Also on the kitchen counter: a note from his mother, who is still in Colorado with her new friend Lyle Canon.

It is a simple message: Charlie, will you call me when you arrive and get settled in? Let me know how your father is doing. Do you think you can make any sense of his study? Do you need money? Also, are you drinking too much? Please be careful. Also, Lyle and I are experiencing a kind of wonder I once thought impossible. Be happy for me. LOVE MOM.

The last two sentences of this note, sans commas, sound more like a command than a closing. Maybe he should be happy that in her fifties his mother has suddenly grown a spine and a sense of her own needs and desires. But it is still f.u.c.ked up: his mother camping with a man a decade her junior while his father lingers, half-senile, in the Mayflower a.s.sisted living complex.

He has not yet called his mother, nor has he gone to visit his father. One of the strange dynamics of the Gulliver family, a dynamic Charlie is only now beginning to realize, is that the three of them-father, mother, and son-seemed to exist in a way in which they feel absolutely no sense of obligation to one another. Charlie, though he never felt completely alone or unloved as a child, spent much of his life feeling somewhat unnecessary. It's different from feeling neglected or unloved, this condition. But he always felt, as he still feels, that he was somewhat expendable. That his parents liked him, even loved him, but didn't depend on him for happiness the way he imagined many parents did. A long time ago, he thought this meant his parents were cool. Now, he isn't so sure what it had meant.

And now, although this does not feel like a homecoming at all, after a week of waking there in that house on Elm Street, spending his days drinking beer, swimming, reading random novels from the pile of books nearest the study's front door, his old life in the wider world-the one he'd deliberately made without his parents' help or support-seems thoroughly gone. And for once, he feels needed by his parents: clean out the study, prepare the house for sale, go visit your father. He doesn't feel as if he has a fresh start or a blank slate exactly, but he does feel that by simply changing his physical location to a place like central Iowa, he has erased several years of pursuing all of the wrong things-meaning, beauty, art, even, in his way, wealth-and now he has returned to the Midwest, the world of the practical, the realm of easily achieved and sensible to-do lists.

He makes such a list that morning as he waits for the coffee to brew.

1.Clean out my father's study.

2.a.s.semble the drafts I find into a potentially publishable ma.n.u.script.

3.a.s.sess and curate the letters, notes, and ephemera that might make a useful archive of my father's long career.

4.Take that archive to the college librarian for a.s.sessment and possible storage.

5.Await the sale of my parents' home and the small but still meaningful percentage of the profit that my mother has promised me.

6.f.u.c.k Claire.

This last thing he writes to amuse himself, to give himself a jolt of energy, but yes, all week he's thought of her, so close to him in that pool, and he wonders how he will see her again and how he can convince her-husband and kids aside-to f.u.c.k him in that pool. It's a goal and he's glad to have a goal. He is glad to have a challenge before him; he wonders what he's capable of achieving. Once, in college, he played Iago. And wasn't that Iago's real motivation? Boredom? Not revenge for a pa.s.sed-over promotion, but an interest in how far terrible things could go?

Lately, Charlie's done nothing. No auditions, no voice-overs, not even a guest-directing gig with some obscure community theater. Writing this dark and ambitious final task, f.u.c.k Claire, puts something in his heart like l.u.s.t. He never knew why he wanted what he wanted, not ever.

But he wanted.

He puts the list up on the fridge with one of Don Lowry's business card magnets.

Out the back window, he looks at the small guesthouse where his work is, in piles and boxes and mazes of clutter, and he looks at the glimmer of the swimming pool between him and all that work.

He gets the coffee, which is terrible, and goes out to the guesthouse/study and begins to look through the stack for something new to read; maybe he'll go to the coffee shop downtown and have a decent espresso and read. He is in no hurry to do anything-tackle the clutter of the study, see his father, or give his mother a progress report. None of his friends know where he is or why he has left Seattle: they are all actors and writers and artists, their heads stuck so far up their own self-obsessed a.s.ses they have not even noticed his dramatic and sudden exit from their world. It would be weeks before they wondered about him. A man exits a pond without a ripple, he thinks.

He writes this on a Post-it note. Maybe he should write a book, but n.o.body writes a book simply by thinking maybe and should. His father once said that after a long day of working on his own book. He remembers his father coming in one day at c.o.c.ktail hour, and taking a gin and tonic from his wife's hand.

They sat in the living room together, Charlie's parents, and his mother asked, "How is the book coming?" and Charlie's father said, "You know what gets me? When people say things like maybe I should write a book. Because the truth is, honey, if you're a real writer, you have to write a book. It's as if you don't even want to do it. You have to do it."

