The Wave Read Online Free PDF Page A

“You can have the couch over there. I’ll get you some blankets.”
    He followed me to the trunk next to my bed, on the other side of the large room. I took out the blankets my mother had given me when she found out that I was living in the drafty garage. I handed these to him and then began to undress.
    The deranged young man watched me strip down to my boxers. He started taking off his own clothes.
    “You go to the couch, GT,” I said.
    “Can’t I sleep with you?”
    “Men don’t sleep together.”
    “You slept in my arms for three nights after dreaming that the fifty-foot woman was after you.” Again he sounded just like my father. The inflections, the insinuation, the hint of Atlanta hovering between his words.
    “No, GT.”
    “But I’m scared, Airy. Scared of the dark and the cold.”
    A tear rolled down his cheek.
    It was a big bed. Shelly and I had bought it together at an antique store in Venice. She had spent long afternoons with Thomas, the onetime captain of our high school football team, in that bed. Sometimes I wanted to burn it. But I needed a place to sleep.
    “No funny stuff,” I said to GT.
    He grinned and jumped on the mattress like a small child, giggling and pulling the covers up to his chin.
    I turned off the lights around the garage and then climbed in on the other side.
    “Good night, Airy,” GT said happily.
    “Good night.”
    “Airy?”
    “Yeah?”
    “The whole world is sleeping, but soon it will be morning. We will all rise up and be remembered.”
    There was a song and a broad field of light gently undulating, ululating, rising higher with each swell and cry. It was cold and burning hot, but neither temperature bothered me. There was a firmament of ice so clear that I could see for miles through it. Deep within the ice were flames echoing the sun. Every breath I took was the first breath on a perfect summer’s morning. And there was no place but many places all at once, a jumble in my mind.
    My mind was the jumble, however, not the places. They were set on a sea of awareness that knew only numbers, but numbers were everything.
    I started screaming at some moment, and the numbers switched register. Hot became cold, and the clear distance became opaque; it never ended, never changed for a billion trillion beats and then again.

8
    GT was hugging me from behind, but I didn’t feel sweaty, as I had when sleeping so closely with Shelly. When I realized that he had his arm slung over my shoulder, I pushed him away.
    “I told you, no funny stuff,” I said.
    “You were screaming in your sleep,” he explained. “When I put my arm around you, you calmed down like you used to when you were a little boy and afraid of what was in the cabinet under the sink.”
    Could my father have told GT’s family so much about me while we never even knew that they existed? Everything about the young man unsettled me. His voice and his knowledge about me, his lunacy. It was all crazy, like a bad dream I couldn’t awaken from or a daydream I couldn’t shake.
    “Is something wrong, Airy?”
    “Go take a shower, GT,” I said. “Take a shower and let me get my head together.”
    He bounded out of bed and went to the makeshift bathroom.
    Watching him go, I thought about my father. Even if he’d had another family somewhere, he had still been a better man than I. I had no money and no children. My wife was divorcing me for a man who, she said, “was better than you would be on the best day of your life.”
    The phone rang.
    “Hello?”
    “Well?” Nella Bombury said in my ear.
    “It’s a little hard to explain,” I said, lifting the bandage to inspect the deep cut in my ring finger.
    “Did you go?”
    “Yeah.”
    “And?”
    “He’s here.”
    “What? You brought a zombie home from the graveyard?”
    “He’s not a zombie. Just a kid. Confused, you know.”
    “And you slept with him in your house?”
    “He’d been living in a graveyard,” I said by way of explanation.
    “I’m