We All Looked Up

by Tommy Wallach

  “Yo, Andy,” Jess said. “You drinking or smoking?” He was wearing a backward baseball cap and a Nets jersey, holding the pipe in one hand and, in the other, a can of Monster that was probably spiked. Jess was biologically a girl, but he’d started dressing like a dude last year, and told everyone he was now a “he.” After high school was over, he planned to get a job and save up for gender-reassignment surgery. For now, he was taking some kind of testosterone supplement every few days; a couple of thick black hairs had begun to grow on his chin. Whatever, Andy figured. To each his/her own.

  “Maybe in a bit.”

  “Hey, Andy.” Misery was stretched out along the couch like a cat, a thin belt of white skin visible below the hem of her T-shirt. She’d dyed her hair orange a couple of days ago, and it made her look like a Creamsicle.

  “Hey, Miz. Where’s Bobo at?”

  “Kitchen.”

  Andy climbed the half set of stairs. Bobo was standing in front of the stove, reading the instructions on the back of a package of maca­roni and cheese.

  “Hey, man. You making dinner?”

  “I’m straight-up sick of this,” Bobo said, holding up the box. “Let’s order.”

  “I’m broke.”

  “So hit up Kevin.”

  “Dude, you do it. I feel like shit when I ask him.”

  “You drink his beer same as me.”

  “I know, but—”

  Without warning, Bobo whipped the box of mac and cheese straight at Andy’s head. It slammed into the wall and exploded into a firework rattle of uncooked shells, peppering Andy’s neck like shrapnel.

  “I said go hit up Kevin,” Bobo repeated.

  Andy groaned. “Fine. But I’m not cleaning this macaroni up.”

  “That makes two of us, yo.”

  Andy crunched over the pasta on his way back downstairs.

  “Hey,” he announced, as if he were talking to the whole room. “Cupboard’s bare up there. Maybe we should order some pizza or something. Anybody wanna make the call?”

  Kevin, who was holding down a massive hit from the pipe, raised his hand. His parents were totally loaded and, unlike Andy’s stepdad, were happy to spread the wealth around. They owned a car dealership in South Seattle, and their last name, Hellings, adorned the plastic license-plate frames of half the cars in the city. In other words, Kevin was set. Bobo said that if they all played their cards right, they could be mooching off him for decades. Andy felt bad about it sometimes, but every friendship involved some kind of transaction, right? They let Kevin hang out with them, and in exchange, he kept them in video games, Dick’s burgers, and weed.

  “I’m on that shit,” Kevin said, finally exhaling. He was one of those guys who got mystical and hazy when he was high, and his conversation with the pizza place was one for the ages: “Do we want pepperoni? Oh, man, I don’t even know. Hold on. Guys, do we want pepperoni? No, we don’t want pepperoni, even though I have no idea why, because pepperoni is delicious. Actually, I’m going to ask one more time. Guys, do we really not want pepperoni? No? Man, that’s crazy.”

  Andy sat down at the absolute edge of the couch, so that he wouldn’t be in contact with any part of Misery’s body, but she scooched over and clung onto his arm.

  “You making a move on me?”

  “I’m kinda freaking out,” she said.

  The television displayed an empty podium with the blue crest of the president of the United States of America behind it. A couple of premature flashbulbs went off.

  “Bobo,” Andy shouted, “it’s about to start!”

  “Coming!”

  Misery leaned the other way as soon as Bobo sat down, leaving Andy’s left side cold.

  “What do you think he’s gonna say?” she asked.

  “The usual,” Bobo said. “Move along. Nothing to see here. I don’t even know why you guys wanna watch. There’s this movie on Netflix where these people get stuck on a chairlift and die. It’s sick.”

  “This is history right here,” Kevin said. “Don’t you wanna be informed?”

  “Sure. But it’ll be up on YouTube in twenty minutes, and that way we can skip the boring parts.”