There was a long silence then and as Charlie sat playing with Legos on the rug in front of them, his mother exhaled.

"That's insane, Gill. That makes no sense."

Charlie's father, wounded and indignant, took his drink back out to the study. Charlie still remembers going to the window and watching him walk down the path. Maybe Charlie was seven, maybe eight. He turned to his mother. He said, "Is he mad?"

"In one sense of the word," his mother had said.

Out in that same study this morning, that place of constant retreat, he does nothing but scan the spines of his father's bookshelves. There seems to be no order to anything, and he flips through novels he's heard of but has never read-The Mill on the Floss, Vanity Fair, Pale Fire. It is next to this last book that he finds Everybody Wants Everything by Claire Lowry. He turns to look at her author photo, over a decade old, and thinks of her a.s.s now, as she shimmied out of his pool, and he thinks, yes, I want to see her again.

In the cafe downtown that morning, Claire sits in the corner, wolfing down a scone and coffee, suddenly aware of how badly she craves the sugar and caffeine. This is her "nice little Sat.u.r.day," a term Don took from a comedy he'd watched a million times, a movie about frat boys or something, with Will Ferrell. Or Seth Rogen. Or a Wilson brother. He liked to make a big deal of how Claire got Sat.u.r.day mornings to herself, until ten thirty, sometimes eleven, to do whatever she wanted.

Two hours! All her own!

With this endless vast freedom, she would usually go to the only coffee shop in town and waste two hours on her computer while eating scones and drinking coffee, because she had no idea what else to do. Two hours, she'd always thought, was not enough time to do anything when you lived one hour away from even a decent midsize Midwestern city.

Don always said, "You should work on your novel!" which is something he had been saying for ten years, which really meant, of late-you should try to make some money.

She logs on to Gmail. She finds an e-mail from an old college housemate, Lonnie Wilson, announcing that a one-man show about growing up gay in rural Iowa, Queer as Corn, would premier in some hip Chicago venue the next weekend. She clicks on the link.

Claire's been invited, along with sixteen hundred other friends of Lonnie's, whose tiny thumbnail heads smile at her under the banner "Who's Going?"

Back in the inbox, she begins to delete other things: a slew of marketing messages from companies she'd once shopped at online-Lands' End, Audible, Athleta; a credit card account update (Re: URGENT-your account is now closed!); a note from an old college professor who is now at NYU, Tim Holiday (Re: My new book is now out from Milkweed!); something from a former college friend, Annabelle Sanderson-Maynard (Re: Sorry for the ma.s.s e-mail! Here's my address in Paris!). Also banished from her inbox: a college pot-smoking pal, Will Molsen (Re: New job in DC!); Bank of America (An Important Notice: Action Required); and Hanna Andersson (60 percent off on select winter styles!).

And like that, all of the exclamation points and all caps and embedded imagery and links to dancing goats and ads for sports bras and Frye boots she cannot afford disappear into some other place, far, far from this outpost in the corn-choked, hog-tied center of Iowa.

"Can I suggest something? Just delete everything."

"Pardon?" Claire says, turning toward the voice to see Charlie Gulliver grinning, wearing fitted khakis and a bright white T-shirt, freshly showered and shiny.

"That is what I did," he says. "When I left Seattle. I deleted my whole online ident.i.ty and threw my cell phone in the bay. It was liberating."

"Why?"

"So," he says, grabbing a chair and putting it next to her, rather than across from her. "I was playing Hamlet at Seattle Shakespeare last fall, and I was onstage, and I was killing it, we'd sold out every show, the reviews were good, Gwyneth Paltrow came to see me backstage and got tears in her eyes. She touched my elbow while patting her heart with the other hand. And I remember, on closing night, I was getting into the famous speech, I don't even have to tell you which one, I'm sure."

"To be . . . ," Claire says.

"Yep. The role every actor wants to land, wants to nail, and I am onstage, and I am nailing it. I'm doing 'To be or not to be' in a way, I think, that's never been done before. It was my thing, my interpretation, almost jaunty and crazed instead of grave and tortured, you know? And I was f.u.c.king IN LOVE with Ophelia too, the woman who played her, I should say, and I was thinking to myself as I was onstage-well, she's married, I can't have her, and then I realized so much of my life is wanting things I can't have, like certain women, or a lake house, or whatever, and my whole career has been auditioning for things I usually can't have, but then I get one of those things, like the role of Hamlet, and I start to think all my self-worth is tied up in that role, and it becomes me. I fall in love with Ophelia, for f.u.c.k's sake, right? Her husband is the managing director of the theater."

"Did you have an affair? Is that why you left?"

"Does that matter?"

The barista calls out a name-Stanley!-to suggest a mocha is ready.

