The Glow Read online

Chapter 2

  Carson and Olivia arrived the Thursday night before spring break. It was ten in the evening. Carson's first act was to drop his bag by the front door and then to scan his eyes around the room, as if he were silently measuring the dimensions. Olivia ran into him from behind, grinned sheepishly, and then held her arms out in the general direction of Kjell.

  "Hey baby you look beautiful!" Kjell said to Olivia, standing up from his desk. The two of them met halfway between Kjell's desk and the front door and hugged while she kissed his cheek.

  "You've been working out." he added. He gripped his hand around Olivia's bicep and squeezed it, grinning at her knowingly. She jerked her arm away and smiled back at Carson, who was just in the process of closing the door. Once she was sitting on the couch, she rested her left leg on the coffee table near where Quentin was sitting. This was enough to end any pretense he had of reading that night. Everyone talked and he could only hear half the words they were saying.

  "How did you even get into the building?" Kjell asked.

  "What do you mean?"

  "I mean, the people at the front desk always call and ask me who is coming, no matter what. And here you just show up at the door."

  Carson smiled. He had the most natural face, and when he sat in a room or did anything he managed to look perfectly at ease. Now he turned to Kjell and explained how they had walked straight into their ostensibly secure apartment building.

  "Our hands were full of shit so I just told the woman, 'My card is in my back pocket.' like it was going to be a huge pain in the ass to get it out, and she waved us through."

  "Of course she did. Olivia is a banshee. The guard was probably hypnotized."

  "We brought some Bombay Sapphire as well in Olivia's bag. The two of you are more than welcome to it."

  The bottle of clear, translucent gin that Carson referred to was promptly placed in a prominent location on Kjell's desk, as well as a couple of limes. Carson began to play around with Kjell's computer, looking for music.

  "What do you got these days?"

  "I was listening to Ride of the Valkyries this afternoon." Kjell said.

  Olivia sighed. Carson ignored everyone and played what he felt like playing. A few minutes went by with Kjell asking Olivia and Carson questions about people in Seattle and other sorts of things before Quentin asked what was coming from the speakers.

  "This is Interpol."

  "You don't know Interpol?!" Olivia blurted.

  Three faces turned towards Quentin from around the room in various states of quizzicality.

  "Yeah I know. This shit always happens when I ask about music." Quentin confessed.

  "Quentin is a philistine." Kjell pronounced. "He's jumped off cliffs before and he was a high school football player."

  "So was my boyfriend in high school. Those games were the most boring thing in the world. You don't listen to Wagner do you?" Olivia asked. She raised her eyebrows playfully.

  "I'm working hard to expand my musical horizons. Why else would I ask what's playing?"

  "We'll have to listen to tons of shit while we're driving around. You're going to totally wish you never said that."

  Carson turned the volume on the computer speakers to a rather high level and a sparse, austere mood began to pervade the room. This lasted for about ten minutes until a particular song faded out, and before a new one could begin Kjell unplugged the speakers and the room went silent again.

  "Your taste is atrocious." Kjell explained.

  Olivia turned again to Quentin.

  "What do you listen to if not the late, great Interpol? What got you jumping off of cliffs?" she asked.

  "Right before I jumped? That was Prodigy." Quentin replied.

  "Get out! I listened to Prodigy all the time like five years ago. That was my favorite."

  "I always sat in the locker room for a few minutes before our games started and listened to stuff like Prodigy, Guns n' Roses, 2Pac, and whatever on my headphones. Our coach told me to stop a couple times because I was quote, not in the moment. He was kind of an idiot."

  "I bet." Olivia said.

  Carson nodded and Olivia continued speaking more.

  "Wow, you actually seem alright." she said to Quentin. "I've met Kjell before and I was worried his friends would be total psychopaths."

  "Remember, there's one more left for you to meet! Alessandro would kill his own grandma just to make a point. You'll see him tomorrow." Kjell reminded her.

  "Oh great. I'm so excited."

