We All Looked Up

by Tommy Wallach

  “Spread them legs, girl.”

  “The safe word is motorboat.”

  After a few dozen blows, the tumblers gave out. Andy rolled up the grating and Bobo shattered the glass door.

  Kennelly Keys was a pretty small music shop, catering mostly to suburban families who wanted to get their kids playing “Für Elise” for the grandparents. The store made its money off cheap violins and Casio keyboards and an ugly plywood mini instrument called My First Guitar.

  “Look at me,” Bobo said, raising two of the tiny guitars over his head at once. “I’m Pete fucking Townshend.” He smashed them together. “Rest in peace, my first and second guitars.”

  Andy made a beeline for the back corner of the shop, where lived the one object that saved the place from total irrelevance—the 1965 Gibson ES-175D in a sunburst finish. The case wasn’t even locked. And then Andy had it, heavy and solid in his hands—like a sledgehammer you could make music with. He powered up an amp, plugged in, turned the dial hard to the right, and strummed the open strings. Shit yeah.

  “Too clean,” Bobo said. “That guitar sounds like a girl who won’t even take her shirt off.”

  “Nothing wrong with a good tease.”

  “At least it’s loud. Let’s do this. One, two, three, four . . .”

  Bobo brutalized a child’s drum kit with a pair of xylophone mallets. Andy turned up the drive knob on the amp and played power chords as fast as he could. After about thirty seconds, Bobo kicked the drums over one by one, then stood up.

  “Good night, Seattle!”

  As the guitar’s reverb died out, they both heard it: a long, low wail. At first, Andy thought it was some kind of alarm. But soon the wail resolved into words—“Someone, please!” The voice was that of a sad old man who’d only been trying to do his job.

  “Looks like Humpty fell off the wall,” Bobo said, sniggering. “Hey, what are you doing?”

  Andy leaned the guitar against the amp. “I don’t want it,” he said.

  “Dude, don’t be fucking stupid. That thing almost makes you sound like a real musician.”

  “Nah. I’m not feeling it.”

  Bobo picked up the sledgehammer and raised it over his head. He looked crazed. “Take that guitar or I swear to God I’ll break it in half right now.” Andy imagined the moment of contact, when the head of the hammer would sever the neck of the Gibson at one of its glistening silver frets, shattering the pearlescent inlays, leaving only the tendons of strings to hold the whole thing together. Such a waste.

  “Why do you even care?”

  “It’s a symbol, yo! Some fucked-up stuff is about to go down in this world, and we gotta have each other’s backs.”

  “I’ve still got your back,” Andy said.

  Bobo shook his head. “Ever since you started hanging out with those girls, you’ve changed. I need to know it’s not gonna be the pact all over again. I need to know my best friend isn’t gonna puss out on me.”

  And for just a second, Andy saw the fear at the heart of all Bobo’s bluster and bullshit. That was the problem with understanding someone too well—you couldn’t help but forgive them, no matter what they did. He picked up the guitar and threw the strap over his shoulder.

  “Whatever, man. Let’s go make sure Humpty Dumpty can put his shit back together.”

  Bobo rolled his eyes. “All right, Mother Mary. Lead the way.”

  They skated across the mall, following the wail of the security guard. With the guitar around his neck, Andy found it hard to build up any momentum. Every push made his muscles burn. He felt so heavy.

  Peter

  PETER HADN’T BEEN PLANNING TO go to the rally. both Bobo and that creep golden had been responsible for organizing the event, which was two strikes against it right there. And when Peter’s parents expressly forbade him and his sister from attending, that seemed to settle it for good. But everything changed when he woke up on Saturday morning.

  Misery’s room was already empty, the wrinkles in the sheets of her unmade bed like a scrawled fuck you to the very idea of imprisonment.

  His mom and dad were waiting for him at the kitchen table, fully dressed and looking solemn. His breakfast had already been arranged on a plate—scrambled eggs, bacon, whole-grain toast glistening with butter. So he was literally getting “buttered up” here—but why? Were they going to ask him to take their side in the next episode of “Misery gets reprimanded and still doesn’t give a shit”? Or maybe they were sending him out to the rally to drag her back home.

