We All Looked Up

by Tommy Wallach

  Peter and his sister were seated in the passageway between the restaurant’s two rooms, just across from the jukebox and the little nook where the pinball machines lived. The tinny digital effects almost disguised the sound of Peter’s phone ringing: Stacy.

  “You gonna get that?” Misery asked.

  He hadn’t even thought about his girlfriend since the announcement.

  “Not right now.”

  “So you’re finally gonna break up with her?”

  “What?” But Peter hesitated a little too long before answering, “No!”

  Misery smiled hugely. “You are? Really?”

  “I said no, Miz.”

  “Yeah, but you had to think about it. That means it’s just a matter of time. Start the countdown.”

  His sister seemed so genuinely pleased at the thought of his dumping Stacy, he was tempted to do it just for her. But that would be even more awful than doing it in the hopes of getting together with a girl he barely knew.

  Misery ordered black coffee and hash browns. Peter decided there was no time like the present to tackle Beth’s famous twelve-egg omelet. The song on the jukebox kept saying something about a bomb, over and over again.

  “So, while we’re on the subject of breaking up,” Peter said, “what about you and Bobo?”

  “Why would I break up with Bobo?”

  “Because he’s a punk. And he’s too old for you.”

  “Two years is nothing. Plus, I love him, even if he is a punk.”

  There was another jingle as four men entered the cafe. They were classic Beth’s—all leather and studs and the reek of stale cigarette smoke—and brought with them the kind of generalized menace that made you cross to the other side of a dark street. As they passed by the table, one of them did a double take. He couldn’t have been older than thirty, but his skin was prematurely leathery—drugs, probably. He was smaller than the others, five-foot-five tops, though something about the way he moved marked him as their leader. Peter noticed the tattoos on his knuckles as he placed his hands on the tabletop: LIVE on the right, ONCE on the left.

  “Misery,” he said, “you’re looking good.”

  “Hey, Golden.”

  “And who’s this guy? You stepping out on Bobo?”

  “This is Peter, my brother.”

  Peter put out a hand to shake, but Golden didn’t take it. His pupils were steel gray, dilated so far that there had to be some kind of amphetamine in his system. He fingered the thin gold chain looped a dozen times around his neck.

  “Hey there, Peter my brother.”

  “Hey.”

  “You take good care of this one, yeah?”

  “That’s what brothers do.”

  Peter’s phone rang again. Golden glanced down and saw the screen, smiled a mouthful of gold teeth. “Better talk to mommy,” he said, then walked away.

  It took Peter five minutes to convince his still-weepy mom that he and Misery would come home right after dinner. Meanwhile, the waitress dropped off their food, looking with tired distrust toward the hysterical laughter and thumping already coming from the game room, where Golden and his friends had ensconced themselves. Peter took one bite of his omelet and realized he wasn’t hungry. It was time to discuss the elephant in the room.

  “So,” he said, “death.”

  “Yep.”

  “How are you feeling?”

  “I don’t even know. It doesn’t seem real yet. I mean, what are we supposed to do? What’s going to happen?”

  “Nothing good.”

  A raucous cry, then the sound of something shattering. A sickle-­shaped fragment of coffee mug slid across the floor from the game room to knock against Peter’s sneaker.

  “So those are Bobo’s friends, huh?”

  “Friends would be pushing it.”

  “Well, I can see why you’d want to be involved with such classy people.”

  “Leave it alone, man.”

  But he’d seized on something important now, and he wouldn’t let it go without a fight. Even if he accomplished nothing else before the end of the world, at least he could set his sister straight.

  “Listen, Miz. I know you’ve never liked Stacy, and I know I’ve never liked Bobo, but that doesn’t make them equivalent issues.” He could see her eyes beginning to glaze over. “Bobo’s a thug. It’s his fault you weren’t with the family tonight. It’s his fault your grades this year have been a train wreck.”

  Misery leaned back against the window at the far end of the booth. “Can you even hear yourself? Who cares about grades anymore?”

  “It’s not your grades that I’m worried about.”

  “Then what?”

  “Your . . . soul,” Peter said, and wondered where the hell that word had come from. “I know guys like Bobo, Miz. They don’t give a shit about anything.”

  “He gives a shit about me. And you don’t know him. You don’t know how fucked up his life has been. That’s why he acts the way he does. And every time I make him happier, I feel good. He makes me feel good.”

  “Misery, you weren’t put here on Earth to cheer up a scumbag.”

  As soon as he said it, he knew he’d gone too far. Misery struck back hard. “You’re the one with a girlfriend you don’t love,” she said. “And I’ve never cheated on Bobo.” She slid out of the booth. “Not that you’d care, but he and I did break up once. And he tried to kill himself. So, you know, there’s that.”

  His sister stormed out of the café, while Peter sat back and tried to process this new information. It did clear up one thing; now he could understand how Misery had gotten hooked. The prospect of rescuing someone from death itself—what was more compelling than that?

  There was another loud crash from the game room. A member of Golden’s crew came out, wincing and grinning at the same time. His hand was covered in red streamers of blood, and a shard of glass protruded from between his knuckles like a shark fin. “My ball got stuck in that fucking machine,” he said, by way of explanation.

