We All Looked Up

by Tommy Wallach

  “The navy base! Do you think there’s another way to get off it?”

  “We already checked.”

  “Well, let’s check again.”

  Anita let the tent flap drop, though she could still hear Andy whining. “You mean right now?”

  Peter, who’d just gotten back from a visit with his parents, was eating a bowl of steaming oatmeal over in their makeshift kitchen area.

  “Up for a walk?” Anita asked.

  “Sure.”

  A few minutes later they were on their way, tromping down to the trail that led through Magnuson Park and all the way to Lake Washington. Anita was grateful for the chance to get away from the crowd, which had begun to smell like one collective wet dog. The once festive strum of acoustic guitars had turned grating, and even Michael looked bedraggled and listless.

  The three of them followed the chain-link fence around the outskirts of the base. The rain made conversation for them, pattering everywhere, filling the silence.

  “Which do you like better, sun or rain?” Anita asked, hoping to kickstart a little communication.

  “Rain, definitely,” Andy said.

  “Peter?”

  “Sun. That’s why I’m going to California. I mean, if I’m going to California.”

  Silence again. Well, it had been worth a try.

  The tension between Peter and Andy was palpable, and it seemed to be getting worse by the hour. Every conversation had become a byzantine exercise in avoiding the subject of Eliza. And the truth was, it sort of sucked to spend all your time with two boys who were both in love with some other girl. Peter got a pass—he and Eliza actually had a history together—but Anita found herself more and more annoyed with Andy. Why was this stupid quest so important to him? He had to know that Eliza was totally wrong for him. Why couldn’t he just drop the bullshit and let her be with Peter already?

  “Remind me why we don’t just cut a hole in the fence,” Andy said, giving the chain-link a karate kick.

  “We need to keep the driveway blocked off,” Anita said.

  “Yeah, but one person could do that. What if the rest of us went inside and got right up in their faces?”

  “It doesn’t matter if we’re on this side or the other,” Peter said. “It’s not like we can just walk into the building. Plus, I’d rather not get shot.”

  The path they were walking on turned muddy; it darkened the white soles of Anita’s sneakers. Fat globs of water fell off the branches of the evergreens, landing heavy as hailstones. Across the street, a building called the Western Fisheries Research Center stood dark and empty as a mausoleum. Anita wondered how many millions of things had stopped mattering in the last month. How many employees of the Western Fisheries Research Center were sitting at home right now, just praying they’d get another chance to continue their fishy research?

  They reached the end of the fence, having failed to locate any secret exit off the navy base. They kept walking, though, following the pavement all the way down to where it met the lake. A wide parking lot gave onto a small lawn, where an old oaken park bench had been stained to mahogany by the rain. They sat down on the wet wood and watched the chop of the water for a while.

  “Andy,” Anita said suddenly, “say something nice about Peter.”

  “What?”

  “Just do it. Right now. Don’t think.”

  It was a trick that Anita’s fifth-grade teacher had used whenever two of his students got in a fight. Andy probably wouldn’t have played along if he’d had more time to think about it, but she’d caught him by surprise.

  “Uh, you seem like a really good guy. Like, for real, though. Not like some kind of act.”

  “Thanks,” Peter said, made shy by the compliment.

  “Your turn,” Anita prompted.

  “Okay.” Peter looked down at his hands. “You don’t know this, Andy, but I heard you and Anita practicing once, in the Hamilton music room. You’re really talented.”

  “Oh yeah? Thanks.”

  Anita exhaled heavily, letting her stomach unclench. She felt as if she’d just finished defusing a bomb. It was movement, anyway, which felt good after three days of total paralysis. But even turning Peter and Andy into best friends wouldn’t turn their protest into a success.

  She looked back out over the lake. “What do we do if this doesn’t work?”

  “It has to work,” Andy said. And he surprised her by putting his hand over hers. She hadn’t realized how cold her fingers were; now the warmth spread down her arm and out across her body, inexplicably fast. A moment passed; then Andy seemed to realize what he’d done. He pulled his hand away.

  “It has to work,” he repeated.

  The next day Anita was taking an afternoon nap (more out of boredom than fatigue), when she was woken by a loud mechanical screech. She unzipped her tent and saw that a crowd had gathered around the fence near the gate. A lot of new protesters seemed to have arrived in the last couple of hours, and they were a very different animal from Sunny’s commune crew. In fact, they looked like the kind of people who’d been at Andy and Bobo’s gig a few weeks back—covered in piercings and tattoos, reeking of alcohol and cigarette smoke.

  An enormous clang, as of a large piece of metal falling to the dirt, and the screeching abruptly stopped. A huge cheer went up, then ­people were lining up to crawl through the newly cut hole in the fence.

  Anita pushed through the crowd and found Andy embroiled in some kind of argument with Sunny and Michael.

  “But I talked to them about that!” Andy said. “They’ll stay in line.”

  “You can’t know that,” Michael said.

  “Maybe not. But we had to do something. It’s been five days.”

