Away We Go (12 page)

TEN MONTHS BEFORE THE CATACLYSMIC, FIERY, KIND OF CLICHÉD END OF ALL THINGS (OR NOT)

A BEAUTIFUL DAY FOR MINOR ACTS OF LARCENY

One day in late November, the campus cloaked in white, Zach pointed up at the construction workers doing some work on the wall near the main gate, and his eyes lit up.

“That's how we get out of here,” he whispered.

Polo Club drew up around him. Our ranks had thinned out since the first few meetings. There were only six of us now.

“No fucking chance we get within a hundred feet of the main gate,” Melanie said.

“Ladders,” was Zach's response.

We barricaded ourselves inside the library, on the second floor, near a window that looked out over Main Gate. Toward evening, construction workers packed up for the night. They took the ladders down, and we spilled out onto the library steps just as they loaded the ladders into a truck and drove up in the direction of Galloway, then veered left.

“Only thing over there are the caf and the greenhouses,” Grace said, hands on her hips. “I always wanted to work in the greenhouses, green thumb and everything and I know all about flowers, most people wouldn't know a stigma from an anther. I didn't get the job, but I'm not mad, just disappointed.”

I nodded sympathetically, and whispered to Marty, “I once had a blue thumb. I think I slept on it wrong and cut off the circulation.”

“I prefer my thumbs in their original color,” Marty said.

A few days later, Polo Club met for an early dinner at the caf.

Sure enough, in time, the construction workers drove up to the cafeteria and then turned north, toward the greenhouse. We ran after them as fast as we could in our boots and winter jackets, arrived to watch from behind some trees as they unloaded their equipment, storing it in a shed halfway between the greenhouse and the north side of the wall. We were silent for a while after they drove off.

Finally Nigel tried the shed door, but it was locked. He frowned. “Yo, brosef,” he said finally, clapping Zach on the shoulder. “I got me an idea. Follow me.” He started trudging back up toward the Greenhouse, and we obliged him warily.

“Oh wonderful, our resident Edison has a fucking lightbulb,” Melanie said.

“Nikola Tesla was the real genius,” Marty whispered into my ear.

“Direct current,” I scoffed, and shook my head in disapproval, to pretend I didn't care that Zach was only a few feet away. We were playing our avoidance game again, barely looking at each other during Polo meetings, passing each other by on campus in mutually acknowledged un-acknowledgment. My proximity to him was inducing feverlike symptoms.

Nigel snapped his fingers. “Attention, attention, listen up my peeps, and you might learn something. I worked at the greenhouse, student employment and all that.”

Grace looked too flabbergasted to speak. “They hired
you,
over
me
?” she said softly, but Nigel didn't hear.

“Watering fields that need to be watered,” he was saying, “plowing hoes that need to be plowed.” He winked at Melanie as he said this. Melanie's response was to try kick to him. He dodged out of the way.

“So
violent,
” Nigel said laughing.

“Him over me,” Grace said to me, eyes wide with the anticipation of my sympathy.

“A universe of cosmic emptiness is not a meritocracy,” I informed her sadly as Melanie kicked at Nigel again and made contact this time.

Grace beamed at Melanie. “I think this warrants a high five.
Girl power!
”

Melanie regarded Grace's hand like it was coated in biochemical waste. “No thanks,” she said. “I don't subscribe to social conventions that involve touching other people.”

“Guys,”
Zach said in a nasal, placating tone. He said he had a cold, but nobody believed him. “What are we doing?”

Nigel had led us to the door of the greenhouse.

“So get this, okay, and hold on to your mofo-ing socks, because shit, groundskeeper-bro has a key to pretty much all the toys around here, including—” He nodded at the construction shed. “We just gotta steal that shit, am I right?”

“Let's think about this for a moment,” Zach said, his voice cracking.

“No thinking necessary. Step aside, my brosefs from other mosefs.” Nigel brushed past Marty and me. “I got this.”

Before we could say a word, he'd already knocked.

Seconds later, the door opened, revealing an old man in a puffy blue jacket, with a tuft of nose hair peeking out of his right nostril. The old man squinted at Nigel in confusion. “And who might you be
?
” he asked, full of patience.

Nigel looked affronted. “Yo, could ask you the same question.” To us, Nigel whispered, “He's not wearing his glasses.”

“I misplaced them,” the old man said, in a tone of utter despondence. He scratched at his nose hair.

“Gerry,” Nigel said, putting a hand on the old man's shoulder. “It's me. Nigel. Your, like, favorite worker. Confidante. Mentee. Fellow Christ lover.”

Gerry's eyes widened in recognition. “You drowned the basil,” he said in reproach. “And the radishes. And the gardenias.”

Grace snorted in disbelief. “Don't complain. You gave
him
the job. You got what you were asking for.”

The old man blinked mournfully. “The radishes were to be a gift for the director.”