  Some hipster-looking dude with glasses came up to the podium only to say, “Ladies and gentlemen, the president of the United States of America.” Then he stepped aside for good old Obama, climbing to the stage with his wife and children in tow. Andy dug President Obama; there were pictures of him smoking a blunt in college, and he wanted to help out poor people and immigrants and shit. Plus, the guy always looked chilled out, even when he was angry; his anger was the anger of someone who was mostly angry because he had to get angry. I’d rather just shoot some hoops and light up, his expression seemed to say, but a bunch of uptight assholes are making me act all serious and presidential.

  “There’s something weird about him today,” Jess said.

  It was true. The president didn’t project the same cool, I-got-this-covered attitude that he usually did. The giveaway was right there on his face: no smiles. No smile for the crowd. No smile for the camera. No smile for his family even.

  “My fellow Americans,” he said, “I come to you today in humility, and in hope. A lot of people have been saying a lot of things over the past couple of days, and I’m here to separate the rumors from the realities. As most of you know, an asteroid called Ardor was spotted in the sky a few days ago. It was our own astronomers at the Mount Wilson Observatory in California who first located the asteroid, though since then the study of Ardor has been a truly international effort. Folks, there’s no easy way to tell you that the most recent estimates made by scientists around the world put the asteroid roughly on course with our own orbit.”

  The press room exploded with noise, and Obama waited patiently until it died down. “Now, I promised, when I was sworn in as your president, that I would be as transparent with you as possible. But when you’re dealing with these kinds of velocities and distances, it’s impossible to determine anything for certain. Truth is, we aren’t gonna know more for a while, maybe not until Ardor is right on our doorstep, which I’m told should be somewhere between seven and eight weeks from today.”

  The First Lady, standing statue-still behind the president, appeared to be weeping. Andy looked around his little apartment—suddenly everything seemed to have changed. Who were these strange people? Were they really the best friends he’d ever have? Misery was shaking, her eyes wide and wet.

  “Holy shit,” Kevin said. “Holy shit.”

  The president went on. “I can’t sugarcoat the result of a collision. The asteroid is almost eight miles wide at its thickest point. If it lands, it will unleash the force of more than one billion nuclear bombs. But this collision is far from assured, and two months is too long for us to be holding our breaths, or acting as if our lives were no longer of consequence. When this danger passes us by, as I know it will, we cannot afford to have let fear run our country, or ourselves, for even a single day. The only thing we can do now, the only American thing to do, is to continue on with our lives, hold our loved ones close, and trust that God will keep us safe. Thank you all, and God bless the United States of America.”

  A veritable strobe light of flashbulbs went off as Obama walked away from the podium. Andy realized that Misery was holding on to his hand so tightly that the tips of his fingers had gone white. This was real. This could really happen.

  “What are our chances?” some reporter shouted, but there was no one left onstage to answer. Meanwhile, Kevin had pulled out his MacBook and was scouring the web.

  “What are they saying online?” Misery asked.

  Kevin didn’t answer, only clicked and swiped and typed, opening up a dozen tabs in his browser. Why was it, Andy wondered, that no matter what color appeared on the screen, computer monitors always shone with the same shade of blue-white light—the exact color of Ardor? Th
e panes of Kevin’s glasses reflected two squares filled with tiny text.

  “What are they saying?” Misery asked again, and there was a desperate edge to her voice that sent a shiver down Andy’s spine. “Kevin, what the fuck are they saying?”

  “I was hoping to find something different,” he said, looking up from the screen. “They’re saying two-thirds.”

  “Two-thirds? Like, sixty-six percent?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So two-thirds we all live, and one-third we all die?”

  Kevin hesitated, checked the screen again, then slowly shook his head. “The other way,” he said.

  Misery stood up, turned around in place like some kind of cornered animal looking for a way out, then fell down onto her knees and put her head in her hands. Nobody went to comfort her.

  “Does it bother you?” Bobo asked.

  “Does what bother me?”

  “You know. Dying a virgin.” He laughed.

  Everyone else had left about an hour ago. Soon after that, Andy’s mom had paid a rare visit to the ma-in-law to announce that she and Phil would be leaving first thing in the morning for Phil’s cabin in eastern Washington, where they’d wait out “all this hysteria.” Andy told her that he’d sooner jump off the Space Needle than spend his last days on Earth cooped up in the middle of nowhere with her and Phil. She called him an ungrateful little punk, then slammed the door.

