A FAULT AGAINST THE DEAD

  THE FIRST QUARTO: PART IV

  GREGORY ASHE

  H&B

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  A Fault against the Dead

  Copyright © 2022 Gregory Ashe

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, stored in any retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise—without prior written permission of the publisher, except as provided by United States of America copyright law. For permission requests and all other inquiries, contact: contact@hodgkinandblount.com

  Published by Hodgkin & Blount

  https://www.hodgkinandblount.com/

  contact@hodgkinandblount.com

  Published 2022

  Printed in the United States of America

  Version 1.04

  Trade Paperback ISBN: 978-1-63621-041-4

  eBook ISBN: 978-1-63621-040-7

  FALL SEMESTER

  SEPTEMBER 2016

  1

  “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” Auggie said as the Uber pulled up in front of the house. It was a cute house, albeit one in need of some care and attention—a little brick bungalow on the edge of town, where the neighbors were quiet and the pantry was somehow, miraculously, always stocked with Doritos.

  His Uber driver, a woman who apparently felt the need for speed even in a small town like Wahredua, adjusted the mirror, checked her phone, and looked over her shoulder. No eye contact, but a quasi-polite nonverbal get the fuck out that, in a cartoon, would have been followed by tires squealing and a cloud of dust.

  Cradling the phone between his ear and his shoulder, Auggie gave a wave as he got out of the car. A wall of Midwestern heat, still in full force in early September, swamped him, the humidity pasting itself to his skin. Auggie went around back and waited a moment, but the woman stayed in her seat, so he opened the trunk and began lifting out his bags.

  On the phone, his oldest brother, Fer, was in fine form. “No, Augustus. No, no. You’re absolutely right. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Let’s not let one tiny fucking thing like, I don’t know, your entire fucking future have any bearing on your decisions.”

  When the third—and heaviest—bag was out of the trunk, Auggie shut the lid. The driver pulled away. No squealing tires, no cloud of dust. But some of the pebbles and broken asphalt on the shoulder spun under the tires, and not for the first time, Auggie wished he’d been able to get off the phone with Fer faster. He could have done something funny with the footage of the Uber pulling away. Maybe the end of a bad date?

  “I am thinking about the future,” Auggie said as he lugged two of the bags up the driveway toward the house. He went back to the road and got the third one. “A lot, actually. It’s senior year, Fer. I’m supposed to be worrying about the future.”

  “Finally. You’re finally making some fucking sense—”

  “But I think it might be a bit of a leap, telling me that I’m going to end up as a San Francisco bridge troll offering five-dollar blowies all because I made the fatal mistake of taking out student loans to pay for my last year of college.”

  “Really, Augustus? Does that seem like a leap to you? In your infinite fucking wisdom, does it seem like a stretch? Because we’re not talking about community college, a couple of grand here and there. Do you have any idea how much a year at a private college costs?”

  “Well, yeah. Because I took out the loans. And it’s all paid for.”

  “I can pay them off. I can move some money around and pay them off this week so that you’re not carrying them around for the next thirty years.”

  Auggie dragged the bags up the walk and onto the porch. They clunked as he set them down and went back for the third one.

  “And five dollars for a hummer?” Fer said. “Who the fuck do you think you are? Johnny Hazzard?”

  “I don’t know who that is.”

  “Nice try.”

  “How do you know who he is?”

  “Because I have this human-sized growth attached to me, and it turns out he’s a major homo, and therefore I have to know the territory so he doesn’t end up swinging on an ass-hook in some boner’s basement.”

  The door to the house opened as Auggie hauled the third bag up the porch steps, and Theo stood there. Theo was Theo, and the months apart had, if anything, somehow made him even better: he was taller than Auggie and built strong, with a bro flow of strawberry-blond hair and a thick beard that made his cheekbones pop. He looked confused for a moment, and then a smile spread across his face as he took Auggie into a hug. The hug turned into a kiss, which, apparently, Fer heard.

  “Excuse me,” Fer shouted. “Some people are trying to have a fucking conversation here. Tell him he can suck your face off when I’m finished with you.”

  Auggie kissed Theo a little more because of that.

  When they separated, Theo raised an eyebrow and whispered, “Fer?”

  Auggie nodded. “He’s worried about my future.”

  “You’re goddamn fucking right I’m worried about your future. If it were up to you, you’d end up on the internet letting clowns give you high colonics.”

  “Is this the kind of porn you watch? Does Johnny Hazzard do that?” Auggie could hear the scream building on the other end of the call, so he added, “I’ve got my future all planned out. Theo’s going to be my sugar daddy.”

  Theo made a face. He squeezed Auggie’s arm and nudged him inside, and he followed with two of the bags, whispering, “I would have helped you carry them. For that matter, I would have met you at the shuttle.”

  “Fer, I’m going to be fine. Look, I’m home—”

  “You’re what?” Fer asked in a very un-Fer-like voice.

  Auggie decided to hurry past that part. “—and Theo’s going to help me get unpacked, and school is all paid for, and you’ve got nothing to worry about.”

  “How much did you pay for the shuttle?” Fer asked.