“I would've done better with the gardenias,” Grace said.

“Sir,” Zach interceded, stepping forward. “I know it's awfully rude of us to drop by unannounced, but—God—it's really very cold out here.”

The old man frowned at Zach's feverish complexion, chewed at the inside of his lip for a few long seconds. “Well. Well, all right then, son, why didn't you say so?”

He invited us into his closet-sized office, packed with books on gardening and forestry, in addition to a copy of Whitman's
Leaves of Grass,
which I naturally gravitated toward. There was only one chair, so we had to stand while he fiddled around with a coffeemaker on a cluttered tray-top table in the corner. Nigel pointed at the wall to our backs, where a dozen different keys hung.

One of those keys would open the shed. We could grab the construction workers' ladders and scale the walls. We could be free.

That was Zach's plan.

Nigel nodded at the keys, meaning he needed a distraction, so the rest of us huddled around the groundskeeper while he stood at the coffeemaker.

“This old thing,” he mumbled under his breath, and tapped the coffeemaker on the side a few times. “Should've gotten a
Cuisinart,
but Lizzie buys me a
Mr. Coffee
. What are you to do?”

“Sir, would you like help locating your glasses?” Zach asked, and my stomach initiated circus acrobatics mode. I pretended to bury myself in
Leaves of Grass,
in a collection of poems called
Calamus,
until for once I was no longer pretending, until the stanzas and poems all ran together. . .

I proceed for all who are or have been young men . . . You are often more bitter than I can bear, you burn and sting me . . . Yet you are beautiful to me . . . you make me . . . think of death, Death is beautiful from you, (what indeed is finally beautiful except death and love?) I think it is not for life I am chanting here my chant of lovers, I think it must be for death . . . Sometimes with one I love I fill myself with rage for fear I effuse unreturn'd love, But now I think there is no unreturn'd love, the pay is certain one way or another, (I loved a certain person ardently and my love was not return'd, Yet out of that I have written these songs.)

“Sir,” Zach repeated, and I was back in the groundskeeper's office. Marty threw me a look of concern but I shrugged him off, slipped the book back onto a nearby shelf. I was hot. I needed some air, but I couldn't leave, not yet. Nigel was still fiddling around with the keys.

Melanie cleared her throat violently. “Ahem hurry the ahem fuck up ahem.”

“We can help you look—” Zach said, still going on about the glasses.

Why did he have to be so nasally considerate while
stealing
?

‘“I can see all right,” the old man said, pressing his finger gently against the one-square-inch time display. “Oh, I'm all right. I manage, that I do.”

“I think the button you're looking for is the
on
button,” Melanie said.

“A good button,” Gerry agreed, and continued pressing the time display. He let out a sigh and was about to give up when Zach leaped to his side.

“Let me try,” he said, and they hunched over the coffeemaker together. “I've always loved the first snow,” he said. “Now if it only weren't so terribly cold. But I suppose you can't have everything in life.”

Nobody said anything.

Melanie looked at Zach like he was crazy, and I couldn't stand it.
Effusing unreturned love.
Sweat trickled down my back. “Actually,” I said, “there's such a thing as warm snow.”

“Oh?” Zach said, brows raised and before he realized what he was doing he was looking at me, really looking at me, for the first time in what felt like weeks.

“It's called water,” I said.

Zach laughed, and I didn't just melt, I phase-changed straight to plasma, like fresh snowfall on the surface of the sun.

From behind us came a noise, like Nigel had knocked into something. Gerry turned, and saw him standing at the opposite end of the office.

“Hey,” he said. “What're you doing over there, son?”

Nigel pointed at a framed picture above the keys, the old man and a woman who might've been his daughter. They were fishing.

“Yo, what is that, G-meister, like, a ten-pounder?” Nigel asked, pointing at the fish in the daughter's hands.

“Oh, I don't know, maybe twelve,” the old man said, his eyes misted over in thought. He turned back to the coffee machine. Soon we had cups of coffee in our hands, but no key. Nigel
shrugged at us in resignation. But when we spilled out of the greenhouse into a snowy evening, he started skipping.

“Guess what I got,” he said, and patted his coat pocket.

“No way in hell,” Melanie said.

He drew out the key, wiggled it.

“Ladder time, boss man?” he asked, dropping it into Zach's outstretched hands.

Zach nodded, a faint smile on his lips.

The key slid easily into the lock. The door of the shed creaked open. I watched the greenhouse, waiting for the old man to stumble out, to yell at us, to call security, to get us kicked out of Westing and taken to alien laboratories for emergency spleen extractions. Zach stepped inside first, motioned us to follow. One last look back, and I shut the door behind us.

Boxes everywhere, cleaning supplies, tools, all piled over each other.

“Oh my gosh, I see them!” Grace said, already moving toward a corner that had three ladders leaned up against the wall.

My foot hit on something hard, and I looked down, squinted.

