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Darius had first heard his new name when he was in high school. He had been playing a video game and drinking pilfered gin and tonics in the basement of a friend’s house while an adult cocktail party carried on overhead. A heroic warrior character in the game was named Darius. Then, after dropping out of college and while driving across country, the name came back to him, and David decided to become Darius. The new name was part of his effort to describe, and maybe even begin to release, a man he was sure was lurking somewhere deep within himself, someone more grand than he yet was, someone destined for greatness, who needed only naming to become flesh and blood.

He had left college during his senior year without telling his parents. He had no plan. He had simply joined a friend on a skiing trip to Jackson Hole over winter break and then never returned to the University of Vermont. When the friend went back to college, he told Darius—then still David—that he could stay in his parents’ condo because they were skiing in Europe over the winter. Darius and the friend had filled their days on the mountain slopes and their nights with an easy après-ski social life, but once his friend left he wasn’t sure what to do with himself. Returning to college seemed retrograde.

He started bartending—his sparkling blue eyes, aquiline nose, eraser-pink lips, and chestnut hair that rode in soft waves over his forehead made for good tips. He also bought a few grams of coke with the intention of cutting it and selling it, but instead blew it with the waitresses, who took furtive snorts from the fake fingernails they dipped into his plastic bag while they stood shivering on the back porch during a smoke break. Then his college friend called and said his parents were on their way to the condo to do some fly-fishing, so he’d better clear out and make sure he got rid of any evidence he’d been there. He spent two days doing laundry and cleaning but got his friend in trouble anyway over a pair of women’s lace underwear that had gotten kicked under the bed, a burn mark on the sofa from a dropped joint, and a grimy grill he’d forgotten to scrub.

Darius didn’t know where to go next, so he spent a few weeks camped out on the lumpy sofa of a lifty he’d met. He went to the bank one day to get some beer money and found his account had been frozen. Apparently, parents had told parents. There was a serious phone call with his father where words like
responsibility
,
accountability
, and
appreciation
were used. Darius promised all of the above, as well as a return to UVM in the fall, with summer classes at a community college to catch up so he could graduate within the year. His account was reinstated and his monthly allowance reinstalled.

But it was a balmy, brilliant April and summer sessions were not starting for a bit. So he loaded up his Saab and, instead of heading east, turned his car toward the setting sun. He thought he’d try Southern California, maybe score a modeling gig so he could distance himself from financial reliance on his parents, learn to surf, get a tan. Classes could wait. However, after just a few weeks of squinting in the sunshine and wiping sand from his feet, he had become disillusioned. He was surprised to find California inchoate and inhospitable. There were so many other handsome, young, unemployed men around that no one took any notice of him. His charms were too East Coast, preppy, snarky, and filled with lingo and code that carried no weight in the airy, sunny, dry atmosphere. Surfing was also much more difficult and physically demanding than he had anticipated. Instead of showing off easy grace, he continually slipped and fell. He left the water dazed and bruised, his lungs burning with inhaled salt water. The sun was harsher than he’d expected, and he freckled, burned, and peeled instead of bronzing. He couldn’t find the glassy, modern apartment on the beach he had imagined himself in, because his allowance wouldn’t cover the rent even if he shared with several others, so after a month or so camped out in a friend’s pool house, lying to his father during their occasional and uncomfortable phone calls, he repacked his car and headed back East.

Thinking there was little to do or see in the middle of the country, he got on the highway and drove and drove, stopping at rest areas to snatch a few hours of sleep when he needed it, filling the passenger-side floor of the car with crumpled wrappers from his fast-food meals. As the blacktop whizzed by beneath his tires, he resigned himself to a return to Burlington, Vermont, where he figured he’d reconnect with some pals, see if there was a late-summer class at the community college he could take to rack up a few credits, apologize sincerely to his parents for his six months of truancy, and try to make his words and deeds begin to match each other.

About an hour before he was to hit the dock of the ferry that would take him across Lake Champlain and back into the life he’d abandoned, he stopped. He’d left the highway hours earlier and had been driving along twisted two-lane roads lined with dense greenery, in-need-of-upkeep houses, and the gone-to-seed small towns of upstate New York. He was hungry. He passed a few restaurants with names like the Dew Drop Inn, but they all had pickup trucks in their parking lots and men with well-worn ball caps and dirt-caked boots coming and going through their front doors. He told himself these were not his sorts of places, that they were undoubtedly grimy and greasy. In truth, he was intimidated by the blatant demonstrations of rural masculinity. Finally, he found himself on a stretch of road with a gift shop that had hanging baskets out front, a store that advertised expensive and brand-name hiking and camping gear, signs pointing to a golf course. He slowed at a sign for the Fishing Hole diner and took note of a few lean folks emerging who were wearing pants with zip-off legs, high-tech sweat-wicking shirts, and web sandals with wool socks. He stopped. Just for a sandwich. Which, somehow, led to a life. Of a sort.

