“As far as I’m concerned,” Jay says, “this is humanity’s last chance. Its very redeemability is on the line.”
He lifts an armful of snow and dumps it on a pile that is going to be the alligator’s head.
Nathan isn’t paying attention to him. He’s back closer to the gator’s haunches, on his knees, gently dusting loose snow from its flank. His ear is right up next to the snow sculpture, like he’s checking for breathing.
“Redeemability?”
It’s Clint who says this. Clint, who’s new to this small group. Clint, who makes the group three instead of two—but just barely: He’s not a very active member. Mostly, he just stands there, stiff-legged and towering. He isn’t helping the other two build the snowgator. In fact, he hasn’t even taken his hands out of the pockets of his winter jacket.
“Yeah,” Jay says, turning to Clint as if he’d forgotten all about him, but nonetheless grateful to have a responsive audience. “My faith in the capacity for human goodness is at stake.” He bends down for another armful of snow, dropping it with a splat on the same pile as before. “If they destroy this one too, the jury will no longer be able to hold its tongue. Evil will have once and for all conquered all that is warm and fuzzy. Case. Fucking. Closed.”
Unlike Nathan, who ignores Jay entirely and continues gently sanding away some snow with a gloved hand, Clint nods and smiles. He wants Jay to know that he has his full attention.
Nathan stands up to inspect the section he’s been working on. Jay stands next to him.
“What do you think?” he says, clapping Nathan on the shoulder. “Should we give him plates on his back like a dinosaur?”
Nathan doesn’t hesitate. “Alligators don’t have plates.”
“How many times do I have to tell you? This isn’t an alligator. It’s a snowgator. And snowgators totally have plates.” When Nathan doesn’t seem impressed, Jay turns to Clint. “Isn’t that right, dude?” he asks, because by now he knows Clint will agree with whatever he says.
Actually, that’s pretty much all he knows about his new roommate. He doesn’t know why Clint transferred. Or what Clint plans on studying. Or what Clint typically does with his free time.
He certainly doesn’t know that currently, behind the fabric of his winter jacket, Clint is clutching a carving knife.
Clint wasn’t always tall or skinny. Along with being the sort of spacey kid who frequently forgot his deodorant and his shoes, who routinely spent the day stinking and clumping around somehow-unashamedly in winter boots, he was pudgy and paradoxically puny. Vertically challenged enough to fit in lockers. Infinitesimal enough to get weighted down by his own backpack. Shrimpy enough that he couldn’t carry his textbooks under his arms. (Instead, he had to hold the books in front of him, tilted toward his soft chest.)
He didn’t ever actually get stuffed in a locker—as far as he could tell, that was mythical bullying behavior—but sometimes, back then, he wished he did. A few seconds of brutality, followed by dark isolation: it seemed preferable to the constant and public brutality he actually faced in school. In the hallways, the other boys knocked his books out of his arms and then scattered, tossing the books in various trashcans and recycling bins for him to retrieve one by one. In class, they sat behind him and pushed his desk into the middle of the room with their feet. His teachers would tell the boys to knock it off—but that was usually all they’d do, at least in part because Clint would laugh off the treatment he received as though he were in on the joke. What else could he do? Nothing, according to his parents. When the boys took and cracked his graphing calculator, his parents bought him a new one. When the boys spread a rumor, in seventh grade, that they found him masturbating in the bathroom, his parents told him to . . . well, they didn’t tell him anything, because Clint didn’t mention the rumor. For one thing, he didn’t know exactly what masturbating was—a fact that was perhaps more embarrassing than the rumor itself. He could tell, by the ways the boys talked about it, that the act was somehow illicit, and he was pretty sure he hadn’t been doing anything other than peeing, but he was also just barely savvy enough to know that admitting ignorance would only make matters worse. At best, it would lead to him asking more and more questions, the final and most basic one being: why does everyone hate me? And by everyone, he meant everyone. For years his parents had encouraged him to try hanging out with these boys, then those ones over there, then . . . . They’d bought him baseball cards and Magic cards; they’d given him manga and motorcycle magazines. Several times, for his birthday and Christmas, they re-did his whole wardrobe. For his part, Clint was as committed to figuring out where he fit in as they were. But nothing ever worked. When students sang along to songs on the bus to school, he’d write down the lyrics so frantically that unbeknownst to him he was making a scene; after he’d Googled the lyrics at home, after he’d listened to it over and over again and gotten all the words completely memorized, he’d wait with twitchy anxiety for the song to finally play on the bus radio again. When it did, he’d sing along too aggressively, too perfectly, too . . . something . . . while the other kids watched in dismay and gave each other looks.