  Everyone began to agree that not enough drinking had been done. Olivia and Carson had been in the apartment for almost half an hour by that point in time, had become fully situated, and yet their Bombay Sapphire was sitting unopened where it had been since it was first taken out of their bag. When this was made fully clear to everyone in the room, they resolved to rectify the problem at once. Kjell began to slice a lime apart on the coffee table. The excitement had caused him to remove his shirt and he was faintly perspiring.

  "Lady Olivia -- what is life like as the declared woman of Carson Karlsen? He doesn't hit you, does he?" he asked.

  "Our domestic violence situation is none of your fucking business."

  "They still haven't found his last girlfriend. You always sleep on your back, right? With a knife in hand? I sure did when I was young."

  "Well actually, I'm not even Carson's girlfriend."

  Quentin skirted his eyes to the side of the table where Carson was standing. The pronouncement seemed to have no effect on Carson whatsoever, who at that point was scanning his eyes out of the window and apparently across to the apartments on the other side of the courtyard.

  "What?!" Kjell shouted at her.

  "What?" Olivia replied, with an innocent tone to her voice.

  "What the hell are you talking about?"

  "If you'd quit bogarting the limes and let me fix a drink, maybe I can talk about it."

  Kjell had a single lime that he had chopped into neat, symmetrical wedges, all of them resting on the table next to his overly sharpened steak knife. He picked one of the wedges up and tossed it sidearm at Olivia's face. She palmed it with her left hand in mid-air -- an impressive feat of agility that certainly caught Quentin by surprise.

  "I need ice and tonic water." she pronounced. Almost at the same time began the noise of Carson rifling through the freezer and refrigerator, presently returning to the living room with all of the necessary accoutrements of a gin cocktail.

  It was at this point that Kjell resumed his inquiry into the nature of Carson and Olivia's relationship.

  "It's probably good you're not in a relationship. I don't know about you but whenever I spend time with Carson it's like Chinese water torture. You finally think he's finished talking, and just when you finally relax he turns around again and spouts some total nonsense."

  "I haven't said anything for the past four minutes and thirty six seconds. I've been very disciplined." Carson replied, breaking back into the conversation. He was hovering over the coffee table again with a freshly made drink in his hand.

  "Do you at least screw each other? I thought you were fucking each other like all the time."

  "This is your brother that you're talking about." Olivia said.

  "I don't care. He's lucky we're not twins. If I had a twin I'd fuck him every day and twice on Sunday."

  "On that note..."

  "This is why it's good to have someone around like Quentin," Kjell continued. "You can see that he's sitting politely on the couch, remaining alert to the conversation, but knowing his place and understanding that nothing he can say right now has any value whatsoever."

  Quentin shook his head and looked towards Oliiva. She winked at him.

  "... I mean... let's be realistic. I have a vastly greater knowledge of the world, and a much more refined and logically consistent working philosophy of its operation than this poor soul you see sitting on the couch. Quentin accepts this and he accepts that I never say anything without a deeper poin
t. My job is to enlighten humanity and his job is to record my insights for the benefit of future generations."

  "Oh I see. You've figured the world out." Olivia said, barely suppressing an undertone of sarcasm.

  "Baby, I've solved the mysteries of the universe."

  "God, you're like almost as full of yourself as Carson is. This is exactly the kind of bullshit I have to listen to by the time we have breakfast every afternoon."

  Kjell stood up, stretched his arms up towards the ceiling, and announced to everyone in the room that he had to take a shit. Olivia took the opportunity to light a cigarette. Carson immediately began to talk about the contents of a book that he was leafing through -- one about Nordic deities and their exploits in the supernatural world. It had been sitting on Kjell's desk next to his keyboard.

  "In the Latin language and its offshoots, Wednesday is the day of Mercury. In Spanish, for example, it is called Miércoles. On the other hand, English takes the name of that day from the Germanic deities. Wednesday is the day of Wōđanaz, who is Odin in the Norse pantheon."

  Olivia walked over and slammed the book closed while it was still in Carson's hands. Then she covered his eyes with her hands.