  “We’re worried about your sister,” his mom said.

  “What else is new?”

  His parents didn’t so much as smile.

  “She’s barely ever at home anymore.”

  “She’s in love.”

  Peter’s mom actually gave a little yelp of a laugh. “Love? At her age? Please. And now I can only assume she’s gone to this rally, even though we told her not to.”

  Peter had heard this all before. “Yeah, but you know what she’s—”

  “We can’t go on like this!” his dad shouted. “It’s totally unsustainable!”

  Peter sensed now that he’d underestimated the scale of this intervention. It was an easy mistake to make, if you allowed yourself to forget about Ardor, which turned all existence into a soap opera. “You want to leave Seattle,” he guessed.

  His mother took hold of his hand. “We can always come back, if we regret it.”

  “We’re thinking we’d go camping first,” his dad said, “to really bond as a family. Then we can stay with your grandparents in Mendocino and see how it feels.”

  “What about school?”

  “I think school is the least of our worries now.”

  Peter felt gripped with a sudden sense of panic. They couldn’t be serious, could they? Seattle was their home. Why would they want to let go of it, to let go of everything safe and familiar, at the most terrifying moment in any of their lives?

  Then again, most of the people who mattered to Peter had already jumped ship—Cartier had gone to Oregon for some epic family reunion just a few days after the announcement, and Peter hadn’t heard a word from Stacy since her family moved to their lake house. Really, what was left for him here?

  Only a fantasy. Only a shred of a hope.

  “I need to think about this.”

  “It’s not up to you—” Peter’s dad started to say.

  “Of course,” Peter’s mom interrupted. “Take the day to process. We’re going to need your help in making Samantha understand why it’s the right decision.”

  And that was where Peter found his angle. “Actually, I think I should go find her now, at the rally. It’ll give us a chance to talk one-on-one. Besides, it’s not safe out there.” He didn’t mention his ulterior motive: Eliza would definitely be at Cal Anderson Park, in her role as documentarian of mayhem. Apocalypse Already was growing more popular every day. Peter had opened a Tumblr account just to be one among her 405,242 followers. He felt a little embarrassed by his crush now, as if he were stalking a movie star or something. But he’d never forgive himself if he left Seattle without at least speaking to her one more time.

  His parents shared a glance—the telepathy of the long-term couple.

  “Fine,” Peter’s dad said. “But in and out, okay? You get your sister, then you leave.”

  “Deal.”

  There were only a few cars out on the freeway, and most of them were busted up in one way or another: windshields with concentric circles of shatter around a central impact point, lightning-bolt scratches and dents in the body, rearview mirrors hanging like eyeballs torn from their sockets. Innumerable black columns of smoke rose from behind the highway walls, as if supporting some great invisible structure floating up above the cloud line. Arson had become a pretty major problem in the past week or so; The Stranger had reported t
hat a few dozen buildings were going up in flames every day. When the view opened up south of 45th Street, Peter could see out over the whole city, to the piecemeal conflagration raging like so many signal fires all signaling the same thing—chaos.

  He pulled off the freeway and turned toward Capitol Hill. From every corner of the city came the sounds of police sirens and car alarms, like a choir of babies crying out for their mothers. Only a few hundred feet up Denny Way, two cars were stopped perpendicular to traffic, blocking the road. Their emergency lights were on, but no one was inside. Peter pulled the Jeep onto the sidewalk and parked.

  A light rain fell from a sky the color of wet cement—the Seattle winter status quo. It pattered gently on his jacket.

  As he walked up the hill toward Broadway, he began to see more people. A group of four men came out of an apartment building, each one struggling beneath the weight of a large flat-screen television. They moved slowly but fearlessly, and their eyes dared anyone to step to them. Peter crested the hill and came in sight of Broadway. Here were the crowds missing from the rest of the city—the poor, the homeless, the immigrants and minorities who’d fallen through the gaping holes in the national safety net (Felipe always had a lot to say on that subject). The vibe was somewhere between a gang fight and a refugee camp. Almost everyone carried some kind of weapon, usually a crowbar or baseball bat. Across the street, a bunch of kids were laying waste to a tricked-out Hyundai.