So, yeah: at some point it became official. They all hated him, and there was nothing he could do about it. He understood, at some level, that this was his fault, that the problem, clearly, was Clint himself. But—more devastatingly—he also understood, contradictorily and somewhere deep down, that it wasn’t his fault, or rather that it wasn’t his fault that it was his fault.
Which is why he tried not to ask too many questions, of himself or others. And why he left his parents out of it as much as possible. After the energy they’d expended trying to help, the only advice they had left was to adopt a grin-and-bear-it strategy. “It’s just a matter of time,” they said. “They’re small town, small-time hoodlums,” they said. Time was the refrain of their message. “You just have to bide your time.” “Their time is now—these few years. Just wait ’til you get to college.” They didn’t seem to understand that, to a twelve-year-old, the five or six years it would take to graduate didn’t seem like a “few years.” It seemed like an eternity. Clint didn’t know how much longer he could keep smiling and laughing and biding his time, but then something incredible happened: a growth spurt. His body stretched up and up. He went from small to tall.
No, not tall. At 6’1” he was taller than the average guy at school, but not by much. Still, if you’d asked one of the other teenagers about Clint, they would have described him as lanky and/or gangly and/or—yes—tall. If they remembered him at all, that is. Something had happened, something apparently connected to his growth spurt: some sort of optical illusion. He was so skinny that his limbs looked endless. But it was more than that. His long legs going straight up with little bend or give, his long arms hanging limply from his side, his concave chest: Clint had gone practically two-dimensional. He’d discovered that if he stayed in the corners of rooms or the edges of hallways, if he stayed as still as possible, his classmates hardly ever noticed him anymore. They looked at him, if they looked at him at all, as though he were part of the wall he stood next to.
Which suited Clint just fine.
“You’ve almost made it,” his parents would remind him, again and again.
To college. That’s what they meant. College was the place his parents had met each other; it was where they worked, together, in the drama department of a nearby university. They only lived here, in this podrunk town (as they liked to call it), because where else were they both going to get full-time instructor work? College was the place where people could be themselves—could study and think and do whatever they wanted.
Looking back, maybe Clint should have been more skeptical, but then again, his parents had been talking about higher education in reverential tones since before he had the capacity for skepticism. That college was a safe-haven was an undisputed fact of his family’s existence.
Until he got there, and was attacked.
And was duct-taped, naked, to a tree.
This wasn’t Jay and Nathan’s first snowgator. Last year they built its predecessor. A Merrill University-wide email had been sent in the morning declaring that classes were cancelled for the day due to snowfall and poor driving conditions for commuters. Jay and Nathan had suited up for the weather and trekked from their dorm to the mall between Saunders Cafeteria and Reynolds Science Center. They’d intended to build a snowman, but soon realized that it was too cold for that: the snow wasn’t sticky enough for vertical construction.
Instead they built the alligator. Twenty paces long with its tail curled, it took most of the day to finish. Jay spent the time digging through the first layer of snow and scooping up the wetter stuff underneath; Nathan sculpted the creature, working at its shape with anatomical precision. As Jay put it: “I provided the long muscle, he provided the short.” In the end, the creature was so big and so carefully carved out, you could make out its white toes against the white ground from at least thirty feet away.
The next morning, though, when Jay had returned with his cell phone to take a picture, he discovered that the gator was gone—demolished, obliterated, stomped to smithereens.
It hadn’t been an accident, either: People hadn’t merely tripped over it while wandering in the dark. The destruction was total and had taken time and conviction.
All that remained, Jay said, were bootprints.