  Kicking off his Jordans, Auggie tried not to sigh. He stumbled over to the window A/C unit that had, against all odds, survived another Missouri summer, and he draped himself over it. The air was barely lukewarm, but after a day on planes and buses and shuttles and the Uber, it felt like heaven. Auggie decided he’d shower first. Then sex. Then unpacking. Or maybe shower sex. He was an adult, and adults were supposed to multitask.

  “Was it more than fifty dollars?”

  “Fer.”

  “Ok, how much did you tip the Uber guy?”

  “A) sexist, because she was a woman.”

  “Did you tip her more than ten percent? Because you’re not supposed to tip, Augustus. That’s the whole point of those apps.”

  “The trip was fine, Fer, and I’ve got a lot to do—”

  “I should have gone with you.”

  Auggie blinked, trying to keep up with the shift in conversation.

  “I should have gone with you,” Fer said again. “I knew if I didn’t go with you, you were going to end up getting eaten out in airport bathrooms and fingered in those little airplane shitters, and instead, it’s so much fucking worse. Let me guess: you paid sixty dollars for that shuttle.”

  “Fer—ok, what’s going on? We talked about this. I said you could come. You said, I don’t know, something about how I was supposed to be a grown-ass adult and didn’t need my mittens pinned to my coat. Something like that. I kind of tuned out at the end. And then I said it sounded like you wanted to come, and you said work was crazy, and I said you didn’t have to come, and you said if you wanted to come, I couldn’t stop you, and I don’t know—when you bought me my ticket, you didn’t buy one for yourself.”

  “I should have gone with you.” Fer’s breathing sounded off. “How much are you paying in rent?”

  “Uh, I don’t know. We hadn’t talked about that. I guess half. Theo, how much is half of your mortgage?”

  Theo stopped halfway up the stairs to the second floor. “Let’s have that conversation when Fer isn’t reaming you out.”

  “Let’s say a thousand dollars, to be safe. And you’re paying half of that, so that’s five hundred a month, and groceries—three hundred?”

  “Three hundred dollars a month on groceries?”

  “I don’t know, Augustus. I don’t know how much your industrial vats of lube cost. That’s eight hundred dollars a month, and on top of that, anytime you want to go out—you’ve got your fancy man now, so that means you’re paying for two. What’s that going to be, another five hundred a month?”

  “Fer, this is an interesting kind of spiraling—”

  “Round up, let’s say, fifteen hundred dollars a month. And you think you’re going to get a part-time job making that much? When you’re tipping—how much did you say again?”

  “That was a good try. Fer, I’m fine. We’re going to be fine.”

  “Yeah? What’s an agent going to say? They show up and they’ve got an offer from a company, something great for your social media bullshit, and they find you mopping up shit or flipping burgers? How’s that going to look?”

  Auggie unpeeled himself—slightly less sticky now—from the air conditioner. “First of
all, I don’t think agents actually, you know, come in person when they need to talk to you about that stuff—”

  “Is this a joke to you? You just want to be a smartass and think problems will solve themselves?”

  “No. Jesus—Fer, Theo and I are going to figure things out. Right, Theo? We’ve got all year to figure out our next step.”

  Theo was carrying the third—and heaviest—bag upstairs, and a moment later, he had disappeared.

  “That’s really inspiring,” Fer said. “Really fucking heartwarming. Great guy you picked there. Great partner to build a fucking future with.”

  “He didn’t hear me.” Auggie softened his voice. “Fer, I promise, I’m going to be ok. You’ve got a lot on your plate; you don’t need to pay for my stuff anymore, and you definitely don’t need to worry.”

  The silence built like a wall. And then, voice thick, Fer said, “You are such a fucking idiot,” and disconnected.

  “Still need to organize the basement,” Theo said as he came down the steps, “because you’re definitely not going to have enough room upstairs to store everything, but at least it’s a start.” Then he must have gotten a better look at Auggie’s face because he said, “You ok?”

  Auggie wiped his forehead and nodded. When Theo pulled him into a hug, he said, “He’s under a lot of pressure right now. I mean, he’s an asshole at the best of times, but things have definitely been worse lately.”

  Theo was silent as he hugged Auggie. Then the hug shifted, and Auggie was pressed against Theo in an entirely different way.

  “I missed you,” Theo said. “Welcome back.”

  “Welcome home,” Auggie corrected.

  A tiny smile played behind Theo’s beard, and he kissed Auggie.

  “Fer’s going to feel better once we have our plans lined up,” Auggie said. “For after graduation, I mean.”

  For a moment, Theo’s face was unreadable. Then, fingers sliding under Auggie’s waistband, he asked, “Are you sure you’re thinking about Fer right now?”

  It was a little harder to find his words than Auggie would have liked, but he managed to say, “And our future.”

  He made a noise when Theo got past his trunks.

  “Huh,” Theo said. “Let’s see if I can get you to think about something else for a while.”

  “Uh huh,” was a pretty intelligent response, a detached part of Auggie observed, for a twenty-one-year-old who had been celibate for twelve weeks. And then Auggie said, “I invented this thing called shower sex like five minutes ago. Maybe we should try that.”

