Away We Go (13 page)

THE METAPHYSICS OF GOODNESS

A few days later, I got a text, one of those invitations which are understood to be contingent upon delivery of an appropriate quantity of alcohol.

There were a lot of parties at Westing.

They were all the same party, in a way.

The same faces. The same rooms and apartments. The same AwayWeTunes.

The guy who sent me the invite, Raj Karesh, was vaguely cute.

I needed to stop thinking about Zach.

I needed to stop using Alice to make myself feel better.

So for a while, I skipped out on Polo Club.

I AwayWeWatched a lot of movies on my laptop. Homeless children being rounded up and harvested for their dreams. A world government that ends war, poverty, crime by implanting everyone with chips that monitor their behavior and location at all times.

I spent nights trying to catch Raj, who proved elusive.

On Christmas night I arrived at Galloway 407 armed with ample volumes of eggnog, and was welcomed like a hero, and drank like a hero while the DJ alternated between shitty songs from MaxBeats and shitty songs from the Farsiders—at one point I got up on a chair. It wobbled under my feet as I spoke:

“If I am to be harvested to save the life of some Columbia professor of art history living in SoHo or NoHo or MoFo, then the least I can do is pass along some cirrhosis as well.”

AWAY WE TUNE

Lyrics Database:
The Farsiders—“The Other Side”

The walls we live behind

The sick, the poor, the blind.

Everyone's so busy

Differentiating ugly from pretty.

Everyone's so glad

With the views from their heights,

They can't tell good from bad,

Or dark from the light.

So bring on the pills and the drink,

Weekend projects, fix the kitchen sink.

Bring on the duck confit in Le Chateaux,

All that's missing from life is a nice gâteau.

Children, children, you've got to choose!

Skip along your merry way,

Do the dishes, pretend to pray,

Pretend you're a color other than blue,

Or fuck the walls, come for a ride

We'll take you to the other side.

Flushed faces stared up at me with admiration. One of them spoke: “Get the fuck out of my holiday airspace, you bitch-ass.”

I got my bitch-ass the fuck out of his holiday airspace.

Then I was making out with a profoundly annoying boy named Juan, because Raj had gone into a room with Cassidy, and this had left me with another small hole in my heart. It was deflating fast, my heart, so Juan would have to do. He was one of Marty's theater friends, the assistant director on Marty's spring production, but more interestingly, at nineteen and a half, he was a super-senior, a rare breed at Westing, since nobody stayed around that long. We hadn't started rehearsal yet, so I knew Juan only in theory, from a distance, but, longevity aside, my impression of him was that he was one of those effortlessly good-looking kids who know they're effortlessly good-looking, who do not appear affected by the meds at all; I disliked him on principle.

So one moment I had his tongue in my mouth in Galloway 407, and the next I had his tongue in my mouth in a room I didn't recognize, in a bed I didn't recognize. I put a hand on his chest, disoriented, unsure of how I'd gotten wherever I was, but he kept kissing me. He was in his boxers. I had only my jeans on.

“I'm a good person,” he was saying, “Or shit, I try to be, yeah?” His hand was in my jeans, I realized, but I felt distanced from the situation, enough so that I started laughing, because my zipper was giving him trouble.

“I think it's—it's all relative,” I said as he continued to struggle with my zipper, so I decided to help him, kicking my jeans off, onto the floor. But my words had given him a pause. He cupped my balls through the fabric of my underwear and asked, “Have you read Hume?” and I didn't know if I wanted my balls cupped or not. My balls and I were miles apart.

I nodded, though I wasn't sure what exactly I was responding to.

“Shit, I got so much hate on that guy,” he said, laughing. “Fucking Hume. Okay, okay. Let's say for a minute or a second or whatever that you're right, Noah, yeah yeah? It's only society looking out for its own self-interest and individuals in society looking out for their own self-interest. Now tell me something. You ever love someone? ‘O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo,' AwayWeRead Romance Pick of the Minute, and you know. Just say yes. Say yes.”

“I don't believe in love,” I said. “I believe in porn.”

“Of course you'd say that. How did I know he would say that? Look, whatever. Just pretend you're in love with me, yeah?” He shifted closer, put a leg over mine.

I could've left. But I knew I wouldn't. He was attractive enough that you could love him from a distance, as long as you didn't know him, like an actor or musician. But we were too intimate now for the possibility of love, though I liked the bristly feel of his leg against mine.