  Misery refused to talk to him on the way home, so Peter just watched the road. He counted three ambulances, two fire engines, and seven police cars. It had already started. . . .

  Home again, Misery ran straight upstairs, ignoring their parents, who’d waited up in the living room.

  “Is she okay?” his mom asked.

  Peter laughed bitterly at the ridiculousness of the question—at the fact that, for the next two months, all such questions would be ludicrous and insensitive and insane.

  “Yeah, Mom,” he said. “She’s fantastic.”

  Andy

  THEY RAN AROUND LIKE CHICKENS with their balls cut off. Teachers. Administrators. Officials. An all-shook-up ant farm of adults, so used to being in control of everything that they didn’t even realize the days of control were over. Next to them, the students looked downright chill. Andy figured that was probably because kids were always getting thrown into shit they had no control over. Then again, he wasn’t feeling particularly chill himself; after a long weekend spent getting stoned and avoiding anything that so much as resembled a thought, he was now undergoing the mother of all comedowns. Question: How could you look the end of the world in the face and not go crazy? Answer: You couldn’t. The only sane thing to do was seek out enough distraction to numb the terror. Andy scanned the room for Eliza—his princess in a castle. Usually, assemblies were packed solid, but today, every row had a few truant teeth knocked out. Of course, Andy wouldn’t have bothered to show up either, if it weren’t for the quest.

  A bright flash momentarily blinded him. After blinking the little purple motes away, he saw her, hidden behind her camera, facing the back of the room. Another flash. For a second, he wondered if she was taking pictures of him. But then he turned around and saw her real quarry. Hamilton had invited some guests to today’s assembly—two members of
Seattle’s finest, one stationed in front of each of the auditorium doors.

  So it was happening here, too—Big Brother on the march.

  All weekend, Andy had walked the streets of Seattle with Bobo, getting a feel for their new city. He’d expected some kind of bunker mentality—the streets zombie-apocalypse empty, tumbleweeds rolling by, and Mad Max tooling around on a Harley. But the vibe turned out to be more music festival than Thunderdome. Everybody had come out to play, from the druggie psychotics to the white-bread suburbanites, all doing their best to wring some enjoyment out of the wet February weather. It might have been enough to make you forget what was really going on, if it weren’t for all the cops. They were everywhere now. No matter which way you turned, some fat-necked, buzz-cut blue boy was looking at you with that just give me a reason glare. On the radio, they talked about how the SPD might start deputizing unemployed civilians. (“Of course, none of them will be given guns,” the chief of police said—so they’d be a ton of help when shit really went down.) Kevin, their crew’s historian-in-residence, said this was how it always started. A few people were granted extraordinary power—just for the sake of public safety, of course—and before long, those well-meaning civilians were lobbing gas canisters and flipping on the fire hoses and driving the trains to the gulags. Andy had figured Kevin was talking out his ass, but now, seeing those cops standing at the back of the auditorium, he wasn’t so sure.

  Mr. Jester, Hamilton’s principal, took the stage, sweating like a guilty killer after three hours of interrogation. How he’d become the principal of anything was a mystery to Andy. Leaders were supposed to be the kind of guys you’d follow into battle. But if there were ever a battle at Hamilton, Mr. Jester was the kind of guy you’d ask to hang back and maybe sweep up the barracks or something.

  “Good morning, Hamilton.”

  The student body answered back, “Good morning, Mr. Jester.”

  “I’m going to keep this short, if I can. I think it’s going to be very important that we maintain our usual routines as much as possible. That being said, there are certain inevitabilities resulting from the tragedy that we have to address. That is, the potentially tragic, uh, nature of things.”

  Mr. Jester said a whole lot of nothing with a whole lot of words. Every couple of minutes the flash of Eliza’s camera would briefly bleach the room.

  Bobo leaned over the armrest. “Yo, if you wanna get her attention, you gotta do something to stand out.”

  “Like what?”

  “What’s the point of calculus?” Bobo shouted, stopping Mr. Jester midsentence and earning a laugh from the room. A good principal would have immediately ordered him out of the auditorium, but Mr. Jester looked to be just a couple of seconds away from a full-on Fukushima-style meltdown. Bobo had always had a sixth sense when it came to the weaknesses of others.

  The principal did his best to ignore the interruption. “As I was saying, school is still technically mandatory, though this policy is being reviewed at the federal level as we speak. Please continue to attend your classes as scheduled.”

  “Say something,” Bobo whispered.

  “Dude, why are you helping me? There’s money on the line.”

  “Because, Mary, I want a real competition here, and you’re already blowing it.” Bobo raised his voice again. “Answer the question! What’s the point of calculus?”

  Mr. Jester squinted into the audience. “Calculus is important, sir, because it’s a part of mathematics. And mathematics are important because numbers, you see, are the cornerstone of an education, along with science and history and, uh . . .” He swallowed the rest of his meandering sentence. Another flash went off, right in Andy’s eyes this time—Eliza had just taken Bobo’s picture! His dumb yelling had actually managed to prick the thick bubble of her awareness.

