Away We Go (16 page)

I stepped over a beer bottle laying on the floor, a girl stretched next to the beer bottle, gazing up not
at
the ceiling, but past it. Juan leaned in. “I'll find the alcohol.”

I wormed my way into a corner and waited for him to return.

The flicking had been foreplay—the flickers had moved on to dry humping. The boy's long hair kept falling into his face. The girl brushed it back. Brushed it back. I imagined her hand was mine—

A tap on the shoulder.

Juan.
No alcohol in hand. He nodded his head in the direction of a hallway. He led me to a door, on the other side of which, we were, quite suddenly, alone, the party muted, though
not drowned out. On the nightstand next to the bed stood a bottle of wine, mostly full.

“Didn't know it would be so crazy,” he said, massaging the back of his neck. “Few people, she says. Few people. Some close friends, intimate setting, haven't-seen-you-in-forever-my-lovely, whatever and whatever, right? So I'm like yeah yeah let's do it, my lovely was a nice touch, and she says thank you kindly sir, nice, all so nice, except I get here and she's intimate with the toilet, throws a plunger at me and yells at me to go get Derek. Fuck is Derek? And the
music
they're listening to—right?
Right?
”

“The Farsiders, I think.”

This answer was too much for him, for he immediately took a long swig from the bottle of wine, then handed it to me. Glancing at the bottle, I said, “I have a policy of not drinking anything that's less than eighty proof.”

“Tasting what you're drinking is frightful shit, yeah?”

“Vodka has a taste,” I insisted.

“Oh?”

“Fire,” I said, fidgeting, unsure of being in someone else's room.

“Look,” he said, sensing I was uncomfortable, “My friend, she doesn't mind. I thought—”

“It's okay.” I raised the bottle to my lips and took a sip or seven.

We passed the bottle back and forth, until he stopped, studied me very seriously. “Noah.
Noah.
What are we
doing
here?” The wine was nearly gone.

“You dragged me here—”

“No, Noah,
no.
Existentially, right?
What are we doing here
?”

“Existing?” I suggested.

“Existing, he says.
Existing!
Burden of freedom, no reason
for anything, yeah yeah? Postmodern relativity of fucking meaning, no grand narratives, not one!
Existing.
Wittgenstein says some things can't be spoken of, so we should shut the fuck up and live, but how can we live if we're going to die?”

He looked at me expectantly, as if I knew anything about Wittgenstein, or living, or dying.

“Vodka helps,” I offered.

“I'm dying, Noah,” he said. “Bloodwork came in and apparently,
ha,
so that's that, capiche, kaput, finito, I asked for a few more days, okay. They're not all soulless as the devil's cock. They gave it to me. A few more days, before they cart me off. So I could see the play. And do this.” He leaned in, and kissed me. He pushed himself into me, onto me, pushed me down on the bed. I tried to press against him, to shift away, but he moved with me, breathed with me, and even as I tried to stop him I pulled him closer, tighter, my fingers tracing the outline of his ribs, his back, until he took his shirt off so I could trace better.

“I can't, Juan,” I said. If my body—my chapped lips, the skin peeling on my shoulders, my nose—was the wrong body for Zach, it would be the wrong body for anyone. I heard my fly unzip. I felt Juan's hand. He pulled me close, pressed my head to his chest, and I held on to him, and he held on to me. God, that felt good. I thrust against his hand. He said, “Do you want to stop?” He kept repeating it. “Do you want to stop? Do you want me to stop?” Until finally I said, “No.”

Zach didn't want me but at least I had this, whatever
this
was, it felt nice, it felt real, as much as I liked Alice, it felt better than anything we'd done. I came. He spoke softly into my ear, “My turn.” He flipped me over, a little roughly, stomach down onto the bed. I heard him take off his shorts.

“Juan—”
Before I could say more, he was on top of me,
in
me, his hands tight on my shoulders, so tight it hurt. I moaned at first, then I cried out. He held me in place, rooted. I couldn't move, couldn't stop him even if I wanted to; I wasn't sure whether I wanted to stop him or not, and then somehow his hands were on my neck, my throat, he wasn't squeezing but I couldn't breathe. I imagined falling, hurtling toward the ground so fast I couldn't take in air. Would I ejaculate upon impact?

He collapsed onto me as he finished. I breathed. Raising myself up on one elbow, I tried to get up. He wrapped his arms around me.

“Please. Don't go.”