“You shave your legs,” I said.

“There he goes again,” he said, massaging my crotch. “Kierkegaard says irony is destructive. It's a defense mechanism. I get it, I get it, you're afraid to get hurt, so you respond to the world with lame-ass ha-has, yeah? Too much of that, though, and you lose the ability to be sincere.”

I couldn't get over the feel of his leg stubble. “What brand do you use? I swear by Gillette, personally.”

“Now imagine.” He reached over and placed his hands on my throat. “If the person you love, like, in an AwayWeRead Romance Pick of the Minute, swooning every time he blinks his long-ass eyelashes in your general direction, imagine if he did
this
to you, right?” He gave me a push, and then he was on top
of me. The bed bounced beneath us. I laughed, because I didn't know what else to do.

His eyes bored into me; he had his hands on my throat. “Are you prepared to say that the only reason your one true AwayYouLove shouldn't collapse your trachea is because society says don't do that shit or you'll get punished for it? Is that the
only
reason I have for not turning your pretty face a pretty little blue?”

I could feel his hard-on pressed against my stomach, and his leg stubble against my leg.

I was afraid.

More than that, I was afraid to tell him I was afraid. If I did, I'd lose control of the situation.

Three years ago, when I was still at Richmond, a Westing student named Mark Lanburger freaked out about the onset of tertiary stage symptoms—memory loss, seizures, dramatic impairment of vision and hearing. He walked into the Galloway common room one night and beat a kid to death with a pink vase.

So I said, “God, will you shut up and fuck me already?”

And he did.

The next morning, I wandered the campus.

The previous night had the tinge of unreality, but it hurt to sit. I waited in line at the Academy Café, massaging my neck, and brought my coffee to one of several benches by the fountain at the center of the Galloway gardens, snow crunching beneath my boots. I stood and sipped my coffee and studied my breath, the dedication on the bench
: In memory of our daughter, Kimberly Anne Holowitz, the light of our hearts.

I would have to spend the day reading
Notes from the
Underground
for my class on existentialist literature tomorrow. I had cracked the book the other day, a slim volume, sampled the opening lines, approved of them.

“
I am a sick man . . . a mean man. There's nothing attractive about me. I think there's something wrong with my liver. But, actually, I don't understand a damn thing about my sickness . . .
”

The opening lines magnified themselves in my memory, followed me wherever I went, they were like a light in my heart, and still I procrastinated doing the actual reading, wandered more, ordered another cup of Academy coffee. The winter burned my face every time I went outside; I enjoyed the feeling; this, I realized, was what I had most anticipated about college: the rolling grounds. We had visited colleges with Jonathan, before he got sick.

The recollection surprised me. I doubted I could trust the vividness of the details.

He'd been sixteen, had finished high school early—a wunderkind. I had thought, on our visits to campuses along the East Coast, that colleges were like parks for young people. Mom and Dad had ordered sandwiches and coffee, Jonathan had guzzled an orange soda, given me a sip, I had spit it out in disgust and they had laughed.

Eventually, I collapsed into a chair at the Academy Café. I only noticed Zach after he rapped gently on the table to get my attention.

“Long time no see,” he said, regarding me warily. “How's it going?” He hovered over an empty seat, as if waiting for my permission. He still had that pale, sickly pallor, but looked better,
brighter.

“Hi,” I said, bookmarking page ninety-seven of
Notes from the Underground
with my finger. I had a headache.

“Good Christmas?” he asked.

“Something like that,” I said.

“Just got done with a dorm team meeting,” he said, still hovering. “Let me tell you, Noah. The glory of public office? Not what they make it out to be.”

I didn't understand what he was doing, but I didn't want him to leave, either. I was relieved to see him again, even if I didn't understand what he was saying.

“You mean,” I said, racking my mind for a quip. “You mean you haven't slept with your secretary?”

“God, no!” he exclaimed, and took a seat. “That's just it! I don't get to do any of the fun stuff real political leaders do. I haven't even embezzled any funds yet. When I brought it up during a council meeting, they looked at me like I was crazy.”

“They lack vision,” I said. Maybe, if we acted like everything was normal, everything
would
be normal.

“That's the thing, though,” he said, turning away to cough. “This whole student government via representative democracy—terrible system.”