  Inside Cal Anderson Park, at least a thousand people were standing around or sitting on the grass in front of the stage, watching a group of purple-haired punkers who seemed to be competing to see which of them could make the most noise. The power cables from their speaker stacks ran across the street and through the broken window of Dick’s Drive-In.

  Peter bought tacos from a food truck for fifteen dollars each (that was an apocalypse economy for you) and sat down on the edge of a fountain to eat. And there, just across the water, he saw Eliza walking arm in arm with Andy Rowen. Peter wasn’t jealous exactly, but he wasn’t not jealous either. Andy had always seemed like one of those kids who just hung around class to say dumb stuff, who’d end up working minimum wage at a gas station or a Starbucks for the rest of his life. But now Anita had taken him under her wing, and if she was as good at rehabilitation as she was at everything else, Andy just might turn out okay.

  But there was no way that Eliza could be into him, right?

  “Big man!” someone said. Peter looked away from Eliza, directly into a consummate Bobo smirk. “I don’t remember sending you an invite to this party.”

  “I’m looking for Samantha. You know where she is?”

  “Are you sure that’s who you’re looking for? ’Cause I coulda sworn you were staring at Eliza.”

  Peter stood up. “See you, Bobo.”

  “Hold on! I might know something that’ll help. Your sister ever tell you why we call her Misery?”

  “No,” Peter said, and he felt pretty sure he didn’t want to know.

  “Because she loves company.”

  Bobo performed a lascivious mime of doggy-style sex. Peter couldn’t help himself; he grabbed Bobo by the collar of his T-shirt and pushed him hard into a tree.

  “Shut the fuck up.”

  Bobo’s laughter turned to a sneer. “Think this out, big man. Is this really the place to get into a fight with me?”

  Peter looked around. A sea of slackers and thugs and freaks: Bobo’s people. Peter was the preppy jock with a target on the back of his polo shirt.

  “Why do you have a problem with me?” Peter asked.

  “You got it backward. I couldn’t give a shit about you. You’re the one with the problem.”

  “What?” Peter laughed, but his heart wasn’t in it.

  “Misery told me about how you can’t sleep.”

  “So what?”

  “So that’s why you’ve got a problem with me. Because I never expected life to hand me anything, so I don’t mind seeing the whole thing go up in flames. Because you know that while you’re staring out the window at three in the morning, shaking like a little bitch at what’s coming for you, I’m sleeping like a baby. That’s why you hate me. ’Cause I’m not scared.”

  At some point during this little monologue, Bobo had grabbed hold of Peter’s forearms. Now, glancing down, Peter caught sight of the long delicate lines that ran upward from each of Bobo’s wrists, like colorless veins. Scars.

  “Yeah, I’m scared,” he said, “but not for myself.” He threw Bobo back against the tree and walked away. Suddenly the whole crowd seemed sick and menacing. The air was heavy with pot smoke, and here and there a couple of guys were fighting at the center of a cheering circle—pressure-release valves. The band had stopped playing, and now some guy Peter didn’t recognize stood before the mic, speechifying about civil rights. Golden sat at the edge of the stage, cheering along with the crowd after every sentence.

  “The SPD has locked up so many people that it’s had to find new places to put them.” Cheer. “Everything’s a fucking crime now.” Cheer. “Everybody out here today has friends who’ve been put away, without trial, without appeal.” Cheer. “And if we stand by, it’ll only get worse.” Cheer. “The world hasn’t ended yet.” Cheer. “I’m not giving up my liberties just because those fuckers are afraid of us. I’ll die first!” The guy pulled a gun out of his jeans and pointed it at the sky, earning the loudest cheer of all.

  Peter had to find his sister right now.

