which stopped me from intellectualizing everything. Acid inflicted onto me a sense of awe so massive I could only describe it as godlike. Of course, any revelation I had while stoned seemed hella banal the day after. I remember opening my Notes App one post-trip morning to find I’d written the phrase, “I am an ant,” in fifteen different fonts. So yeah, banal. But even a fleeting spiritual experience was better than atheism’s flat emptiness.

I’d agreed to this trip, Ethan’s first, with the hope that I’d have an acid-inspired revelation, but after my conversation with Cleo two nights before, I’d decided revelations weren’t worth the hype. She and I had planned to discuss over dinner whether there was anything to salvage from our broken relationship, whether our six months of post-split hook-ups had ruined our chances at love. Instead, she told me the Bad Thing that Ethan said about me.

After I heard, I’d wanted to bail on the trip, but Cleo begged me not to. “His Dad left when he was twelve,” she said. “He hasn't processed the trauma of abandonment.”

“What the fuck do I care about his trauma?”

“Abandonment aside, if you bail, he’ll know I told you,” she said.

By then, I didn’t trust Cleo, but when I asked if she’d hooked up with Ethan, she said, vehemently, no.

I was and still am weak-willed when it comes to love. I agreed to go. Acid was out of the question, though. I couldn’t risk a spiral. I promised myself I’d make it through the weekend without confronting him or embarrassing myself.

“Yo, Nietzsche!” Ethan yelled. “Get over here.”

They were crouched over an earthworm. Kyle said, “It looks insane.” I crouched, too, trying to see what they saw: the thousands of ridges along its purple body, undulating over the dirt, and the mucousy, Band-Aid-shaped bulge around its front. Flesh of my flesh, I thought, reminded more of the DMX album than the Genesis verse. I dimly recalled something my middle-school biology teacher had taught us: If you cut a worm in half, each segment becomes its own worm. I wondered if the new worms shared the previous worm’s memories, or if the split rid them of their baggage.

Ethan asked, “Do you think they have hierarchical societies? Like, is there a top worm?”

“Do worms even socialize?” Kyle asked.

“They fuck, right?”

“Top worm. Big slime. Big worm man.”

“Is the worm vibrating for you?”

“Nah.”

I said, “Ethan, I’ll give you five bucks if you eat it.”

“Disgusting,” he said, spitting on the ground.

“What are you, pussy?”

“To eat an earthworm? Yeah, I’m pussy.”

Kyle held the uneaten half of a turkey sandwich, folding and unfolding the white bread so that it looked like a mouth with mayonnaise teeth and an American cheese tongue. He saw me staring and asked, “You want some?”

I said, “Nah. I think the drugs are fucking with my appetite.”

The trail ended at the burned remains of a cypress tree, the brown trunk scorched black at its jagged, branchless summit. We headed back to the car. Kyle and Ethan discussed the mind-body problem, cashews vs. almonds, life after death, and which Transformer had the most swag. They were easy to ignore. I’d stopped worrying about convincing them I was high. Now that they were stoned, they’d become wrapped up inside of themselves, and whatever I said or didn’t say would make little difference.

Kyle said he saw geometric shapes moving through the clouds. Ethan’s hallucinations had a “cleaner, Bauhaus-y vibe.” I didn’t see shit. I remember thinking: Everyone’s experience is totally their own, there’s no way to share it fully, we’re trapped inside our minds and always will be, until we die. I want to say I’ve become happier in the six years since, but I’m not sure I have.

…

In the parking lot, I suggested Ethan take the second tab. He said, “Maybe.”

“Don’t be a bitch,” I said.

“Aight, but can you drive? I had a hard time keeping it under my tongue last time.”

I drove us to a grocery store. It looked like every other supermarket except for a mural of an eagle flying over the pharmacy window, next to the lettering, “Welcome to Forestville.” Kyle and I followed Ethan, who pulled into his cart a thirty-rack of Tecate, a package of chicken breasts, a roll of paper towels, a pint of Maker’s Mark, a gallon of orange juice, and a jar of Castelvetrano olives.

“Fucking love the grocery store,” he muttered.

“You’re supposed to be horrified,” I complained. “This place is disconnected from reality. Isn’t it fucked up that we look at chicken breast without thinking of feathers or beaks?”

He didn’t reply. Kyle said, “I know how you feel. Food is not supposed to be in cans.”

Even though we were only staying in Forestville for a night, Ethan’s supermarket haul cost $175. I stood behind him, watching his greedy ass watch the cashier. I imagined the blissful high thoughts of a man without self-awareness. His skinny jeans kept sagging without a belt; he had to adjust them by hand. I said, “I’ll pay for all of this shit if you tell me your dad’s name.”

Ethan said, “The fuck?”