Everything
was
normal
;
acting made it so; the Believers were right all along; manifest your reality in the face of deadly comets, though it hurt to sit. Though too much irony, too much pretending, degraded your ability to be sincere.

Zach waved a hand in front my face. “You there, kid? I have important news.”

“Another rodent mishap?” I said, before I could stop myself.

His face fell. “Look—” he started.

I looked.

In typical Zach fashion, he looked away.

“What, exactly, do you want from me?” I asked, and it felt good.

He exhaled a long breath, ran a hand through close-cropped hair. He spoke hesitantly, his voice growing quieter the longer he talked. “I just—wanted to tell you—new development.”

“Okay,” I said. “Tell.”

“Well,” he said, and risked a glance, a quick smile. “Melanie knows how to call our parents.”

CALLING HOME ON NEW YEAR'S

Melanie had gotten her hands on the number for the Home Hotline.

The first part—*876691—allowed you to dial out of Westing.

From there, 1-72-CALL-HOME would connect you with an operator who would then connect you to your parents.

What if they knew where the sick kids went? Would I want to know? And what if they asked to see me?

We decided to call our parents together, on New Year's Eve.

I spent the evening pre-gaming and reading the comments section of an AwayWeKnow article titled “New Data on Hazardous Asteroid Headed for Earth.” jimbo_the_jumboshrimp9 stated that the asteroid would hit, the dead would rise up from the ground, Jesus and the Antichrist would have their long-awaited pissing contest in the land of milk and honey and nuclear warheads
.
BoobsInaTube asked if jimbo_the_jumboshrimp9 was an alias for Morgan, president of the Believers. jimbo_the_jumboshrimp9 declined to either confirm or deny that assertion.

Later, Polo Club barely fit in Zach's room. By midnight, empty bottles of beer and hard alcohol littered the floor—the drunker we were, the less scary it would be to make the call. Melanie had even sported a celebratory pink bow for the occasion.

“I feel like this is
it,
” Nigel was saying. “Fucking
it.
The beginning. My life starts here, bros. Not there. It's here. First day of the rest of my capital L longevity-challenged life. Shit, you know what I mean?”

And then he and Grace were kissing.

Melanie made a gagging sound, mumbled, “I hope you have Plan B, because I wouldn't trust lover boy over there to put his socks on right.”

Grace threw up the international one-finger-signal for mind-your-own-ovaries.

“Oh shit,” Melanie said. “Miss ‘Oh my gosh I have a green thumb sprouting like a tulip out of my ass' knows the one-finger salute.”

Zach regarded the make-out session from his bed with a bemused, cross-eyed expression; he was in one of his quiet moods, had withdrawn into himself. He raised a weary, resigned eyebrow at me, but I didn't feel like playing decipher-the-subtext today. I could almost feel Juan's mouth pressed against mine; we hadn't hooked up since that one night, but I knew we could. He kept sending me messages on AwayWeGo, and that made me feel like I belonged in my body, that I wasn't just some ghost flickering in and out of matter. There was no good reason to see him again, and many good reasons against it. But I needed to be needed. Otherwise, why stay? Camus said that all philosophy was an attempt to answer that question, Hamlet's to be or not to be. Why bother with the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune? The scorn of time? The pangs of despised love?

I turned away from Zach, leaned into Marty-guy, who was at my side, the two of us at the foot of Zach's bed, and said, “If you think about it,
every
moment is the beginning of the rest of your life.”

“Whoa, Noah.
Whoa,
” Marty said. “You should start an AwayWeBlog.”

I laughed. Self-help blogs were the lastest AwayWeGo epidemic, kids you'd watched streak through the Westing campus
doling out advice like
Make a List of 5 Things You're Thankful for Every Day
and
PPV Isn't The Only Thing That's Contagious. Remember to Smiiilleee.
☺

“Marty and Noah's E-guide to Happiness and Personal Growth,” I proposed.

He nodded in excitement, nearly losing his glasses in the process.

“Step one,” I said. “Buy a bottle of vodka.”

“I'm trying to be more sober,” he slurred mournfully, while sipping at an empty bottle of beer.

“You're doing an admirable job,” I said.

“Have I ever told you”— he squinted at me—“that you have a great nose?”