This year, Jay and Nathan decided to bundle up again. Pulling on snow pants and stepping into boots, they got themselves into their gear like they were super heroes on a mission. The whole time Jay kept talking—to Nathan? to Clint? to himself?—rehashing what happened last year, what they were setting out to do today—a “redemptive redo,” he called it, “not for us, for them”—only pausing to tug at the heel of his glove with his teeth.
Jay was still talking as the door to their dorm closed. Clint hadn’t budged. He’d stood there, in the room, frozen in place.
The door opened again. It was Jay: “Dude, you coming?”
Clint nodded, let out the breath he’d been holding in. “Just let me get my coat.”
This time around, before the snowgator construction was to begin, the three of them had made a pit stop at Saunders Cafeteria. Nathan brought a notebook with graphing paper so he could work on a design.
Jay looked over Nathan’s shoulder as he drew.
“You should add some clouds in the background,” he suggested. “The difference between an alligator and a snowgator is that snowgators can fly.”
Nathan didn’t add any clouds, so Jay kept talking: “Well, not fly exactly. They take their tails and thump them against the ground and launch themselves straight up into the air like eighty, ninety feet.”
Reflexively, he turned his head, looked for Clint and his reliable reassurance. When he didn’t spot him, he shrugged his shoulders, assumed he’d gone to the bathroom. “Their teeth are different, too,” he said (to Nathan? to himself?). “A snowgator’s teeth are as hard as diamond and as soft as gold. A fucking paradox, is what it is.”
Clint wasn’t in the bathroom. He was back in the corner, by the unattended ham station, watching Jay’s head swivel once more, search for him. He stood stiff-legged, trying to make himself inconspicuous, two-dimensional. He was thinking about last year’s snowgator—about how much it had meant to Jay, about the inevitability of other guys destroying this year’s gator, too.
He’d been considering doing what he was about to do for several minutes now, ever since Jay finished his story about the snowgator, ever since Clint had spotted the heat lamp, the abandoned cutting board, the carving knife.
“We’re sorry,” his parents had said after flying him back home from his first college.
“Are you okay?” they’d asked.
Tears had formed in their eyes.
But then they’d said other things.
“What were you doing at a fraternity?”
And: “Were you seriously considering joining a frat?”
And: “Those guys are barely better than the ones in this town.”
And: “The dean tells us that this was an initiation ritual?”
And: “That things got ‘out of hand’?”
They paused, enraged at the injustice of it all, enraged at what it meant about either 1) the college experience they found so precious or 2) their son. One or the other. They had to decide.
“At least the weather was warm, right?” they’d say.
They’d do that, Clint knew—make awkward jokes, use dark humor—because that’s how they felt. Awkward and dark. After all, what else was there to say? If their son couldn’t make it at college, where could he?
What happened was a fluke, an anomaly, an error in judgment. It must have been.
It was too late to enroll at another school in the fall, but his parents got him into Merrill for the winter-spring term. They filled out his application, they registered him for his classes, they drove him part-way across the state. He could come home whenever he wanted, they said, but something told them that he’d really find his groove this time. Just no more frats, okay?
Clint had no intention of going to or joining another fraternity, even if, like the last time, they were the ones who sent him the invite, even if all he did was nurse a beer or two and sway to some music. Evidently, that was enough to warrant others’ wrath. Yes, it had been an initiation ritual, all right, but not for him. The guys who had rushed him—they were the pledges. Clint? He was the target. (Is that why they’d invited non-pledges? As bait?)
He didn’t say any of this to his parents or to the principal because it didn’t matter. What mattered was that he’d made a mistake. He’d dropped his guard; he’d bent his knees; he’d shuffled his feet into the middle of the room. As the alcohol worked its way through his system, he’d even let himself forget about his surroundings. His brain and feet and flailing arms had gone blurry. He’d recognized the song and started singing along.
In other words, he’d let himself go three-dimensional.
A mistake he’d never make again.
Or that’s what he thought until he’d gotten to his new dorm room. He had turned the key and was reaching for the handle when the door opened.
“Welcome aboard, dude,” Jay said—although Clint couldn’t at the moment remember his name. Jay took Clint’s bags and chucked them on an undressed mattress that had been lofted atop two desks. “Wanna watch this societal emasculation with me?”
Clint had no idea what he was talking about—he appeared to be watching some sort of basketball game—but that didn’t seem to bother Jay.