  The laugh showed in Theo’s eyes. “You invented something called shower sex, huh?”

  Auggie nodded enthusiastically.

  “Well, I guess you’d better show me,” Theo said, tugging on Auggie’s shirt. “For the sake of progress and all that.”

  2

  On a relatively small campus like Wroxall’s, it was the kind of coincidence that was bound to happen—the class Theo was auditing (Studies in the Author, and, of course, the author was Shakespeare) was being held in the same classroom where, four years before, Theo had met Auggie for the first time. It wasn’t exactly a remarkable room—tablet-arm chairs, high-traffic carpet squares, a battered desk, a whiteboard (in the corner of which someone had written in blue marker, Add me on Snap and then a username that looked like hamburgergoblin, although Theo thought he might be reading it wrong). The connection to that class, years before, registered at the back of Theo’s mind as he found a seat—near the door, and near the front, because he was auditing and because he had absolutely zero need to impress Professor Arrowsmith.

  He’d had a late start to his morning—before noon, it was still technically morning. Auggie had been, well, energetic the night before, which had been awesome and fun and, if Theo were completely honest with himself, had made Theo realize how much he had missed Auggie. Not only the sex, but all of it—having Auggie around, being near him. But when Auggie’s alarm had gone off at eight for his morning class, Theo had stumbled around long enough to see him out the door, and then he’d crashed again. The luxury of being a grad student. A grad student, admittedly, who was about to reach the end of his funding package. But, for now, a grad student who didn’t mind that he could catch a few more hours of sleep before his eleven o’clock class.

  He got out his laptop, which had started making ominous scraping noises every time he turned it on, and waited the approximately three-to-five minutes it required to boot up. Students began filing in. This was a cross-listed course, so Theo was unsurprised to see some of the newer grad students file in along with the undergrads. They managed to cohere into two distinct clumps—undergrads at the back, most of them in gym shorts and tees and toting expensive coffees, and grad students at the front, looking far more composed, collected, and, well, adult-ish. Theo didn’t miss the fact that the grad students gave him a wide berth; the last few years hadn’t exactly been smooth sailing, both personally and professionally, and Theo figured they didn’t want the bad luck to catch.

  When his computer had finished booting up, Theo did what he’d been doing (an accurate, albeit unappealing adverb would have been obsessively) for the last four weeks: checking every academic job site to see if anything had been posted. He pulled up The Chronicle. He opened a tab for HigherEdJobs, and Academic Jobs Online, and, of course—where you could get the best gossip, rumors, speculation, and wailing and gnashing of teeth—Academic Jobs Wiki.

  Jobs.

  Colleges and universities were starting to post jobs.

  Theo clicked through the sorting and filtering options and selected English jobs. Some of the sites let you dig down by specialization, so where he could, he set that to Shakespeare or Renaissance/Early Modern. The Chronicle and HigherEdJobs had two, and Academic Jobs Online had a different two, and Academic Jobs Wiki already had all four copied over, with comments and hopeful musings from anonymous posters—because the job-seeking academic was a feral, hungry beast that mostly operated nocturnally.

  One job in Indiana.

  One job in Turkey.

  One job in Alaska.

  One job in Provo, Utah.

  Theo stared at them, already trying to run through pros and cons. Indiana wouldn’t be bad. It was within driving distance—ok, a long day’s drive, but still. Turkey was…well, Turkey would be an amazing cultural experience. Alaska. I mean, Theo thought, everyone says it’s beautiful. And Provo, Utah. Well, if they didn’t burn him at the stake for any number of sins, then Theo was sure he’d enjoy the mountains, although with his knee, skiing was definitely out.

  The location, however, was secondary. Wherever he went, it would be a job, and a job would mean stability, a chance to build up his CV, get a few more publications out the door, so that when he went up for tenure, he had a shot of getting to a better school, a better location. Or not. At this point, a job was a job.

  No, the problem wasn’t the location. The problem was Auggie. He had avoided the conversation last night, although he wasn’t sure how smoothly he had managed it. To be fair, it had come earlier than he’d expected, and he certainly hadn’t anticipated Fer being part of it. Theo knew they needed to have the conversation. He knew it was going to be hard. In some ways, actually, the locations made it easier. He didn’t have to say, You’re throwing your life away on a person who doesn’t have a future. He didn’t have to say, Can’t you see how much better your life can still get? Instead, he could say, Indiana is kind of like Missouri, but with more hoosiers—do you want more hoosiers? Or he could say, Seriously? Alaska? You don’t even like to wear socks eleven months out of the year. Or, Turkey? But what about your social media content? What about the time zone difference?

  And anyway, none of it made any difference because a job, a future, any kind of life after this—it was a pipe dream. But it was nice to pretend.

  He was so caught up in his thoughts that he barely noticed the movement next to him. Then a familiar voice said, “Provo would be cool. I mean, they’d probably burn us at the stake, but Utah is like California junior, which, oh my God, why did I say that out loud because now you won’t want to go there?”

  Theo stared at Auggie. Then he said, “What are you doing here?”

  “Um, rude.”

  In spite of himself, Theo smiled. “Hi, Auggie. Good morning.”