Claire clears her throat. "I don't know. I think it would matter?"

"I had an affair."

"You thought she'd leave him?"

"No. No, it always starts out that I think I'm going to love somebody. But then I realize what I am really doing is seeing if she loved me."

"Did she?"

"She did."

"That's why you left?"

"No. Not exactly. I'm checking out."

"Of what?" Claire asks.

"Striving. Trying to get what I want?"

"Love."

"Laid," he says.

Claire widens her eyes.

"Kidding," Charlie says. "I mean, I am checking out of anything that prevents me from enjoying each day. And e-mail and all of that s.h.i.t actually prevents me from living in the moment. I'm done; no more. Expectation, antic.i.p.ation, fear of change. Good-bye to all that! To desire things one can have or can't have or whatever-all desire leads to the same thing."

"What if you need to communicate with the outside world? E-mail is practically a necessity," Claire says.

"This is what e-mail is: either a cowardly way for people to ask favors of you that they would never ask in person, or a way for people to pretend they are having a friendship with you when they really are not."

She looks at him with a smile, a kind of smile she hasn't smiled in years. It even feels different in her cheeks and lips, a tingling, a buzz.

He seems to notice. "Most of our relationships with people are fleeting. All relationships are, essentially, disposable. When they're done, they're done," he says. "s.h.i.t like Facebook keeps everything alive way too long."

He lowers his voice and points to a tab on her screen. "Click there and you're free of all of these f.u.c.kers."

"Here?" she says and then she does it.

A warmth begins to flood her body. She's flushed.

"Yep. And then there," he points to another b.u.t.ton, his hand grazing hers.

"Type your pa.s.sword and then click okay," he says. His hand touches the small of her back.

The computer asks her if she's sure.

"You can never be sure," Charlie says. "That's why I played Hamlet. But you have to act."

He is leaning in as if they are studying, together, something on the screen, and she catches his smell, he's so close, bourbon, chlorine, coffee, and the scent of overpowering soap, like the little harsh bars you get at cheap motels.

"Ha!" she says and then clicks I Am Sure on the screen in front of her. A box of coded letters appears and she has to decipher them and type them into a box. The box disappears, replaced by You have deleted your Gmail account.

"You really did it!" he says. "Good for you."

She's all heat now, and a dampness at her center feels like it's spreading out inside her body.

Her calf touches his. He exudes a kind of tangible aura, a palpable heat, as if the air between them is solidifying. If they were in darkness, she imagines that his skin would glow and the air between them would be phosph.o.r.escent with a strange solid light.

"You use Facebook?" he asks. "Log in."

"Yes, I go on it every morning and keep refreshing it, hoping for justification for logging on in the first place."

She logs on, then turns and looks at him expectantly. "What do I do with this?"

"Oh boy!" he says, reaching over and commandeering the mouse. "Someone took a picture of the brunch they were enjoying in Boston. A couple in golf shirts with blond hair! And look, Claire, that waifish girl who won't look at the camera just posted a link to an article about her upcoming art installation in Detroit. She is sooooo way talented. Also you can see right down her shirt. No wonder you can't sleep. You've got all of this useless bulls.h.i.t ruining your brain synapses."

"Well, s.h.i.t," Claire says.

"Good reaction," he says. "What do we have here? A notification!"

One "friend" has updated his relationship status and Charlie reads it aloud: "Sam Kukla is in a relationship!" Then he adds, "Yay!"

"You're really invading my privacy here. You know that?"

"There's no privacy in Grinnell," he says. "You don't need Facebook, Claire! It's all people bragging about their awesome lives, or pretending they have awesome lives, or cluttering up your intellect with the things that should be steeping in their own intellect, you know, ideas that require some time before they are shared with the world. Or pictures from people who are living a fuller life than you."

"You're totally right. I know that."

"Are you living a full life, Claire?"

He still has the mouse. He moves through the Facebook menu with a series of clicks and says, finally, "May I?"

He hovers over a b.u.t.ton that says, Deactivate My Account.

"Sure," Claire says. "Why the f.u.c.k not?"

He does it. Five friends pop up-Sara will miss you! Tyrone will miss you! Marisol will miss you! Simms will miss you! Okkar will miss you!

"G.o.d, that is so sad," Charlie says. "Poor f.u.c.kers."

"They won't really miss me."

"What's your pa.s.sword?" he says.

"Um, Ophelia69."

"No way!" He types the pa.s.sword.

"I'm kidding. It's WendyBrybry." She types it instead.

Facebook asks her to type a random phrase to verify her humanity. She types the words that appear in the box: FAIL HARD.

They bust up laughing over that, she hanging down her head and pressing her forehead into his shoulder. Heat.