I tried to get up again, he wouldn't let me, he said, “I'm sorry”; he said, “I didn't mean to hurt you.” He pulled me back, gently, but against my will. He said, “I'm dying. I'm dying. I'm dying. I wanted you to care, okay?”

I didn't answer. His whole body trembled, and I trembled with him.

He said, “I love you.”

He said, “I'll do you again, yeah?”

I felt numb; I felt like I might wink out.

He said, “I'm going to blow you, yeah?” but I couldn't get hard. He kept saying he was sorry, he cried into my peeling, disappearing shoulder. He mumbled words into the side of my neck. I waited for him to fall asleep, and then I left.

I never saw him again.

COSMIC SKITTLES ATOP SUNSET HILL

The week after the play's premiere and Juan's curtain call, Marty dragged me to Sunset Hill at 2 a.m. to see a meteor shower. His attempt at cheering me up. I couldn't say no. We'd been drinking heavily in preparation, while listening to an audiobook on AwayWeRead, in which the main character, Leanna, discovers that she is a robotic surrogate child, and that all her memories are those of the dead daughter she was custom-built to replace. On our way out of Clover House I asked Marty, “How do you know you're real? Or if your love is real?” I leaned into him and he leaned into me. I wrapped my arms around him and let him carry me forward until he said, “Christ, Noah, do some shuffling.”

“What?”

“Shuffle.”

“That's not the answer I was looking for, Marty.”

“Oh,” he said, a note of despair in his voice. “I
know.
”

We paused by the Wellness Center, the parking lot empty except for the handful of cars belonging to Westing's overnight personnel. I'd misplaced our bottle of scotch somewhere—this upset me so much I'd kicked Clover. Now I was walking with a slight limp.

“Wellness,”
I said. “What a joke.”

“You don't love Alice, do you?”

I looked at him with wide eyes.

“You don't, do you?”

“I love
you,
Marty-guy,” I said. “I'm going to ride you around our room like I'm Teddy Roosevelt in the Spanish-American War and you're the horse that got shot out from under me, but from
before
you got shot out from under me, which is why I'm riding you like yippee-ka-yay!”

“Noah.”

“Yes.”

He didn't continue, so I nudged him in the shoulder. “Don't go all silent on me, not after all we've been through. Those damn Spaniards, messing with our Cuba.”

“
Their
Cuba.”

“Messing with their Cuba.”

“It's—” He went quiet. “I don't want to hurt your feelings, but that was the worst sexual innuendo I ever heard.”

“Says the guy who tried to get in my pants by complimenting my nose.”

Marty laughed.

It proved surprisingly difficult to get up Sunset Hill when your BAC caused the ground to lurch beneath your feet. Marty stumbled, fell. Before I quite knew what I was doing, I had reached down and picked him up, was carrying him up the hill, step by step, screaming, “Never leave a man behind!”

Marty laughed again and held on to me.

I almost didn't make it to the top. Several times I lost my balance. He didn't tell me to stop, to put him down. He understood I needed to do this for him. I wanted him to know that if he'd been born a slave in the City of Light, I would've carried him out of the darkness, no matter what the Elders did, no matter how many Peacekeepers stood in my way. But there were no great battles at Westing. We had security clacking in the night, long lamp-lit walls equipped with flashing-red
cameras, going away silently and appearing as a name under TODAY'S DEPARTEES. We had The Great Cliché with its one-in-ten-thousand chance of impacting Earth on September 26th at 11:37 p.m. We were left to drunkenly climb a hill in the predawn hours with a friend in our arms for no other reason than we felt like picking him up.

“I never thanked you for your play,” I said. “Your words,” I corrected. “For letting me borrow them.”

“I'm waiting.”

“That was it, Marty-guy.”

“Noah, you don't thank someone by pointing out the fact that you haven't thanked them. That's like saying you read a book by pointing out that you haven't, that you—”

“Thank you, Marty,” I said.

He went silent for a time. “I wanted to write something
holy,
” he said eventually. “Alice was teaching me the constellations the other day,” he went on. “You know all the constellations? Orion and Cepheus and Hercules and Lyra—”

“No,” I said.

“They're these old myths, these old holy things,” he said. “A religion written in stars. It's beautiful. But why can't we have a new religion? Why can't we have Peter instead of Orion? Why can't we have Wendy instead of Cepheus? That's what I wanted.”

