Lorenzo was easily the shyest person I knew, so I was surprised when he told me he wanted to be an actor. He always sat at the back of class and never raised his hand. Our crueler teachers, despising his timidity, called on him anyway and ordered him to stand and answer questions about recent readings or problems from our textbook. His voice trembled, and tears jeweled his eyes. But no one spoke up for him or otherwise tried to stop these interrogations. When our teacher finally allowed Lorenzo to sit again, dismissing him with a flick of their hand, he crumbled into his chair and stared into his lap for the rest of class, depleted beyond function.
Lorenzo confessed his dream to me while seated on a stone staircase in a neglected corner of the city, where not even stray cats strolled. He spoke as if his secret wish conferred on him equal pleasure and shame: it was both a great ambition and a regretful waste of time. His eyes searched mine for approval, and I tried to give him my best impression of such a look. But I couldn’t understand his desire to be an actor. I assumed, because of his unwillingness to speak as if obeying an obscure vow, Lorenzo dreamed of being a writer or possibly a mime.
I told him I thought he would make an excellent actor. He did have a face for the screen with a jutting chin, a tattoo of grey stubble (even in high school), and soft grey eyes that suggested intelligence and warmth rimmed by long eyelashes which the girls in our class openly coveted. His reddish hair was always combed to the side, the tracks of celluloid teeth visible in the even gaps across his coif, like rows of a field.
Lorenzo rose from the cold, shaded steps and hugged me, patting me softly on the shoulder with a small hand. He said that he watched acting workshops online and even cultivated a repertoire of impressions as part of his “craft.” He wanted to take an acting class in-person but worried about his nerves and the cost. The last part he said with an affected nasality, mimicking someone, perhaps someone famous, but I couldn’t say who. He laughed then searched my eyes again.
I told him I thought it was a good idea if he could afford it. But really, I thought an acting class where he had to stand and perform in front of others would rob him of his delusion and refocus his attention on science and math, which we were both on course to study in university.
I wish I could say more about his acting, but he never mentioned it again. He could be like that: candid then shockingly private.
I was new to the school, when I met Lorenzo. My family moved from Canada to the desert for my dad’s work a few weeks before the start of spring term. I wasn’t used to wearing sunscreen, except at the beach, and for a while my face and arms were always red and peeling. My mom wouldn’t let me leave the house without a large safari-style hat, which no one else at school ever wore. None of my new classmates burned but instead handsomely tanned. In my occasional neglect of sunscreen, my ears reddened to germanium petals and a tender scarlet butterfly spread across my cheeks and nose. Even when I did remember, I’d manage to forget some essential area and appear as if an angel had nibbled a ruby chain across my collarbone.
I met Lorenzo during lunch. After collecting our meals on plastic trays, we were allowed to eat where we liked. I chose the concrete courtyard walled by classrooms, hoping to be alone. The desert sun shone brazenly, wilting the feathered grasses that leaked from the cracks in the cement. A few boys kicked around a half-deflated soccer ball, which scraped across the ground and sprayed orange dust into the air. I hid with my hat in a shaded corner next to the buzzing utility box. After I sat down, balancing my tray on my knees, Lorenzo’s shrunken form rounded the corner and greeted me. “Hello!” I remembered his helpless tears from class. I think he was emboldened by my friendlessness (I couldn’t reject him if I had no other friends) and intrigued by my mild foreignness. He said—his shadow a puddle wetting his feet—that, having lived in the desert all his life, he was fascinated by the North, or, from what I gathered, the storybook idea of it: chalets draped in blue snow, dark stands of swaying conifers, burly coats, and wool toques that bobbed above toboggans. The state of Pennsylvania captured his imagination especially, though I couldn’t tell you why. He spoke at length about the state’s supernatural beauty which he gleaned from photos on the Internet. But what Lorenzo described was like nothing I’d heard before and sounded closer to fantasy—to Oz or Mercury—than to North America, filled with impossible eight-winged insects, unheard-of mammals, immense mountains, and vast steppes.