  There was a big oak tree next to the stage, with a few people perched in the branches. From there, Peter figured he’d be able to see out over most of the park; Misery’s orange hair ought to be easy to find. He reached the bottom of the tree and gazed upward. A pair of skinheads drinking Olde English, a black kid with a pair of binoculars, and highest of all, on a branch that looked about as thin as one of her arms, Eliza Olivi.

  “Hey!” he cried out.

  She looked down, squinted to recognize him. “What are you doing here?”

  “I’m looking for my sister. But I’d like to talk to you, too.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Yeah. I think it’s about time.”

  One of the skinheads threw an empty beer can at Peter’s head. “Shut up, dude. I’m trying to listen.”

  Eliza climbed down the tree. It took a long time, as her sweater kept getting stuck on branches. He felt as if he were her prom date, waiting at her door with a corsage as she slowly descended the stairs.

  “So, Peter,” she said, brushing the dirt off her hands, “what shall we discuss?”

  After imagining this moment for so long, he had no idea what to say first. His heart was pounding, and his head was brimming with the memory of the last time they’d stood this close together. If he hadn’t thought it would make him sound like a total freak psycho, he probably would have said I love you right then and there.

  “Shit, it’s happening!” the guy at the microphone shouted. “It’s a bust!” He knocked the mic over, leaving a high whine of feedback to hang in the air like a scream. The park began to collapse in on itself; hundreds of people were running toward the stage like animals trying to escape a forest fire. Puffs of pinkish smoke filled the air like little fireworks: tear gas.

  “You should get out of here,” Peter said.

  “Can’t we leave together?”

  “I have to find my sister.”

  “Then I’ll come with you.”

  “You shouldn’t—” he started to say, but then she’d taken hold of his hand, and he didn’t want to argue anymore. They rushed headlong into the gas; the burn was like the one he’d get chopping onions at Friendly Forks, only a hundred times worse. Everyone was screaming, a hellish dissonance punctuated by the hiss of gas canisters and what was either the popping of balloons (though Peter couldn’t remember seeing any balloons) or gunfire. He and Eliza broke out into a space of cl
ear air and saw the line of riot police, dressed all in black, with thick visored helmets and Plexiglas shields as big as their whole bodies.

  “There!” Eliza said.

  Misery’s flame of hair disappeared behind a cloud of vaporous pink. Peter tried to run to her, but something was holding him back.

  “Let go of me, Eliza!” he said. But when he looked over his shoulder, it wasn’t Eliza who had hold of him; it was some young cop, his eyes full of fear and threat.

  “Sir, my friend’s just looking for his sister,” Eliza said. She put a hand on the officer’s elbow. “He’s not trying to start anything.”

  The cop wrenched Eliza’s arm behind her back, and then he was carrying her away, back beyond the wall of shields. Peter would have gone after her, but the riot cops were moving forward in lockstep now, forcing everyone back the other way. He ran with the mob, toward a second line of cops waiting on the opposite side of the park. They were grabbing up anyone who came close. Peter was one of the lucky ones, sprinting through the line and out of the park. His eyes were still burning when he got back to the Jeep, as much from shame as the lingering effects of the tear gas. He’d escaped, but what was that really worth, when he’d lost everything else?

  In the end, the rally wound up provoking the exact thing it had set out to prevent.

  Early the next morning, the government declared an official state of emergency. The National Guard was called in, and a curfew was instated. Leaving the house for any reason other than to stock necessities was forbidden. Being out at all after dark was forbidden. It had happened just as Bobo and Golden said it would—which somehow made it that much worse. Exactly twenty-three days before Ardor was to either spare or slaughter them all, martial law had finally come to the city.

  Eliza

  PRISON WAS A LITTLE BIT like sleepaway camp, if sleepaway camp were populated exclusively by people who really didn’t want to be at sleepaway camp. The place was coed, probably because the police didn’t have the space or resources to provide a separate facility for each gender, and everyone slept in a single enormous room filled wall-to-wall with cheap, creaky bunk beds. One wall was just windows, but they’d been covered up with a single piece of canvas so thick that it only let in light at the very edges, like a thin white frame.