The Road to Amazing (7 page)

"So where is it?" I asked. "Christie
said there were ruins, but I don't see any—"

And it was strange. All of a sudden I
saw how this little cove, and the apron of flat land that
surrounded it, was actually a pretty good place for at least a
small town.

Min saw it too.

"There," Min said, pointing to the
cairns I'd seen earlier.

Except that's not what they were. They
were the remnants of stone foundations. The houses had long since
fallen away, and at some point whatever they'd used for mortar in
the foundations must have deteriorated too. So now even most of the
foundations had collapsed, but a few small sections remained
upright. If you connected the dots, you could see they formed
rectangles — the outlines of what had once been buildings. I could
make out at least three foundations, but there were probably more
in the trees. There might even have been a "main street" at one
point.

There were ruins here after all,
really obvious ones. I'd just missed them.

It sort of gave me the chills knowing
that Amazing was real. Maybe that meant the story about everyone
disappearing was also real.

Where did they go?
I wondered.

I wanted to ask Min, but I felt
stupid. I had a way of letting my imagination get away from me.
It's possible I could even be a teeny-tiny bit melodramatic, and
Min had been known to (affectionately) tease me about
it.

We started meandering among the ruins.
Christie had said something about an abandoned well, but I didn't
see that anywhere. That was all I needed, to accidentally fall down
an abandoned well. On the other hand, it would definitely give this
weekend some drama.

"So," Min asked me, "how are you
feeling?"

"What?" I said.

"About the wedding."

"Fine. I mean, Kevin is stressed, but
I'm great."

"Yeah, I sensed that. About
Kevin."

"I wish I could do something," I said.
"He's such a good guy. But for the time being, I'm trying to be
supportive and just listen."

Min nodded.

"I liked what Gunnar said
last night," I said. "About how Kevin and I first met. And how
we're
destined
to
be together."

"You so are."

I stopped at one of the stacks of
rocks — part of a foundation. I touched it with my foot, and to my
surprise, a couple of the rocks fell over with a
clatter.

I laughed. "Isn't that funny? It's
been standing all this time, and I barely touch it and it
collapses."

Min smiled, but didn't laugh. I
stopped laughing too. Suddenly it didn't seem so funny anymore. I
tried to rebuild it, but I couldn't figure it out. It was a puzzle
where nothing seemed to fit.

"You okay?" Min said, watching
me.

"Huh? Yeah. Why?"

"It feels like there's something on
your mind."

Min knew me really well, and at that
moment in time, it was kind of annoying the shit out of
me.

"No!" I said, but maybe it
was more to myself than to her. "For the first time in my life, I'm
determined to
not
be neurotic about something.
Kevin
is the neurotic one this
time."

"What's going on?" she
said.

I didn't answer.

"Oh, come on," she said. "You think
I'm going to tell?"

She kept staring at me, her eyes never
blinking, a little like a Russian interrogator.

I cracked under the
pressure.

Okay, yes, there may have
been one little thing that had been on my mind about the wedding.
But it was such a teensy-tiny thing that I really wasn't lying
before when I said I was perfectly calm about getting married. It
doesn't mean I'm an unreliable narrator, and it
absolutely
didn't mean I was being
neurotic.

"It really doesn't have anything to do
with Kevin," I said. "I love him completely and totally, and I want
to spend my whole life with him."

"Who wouldn't?"

"I also don't have cold feet, or
last-minute jitters, or anything like that."

"Of course not."

"But, I mean,
marriage
. What does that
even mean?"

"It means whatever you and Kevin want
it to mean," Min said.

"Oh, everyone always says
that, but what does that mean
really
?"

"It means a lot," she
said. I started to talk, and she interrupted me. "No, wait, hear me
out. Being able to define your own marriage? That's literally what
the last century has been all about. All the social changes — the
whole trajectory of the twentieth century, and the twenty-first
century so far — when you boil it all down, what it's really about
is you and me, every one of us, being able to decide for ourselves
how we want to live our lives. It's no longer up to our parents, or
decided by our religion, or dictated by our communities and our
government.
We
get to decide how we want to live our lives, all of us, as
individuals.
You
get to decide. Rich straight white men have always been able
to do that — they had the privilege to be able to choose their own
destiny, to change or rewrite the rules whenever they wanted, but
now more and more people can. And that is literally what this
upcoming election is all about. I don't understand how more people
can't
see
that,
how everything we've all worked so long and hard to achieve, all
the progress we've made—"

"Min?"

She nodded. "Right, sorry, I went off,
didn't I? The point is, those aren't meaningless words, what I said
before."

"Okay," I said, "so Kevin and I get to
decide what our marriage means."

She nodded emphatically.

"What if we disagree?" I
said.

"Then you compromise. You work it
out."

I didn't say anything. I almost kicked
another stack of stones, but at the last second, I decided not to.
Down on the water, the seagulls still cawed, but now I heard
another sound too: voices. It was Ruby and Nate, probably on the
beach over below the deck, laughing about something. So back at the
house, everyone else was waking up too.

"Kevin wants to have kids," I said to
Min.

"Really?" she said, surprised. She
knew how I felt about the dream-destroying little monsters. "But I
thought you talked that all out."