“You know my dad’s name. It’s Albert. Why don’t I know yours? Why don’t I know anything about your family? You could have a twin sister and I’d never know.”

“Fuck off,” he said, still facing away from me.

“You probably ate her in the womb,” I said. I put my hand on Ethan’s shoulder. “Seriously. What’s the point of this” (I didn’t want to say, ‘getting high,’ in front of the cashier, a tired, stringy-haired man with a tube of vape juice tucked into his shirt pocket) “if it doesn’t crack you open? You never talk. Why not try?”

He shrugged free of my grip. “Here,” he said to the cashier, handing over his silver AmEx.

…

Our Airbnb was a cabin on a shaded, quiet lane, perched fifty feet above the Russian River. Two bedrooms and a loft above the living room. I claimed the loft. Underneath were built-in bookshelves. While Kyle and Ethan played ping-pong on the deck, I checked out the titles. There were six copies of a coffee table book about table tennis; the author must’ve been our host.

I built a fire in the wood stove as the sun set. The burning logs shot sparks onto the black tile hearth. I drank one Tecate, then another. Tonight would be bearable only if I dulled my senses. I called Cleo. “How are you, beautiful,” I asked, loud enough for Ethan to overhear.

“Okay…” she said. “What’s up?”

“Nothing. At the Airbnb. Making a fire. Drinking beer. Manly shit.” I burped. “What’s good with you?”

“Clark, I’m at Zeitgeist, and it’s kind of loud. I only picked up in case you were having an LSD freak out. You’re not, right?”

“No.”

“Let’s talk later then, okay?”

“Sounds good babe. I miss you.”

“What the fuck? Why are you saying all this relationshippy shit?”

“What,” I whispered. “You don’t miss me?”

She sighed. “I do.”

“I do, too.”

She asked, “How’s the predator doing?”

“Pretty well, unfortunately.”

“Has he said any more insane shit?”

I didn’t want to discuss Ethan with her. I was still suspicious. I said, “I gotta go. I’ll call you tomorrow.”

She hung up.

Ethan came inside. I could see the bones in his skinny, pale feet, which he scrunched into the rug. “Carpet,” he said thoughtfully, “is fake grass.”

I said nothing. Ethan sighed. He sat across from me, ran a hand through his pompadour. “What’s going on, man?” he asked. “Anything you wanna talk about?”

It was the nicest, most straightforward question he’d ever asked me. I must’ve really been a shit that day. Or maybe he was higher than I thought.

I considered telling him: I know what you said to Cleo. A part of me wanted to suss out how he felt. But having a direct conversation felt impossible, like talking from opposite platforms as a train arrived. In our typically male discourse, the only acceptable emotions were anger, jealousy, and a neutered, sappy love. Hurt, sadness, and shame—these were the unacceptable, sieve-caught emotions that we couldn’t address. I felt a bad combination of the three, so I didn’t say anything. Besides, the angry part of me didn’t want to give him the satisfaction. I’m ashamed of it now, but I wanted to hurt him.

Kyle came in, pointed at Ethan with a rubber paddle. “This guy takes no mercy, even when stoned. Jesus.”

A mean idea took shape. I remembered Cleo’s words: Ethan hasn’t processed the trauma of abandonment.

I spoke to Ethan while looking at Kyle. “Yeah, man, I’ve been going through it.”

“Oh shit,” Kyle said. “Are we finna have a session right now?”

I walked over to Kyle and extended my arm for a dap. He hit me back automatically. The sound of his palm against mine like an affirmation. I said, “Maybe I do need some coaching. But I’d want it to be private. Would that be okay, Ethan?”

Ethan massaged circles into the shag carpet, the cloth tendrils flattening at his touch. “I don’t know… I really don’t want to be alone right now.”

“I can do a session in twenty minutes,” Kyle said. “That’s not too long, is it?”

“Twenty minutes,” Ethan said.

I said, “Feed the fire while we’re gone. But don’t let it get too hot.”

“Okay…” he said, walking up to the stove. He put his hand out tentatively toward the black metal, testing it for heat. I found my shoes.

…

“I’m not that high anymore,” Kyle said. “I can lock in.”

“I’m pretty much sober,” I said. We stood on the riverbank, using the last of the day’s light to watch the wide, shallow river fold itself over the rocks. A crow squawked. I wondered if it was one of the crows from the trail, if they had followed us here.

Kyle asked, “What do you wanna talk about?”

I didn’t want to talk about anything. What I wanted was to stay outside long enough that Ethan would wonder if we’d abandoned him. I imagined his increasing anxiety over our absence, a nervousness magnified by his spiral-inclined high brain, the spiral like a corkscrew that punctured and twisted through his bravado. I said, “I’m not sure.”

He asked, “How are you doing with the breakup?”