  “It’s been nice knowing you!” Andy shouted after her.

  He and Bobo turned out the lights, but they were both way too keyed up to fall asleep. So they nuked a bag of popcorn and played a couple wordless hours of PS4, instead.

  “Suck it,” Bobo said under his breath, racking up yet another kill. He was kicking Andy’s virtual ass.

  “How can you focus on this?” Andy asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean I’m losing my shit over here. How are you not?”

  “I don’t know. I guess the idea of death doesn’t really scare me.”

  As if on cue, Bobo’s avatar took a plasma ball to the face. Half the screen went black. Bobo threw the controller down and leaned back on the couch.

  “Aren’t you gonna respawn?”

  “Nah. You kinda blow tonight. It’s no fun.”

  Andy kept playing on his own for a while, until he noticed that Bobo had pulled back the sleeves of his hoodie. A thin pink line ran upward from each wrist, disappearing under the black fabric bunched around his elbow. Andy felt something clench up inside him. He looked away.

  “You have to do that?”

  “Relax, man. I’m proud of ’em.” He admired his scars. “We could try it again, you know. If shit gets real.”

  Andy didn’t say anything.

  “I don’t blame you,” Bobo said. “So you pussed out. I get it. It was a big thing.”

  “I didn’t puss out.”

  If only they’d been in the same room, everything would have been different. But when they made the pact, they decided to do it separately and alone, synchronizing the alarms on their phones like something out of a James Bond movie. Andy couldn’t even remember now why he’d agreed to it. Bobo had just broken up with Misery (temporarily, as it turned out), and his dad was in some kind of alcohol treatment facility, so he had plenty of reasons, but Andy hadn’t been going through anything worse than the usual shit. Crazy as it sounded, he just didn’t feel right saying no. He called Bobo’s cell as soon as he realized he couldn’t go through with it, but there was no answer, so he called the police. Later on, a paramedic told him it had come down to just a few minutes. “You’re a hero,” the guy said.

  But Andy knew that wasn’t true. He’d abandoned his best friend. He had pussed out.

  Bobo finally pulled his sleeves back down, like dropping a curtain on the past.

  “I’m just saying think about it, all right? Just in case.”

  The clock blinked over to four thirty.

  “We should get to bed,” Andy said. “School’s gonna be a bitch on three hours of sleep.”

  “I already Googled it. School’s canceled tomorrow. They’re giving us a three-day weekend. As if we were gonna go anyway.”

  Andy hadn’t even considered skipping out on school, but Bobo was right. There was no reason left to show up at Hamilton. For that matter, there was no reason left to do much of anything. Andy thought about making the same old drive, sitting through some pointless sad assembly, seeing a bunch of people he didn’t really give a shit about and who definitely didn’t give a shit about him. Was there even one person there that he’d actually miss?

  “Eliza,” he said, and the word was like a doorway stumbled on in the dark.

  “What?”

  “Eliza Olivi.”

  “What about her?”

  What was it that made you keep playing a video game, hour after hour, day after day, no matter how terrible the writing was or how boring the story? You kept going because you had a quest. It didn’t even matter what it was—saving a princess or conquering an alien world or assassinating a king. Andy pictured Eliza as she used to be: shy and spectral, quiet as a painting. It was as noble a quest as any.

  “I’m going to sleep with her,” Andy said.

  Bobo laughed. “Bullshit.”

  “A hundred bucks says I do it by the time Ardor gets here.”

  “Fine. But make it a thousand.”

  “A thousand?”

  “It’s the goddamn end of the world, Andy. And you have to have sex with her, okay? We’re talking hard-core, sustained intercourse here.”

  “Sustained?”

  “Sustained. None of that premature ejaculation shit.”

  “Deal.” They shook hands—a gentleman’s agreement. Sure it was immature and stupid and probably impossible. But you had to have something to get you out of bed in the morning. Something to hope for. And for Andy, that something would be Eliza.