“7-foot men,” he continued, “these bona fide fucking behemoths, throwing themselves backward after getting bumped by a 180-pound point guard, and they get up and act like they’re not embarrassed, like they haven’t lost all self-respect, like, like they still get to be called men.”
Jay kept watching the game as he sidled for the mini-fridge and grabbed two Cokes. He handed one to Clint. “You like basketball?”
Clint had barely made it into the room. He wasn’t ready to answer any questions. “Not really . . .” he said, almost instantly realizing that was probably the wrong answer. “I mean, I don’t really know a lot about it.”
He waited with bated breath for Jay’s judgment.
It never came.
“It’ll be halftime soon,” Jay said. “Then we can hit up the cafeteria. You’ve got a meal plan, right? If not, I’ve got a shit-ton of meal points because Merrell University seems intent on fattening me up for the slaughter. Sometimes I wonder if they’re like the captain from that pirate movie. The one with Johnny Depp? Based on that ride? Remember how he gives the girl all that food because he’s a skeleton and likes to watch her eat?”
“Yeah,” Clint said finally.
Which seemed good enough to Jay: He kept watching the game as he helped Clint unpack. He also kept talking: about the “insidious effects of international basketball” (“I mean, not to be a xenophobe, but where do these guys get off changing the rules to a game we invented?”); about recent suspensions (“the problem wasn’t the suspensions themselves but the fucking gall with which they were given. Like the rulebook was clear-cut and you’d have to be a goddamn idiot to think that two guys who never threw any punches in a brawl that never really happened might not get suspended . . .”); about his dream to dunk over someone (“Just turn and—hey, might as well—tomahawk jam the fucker”).
“Dude,” Jay said at halftime. “Grub time.”
Except it was weird: he didn’t seem to be talking to Clint. His voice was too loud.
Sure enough, another guy rolled out from under the lofted bed, between the two desks.
“This is Nathan. He hangs out in our study cave all day playing Kill Something Or Other And Move Onto The Next Level.”
At the time, Clint thought without thinking that that phrase—our study cave—referred to Jay and Nathan. But later he realized, as he played and re-played the conversation in his head, that Jay meant our as in theirs: Jay’s and Clint’s. After all, Jay and Clint were roommates, not Jay and Nathan.
“Are we going?” Jay said.
Clint lies in his bed and listens to Jay’s breathing from across the room. When it gets heavier and steadier, Clint swings off the mattress. He plants one foot at a time on the desk, maneuvers as quietly as possible to the wood floor. He’s still wearing socks so his feet won’t make suction sounds. He’s still wearing the rest of his clothes, too. That way, he doesn’t have to worry about dresser drawers creaking.
He purposely left his jacket in a heap by the door, and he picks it up but doesn’t put it on until after: after he’s in the hallway, after he’s carefully pulled the door closed, after he’s decided not to worry about the lock.
The knife’s still there, and Clint’s lucky he doesn’t impale himself with it. The point of the blade has punctured a hole in the lining of the pocket. The blade’s buried to the hilt in the jacket’s lining.
Clint’s not exactly sure why he’s being so quiet, except that this is something he wants to do for Jay and not with him. He wants Jay to have his faith in humanity restored; he wants Jay to believe that, this time, no one came to destroy the gator. Even though there’s no doubt in Clint’s mind that this belief will be false—that the gator has no chance to survive the night unless there’s someone there to protect it.
A few minutes later Clint rounds the corner of Reynolds Cafeteria and sees that he’s either just in time or a few seconds late. It’s dark, but the gleaming white gator is easy enough to make out. It appears fully intact, but won’t be for long.
From this distance, the figure is little more than a shadow. But there’s no doubt that it’s making its way to the gator.
So is Clint, at a dead sprint.
“Nathan?”
That’s what could, even should, happen.
Clint could arrive on the scene, out of breath, knife partially pulled from his pocket, and his mind could, even should, register his jacket and stocking cap and, lastly, as it swivels to the snow-crunching sounds behind it, his face.
Nathan.That’s who this is.
And Clint could catch his breath and say, “Hey,” and “Are you here to protect this thing, too?”