“Blazing Phoenix Fireworks” it said on the box.

“Leftovers from convocation day?” I said to Marty.

“Probably,” he said with a nod. “You didn't even
see
. You were in bed the whole day. You hissed at me when I opened the blinds.”

“I
heard
them,” I said. “They made beautiful sounds.”

“I brought you pizza from the cafeteria,” he said.

“Did I tell you you're the best?”

He shook his head no.

“Martin dear, you're the best.”

“I do try,” he admitted.

“Marty, Noah, get over here!” Grace said.

We joined the rest of the group by the ladders. I reached out a hand to touch a cool metal step. Up these steps, and I could see my parents again, defy whatever plan the administration or the government or the great tragic powers of the world had for me. Zach met my eye. His sweat-slick face shone in the light from an overhead window.

He was going to say something to me, and I knew we'd be all right again.

He said, “We need to leave everything like it was. Don't touch anything.”

THE SEARCH FOR INTELLIGENT LIFE

That night, Marty told me, “I know what'll cheer you up.”

He logged on to AwayWeWatch and put on this sci fi flick,
Pulse, My Electric Heart,
about two robots who want to have children so badly that they adopt a toaster and name it Sandy. While the credits rolled, we lay in our double in Clover and rattled off all the things we wouldn't live to see: gene therapy, holograms, clones, terraforming Mars, virtual reality, centralized memory banks that store people's consciousnesses, switching between new and better bodies like cars.

“I don't think it's possible,” I said. “I mean—statistically—what—the universe is ten billion years old?”

“Fifteen.”

“Fifteen billion years old! Think about it, Marty-guy. If this stuff were possible, then at our current rate of technological progress, we'd probably get there in, like, five hundred or a thousand years.”

Marty didn't respond, so I continued. “If the universe is infinite, and there are billions and billions of stars, there's got to be intelligent life. That's the argument, right?”

“Oh, if not here, then somewhere. You would hope.”

“So I'm saying—think about it, Marty-guy. If there's intelligent life, then just statistically, pure statistics here, some of it must have, like, five hundred or a thousand or ten thousand years on us. Statistically.”

“Statistically,” he agreed.

“So, if that stuff is possible, they've already done it. If it's possible to become gods they've already done it; if they could teleport here right now and save us from Apep and turn us all into immortal gerbils, thereby ending our suffering, they'd have done it.”

“Are hamsters different in any significant way from gerbils?”

“Completely different,” I said with all the confidence of the rampantly drunk. “In all relevant senses.”

“I had a hamster once when I was a kid. You know? He had a good soul. He really liked his wheel. I would ask about him whenever I wrote my family.”

I made a conscious decision
not
to ask the question he wanted me to. “It would suck to be an immortal gerbil. What would be the
point
? If there's no greater meaning, right, no purpose, if it's only us, scrambling around on our wheels—”

“Did you ever think the aliens are waiting for the right moment to intervene and alter the course of our evolution, like in
Year Thirteen
?”

“Marty, I'm trying to make a point here about the meaning of all things and here you are, going off about the onset of puberty.”

“I'll have you know
Year Thirteen
is an AwayWeRead Top Five Fall Debuts pick.”

“Whatever it is,” I said, pretending to be aghast. “it doesn't sound like a nineteenth-century Russian novel to me.”

“I do read other things,” he said. “Occasionally. For fun. I do read for
fun.
”

“The Russians aren't fun?”

“I didn't say that,” he said hastily.

We lay in the dark for a while, until he asked, “Do you know why I like the Russians?”

I ventured some guesses: “Vodka, existential angst, ennui, terrible marital situations . . .”

“My grandpa, he told me about growing up in the Soviet Union, memorizing everyone, Pushkin and Mayakovsky, for school. When I came here, I spent, like, my first whole week in the library, trying to read up on everyone he told me about. I think most kids write home. I believe that. They're just afraid to talk about it, at Westing. I don't really understand it. In my old recovery center it wasn't a big deal, writing your family.”

“Reading their letters would make them real,” I said. “I don't want them to be real.” If they were real, then their loss would be real. “We're not real to them.”

“Don't say that.”

“We're
not,
though.” I wanted to tell Marty that the separation between us and our parents, it wasn't about walls, it wasn't about conspiracies, it wasn't even about PPV. It was about our language, the stories built into our language. It was about fictional demarcations of difference, like sick and gay, when in fact we were all subject to the great tragic powers of the world. Language enacted its own quarantines, and the stories built into it weren't all roses and puppies—they could work great evils. They could push people apart.

“If I was writing a story I'd edit them out,” I said.

“Good thing I'm the writer,” he said, a laugh in his voice.

I rolled out of bed, crossed the room, and smacked him in the rump with my pillow. He smacked me back. We had a pillow fight, delirious from grand talk and lack of sleep, until we both collapsed on his bed, and I kissed him good night on the cheek.