  "Just because you can read a sentence from a book, it doesn't make you a genius."

  "Not just read but memorize my dear."

  "What is Friday named after?"

  "Baby you know I didn't get that far."

  "Do you remember what I told you about being an insufferable asshole in front of strangers? We don't even know this fucking kid over here and you're already playing the professor."

  "Baby, here have some more gin. It turns you quite convivial."

  From the restroom Kjell grunted rather loudly. The noise was clearly heard by everyone in the apartment. A moment later the toilet flushed and he reemerged, still without a shirt, and this time wearing shorts instead of pants.

  Carson picked up a pair of binoculars and held them out towards the room.

  "Kjell, everything looks to be in perfect order except for the small matter of this optical instrument. Why on Earth is there a pair of binoculars situated on the windowsill directly beside your computer?"

  "If you see something, say something."

  "Precisely my point. I'm saying something about these binoculars. I'm not sure that they're entirely appropriate for an urban environment."

  Kjell started massaging the back of Olivia's shoulders as she was sitting down. He made no further attempt to explain himself and watched as Carson began to look out of the window with the aforementioned binoculars. This was the focus of attention until Carson began to smirk at something he saw.

  "The binoculars are not important. What I've been meaning to ask about for ten minutes now is the statement that you two aren't actually dating? I mean, you were just in Europe for a month."

  "Ahh yes..." Carson began, but Olivia was more forceful in her response.

  "We don't own each other. Isn't that what it means when you call someone 'my boyfriend' or 'my girlfriend'? Why the need to explain everything in this way that is non-threatening to people?"

  Kjell stopped massaging Olivia's shoulders and pointed at Quentin.

  "That's the most absurd thing I've ever heard. Quentin has a girlfriend. He understands that after he nuts a girl two or three times that more substantial commitments must be made if our society is remain cohesive, isn't that right?"

  "What do want from me?" Quentin replied.

  "What would Marcela do if you told her that you didn't want to be her boyfriend? If you said it was an oppressive label."

  "Probably tell me to fly a kite."

  "See Olivia. Your tits are more than big enough to warrant that kind of leverage over the male psyche. You're supposed to be civilizing this young boy over here." Kjell said, pointing to his brother Carson.

  "Carson can be as civilized as he's inclined to be."

  "And what if he runs off and screws other girls? Is that permissible?"

  "What is your obsession with what's 'allowed'? I can do what I want, and Carson can do what he wants. For now we're here tonight."

  "So let's say, hypothetically, that Carson makes out with Uma Thurman. Would you get upset?"

  Olivia gave Kjell a somewhat cantankerous look and the subject was dropped.

  Before long, all rational conversation came to an end. The most salient sign of this shift in the evening came when Kjell tripped over the leg of the coffee table and found himself sprawled across the floor. There he remained in the prone position while he screamed accusatory phrases at Carson, who Kjell was convinced had tripped him. The drink in Kjell's hand flew all over the place, but nobody else summoned the reserve of energy and responsibility that would have been required to clean such a mess. It gradually soaked into the carpet.

  By 2:26 in the morning the gin was gone. Carson scrounged through the cabinets and came up with another half empty bottle of cabernet, which he immediately lambasted as a terrible alternative. This simply led to more insults from Kjell, who was also in the process of singing along to a Mariah Carey song that he was playing. The lyrics were heavily improvised to their particular situation.

  Olivia began to pass out cigarettes at a more rapid pace. Kjell smoked at least five of them that night, in spite of his being a self-proclaimed non-smoker. Quentin also thought he smelled the burning of marijuana, but he lacked the impetus to pursue the matter. In fact his vision became so blurred that he eventually slumped over on the couch, having heroically finished the last of his tonic. The empty glass was somehow placed on the floor against the wall.

  What Quentin finally saw before he passed out was exactly what he pretended not to see. Olivia was making out with Carson. Both of them leaned against the wall, close to the kitchen, and as time passed they slumped to the floor. At this final sight Quentin slipped into unconsciousness.