Away We Go (10 page)

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NOAH V. THE GREAT TRAGIC POWERS OF THE WORLD

We're out picnicking by the lake, on a day so beautiful you can't help feeling as miserable as if you had just turned seventeen, which, in fact, I have.

I think Marty and Alice have figured it out, but they know better than to congratulate me on my increased proximity to death.

I am commemorating the occasion by juggling.

Learning to juggle is the one incontrovertible way I've managed to better myself in the year since I came to Westing, because what else is a lonely, sexually frustrated boy to do but to get his hands on as many balls as possible? Or in today's case,
apples.
The apples rise and fall and rise and fall as Alice talks about the newsies.

“—it's just so important that they know about all the resources the campus has to offer. Westing counseling”—she shoots me a meaningful look—“the sexual assault hotline, the office of residential life. I know personally how hard the adjustment can be.”

Marty's nodding, maintaining eye contact, almost as if he cares, while the two of them feign interest in my display of manual dexterity. I'm about to make a comment like
I doubt a shrink could counsel meaning into life,
but Alice knows me too well. “You look like you're in the mood to argue,” she says, studying me with a small frown.

“You would know, seeing as we do it so much. What do they say? Ten thousand hours of practice leads to mastery?”

I catch the apples, spill them into the blanket between us.

“We don't do it
that
much,” she says.

I glance at Marty for support. He gives me his patented deer-in-the-headlights look.

“More than a little but less than a lot?” he offers, and stuffs his face with a sandwich to avoid further questioning.

“The other day we argued about my socks. Remember that?” I say as I turn back to Alice.

“Well, they were on the communal sofa and I thought—”

“It was one sock, Alice. One lonely, little sock, somehow accidentally—” I stop myself. “See? See? We almost started arguing about arguing about socks.”

“The truth is,
I
went to counseling, Noah,” Alice says. She has a way of stating simple facts that feels like chastisement. “I know it may be hard for you to imagine, but it helps. They teach you strategies to reframe your thinking.”

“About dying?”

“About living.” She bites her lip. “You barely even eat. I worry.”

My turn to sigh. “I was working up to it, you know. Arguing, I mean. But you ruined it.”

“I know,” she says.

I love that she knows, so I lean over and give her a brief kiss. For once, my thoughts do not drift to Zach.

Marty cracks open some Pushkin, pretends to read
Eugene Onegin
. He does an admirable job, even goes as far as to mouth the words.

“Martin, dear?” I say.

Marty looks up, and I say, “If Pushkin is the best Russians
can do,” I say, “they ought to stick to chess, balalaika, and scorched earth tactics.”

“Noah,” he says. Shakes his head. “I don't even know where to start.”

“You can start by dropping that,” I say, nodding at his book.

“Have you even read Pushkin?”

“As a matter of fact I have. Dr. Seuss can write better limericks, frankly.”

He gives me such a helplessly exasperated look that I feel guilty. I'm about to apologize when Alice says, “Noah Falls. You're such a troll.”

I want to tell them I was perfectly serious; the other week I spent a good hour crying over
Oh, the Places You'll Go!

“It's okay,” Marty says. “Noah has this thing where he has to annoy me periodically. And get me drunk.”

“And look out for you after he's gotten you drunk,” I say, forcing brightness into my voice.

“And look out for me after he's gotten me drunk.”

Alice smiles wistfully at Marty. “You're too good to him, you know?”

Marty blushes, turns a page, but Alice has turned her attention to me. Doubt flickers over her face. She thinks she's hurt my feelings, and now she's about to apologize. I hate how fragile she thinks I am; she doesn't understand that I'm the one who's hurting her. It strikes me that the only functional relationship I've ever had was in Marty's
Peter Pan
. Peter's vision was failing, Wendy's hair was turning gray, but it was okay, because they were in love, and every night they would escape to Neverland together.

“Noah?” Alice asks, and her voice jolts me from my thoughts.

Marty hunches over
Eugene Onegin,
adjusts his glasses.