  In a landslide, running unopposed, she’d just been elected his reason to live.

  Peter

  AFTER IT WAS OVER, PETER sat on the couch and let his mom hold him. His dad kept changing the channel on the TV, hoping to find someone able to contradict some part of the president’s speech. Both of them were crying, his mom steady as a stream, his dad like an imperfectly sealed pipe—just a slow drip around the edges. Peter loved his parents, but right now, he would have given anything to get away from them. Their anxiety burned away all the oxygen in the room; his own feelings couldn’t breathe. He was only eighteen! There were so many things he hadn’t experienced yet—world travel, bungee jumping, sushi. And what the hell had he been waiting for? Why had he assumed time was some sort of infinite resource? Now the hourglass had busted open, and what he’d always assumed was just a bunch of sand turned out to be a million tiny diamonds.

  Peter could feel the moisture of his mom’s tears bleeding through his T-shirt. He shivered. His parents had always been pretty miserly when it came to heating the house. The wisp of a funny thought: Why not keep the thermostat at a balmy eighty degrees from here on out? Odds were good they’d never have to pay the bill. And how many nest eggs and trust funds would get blown in the next couple of months? How many secret grievances would finally see the light of day? How many neighbors would finally go ahead and shoot the yipping Chihuahua that had been keeping them awake every night? Or, come to think of it, why not just shoot the inconsiderate neighbor who wouldn’t keep his damn dog in the house? All of a sudden, the world seemed like a very dangerous place.

  “I’m going to go find Miz,” he said.

  His mom actually moaned—one long, ghostly note—as Peter peeled himself away from her.

  “Good idea,” his dad said. “But come right home, okay?”

  “Sure.”

  Misery would be over at Andy Rowen’s place—the ma-in-law—where her crew always hung
out. He texted her to come outside in twenty minutes; for some reason, he really didn’t want to see her boyfriend right now. The news about Ardor seemed to affirm the Why bother with anything? philosophy that Bobo and his friends had always championed. Peter couldn’t help feeling like a sucker for having sided with the seekers and the strivers of the world.

  She was waiting for him when he got there, standing on the sidewalk in a round puddle of light. Impossibly slim, like an orchid. Her pumpkin-colored hair and crazy ripped-up clothes seemed like some kind of futile existential gesture, and Peter felt freshly responsible for it. He’d always suspected that his sister’s rebelliousness was, in some way, a response to his own mainstream triumphs. And though he’d come to terms with the sarcastic attitude and the slacker ethos and the freak-show fashion sense, the one thing he still couldn’t understand was why a smart, pretty girl like her chose to spend all her time with a drug-dealing creep like Bobo.

  “Hey, Miz.”

  “Hey.”

  They hugged in that awkward space between the front seats.

  “Mom’s freaking out,” he said.

  “I’m sure.” His sister pulled a pack of Camel Lights and a red Bic from her purse. Peter considered chastising her, then figured that lung cancer was yet another of the million things that no longer mattered. “Hey,” she said, breathing out a cloud of smoke, “would you mind if we didn’t go straight home? I can’t really handle being in that house right now.”

  “I would the opposite of mind.”

  It was a clear, quiet night. The news had emptied the streets. Peter didn’t have any destination in mind as he started driving, but when he saw the sign for Beth’s Cafe—a pig with wings atop the old DRINK NESBITT’S ORANGE marquee—he pulled off and parked.

  The door jingled as it opened, wafting a breath of warm air that smelled of pancakes and bacon. Beth’s had always been Misery’s kind of place, rather than Peter’s, but it felt right to him tonight. The twenty-four-hour greasy spoon hearkened back to a time when the freaks of the world didn’t feature in every prime-time drama and on every street corner, when they really needed their own places to congregate. Tall red stools were evenly spaced along an L-shaped counter. The waitress at the register—a smileless Goth monster with a face comprised mostly of holes filled with metal—greeted Misery by name. Nobody in the restaurant looked particularly tragic or hysterical. Was it possible that none of them had heard, or were they all still in shock?