  “Listen,” Mr. Jester said, “I’m trying to tell you some important stuff here, so if you could just cut me a little bit of slack, we can—”

  “What are these cops doing here?” Andy shouted.

  “That’s not important right now. It’s just regulations.”

  “What regulation says we need armed police officers at a high school? What are you afraid of?”

  “Nothing, and that’s quite enough, Mr. Rowen.”

  Andy ignored him, electrified by the attention. “Yo, Hamilton, if you care at all about your personal rights, come to the bleachers after school. We gotta stand up for ourselves. This is how fascism starts—”

  He felt something tighten around his shoulder; one of the cops had grabbed hold of him and was trying to lift him out of his seat.

  “What the hell?”

  “That really isn’t necessary, officer,” Mr. Jester said.

  “Get off me, pig!” Andy wrenched himself out of the cop’s grip, but his momentum sent him careening forward into the metal rim of the empty seat in front of him. A white flash of pain, then a slow trickle of blood tickling the follicles of his right eyebrow. Outrage rippled through the room like a murmurous earthquake. Another white flash, only this one came from Eliza’s camera. Andy looked right at her and smiled. Blood leaked into the corner of his mouth.

  “Bleachers after school if you value your freedom,” he shouted one last time, as he was dragged up the stairs and out of the auditorium.

  At lunch they considered their next move. Kevin insisted that they had momentum now, politically speaking—Andy’s injury was all anyone could talk about—and they had to strike while the iron was hot. Of course, none of them really knew what striking would entail. Bobo offered to take point at the bleachers, and Andy was only too happy to agree. He’d never really liked the limelight, and the last thing he wanted was more trouble. He was lucky to have gotten out of that assembly with just the head wound. (“Let’s not make some kind of federal case about this,” the cop had said, holding a soggy ball of paper towels to Andy’s forehead, “and we’ll forget about the scene you caused in there. Deal?”)

  Almost a hundred people were waiting out on the bleachers after school, their hoods pulled up against the drizzle like a monastery’s worth of monks who’d neglected to color coordinate. A lot of different crews had answered the call. There was James Hurdlebrink—he of the hideous mullet and the stratospheric IQ—along with the gamer kids and mathletes he ran with. The slackers from pretty much every class had shown up, though good luck getting them to actually do anything. Finally there were the artsy types—girls who dressed like Joan Baez and played acoustic guitar, boys who dressed like Kurt Cobain and played electric guitar, mega-gay theater kids, the staff of the school paper, the menagerie of monstrosities that made up the Hamilton orchestra. Lending gravity to the occasion was the cop who’d roughed Andy up, watching them from the far end of the football field. He reached down toward his Batman-style utility belt, and for a second, Andy half expected him to whip out his sidearm and mow them all down. But he just unsnapped the radio and said something into the microphone.

  Andy stood behind Bobo and tried to look grave and traumatized. Misery had wrapped his head in an Egyptian mummy’s worth of bandages, to make his injury look worse than it was, but now they were heavy and cold with rainwater and smelled like a musty hospital.

  “I know you all saw what happened today,” Bobo said, addressing the bleachers from the middle of the track that circumscribed the field. “Maybe it surprised you, but it didn’t surprise me. The assholes who run things want us to think that we’re in danger from people like us, but you and I know that the real enemy’s already in our midst. I’m talking about them.” He pointed across the field, right at the cop. “They’re as scared as the rest of us, only they’ve got guns. You think they’ll stress over shooting some kid who’s giving them a hard time? They can do the math: sixty-six point six percent chance that they won’t have to answer for shit. And even if we’re still alive two months from now, you know that every cop on the street will be called a hero
, whatever he did. Extraordinary circumstances, they’ll call them. We’re at their mercy, unless we stand together.”

  “What are you suggesting?” James Hurdlebrink asked.

  “Nothing hard-core for now,” Bobo said. “We gotta sit back and see how things develop. But we need to be ready. We need a chain of command to organize shit.”

  “And you’d like to be at the top of that chain?”

  “Why not?”

  James laughed a harsh, condescending laugh—one that had probably cost him a lot of friends over the years. “Because this is moronic. What are we going to do against a bunch of armed cops?”

  “There’s plenty we can do.”

  “Like what?”

  “I know people,” Bobo said. “People who get things done. You’ll just have to trust me on that.”

  James spread out his hands in temporary surrender. “As you wish, fearless leader.”

  “Anyone else have something to say?” Bobo looked over the crowd. “Good. I’ll make a private Facebook page later tonight, so friend me and I’ll send you an invite. Now Misery has one more brief announcement to make.”

  Misery stood up at the back row of the bleachers. “You’re all invited to the Crocodile at ten o’clock this Friday for the Perineum reunion show. Wait, I take that back. Not invited. Required. Consider it your initiation. Cover’s five bucks.”

  “Isn’t that Valentine’s Day?” someone asked.

  “So what?” Misery said. “Bring a fucking date.”

  The crowd dispersed, but not before Andy noticed Anita Graves watching from behind the bleachers; she turned and walked off the moment he made eye contact. That girl was getting weirder and weirder.