We ate lunch together every day. I never went back with him to the shaded area in the courtyard and preferred we talked either in the cafeteria or classroom. I worried that rumors would start if two males consistently sought each other’s company in private. I was afraid of this since elementary school, when my best friend and I were chastised for sitting in each other’s laps and swapping childish kisses. Our nail-biting teacher informed our parents, and I was no longer allowed to watch TV, my mother suspecting it had influenced this behavior. I was forbidden from seeing my friend outside school, and my parents remained vigilant to any kind of deviance in me, which would be relayed in full to my pediatrician for analysis. She sought to remedy my disposition by enrolling me as a goalie on a local hockey team where I grew to thrill at the abuse of bruising pucks.
I’m not sure I knew Lorenzo well. Our conversations mostly focused on myself, and he conducted them scientifically, asking increasingly granular questions about my past life. He asked me to tell him about sledding, snowfall, snowballs, and my encounters with moose and polar bears. He seemed to want to extract as much information from me as possible, like my memory was both his playground and a portal to a more appealing world. I embellished heavily, invented for my own pleasure cities of ice, civilizations of yetis, and colorful auroras that twisted like doves in the afternoon sky. I employed the impressive tone of the explorer just returned from the East, recounting his exploits to his enthralled but feeble-minded king. In exchange for my fibs, Lorenzo taught me about the desert, which he characterized as boring and bland, sweltering and without culture. Despite this, I grew to love it: the cactus-stippled hills, the algal tresses of mesquites (which swayed in the wind as if underwater), the black lizards that skated across the sidewalks, the mechanical whirr of hummingbird wingss, and the citrus-scented air. It slowly became the scenery of my heart.
We had art class once a week where we smudged charcoal cigarillos over curtains of newsprint until our subjects—a wooden dummy, a shoe, a bowl of plastic fruit—more or less emerged. We sat and drew, as a rhombus of sunlight moved across the vinyl floor, warming the tiles until they smelled. By the time the glowing shape had moved from one end of the room to the other, now crawling up our teacher’s leg, an hour had passed and class was over.
It was relaxing, even though the work was pointless. While moving my hand over the paper, I parsed problems from class, slowly unknotting turgid formulas and matrices, which I later scribbled on my homework.
Lorenzo enjoyed the class because there was no threat to his quietness, though but there was no back of the class to hide in either. The easels and stools were spread randomly around the room, facing different posed objects. We usually chose stations close to each other: Lorenzo and I were often within arm’s length, usually back to back.
Ms. Trujillo strolled through the maze of students in loud clogs, commending this or gently correcting that with a grey wad of eraser or the rub of her fingertip. When she saw Lorenzo’s work, she cocked her head and lingered over it before quietly declaring it “wonderful.” Though I couldn’t see him, I knew a small creased smile embossed his face and his dark eyebrows flexed, as if he were about to rill with laughter. When Ms. Trujillo turned around to me, she immediately relieved me of my charcoal and corrected the lines and shadows of my implied shoe with a kind of celerity that seemed fueled by annoyance. “That’s better,” she sighed, as if satisfying a compulsion, gazing now at a much more obvious shoe.
Ms. Trujillo encouraged Lorenzo to submit his work to competitions and have it displayed in municipal buildings in the city. But he never did. He wasn’t interested in art. I never saw any doodles in his notebooks or the margins of his homework. He was merely good at it, and his unexpected skill bemused him as much as it impressed our teacher. It was like his talent for math. He uncovered a solution, as if unwinding a python from a suffocated rodent, much like he limned a chair or figure or face with only a graphite bar and few twitches of his fingers.
I don’t have any of his drawings. I don’t know if he ever kept them. I wonder if I asked his mother after all these years if she would let me see them.
Lorenzo invited me to his house once where he lived with his mother. His father, an alcoholic, had died when Lorenzo was six. It was his mother, actually, who’d invited me, entrusting her son to pass on the message. Lorenzo did, but weeks late, and he traded down the offer of Sunday dinner for a brief coffee after school, inventing an excuse on my behalf for the shortened visit. After I parked out front, Lorenzo gazed out the passenger window, seeing his house as he thought I might see it: minuscule and shabby. It was a coffee-colored adobe structure connected to the sprawling street by a cracked driveway, on which a silver pickup was parked. An iron gate guarded the door, which a small white dog bounded against, its shrill yaps filling the quiet of the midday suburb.