If pressed, Darius would not be able to say why, after lunch, instead of continuing to the ferry, he stopped at a multicolored farmhouse on the main road that had a
R
OOMS
FOR
R
ENT
sign out front. And why, when the middle-aged, retired-from-schoolteaching-in-New-Jersey husband and wife who owned the B&B asked how long he wanted to stay, he said, “A week.” He would not be able to tell you why, later that evening, back at the Fishing Hole diner, he picked up the local paper and turned immediately to the “For Rent” section. He was not self-aware enough or given to self-reflection enough to consider that he was once again simply avoiding college and his parents and the obligations they represented. He did, however, recognize something dark and protective in the landscape that surrounded him. There was also something vaguely familiar about the area that nagged at him. It took him several weeks before he remembered a visit here—or somewhere near here, somewhere like this—over a weekend in his last year of high school. A friend already two years into college had invited him to come along with a group. He didn’t really jibe with the other boys, almost young men. They seemed to all be old-money WASPs, self-satisfied and jocular, where he was newer-money, brooding, uncomfortable with the assumptions and entitlements of the crowd. He felt slightly off balance with everyone. He got their jokes a moment too late and then not completely. There had been a sprawling log house where they stayed. Just before the trip, he had broken a bone in his foot when he took an awkward step off a curb after a night of drinking. A stupid accident that required a cast and kept him from the other boys’ lawn games. There had been a younger sister. Shy, serious, pretty. They’d chatted a bit. He tried flirting with her, but she had not flirted back. There was only that one visit. He’d never been asked back. He drifted away from that crowd. Or maybe they quietly closed ranks against him. It was hard to tell. He had heard stories afterward. The guy whose house he stayed at had been in a car accident. Drunk. Killed a friend. The father—a total bastard, sleazy, double-dealer—had died in some freak accident involving a tree and a thunderstorm. Darius got these pieces of gossip as so many others did: tidbits passed around at a party, something offered up like a canapé.

But these memories were not what kept him there. It was the mountains themselves that appealed to him. It was the density of them. Unlike out west, there were no vistas. You couldn’t see the mountains on approach. You were just suddenly in the midst of them, caught in the thick of their deep, forested web. He knew no one here. It seemed a place where he could lie fallow for a while until he figured out who he was, what he wanted to be. Until he reinvented himself as some sort of a more interesting, memorable sort of a man.

Darius rented, month to month, a one-room-with-sleeping-loft, unheated, uninsulated camp. He was supposed to “keep an eye on things,” as the owners were splitting up and would be putting the place on the market once the divorce was settled. He wasn’t sure what he was supposed to keep an eye on—the owners suggested there might be intrusions by teenage squatters or black bears, but he never saw any signs of either. He stopped at the local feed and hardware store and bought himself some canvas pants and flannel shirts because that was what he saw the locals wearing. He wanted to distance himself from the hiking, antiquing, summering, fly-fishing, seasonal crowd. He had no idea that the contours of his face and speech gave him away no matter what he wore. He tried on the clothes, looked at himself in the mirror, and decided he needed a two-day scruff and ball cap to complete his look. He found an already worn-in hat with a John Deere logo on it on a hook near the door. But the pants and shirts were perplexingly stiff and uncomfortable. He went to the laundromat and washed them over and over. The shirts softened, but the pants still left welts at his waist and on the backs of his knees. He put them on, crawled on his knees in the dirt, rubbed black mud into the canvas, jammed them into a canning pot full of water, boiled them on the stove, and then washed them a few more times. Finally, they were, if not quite comfortable, at least not painful to wear.

He started taking note of the postings on the tackboards at the diner and the hardware store. He took down a few numbers and called about odd jobs: mucking out a barn, stacking wood, cutting brush, shoveling manure. He’d thought that these tasks would give him a sense of the people who lived here, would allow him to step over a line between visitor and resident, a boundary that could be felt but not seen. However, all the jobs turned out to have been posted by recent transplants or vacationers from New Jersey, Connecticut, or downstate, people who said they came for the untamed beauty of the mountain landscape but, once there, spent their money and other people’s time trying to beat back and tidy up the nature that surrounded them.

Darius did the work he was paid a few folded twenty-dollar bills to do, and in the evenings, admired the calluses growing on his hands, the muscles starting to create definition in his arms and back. He stopped going to the diner, feeling that he was not yet ready to be seen much around town, that he was still working on developing the man he wanted to eventually reveal. He picked up sandwiches or prepared meals at the local Stewart’s convenience store and spent the evenings reading paperbacks he found stacked up on two simple shelves tacked to one wall of the camp. There were dozens of them, all romance and self-help. He had little patience with the romances but read them anyway and found them instructive in methods for charming women, something he’d relied on his looks to do for him in the past. Looks that he hoped were changing, becoming less refined and more rugged. The other books all had titles with words and phrases that were new and strange to him.
Siddhartha
,
Jonathan Livingston Seagull
,
The Book of EST
,
Dianetics
,
What Color Is Your Parachute?
,
I’m OK, You’re OK
. Their subtitles and prefaces were puffed up with words like
awaken
,
unleash
,
take charge
,
ultimate
, and
destiny
.