I put a hand on Marty's leg. “Step two of Noah and Marty's E-Guide to Happiness and Personal Growth is to compliment each other's noses and buy a copy of the
Kama Sutra
.”

“Step three—” Melanie said, as Grace and Nigel continued sucking on each other's faces, “the day-after pill.” Melanie covered her eyes with her arm, her shoulders heaving with what I thought was laughter.

Grace responded with another mind-your-own-ovaries gesture.

“Step four: Turn to page sixty-nine.” I gave Marty a wink.

He either winked back or had lost control of his facial muscles. “One of the finest noses I've ever
seen
.”

“Hey, Noah—” Zach said.

I ignored him.

“I think I want to call home,” Melanie said, quiet, wiping at her face with her sleeve. Her bow bobbed.

Outside our door, sounds of partying. Laughter. Shouts. Feet thudding in the hallways. Security didn't care. Their job was
to keep us inside the walls. Marty broke our silence by saying, “Some animals don't die. I was reading. Crocodiles. Also jellyfish. They are beyond death.”

Nobody responded to Marty-guy, so I had to. I observed, rather astutely, “We have to keep dying. Otherwise, what would the funeral-industrial complex do? Can you imagine the loss of jobs?”

“Crematoria workers, begging on the streets, coffin makers unable to feed their children,” Zach pitched in, and I couldn't help it. I laughed.

“Why, the ancient and honorable trade of urn making would cease to be a commercially viable enterprise,” I said. “
Besides.
We need to make room for babies.”

“I want to call home,” Melanie said.

“Noah,” Zach said, “I've heard it takes a good seven minutes for your brain to shut off after the rest of your body dies. Maybe that's where it all comes from. All the—myths and legends and religions and . . .” He trailed off.

I hated Zach for looking at me the way he was looking at me, for saying something so perfect. The stories we told, and the words they were composed of, they all fell short of capturing the world, the same way that “sick” could not capture any one of us here, the way that “sick” was a story the outside told about us, the way that “boy I love” was a story I told about Zach, the way “just a friend” was a story he told about me. But Camus said to live meaningfully was to acknowledge our condition—the fact that we had all these contradictory stories and no way of knowing which was right.

“What do you believe in?” I asked him.

“I believe in
you,
” Marty-guy said into my ear, ruining the moment.

“You guys are killing me,” Melanie said. “I WANT TO CALL HOME.” She seemed surprised when we all turned our glassy-eyed gazes on her. She wiped at her face with a sleeve again.

“Hey, maybe tonight's not actually the best—” Zach started in his placating-leader tone. He gestured at the state of us. Nigel broke off making out with Grace to let out a triumphant belch.

But Melanie already had her phone in her hands, set to speakerphone. The only sound in the room was the dial tone, the clicking of the keys—she entered the dial-out number—dial tone again. She entered the operator's number.

I held my breath. On the third ring, I noticed the tear lines on her cheeks, illuminated by the glow of her screen. I opened my mouth to say something, but before I could, a familiar voice filled the room:

“Welcome to Away We Call Wireless. We are sorry, but your number cannot be completed as dialed. Please check the number and dial again.”

Silence.

“Melly-baby, you
dialed
it wrong,” Nigel said, but Grace shushed him.

Melanie dialed the number again.

“Welcome to Away We Call Wireless. We are sorry, but your number cannot be completed as dialed. Please check the number and dial again.”

“I thought you said you called—” Nigel said, but Grace elbowed him.

Melanie was shaking.

“Welcome to Away We Call Wireless—”

“Welcome to—”

“Welcome—”

“Wel—”

Zach got up from his bed, pried the phone gently from her hands, and wrapped his arms around her. She leaned into his chest, crying, and my heart thumped
I love him
and
I love him
and
I love him.

“I thought you fucking said—” Nigel started again.

“You all think I'm a bitch,” she said, gasping, “and I just wanted—I knew you were all chickenshit and I just wanted you to believe—I wanted to believe—”

She didn't finish the thought.

Zach left to walk her to her room, and in the interval Marty fell asleep on my shoulder, drooled on me a little. I kept checking his pulse to make sure he was alive. Zach returned, stood in the doorway with a downcast expression. Our cue to leave. I shook Marty awake lightly, though it felt like I was the one who was asleep. I was still reeling, struggling to understand. Did we have the number wrong? Or was there no number at all? Nigel kept saying, “I don't get it, babe.” Grace had to practically carry him out of Zach's room and down the corridor, his arm draped around her neck, because he couldn't stand on his own.