When we stepped inside, the dog sniffed my pant leg while swaying a fernlike tail. His mother was more timid, however. She extended her large hand to mine, shaking it with fingers before retreating it to the other below her floral bosom. She made coffee for us on the stove—the evil eye of the gas ring glowing in the curtained dark—then carried a pewter tray to the living room, where Lorenzo and I waited, and placed it on the coffee table. The tray was arranged with white dishes of cookies and plastic-wrapped candies, a bowl heaped with sugar with a curved spoon plunged inside, a squat carafe of milk, and three cups of coffee whose pond-like surfaces sparkled with lime. Lorenzo sipped loudly from his cup, his fingers pincered tensely around the small handle.
The little conversation we had was translated through him. I made sure not to say anything that Lorenzo would censor, which I considered a possibility, and shared only banalities: “I love your home,” “the coffee is delicious,” and “your son is my best friend.” Lorenzo blushed, and his mother brightened, but I’d said it to be polite.
I have a photograph of me and Lorenzo somewhere. When I remember his face, it’s the one from the photograph. It was taken on a bench the last time we saw each other before starting university. I’d been accepted to a college on the East Coast, and Lorenzo was going to the best university for engineering in the state. We leaned against each other on a bench. He threw his arm around my shoulder and held up a small digital camera with his other hand. We smiled, the flash winked. When he lowered the camera, his eyes brimmed with tears. I made an excuse to leave. I wanted to get away from him, feeling the pathetic need to get high alone. Lorenzo and I side-hugged, and for a second, he rested his head on my shoulder, and I saw the black fan of his eyelashes twitch on his skin. After we let goembraced, he paused as if to say more but only muttered a goodbye before shuffling down the street. I felt relieved to be rid of him. I had started to find his shyness grating, and I bristled during our interactions. I made more outgoing friends during our senior year, who were unlike Lorenzo in almost every way.
When I got home, the house was empty. I smoked in my room with the window open and fell asleep, the textbooks and papers from yesterday’s studying spread across my bed and desk like an unraveled mummy.
Lorenzo sent the photograph to my college dorm a few weeks after move-in with a small note, which I lost.
I was at school and hadn’t talked to Lorenzo in over a year, when, in between games of tennis, I noticed a message from him on my phone. It read, Dear Name, I hope you’re well. You’ve always been a good friend to me. I can’t explain how much it’s meant. Goodbye for now. A black feeling dropped into my stomach. My heart thumped and sweat trickled down my face, but this was mostly from the rallies. A few drops scattered over my screen as I typed back, Thanks Lor, I feel the same way. Are you doing well? Before he replied, my eager partner compelled me to start the next game, drumming a fresh yellow ball between his strings and the ground. It was my serve, and after four aces I returned to my phone. I’m much better now, he’d responded. I pressed the small phone-shaped icon in the corner of our chat, and he immediately declined the call. My partner stood on the baseline, cradling a ball on the strings of his racquet, and I thumbed back a quick reply, What do you mean? I rushed back to the court and lost four points as quickly as possible: a whiff, a bungle into the net, a comet that clanged the back fence, and a volley that sailed into the alley. When I looked at my phone, my partner was standing over me darkly.
“I know you lost the game on purpose,” he said. “What gives?”
“I think my friend needs help!” I blurted.
He stormed away, slaying invisible bugs with his racquet. I tried to call Lorenzo again, but again he declined. Again, but now it rang with no answer. Call me please, I typed thenand solemnly returned to the match, where my friend trounced me in the next six games, as he grew increasingly frustrated at my lack of effort. He stomped his rubber-soled shoe on the green hardcourt at each point he won.