“You're right, actually,” I say, and suddenly I'm standing. Marty and Alice stare up at me from the ground, perplexed.

They are both too good to me.

And no matter how good they are to me, it's not enough.

Why can't it be enough?

Why do I have to walk around with a nagging emptiness inside me?

“Noah,” Alice says, quiet. “You're the best person I know. I believe that.”

“I'm—”
Terrible
is the next word I have in mind. Briefly I'm back on the cobblestone path with the autumn-bare branches overhead, the birds flitting above, the teachers approaching, and Zach's telling me he's terrible and I'm thinking of squandered poetry, birds that mate for life.

“—going for a walk” is how I finish. I start down the path that circles the lake, leaving Marty and Alice to stare after me. The Galloway gardens are up ahead, flowers wilting from the heat, the water in the fountain dappled in the light. I shoulder through the back entrance of Galloway, past students sipping coffee and eating goddamn sandwiches in the Academy Café, down a corridor and then another, past the elevator bank, into the lobby.

I don't know where I'm going.

I don't know where I'm going.

I have nowhere to go.

So I stand in the middle of the lobby like the statue of a lost boy.

Counseling, she keeps bringing up counseling.

Sure, there are times when the emptiness is too much, when all I want to do is sleep, or drink. Times when beauty is unbearable. Times when I am in bed with Alice and it seems like
I will be in bed with her forever, and I feel forever like a weight on my chest. But these feelings are a manifestation of and a communion with what Foucault calls the great tragic powers of the world, and I don't want to be medicated out of them. I live on a rock hurtling around a giant ball of fire suspended in a void of infinite nothingness. The only way to transcend that nothingness is through
art, love, work,
play, religion,
what else is there? But transcendence is impossible, it's a fanciful tale; what is empty can carry no weight. If I ever forget that fact, the great tragic powers of the world remind me of how little I am, how small I am, because as students stream by me, in and out of the lobby doors, I catch intermittent glances of Westing's walls.

I decide to spend my birthday with the one person I know who doesn't want to be with me, but I hesitate, pacing back and forth outside Clover House's multipurpose room.

This is where I bump into Addie. We know each other the way strangers on a small campus know each other—through distant silhouettes, the flash of a passing face, and AwayWeGo status updates. She takes me in with big brown eyes and says, “Oh. I'm glad—he'll be happy to see a friend.”

Friend.
The word echoes in my head as she disappears around a corner, leaving me alone with her label. Now I can't change my mind, can't do what I do best and run away, because she'll ask Zach tomorrow if I came and he'll say no I didn't; that's not behavior worthy of a
friend.

At his door, I knock.

He doesn't answer.

I let my breath out; didn't realize I was holding it.

I knock a second time, loud, clear. He says, “Come in.”

I edge the door open.

He smiles from his bed. “Oh, man. Long time no see.”

He's lost weight, but he's still beautiful. I can think of no other way to describe him. Too pretty to die, because, of course, the right to life increases in direct proportion to facial symmetry, as judged by your friendly seventeen-year-old arbiter of life and death.

“Distance makes the heart grow fonder, so I spent the last week or so in Alaska,” I explain.

His face is inscrutable for a beat, but he breaks into a laugh. “Oh yeah? How'd that go?”

“I wrestled a bear,” I say as I slide a chair over to the bedside and take a seat.

“Hey, wouldn't you know? That's what I was about to guess!”

“The bear won.”

His hand is inches from mine.

“You and I, kid, we don't believe in competition, though,” Zach says. “Oh I know, I know, I know we live in a world where everyone is like ra ra ra fight to the death—”

“What was that?” I said, cupping a hand to my ear. “I didn't catch that.”

“Ra ra ra fight to the death,” he repeated, “But we, you and me kid, we defy the paradigm that delineates bear wrestling into a win/lose binary in which man must either prevail or be prevailed over by bear.”

“Speak for yourself. I wanted the bear to eat my dust.”

I could take his hand. It's right there, atop the blanket.

“I believe that's a racing metaphor. Not suited to bear wrestling.”

“Name me a bear-wrestling metaphor,” I say.

