Away We Go (11 page)

“It's fascinating stuff, I know,” I say.

“Noah Falls, you know better than this. You shouldn't be doing this, not on your—” she stops herself. “I kept meaning to—”

Alice keeps meaning to do everything in this apartment. It figures that when I try to help out, she feels she owes me an apology.

“It makes me feel useful,” I say. “Like I'm doing something useful with my life.”

“Do you want help? Giving meaning to your life?”

I don't. The search for meaning is complicated enough without additional parties getting involved, but the dishes go by quicker with her help, though my hands keep shaking.

“Noah,” Alice says. She's noticed.

I hand her a fork I just washed.

“Noah,” she repeats, louder. “When I came in here—you were smiling—you were thinking about him? Is that where you went?”

“I was thinking about doing the Macarena. It's all in the hips.”

She lets out a sigh.

I am too much.

“It hurts,” she says. I glance up in worry; new PPV symptoms usually mean the virus is adapting to the medication. “You push me away a lot,” she explains. She dries the fork I gave her, replaces it in the silverware drawer. I listen to her thud up the stairs while in the background the rain patters lightly, the wind buffets our apple tree. Of course, the moment Alice leaves me, I miss her, I feel emptier. Her leaving is an ache in my chest, a shortness of breath. I want to yell after her, to tell her I'm terrible, to tell her I love her, but platonically. The sight of my blurry reflection in the kitchen window makes me queasy. Outside the rain falls harder, the apple tree bends. Without thinking I reach up, rub at my eye, get soap in it, and it burns.

“Fuck,” I hear myself say.

What does it even mean, to
love
platonically? Is that just a nice way of saying
I'll never love you?

I wash my eye out in the newly spotless sink.

“Thanks for the help,” I whisper to Alice, though she is upstairs now and can't hear. I dry my face with the dish towel, after which I go up to my room, because my room has a door, and on this door there is a lock, and I use this lock to quarantine myself, so I can feel miserable in the perfect solitude of the gray walls that I call mine, without the risk of contaminating anyone.

Polo Club's key is on my nightstand, exactly where I left it.

I pull a pillow over my face so I don't have to look at it.

DREAMS OF DARWIN

Noah stumbles around and around Westing Lake, sipping at a bottle of vodka. His skin is peeling. He is falling apart, falling to pieces, which are scattered by the wind. On a hill overlooking the lake, a windmill spins.

A flock of finches appears on the horizon.

It grows larger.

Noah stares after the birds, brings the vodka to his lips. High above him, the windmill spins faster. It is a very picturesque windmill, and as the flock passes by, the windmill's blades picturesquely cut the flock to pieces. A hail of severed beaks, wings, feathers meanders to the ground.

A talon clips Noah in the arm, draws blood.

“Ow,” he says.

Noah reaches to pick it up from the ground, holds it tight in his hand.

Overhead, a few finches have made it past the windmill. The males perform a mating dance to celebrate. The females accept or reject the males. Most of the males are rejected, and sulk. A small number of lucky couples proceed to mate and nest. The mothers lay eggs, guard them.

An occasional eagle drops out of the sky to make lunch of the happy parents.

Wind picks up, ruffling Noah's hair. Trees sway. A nearby branch cracks, tips, spilling a nest of eggs. The mother squawks, either in dismay or out of habit.

The remaining eggs hatch, grow into finches, who take off in a much smaller, more agile flock that does not fall prey to the windmill's blades, but that will eventually die out due to climate change. Noah knows he should feel triumphant at their momentary victory, but he does not. He bends down to bury that talon he picked up, only to find it has dissolved into dust.

“I will remember you,” he says to the bird, but when he turns toward the lake, he is surprised to find he has no reflection.

He did not notice his own disappearance until he was already gone.