I peeked out of Zach's room to stare after them. “You two be safe now,” I called, trying to lighten the mood.

“Not nice, Noah,” was Grace's reply.

“Baby, it was a joke, and pretty
l-m-a-o
if you ask me,” Nigel slurred. He gave me a thumbs-up, and they disappeared, around the corner.

A couple seconds later I felt a tap on my shoulder. Marty's wide eyes took me in, and he said, with the slow deliberation of a drunk trying not to sound drunk, “I will give you and Zachary a private moment.” He stumbled off down the hallway, pitching first to one side, then another.

So it was just me and Zach. I wanted to close his door, but I didn't. It gaped open, spilling light at my feet.

“Happy New Year, kid,” Zach said with a sad smile.

“That was kind of you,” I said.

He winced, shook his head. “God, I'm a terrible person. I'm terrible to you. I'm just—I'm just very confused.”

“You wanted to connect us to our parents.”

“I don't know why you like me.”

I tried to find the words to explain, to tell him it mattered that we were sick, that we were standing here, comets and PPV and all, that we'd wanted to call our parents together, whether or not we could've pulled it off, whether or not there was ever a magic number you could dial to connect you to them. It mattered that we'd done all that together.

“Was she okay?” is what I asked instead.

“She's pregnant,” he said, playing with his collar. They're making her—they're making her end it.”

I nodded stupidly.

“The baby would be infected,” he said. “They don't live past the first few months when they're born with it.”

I didn't know whether he was explaining why they were making her end it, or why it was
okay
that they were making her, so I nodded some more, waiting, but Zach had run out of things to say.

“Did you think it would work?” I asked. “The Home Hotline, I mean?”

“Oh, I don't know,” he said with a sigh. “Who knows? I don't know what I'm doing most of the time. I figured you'd know that by now.”

I was afraid to go for a kiss, so I hugged him.

“Noah, I—”

“Can we just stay like this awhile?” I asked.

He let out a sigh. “We can stay like this,” he said.

And we did.

We stayed until he said, “Tell me why you like me. Why me of all possible people. I'm not even that great. I mean, I've met better specimens of humanity. I can list half a dozen off the top of my head.”

“How much time do you have?”

I felt his laugh pass out of his body and into mine.

“So cheesy,” he said.

“As cheesy as that dystopian I saw you AwayWeReading in the caf the other day?”

“Hey.” He pulled back to regard me with mock sternness. “
Final Flight
is a tour-de-force that's impossible to put down. It says so in the blurb.”

“Uh-huh.”

I felt closer to him than ever, but he pulled away from me, brought his hands to his head, massaged his temples. He turned his back to me to look out at the crescent moon hanging in his window. “God, I was supposed to be better than this. My mom was this executive at IBM. She was always saying how I had so much privilege, I ate privilege and I shit privilege and if you don't do something with it you're a waste. I'm sitting here doing nothing. We still don't know where we go when we go away.”

“Why does what your mom thinks matter?”

“You don't understand, kid.” He shook his head. “People like her make the world go round. They're the ones who get to be remembered.”

I came up behind him, wrapped my arms around his waist, but he brushed me off. I stumbled into his desk.

“I'm sorry,” he said. Then, “I feel like, like I'm spinning and
I'm spinning and I don't know where I'm going. Round a rosy, pocket full of posies, ashes, ashes, we all fall down.”

He spun and spun and let himself fall down.

I hesitated, but only for a moment.

I followed suit, landing beside him.

“We're crazy,” he said, laughing.

“Yes,” I agreed.

In my pocket, my phone went off.

A text from Alice.

Happyyy New Year. : ) :) :) I am so happy to have a friend like you in my life, Noah.

Marty and Noah's E-Guide to Happiness and Personal Growth

5 Super Tips for a Healthier, Happier YOU

 
1
    
Your life is a reflection of YOU. Take a good look inside yourself. If you don't like what you see, there's always the age-old remedy of hallucinogenic substances.

 
2
    
Avoid the study of history. Why should the ancient Aztec practice of human sacrifice (by evicting the heart from its typical place of residence inside the chest cavity) put a downer on your mood today?