Free The Point of Vanishing by Howard Axelrod

it.” His eyes were everywhere but on mine. “Good article on the second serve,” he said.
    The doctor had said I wasn’t allowed any sports, not for at least three months, not until the blood behind my eye dissipated. “I appreciate it,” I said.
    Andrew kept staring at the floor. Usually, he was the first into any conversation. At dinner, if someone was telling a story he’d already heard, his lips would involuntarily start mouthing the words as he listened, as though the story were his as well. He was the best athlete in our class, but he was really a literary cheerleader at heart. He’d barge into our room, book in hand, and declare, “You have to read this Carver story, it’s fucking awesome!” Or, “Seamus Heaney is a goddamned legend!” On court he’d grow indignant if his opponent dared to believe in any chance of victory, but off court he was more open and curious than anyone I’d ever met, but his confidence needed to be filled in by his friends—his love for that Carver story or Heaney poem not complete until he’d succeeded in recruiting your excitement, too. He was the perfect friend for me—his enthusiasms pulling me into long literary conversations, his status as an athletic stud making those conversations safe.
    But I didn’t know what to say to him now. Maybe he needed me still to be something of an athlete—or, being a friend, maybe he just knew I might still need to feel that way myself. But the feeling I had, the extra space in the air, was like that odd quiet after a funeral—that sense that the world is held together much less firmly than you think. And I had no idea how to say any of this, at least not in any way that was simple, that went along with the story about myself I wanted to believe.
    As Andrew moved into another conversation, I knew no one would come any closer. And the hum of the party, the easy warmth of companionship—it was almost enough. It reminded me of the car ride back to college. The May greenery of Hammond Pond Parkway had streamed by outside the window, the trees appearing both looser and more dazzling than they ever had. It was easier now to see shape, to see pattern—and much harder to see the leaves, dappled by the sunlight, as solid, as limited to just being leaves. My vision see-sawed between the two—if I leaned into the world and kept a hard focus, the leaves looked as they always had, though a bit more flat; if I leaned back and let my focus go soft, the leaves transformed into shimmering patterns, the spaces between them filled with light, each tree like some primeval chandelier. The game scared me a bit, how easy it was to lose the firmness of the world, its definition—to feel, as with the very word
definition
, how much meaning depends on shape. But the game also relaxed me, which was enough for me not to question it too much. And now I found I could do the same thing with my friends, could see them and myself as patterns of conversation, patterns of silence. What came naturally visually, apparently, also came naturally psychologically. But there was a sadness in the center, some heightened sense of the space I’d always felt between me and other people. Being a confidant was a role I liked, listening to Mom in the kitchen before dinner, or to Andrew raving about some newpoem, but it wasn’t a role I’d ever learned to let someone play for me. My privacy had always been a natural moat, a helpful protection. But it was strange. Now that I felt most vulnerable, it was a moat I did not entirely want.
    The snow began. It spit, it blew, but it kept falling. It fell, and fell, and I began to forget the air between the trees wasn’t always filled with snow, that the windows had ever showed stillness or sky. Inside the woods the air grew quieter, more intimate. The snow took no notice. It fell through the gray, flat afternoons, and it fell, brushing against the