BEGIN WITH A LIE AND PROCEED

A few days pass before I have the nerve to bring up Zach to Alice. To tell her what I should've told her a long time ago. “Noah—” she lets my name hang there, at 11:52 p.m., in our kitchen, between the two of us, for a moment as real, as tangible as the scrambled eggs I'm having, the vodka-orange juice mixture I'm sipping. In eating an egg, I am not just eating one future chick. I am eating all the generations of chicks that would have followed from that chick. I offer her a bite, and she takes it. Swallows. We are eating generations together.

“We can talk about this tomorrow,” she says. “You're eating. I'm glad you're eating, at least.” Her eyes linger on the orange juice suspiciously.

I surprise myself by saying, “Let's talk about it now.”

Generation after generation, new traits would accumulate and old traits would be weeded out until finally, new species would emerge, splinter off from the old. Alice looks away, stares at our floor, the crumbs on the floor, the crumbs that only Alice sweeps, because who has the time for sweeping, for brooms and feather dusters? Who has the time to
care,
when we are ending whole worlds with our gastric enzymes?

I say, “I'll do the floors tomorrow.”

“Noah . . . I can't do this now. I don't—” She blows a strand of hair out of her face. “I already know. You had a friend. From the play. Juan. Okay?”

My mouth hangs open.

“He said—he told me—back in, back in April, just before the premiere. He came to see me and told me you loved someone else. He asked me to let you go. Okay?” Alice turns away.

“He told you—” I say.

“I knew this wasn't a good time—” she says, wiping at her eyes. “Knew this wasn't—I see the way you look whenever anyone mentions him. Don't you think I can see? And that time—there was this time you were walking back with him from the Wellness Center. You seemed so happy, I thought you might
skip
.” She laughs, but there is no humor in it.

“Alice—”

“
You.
Skipping. Mr. Nihilistic Void of Nothing. Can you imagine that?”

“Nihilists are allowed to have a spring in their steps, too,” I say. The joke is lame, I know, but I'm afraid of the very conversation I've started.

“I don't want you to be sad, Noah. That's the only reason I don't want you to drink. That's why I wanted you to talk to someone. You shouldn't have to drink to be happy, should you?”

“He's
dying,
Alice,” I say, feeling a pressure building up inside me, the pressure of having to put on this silly act for so long. For no reason I can discern, I let my fork slip through my fingers and fall. We watch it for a few long seconds, lying on our dirty floor, until Alice bends to pick it up.

“Give it to me—” I say.

“Noah, I can—”

“Give it to me—”

“Be
careful
—”

After washing it off, I return to my seat. I continue to eat. I'm eating generation after generation, species after species, the first thing I've eaten since a bowl of soggy Cheerios and milk
with a splash of vodka in the morning. Alice doesn't want me to die. It is a lot of work, not to die. The constant eating, for example. The cleaning, the dishwashing. The feelings. Having feelings is terrible. I am tired of them. Alice picks at a scratch in the table.

“You should tell him,” she says. “How you feel.”

I laugh.

“I'm serious, Noah.”

“I don't think he feels the same.”

“You can't know—”

“I do, though,” I say, even though I don't believe my own words. I am simply speaking out my fear. If I speak my fears, they won't turn out true. “I should've always known. I'd send him these messages, on AwayWeGo, and he wouldn't always get back, or he'd get back to me in a few days, a week, and I was always the one who had the last word, and sometimes he'd forget and mention it when he saw me, say oh, I'm sorry, I'm really bad at keeping up, this and that, but the truth is, Alice, the truth is that if you love someone you respond to their message and you don't forget because it's so goddamn important to you, and you don't avoid them, because it's so goddamn important to you—”

“I need to go,” Alice says, and before I can do anything, she's standing, and she's going to bed in her room, and she's not calling out to me, not asking me to come to bed with her, not brushing my hair out of my face or stopping me from picking at my cracked lips or giving me a good-night kiss.

That's how I know we've reached an end.

Tonight and for many nights after, I'll have my pillows all to myself. But when I set my half-finished vodka-juice concoction on my desk and fall into my bed, I'm afraid to close my eyes
without the knowledge that someone needs me to open them again.