I learned the next day from a high school acquaintance that Lorenzo was in the hospital. I went to my dorm and laid in bed, trying not to imagine the horror of the situation: blood and blades, pills and vomit, a leap, a wade into an alpine lake. Each scenario had its own horrible appeal, and they played on a loop on the screen of my closed eyelids.
Lorenzo survived, but I didn’t know this, and I walked around for a week with a murderer’s mien, the teary eyes of a painted saint. The truth I’d find out later: the drugs he overdosed on had occasioned a stroke, which was severe, due in part to an unknown cardiac abnormality: a pinhole piercing the invertebrate atrium of his heart.
I saw Lorenzo when I was home from college for Easter break, over a year after his stay in the hospital. He wasn’t the same. The stroke disabled him, he’d dropped out of college, and he lived at home with his mother, unable to take care of himself. She greeted me at the door: a nod and unsure smile. A sense of vacancy now occupied her. The dog was quieter, some grey grown around its muzzle, though its tail still sped when it smelled me.
She led me through the tiled hallway into the living room, where Lorenzo watched TV from a wheeled bed. She approached his bedside and whispered something to him before waving me over. Lorenzo stared at me—lips blued, skin paled, and eyes bulged in a leering way that unnerved me. His pupils dilated so large he looked without any, like a blind oracle. His sightless stare penetrated me. He slurred my name and smiled, showing brown, poorly cared-for teeth. I felt afraid, like in those dreams where a family member distorts suddenly into a monster.
“It’s good to see you, Lor,” I said, masking my horror and the niggling notion of responsibility that chewed the corners of my soul. I rested my hand on his wrist. His hands—paralytic like knots of roots—fidgeted to either side of him, and he turned back to the fluttering images on the screen, still baring his teeth.
We watched TV until late. His mother made me a plate of food, which I accepted and ate without realizing, while I watched the chromatic flashes on Lorenzo’s face. His mother got ready for bed: donned a nightgown that descended to slippers, scrubbed dishes, and flicked off lights around the house. She kissed Lorenzo on the cheek and one-hand clapped goodnight to me.
When her bedroom door shut, Lorenzo’s head turned to me. His large glaucous eyes stared at me in the half-dark, and his jaw moved as if chewing. I leaned closer. His speech was garbled but lucid, and I understood him without really understanding. He said, with foam filling the corners of his lips, that one day he would move to a farm in the mountains of Pennsylvania to watch the immense, castle-like clouds scud over the state.
I only hoped he would. Terrified, I scurried out of the house.
I dreamt about Lorenzo the night before he died from a second stroke. In the dream, he rode a horse through a sprawling grey field. Ridges of sparkling snow striated the ground like tiny drumlins. The frozen grass crackled as the horse plodded forward, shifting its massive weight from one pair of hooves to the other. Lorenzo and the horse slowly approached me—the saddle’s galvanized pieces tinkling at eye level—and passed through me as if through a ghost. I inhaled the grassy, dungy odor of the horse, as steam chuffed from its rubbery nostrils.
When Lorenzo passed me, I saw that he was older. He wore a black and red beard and a wide-brimmed hat, from which tufts of hair stuck and laid flat to his temples with sweat.
A red house and barn stood in the valley, partially hidden behind a blue veil of fog. The barn’s roofline sagged like a rope. Lorenzo and the horse descended toward it.
As with all dreams, I didn’t understand it until later. In this case, when I learned Lorenzo died. He was twenty-six. I didn’t go back for the funeral. It wasn’t well-attended, as far as I knew.
A few years ago, I had the chance to visit Pennsylvania when I was still living on the East Coast. My girlfriend at the time had a summer house in the western part of the state in a town nestled into a valley where a vascular river wriggled. She talked often about this house which her grandfather had built and her love for that part of the country: its farm-checkered landscape (like a massive game board), the junglelike immensity of its summer forests where she and her cousins had played, and other polished gems from her memory’s trove. She invited me to stay with her there for a week in August, when her family would be gone. But I thought of a reason to stay behind. Our relationship ended before she left, and from my humid apartment, I dreamt about the state as Lorenzo had described it: the lofty alpine zones, the palatial clouds, the red barn below them.