And then, even when Nathan says, “Nope” and Clint grips the knife more tightly and asks, “Huh?”—even then there could be time to talk.
“I’m here to—” Nathan could say, finishing his sentence not with words but by puncturing the gator’s: a single staccato kick to its haunch.
“You can’t do that,” Clint would say.
If Nathan hears the steely coldness of Clint’s voice, he could ignore it.
“Building the first snowgator was my idea,” Nathan could say, crouching, setting his gloved hands on the gator’s eyeballs, squeezing until they crumble.
Clint could realize for the first time that he’s forgotten to wear gloves. His hands have been in his pockets, but now one of them, the one holding the knife handle, has been exposed to the cold air for several minutes.
“Demolishing it was my idea, too,” Nathan could say.
At this point he could suddenly sit on top of the gator, straddling it, and Clint could expel a cloud of relief when the gator doesn’t cave in.
Nathan would breathe steam out of his nose too. “This isn’t real,” he could say.
Both of them would look at the snowgator’s snout, at the nostrils that could not exhale. There would be the snowgator’s teeth, dozens of them—triangles that Nathan had carefully etched with a twig.
“It doesn’t matter,” Nathan could say, lobotomizing the head with his finger.
Clint would point out that it sure seemed to matter to Jay, and Nathan could reply, “That’s what I’m trying to tell you.”
The reason he and Jay got along, he could clarify, was precisely because they both took themselves seriously about unserious things.
“This isn’t life or death,” he could say. “No one’s actually getting hurt.” His forehead could tilt. Would he see the knife? Would the bit that’s exposed glimmer? “No one needs to get hurt.”
Or maybe he’d say something else. Nathan, after all, is not one to get carried away with words. Maybe he’d communicate in some other way. Along with the head tilting forward, maybe it would tilt to the side. Maybe he’d smile, not in a way that patronized: in a way that disarmed.
However it happened, somehow or other, if given enough time to do so, Nathan could turn the snowgator into a metaphor, a symbol, a way of seeing his and Jay’s world and inviting Clint to join them.
Then they could extend the metaphor together.
The two of them could use the knife to sacrifice the gator—cut its throat like one would a lamb—or to dismember the gator, slicing off its limbs and leaving them in the snow for the three of them to find tomorrow. Maybe they could reassemble the gator, the three of them, or simply get angry together about the heinous butchery before their eyes. Clint and Nathan could exchange glances, knowing looks, winks. They’d all have something to talk about for another year.
The story could end with Clint crouched in the snow instead of stiff-legged, his own limbs jutting out in three dimensions.
But it’s not that kind of story. Because it can’t be.
It can’t be, because Clint can’t see what’s right in front of him. It’s what’s behind him that floods his vision and all his other senses too.
He doesn’t, for example, feel the cold—won’t notice it again until minutes later, when he tries to let go of the knife and his hand is practically frozen to it, blood-crusted fingers locked and unable to unclench.
To the contrary, heat overtakes his body like a vapor—the same dry heat made damp by the clamminess of his own skin just a couple months ago, just a blink of an eye ago, might as well be right now, this very moment; the same crackling, prickling steam he felt that night—this night—taped to the tree. The truth is, back then he hadn’t noticed the temperature one way or the other. Nor had he heard the shriek-suction of the duct tape. At least, he didn’t remember hearing it—until now. It was the next morning, when they found him—they as in the campus police, or campus security, or whatever that crack squad of campus enforcement called themselves—it was only then, as they ripped the tape and his body down, that Clint finally felt the warm, dry air. And even then it hadn’t seemed dry at all. The air had washed over his body like river water.
It would have been soothing if he hadn’t been so indifferent to it.
His nerve endings had been equally unresponsive, but now, at long last, he feels the pain—all of it. Of the bark, of the fear that they won’t ever leave, of the terror that they won’t ever come back. Of the tape being removed. He feels, even more than he hears, the laughter. Theirs and, more excruciatingly, his own accommodating chuckles.
It’s Jay’s fault, this pain. Jay has done this to him.
And Clint is thrillingly, elatedly grateful.
Clint lunges, knife exposed, ecstatically insisting, over and over, on the importance of cause and effect in a moral universe.