I hadn’t talked to Kyle about my life in months. He didn’t know I was still seeing Cleo. I didn’t want to explain. It made me sound weak. I said, “Can we talk about something else?”

“Sure. Pick a topic.”

I picked up a flat stone, gray with blue speckles. When I flung it, the rock skipped once, then sank. “I dunno.”

“Let’s talk about friendship,” Kyle said. “What makes somebody a good friend?”

“I know what good friends don’t do. They don’t betray their homies, talk behind their backs, put them down. They don’t do anything to hurt each other.”

“Right,” Kyle said. “Exactly.” He looked like he was waiting for me to realize something.

“Well, the Ethan shit is different.”

“I don’t think it is.”

“There’s context that you don’t have.”

“Tell me.”

“I can’t right now. Next week, maybe.”

“‘When you said that about his dad… it sounded like you wanted to hurt him.”

“I did want to hurt him. I’m a piece of shit. I don’t deserve friendship, I don’t deserve anything more than what I already have, which is a shit life, a shit job, and a shit future.”

Smoke from a chimney we couldn’t see drifted above the treetops, visible only briefly before dissolving into air. Kyle said, “Self-pity will only lead you back into yourself.”

I have to say, he was a better life coach than I expected.

He asked if I wanted to go back. It was dark and the wind had turned from cool to cold. “In a minute,” I replied. I picked up another stone, felt its edges, and put it down. We listened to the river. Its random babbling splashes sounded like life.

Inside, it was warm. Ethan had added logs to the fire. He crouched by the stove with his shoulders hunched, gripping his right wrist with his left hand, the knots of his spine visible through his black cotton sweater.

As I stepped forward I saw the burn blooming cherry-red across his palm. I almost shouldn’t say palm. The heat had erased it until only melted underskin remained. The fleshy section where his thumb began wasn’t even red, but yellow, with tiny blisters already bubbling in the wound.

“Hey guys,” he said shakily.

“What the fuck…” Kyle said.

I looped my hands under Ethan’s armpits and pulled him upright. He said, dreamily, “Get offa me,” then, sharply, “Enough,” pulling away from my grasp. He didn’t want to be touched. Not by another dude.

I ran into the kitchen, found a bowl, and filled it with ice water. I told him to put his hand in. Maybe he saw the fear in my eyes; anyway, he didn’t resist, he submerged it. When I asked what had happened he said, “I fed the fire, but got nervous that I’d made it too hot. So I checked the stove. The feeling on my hand was incredible. A bunch of distinct jolts ran up my arm. Like I was in control of the fire. Like a demi-god or something. I was too busy enjoying the pleasure that I didn’t notice when it turned to pain.”

While he talked I googled “Difference btwn second and third degree burns” and “When to take burn victim to hospital.”

“It still feels hot, even in the cold water,” he said. “Ow… ow.”

Kyle paced in the living room, muttering to himself. I knew he felt guilty for leaving Ethan. I felt it too. The internet said not to put ice on the burn, and I’d put ice in the water. I started scooping cubes out of the bowl with my hand, then wondered if my hands were dirty; I scooped the rest with a cup measure.

“I’m calling 911,” Kyle said.

…

In the emergency room, Ethan whispered to me: “Don’t tell them I’m stoned.” His pupils like sinkholes.

By then, revenge was the furthest thing from my mind. I patted him on the shoulder and said, “Don’t worry dog. They won’t be able to tell.” Then I went back to feeling horrible.

The doctors cleaned his hand, wrapped it in gauze, and discharged him. There wasn’t much else they could do. While they attended his wound, Ethan scrunched his eyes and stared at a blank, white space on the wall, as if stifling a pained cry. He looked like a little kid.

…

By the time we returned to the Airbnb, Ethan’s pain had gotten worse. He said his hand felt like one raw nerve, swollen to bursting. They’d given him a big bottle of Percocet. He offered us some. I took two and climbed into the loft. I wanted to avoid thinking about how I’d gotten exactly what I’d wanted. I felt numb, guilty. As the first gray light peeked through the tiny window by my head, the robins and mockingbirds started their dawn chorus. I closed my eyes and waited for the drugs to make me happy.

I drove us home the next afternoon. Ethan sat in the backseat clutching his wrist, his right hand wrapped. He’d checked under the gauze before we left; the flesh by his thumb had risen into a domed, oval blister that looked like omurice. The Percocet made him distant and quiet, which was fine with me. I didn’t want to talk. There weren’t words to make sense of what had happened. Words, to us, were for distraction. We could easily string them into freestyles, but couldn’t communicate how we actually felt. I realized over the two-hour drive that I would never confront Ethan about what he’d said to Cleo, that I would toss him away like an empty bottle at the bar. But that thought didn’t bother me as much as the underlying worry that he and I weren’t so different. That if I were in that hole, I too would’ve clawed back.