I paused, halfway up the hill. We looked up at the sky and he pointed out Peter to me, Peter and Wendy holding hands, and maybe it was the alcohol but I
saw
them standing out against the night, and it was the most beautiful thing, a new constellation that hadn't existed before, until Marty and I played connect-the-dots with the stars, but now it was there, a new myth that we could both believe in; I wanted to shout our discovery from the top of Sunset Hill so all of Westing could crane their heads up and see.

“The meteor shower will be the Skittles,” he said.

Marty-guy had given me something beautiful to believe in, and I wanted to return the favor, so I started to tell him a holy thing I knew: “In this book,
The City of Light . . .
” I knew Marty was rolling his eyes—L. J. Sawyer was no Turgenev—but I kept going. “There's this slave who tells Winston about a reeducation camp for rebellious slaves.”

“Uh-huh,” Marty said, and let loose a tremendous fart. The kind that blows your hair back, if you're the unlucky sap who happens to be carrying the flatulent friend in question up a hill. A second fart followed the first. We were shaking with laughter. Somehow, we ended up side by side on the grass, tears streaming down our faces.

“I'm—gassy—on Tuesday nights,” Marty gasped.

“Only—
Tuesdays
?”

“Taco Tuesdays,” he explained.

“You could've—warned me,” I said, blinking away the tears. Then, “We're going to try this again. No more gas attacks.”

“I don't promise anything.”

Once I'd gathered Marty up again, I resumed my story. “The reeducation camp I was telling you about? Remember? From before you nearly killed me.”

“It was
harmless.
”

“That's what they said about zeppelins, and look what happened.”

“You're comparing me to the
Hindenburg
?”

I decided not to press the analogy, and instead continued with the story. “The slave said there was this pit that used to be a swimming pool, but the Peacekeepers drained it and used it for—well, they'd randomly pick out a few prisoners, throw them into the pit, give them clubs and sticks, and tell them to kill each other. The last slave standing got to live.”

We'd reached the crest. I was still holding him, and he felt so light. That's the only reason I made it. He was so goddamn light, too light for a fight to the death.

“Marty,” I said.

“Yeah?”

“You need to eat more. More tacos. You're, like, twenty pounds.”

“You're telling me
I
need to eat more?”

I almost dropped him, but held on.

“I just need to believe we wouldn't bludgeon each other to death, because we're best friends even though maybe you hate me a little or a lot.”

“I don't hate you,” he said quietly. “Why would you say that?”

“You think I don't know?” I asked. Then, “I can break up with her if you want.”

“No,” he said, and shook his head.

I was still holding him.

I wanted to hold him as long as I possibly could.

The Peacekeepers were going to shoot him if I dropped him. I would have to hold him until the meteor shower, until Peter and Wendy spilled their cosmic Skittles against the sky. Only then could I save him. Only then could we escape to Neverland together.

“Christ, Noah,” he said quietly. “I just wish things were different.”

I hugged him tighter.

“Because look,” he said, holding on to me, “I've been thinking about how it's this crazy thing that we're here, but we forget about how holy it is. It's hard to remember sometimes that Skittles are just as sacred as the Bible if you're sharing them with Wendy and that a blanket can be all the cathedral you need. That's why you need to know what to look for when you look up at the sky.”

I adjusted my grip on Marty. My arms ached, shook.

“Noah, maybe you should—”

“I want to believe in something, but I don't know if I can. I want a story to believe in, but there are too many to choose from. If I knew what to believe in, I'd be real. I don't feel real. I feel vague, wispy. You know how your breath fogs in the cold and then disappears?”

I couldn't hold him any longer. I would have to put him down. The Peacekeepers would prevail. The soldiers guarding the hospital exit would win.

I had to let him drop, but I did so as gently as I could.

Marty stretched out on the lawn, hands behind his head, while I remained standing, waiting for the meteor shower to begin.

“You ever—you know—thought about—making a run for it?” he asked. “Up and over the wall?”

I waited a few seconds before answering. “You've been reading too many of those F.L.Y. newsletters, Marty.” He knew better than me that we wouldn't survive out there. Regular treatment was the only thing keeping him from going blind. “You stayed up there a long time, that night. On the wall.”

“Do you think they moved them? The ladders?”

“I don't know,” I said.

“If Apep's coming it wouldn't even matter. Whether we're here or out there.”

“But Marty-guy, you know better than that. One in ten thousand.”

He hesitated. “According to AwayWeKnow. I wonder how much Westing pays them.”

I sighed, didn't answer.

That's when the Skittles began to spill across the sky.