I turn on the lights and rip a piece of a page out of one of my notebooks.

Tell him,
Alice said.

I give my pen a squeeze. It feels more meaningful this way, to shape the words, the letters, myself. But the paper stares at me accusingly, as does the key on my nightstand.

My room is full of accusation, and I can't think.

Tell him.

As if it were so easy, to arrange my words in the right order, the way Marty did for me in his play.

I down my vodka-orange juice concoction for inspiration.

Eventually, my pen moves.

I begin with a lie, and proceed from there.

The next day, the weather column of the
Westinger
forecasts heavy rain for the evening; there is no mention of the F.L.Y. demonstrations, no call for protest. That's the problem with science, I think. It can only ever tell you stories about practical matters. It will tell you you'll need an umbrella for tomorrow, but won't tell you whether or not you should hold it over the boy you love to keep him from getting wet.

The protesters have packed the residential quad, holding placards under a sky that is, for now, entirely cloudless.

About fifty students in all.

I pass them on the way to Zach's, and for a moment I think I see Marty among them. The crowd shifts, and I lose him. Security officers stand at the sidelines of the demonstration, sweaty and miserable in their uniforms. A girl holds a poster that reads “Think you're free? Think again,” while a boy waves “TERTIARY CARE = VIVISECTION.” A pair of administrators stage a halfhearted counter-demonstration on a nearby strip of lawn, complete with the usual handouts: glossy tertiary care informational flyers featuring young, smiling hospice nurses posing in beautiful rooms; AwayWeKnow articles detailing how the Houston quarantine and the cyber-bullying death of Katrina Mackey transformed the National Recovery Program.

All I can think about is the note in my hand. I slip it under Zach's door in Clover, and as I do so, I feel unreal.

I am less than a fiction, because when I played Peter Pan in Marty's play, that was the only time I ever felt necessary. An audience waited on my every word. The story couldn't go on without me. If I stood still, so did the whole world.

It was nice.

Act 3: Scene 3

[
Peter and Wendy sit on the floor of Peter's room. It is dark and eerie. A blanket rests on a nearby chair. Outside the room, in the corridor, two sleepy soldiers guard the exit. From out of view comes the sound of approaching steps.
]

PETER

                   
I can't see, Wendy. It's all gone black now. I think they're going to come for me now.

WENDY

                   
Don't say that.

PETER

                   
I want to go to Neverland forever.

WENDY

                   
Don't say that. Tell me more about how you don't understand EA Sports Phil Mickelson's PGA Tour.

PETER

                   
I don't understand—

[
The steps are louder, now. Wendy glances at her watch, grabs the blanket from the chair.
]

PETER

[
pulls the blanket over himself and Wendy. Then rips open a package of Skittles.
]:

                   
—why anyone would choose golfing as their vicarious professional athlete fantasy? You might as well be a bowler.

WENDY

                   
I have an idea.

[
Wendy takes Peter's hand. The two stand, wrapped in the blanket, clutching at Skittles in their free hands. Skittles are slipping out of their grasp, falling.
]

PETER

                   
I can go alone.

[
The steps are deafening.
]

WENDY

                   
Don't be stupid, Peter.

[
She pulls him into the corridor, toward the guards. The guards shake themselves awake, yell out for the children to stop. Instead, Wendy and Peter break into a run. For a few moments, the only sounds are the voices of the guards and the rumble of approaching steps. Peter and Wendy move mutely through this noise,
toward the exit. The guards lower their weapons, aim. And then, all sound stops. Wendy and Peter are mere feet away from the exit and the soldiers guarding it.
]

PETER

                   
To die will be an awfully big adventure.

[
The whole stage goes dark. There is no more Peter, no more Wendy, no more soldiers or hospital or illness, no more outside or inside. There is only the light patter of Skittles falling. A spotlight shines on the Skittles, littered across the floor of the stage. The red digits of a wall clock read 2:33 a.m.
]

THE END