"Well, yeah,
now
he says he doesn't
want them. But he used to want them. I think he only says that now
because he knows it's what I want."

"Kevin is a big boy. If he says he's
okay not having kids, you should believe him."

"But the point is," I
said, "don't I need to be open to the possibility? Isn't that what
being married is all about? And I don't want to be open to that
possibility. There are
lots
of possibilities I don't want to be open to. And
there are other possibilities that maybe I
do
want to be open to that Kevin
might not."

"Are we talking about sex?"

I had to think about that. Kevin and I
had a pretty great sex life, but we were definitely monogamous —
that was important to us both. Still, I also knew that we were both
reasonable guys, and if one of us was ever truly unhappy, we'd
figure something out.

"We're two guys," I said. "Sex is
actually one of the things I'm worried least about."

"That's totally sexist, what you said
there, but I'm going to let it slide for the time being. So it's
not sex. Then what are you worried about?"

"Other than the kid thing? That's it,
I'm not quite sure." I thought for another second. "I want to make
a difference in the world — help the homeless and cure AIDS, that
kind of thing. And I have these vague dreams about traveling.
Getting lost in South America, hitchhiking through Europe, living
in a remote lighthouse for a year — although I know that last one
would probably be a complete disaster, cold and impractical, and
not nearly as romantic as it seems."

Min smiled.

"And obviously I want to make it as a
screenwriter," I said. "I mean, that's why Kevin and I moved to Los
Angeles, and I still haven't had any success at all, and the city
has turned out to be something of a dystopian hell-hole. But I sure
as hell don't want to give up on that dream yet, and maybe not
ever."

Min nodded.

"You only live once, you
can't take it with you, and all that?" I said. "I don't want to be
the guy who goes to work, and comes home and sits in my plush media
room watching other people do cool things, like the couples
on
House Hunters
who sell everything and move to some great new city. There's
a line in
The Glass Menagerie
where the main character, Tom—"

"I know who the main
character in
The Glass Menagerie
is."

"Tom says, 'People go to
the movies rather than moving. Hollywood characters are supposed to
have all the adventures for everybody in America.' Which I
absolutely love. It's, like, my favorite line of all time. I want
to move too, not just go to the movies." I thought about it.
"Although I do love movies, so I also wouldn't mind a plush media
room. I also like
House
Hunters
. Or at least
House Hunters International
."

Min rolled her eyes. "Is it my turn
now? Can I talk?"

"I already know what
you're going to say. You're going to say that Kevin is a great guy,
which he totally is. I mean, I literally just told you how he moved
to Los Angeles with me so I could pursue my dream of screenwriting.
And all the other things I talked about, I can do them
with
him. If we do
disagree about something, we really will work it out."

"Wow, I'm absolutely brilliant. So?
What's your rebuttal?"

"I dunno," I said. "It seems too
optimistic. Aren't you the one who's always saying the whole world
is going to hell?"

"Oh, sure, in the big picture, the
corporations and religious fundamentalists are going to screw us
all. But on a micro level, I still have faith."

I laughed out loud. At this point, I
was back to liking how well Min knew me, that we really understood
each other.

"I think I know what the problem is,"
Min said.

"You usually do."

Min ignored me. "You're afraid to grow
up. You're afraid of being an adult." She sighed. "Such a
Millennial."

"I am
not
. I mean, I'm a Millennial, but
I'm not afraid of growing up. I'm
already
grown up. I'm twenty-five
years old!" I thought about it for a second. "I'm also sick to
death of the whole man-child thing. You know, that you see now in
almost every TV show and every movie? Yes, yes, you can't stay home
and drink beer and play video games all day, how incredibly tragic.
They seriously
do
need to grow up. But that's not what this is."

Min kept ignoring me. "And that's what
marriage symbolizes: being an adult. So it stands to reason it's
giving you pause."

I'm afraid to grow
up?
I thought. That couldn't possibly be
right. Could it?

It did have the ring of truth. Min was
actually pretty good at this, calling me on my shit. But it usually
all worked out in the end, because I'd been known to call her on
her shit too.

"Just so we're clear," I
said, "I'm really not having second thoughts about the wedding. I
mean, like, at
all
."

"I know that."

"We're just talking."

"I know that too."

"All that said," I said, "well, who
the hell wants to grow old? As far as I can tell, it's all about
not getting enough fiber, and ear wax removal systems, and cracked
crowns not being covered by insurance, and how you need some sort
of tool to scrape your tongue or you'll get bad breath. Oh, and
then you die."

"There's a slight possibility you're
dwelling on the negative."

"Not to hear my parents tell it. But
you want to know the worse part? They don't have friends, they have
dinner party guests. I don't know if they ever did, but they don't
now. It makes me so sad."

"So you've said. But that's one thing
you're never going to have to worry about — not having friends. As
for the bad breath, well, that's a separate issue."

"I want my life to be special," I
said.

Now I really had gotten down to the
nub of it. It wasn't so much that I was worried about growing
older, or even that Kevin would one day announce that he
desperately wanted kids, so we'd have to work out some kind of
compromise and we'd end up getting a corgi.