“I can't.” He throws both hands up in exasperation.

“Also, if you're racing, and you use a racing metaphor, it's not a metaphor then, is it? It's literal. So bear wrestling might be
a perfectly appropriate time to use a racing metaphor and a race might be a perfectly appropriate time to use a bear-wrestling metaphor, because if there's one thing we want to preserve, it's the metaphor-literality binary.”

“But kiddo,” Zach says, delighted, “bear-wrestling metaphors, they don't exist! Nobody wrestles bears! It's a myth propagated by outdoorsmen who need to bolster their fragile sense of masculinity while traipsing around in fabulously bright clothes—”

“Zach,” I say, because this is too much. I like banter. It's light and airy, induces weightlessness without the need for leaving Earth's atmosphere, tons of rocket fuel. But too much of it, and you feel diffuse enough to disappear the moment you step through the door. The only thing grounding me is this knot that has formed in my chest.

“—and sleeping in tents with other men,” he finishes.

The knot tightens. “Zach,” I say. “It's my birthday.”

His face goes rigid, his blue eyes sad. “It's terrible, isn't it?” he says finally. “A terrible day. I'm sorry.”

He takes my hand, gives it a squeeze. His is warm and clammy and wonderful.

I could ask him to drink with me, birthday shots. When I drink the pretenses fall away. The more I drink, the less I have to act. Could Zach be acting, too? He must be acting—I want so much to see him as he really is, to make up for volumes of lost poetry. And speaking of paradigms, if Zach succumbs to that drunken urge, so common to Westing, to subvert the clothes-body paradigm, well, that's a price I'm willing to pay.

“Do you want to drink tonight?”

He retracts his hand by pretending to scratch an itch on his nose.

“I don't know if that's a good idea.” He says it so gently I can barely hear him. “I mean I'd love to, Addie's got me cooped up in here, it's like house arrest, I tell you. ‘Zachary, the doctor told you not to get up unnecessarily'; ‘Zachary, the doctor told you to drink more water'; ‘Zachary, no junk food'; Zachary Zachary Zachary. She won't even let me have
candy.
Too much sugar. God, I tell you, kid, I've never been more annoyed with the sound of my own name. But I don't know if it's a good idea.”

I don't want a clarification of their on-and-off-again status. I don't want to know, I don't want to know. . . .

“Are you guys—” I start, change my mind. “I was thinking—about the day we ran in the rain. Remember?”

He gives me a wan smile, but his eyes focus on his bedsheets. He pushes himself up against the headboard of his bed and says “Not really.” The knot in my chest pulls at every muscle in my body.

He keeps talking, but I'm not really listening. Why did I come here? He has this impossible capacity for vacillation, for making me as confused as he is, except maybe he's not confused at all. If I mean nothing to him, then the world will go on without me easily. It will simply spin merrily along. I want someone somewhere to throw a fit, punch a wall, rail against the great tragic powers of the world.

“You don't remember letting me win?”

“So you admit I was beating you?” he says.

“You don't remember my head in your lap?”

“No,” he says quietly.

“You don't remember lying in bed together?”

“I'm sorry,” he says.

I wipe my brow, which is sticky with sweat from an afternoon by the lake. Alice told me I was the best.

“I think you're the best,” I tell him.

He cringes at that, but I continue: “Do you ever think about—giving it a try? Us?”

He shakes his head. “I'm sorry, Noah,” he mumbles under his breath.

I pitch forward, my head in my hands, and don't move for fear he'll see me crying. The bed screeches, and I feel his hand in my hair.

I look up at him, and he stares back at me with a stricken expression and says, “God.”

There are no clean dishes in our apartment.

The stack of dirties rises past the ledge of the sink, so I set about doing what must be done while a light rain begins to knock against the roof. Several times the drain clogs with food, and several times I clean it out with my fingers.

“Hi, Noah.” Alice's voice makes me jump. She's where the door would be, if our kitchen had a door, a door I could lock. She watches me intently as I dry a cup, her drenched hair glossy in the light.