  “You should have been patient. Given enough time, the ocean can turn a mountain to sand.”

  “It’s the end of the fucking world, man! We don’t have time to be the ocean.”

  “We won’t be part of any happening that encourages violence,” Sunny said. “I’m sorry.” She took Michael by the arm and walked off in a huff.

  “No one’s encouraging violence!” Andy called after them. He turned to Anita. “Can you believe this? She’s saying they’re all going to leave.”

  “Andy, who are all these new people?”

  “I brought them,” he said, sounding both proud and guilty at once. “After you and Peter went to sleep last night, I biked over to the Independent. It’s this apartment building that Bobo moved into a couple weeks back, ’cause Golden lives there.”

  “Does that mean Golden’s here right now?”

  “These people get shit done, Anita. And we need that now. But don’t worry. I’ll make sure nothing gets out of hand.”

  He jogged off toward the hole in the fence before she could berate him any further. And what else could she do but follow? The hole had been cut so low to the ground that she had to get down on her hands and knees to pass through it. The bite of gravel, then a patch of soft dirt, and finally the cracked cement of a derelict runway. A small commemorative plaque was mounted just on the other side of the gate: SAND POINT AIRFIELD WAS THE ENDPOINT OF THE FIRST AERIAL CIRCUMNAVIGATION OF THE WORLD IN 1924. Just another little piece of utterly irrelevant history, aspiring to permanence, doomed to oblivion. The end of the world revealed the futility of all commemorative plaques.

  Everyone was running for the only building on the lot that had any lights on inside. It was some kind of barracks, but it looked less militaristic than academic—like something off the campus of a liberal arts college on the East Coast. Anita moved with the crowd, expecting sirens to switch on at any moment, followed by a hail of machine-gun fire, but they made it to the foot of the building without incident. The doors, unsurprisingly, were all locked.

  Even if they’d lost Sunny and her friends, the people who remained seemed galvanized by the change of scene
ry, chanting and waving their signs with newfound enthusiasm. Golden’s crew rolled a few kegs of beer across the tarmac, and they quickly succeeded in transferring the majority of the contents into their bodies. More than once, Anita plucked a cup out of Andy’s or Peter’s hand, but before long, the two boys were as red-faced and muddled as the rest of the protesters.

  Decorum didn’t last long. The nearly full moon was shining down like the bright, pupilless eye of some phlegmatic god when the first stone was thrown. The crowd was desperate for action, and pretty soon everyone had joined in, taking drunken aim at the barracks with whatever was close at hand. Anita saw Andy pull the commemorative plaque out of the ground and toss it onto the roof, where it stuck in a rain gutter. Within fifteen minutes, half the glass in the barracks had been knocked out. Not long after, a plump man in uniform appeared in the exclamatory comic-book bubble of a broken window on the second floor. The hailstorm momentarily ceased.

  “How do y’all see this ending?” he called down.

  Golden, standing on the steps of the barracks, had elected himself negotiator. “You let everybody out, including yourselves.”

  The man disappeared from the window for a long time, so long that Anita began to worry he was planning some kind of assault. But then, just as the crowd was getting restless, he reappeared. “You don’t touch any of my men and women.”

  “Of course,” Golden said.

  “Your word.”

  “You’ve got it.”

  Like that, it was over. Within minutes, the tarmac filled with hundreds of kids, all of them dressed in pale-blue jumpsuits. Interspersed among them were a few soldiers in full camouflage, hurrying through the crowd toward the front gate. Anita saw Corporal Hastings pushed down onto all fours, but he only stood up again and kept walking. Parents called out the names of their children and reunited tearfully. The rain had begun to fall again, and as they were all too buzzed on their triumph to want to disperse just yet, the celebration moved indoors.

  Anita had lost track of Andy and Peter in the hubbub, so she followed the crowd into the barracks. There was still power inside, and it was blissfully warm. They ended up in what looked to be the central dormitory. Everyone was milling around, looking for loved ones. When Anita finally found Andy, he hugged her tightly.

  “Can you believe it?” he said. “We did it!”

  “I guess so.”

  She could feel his heart beating so fast it was almost a flutter. He started to pull away, but then they were pushed back together by a shift in the crowd. For a moment, she thought he was about to kiss her.

  “So what do you think I should say?” he asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “When I see Eliza. I mean, should I take credit for this whole rescue thing, or should I play it cool?”

  Anita made sure that no sign of disappointment appeared on her face. “Whatever you want.”

  “Be less helpful. Come on, Anita. This is serious. It’s game time!”

  “Isn’t everybody going home?”

  “No way! Golden brought a fucking party with him, yo. Tonight, the thrill of freedom meets a shit-ton of hard liquor. If I ever had a shot with Eliza, this is it.”

  Somebody switched off the overhead lights, earning a chorus of lascivious yowls from the crowd. A moment later some kind of huge curtain fell away from the windows, letting in a few pale strands of moonlight.

  Andy cracked his knuckles and hopped up and down like a boxer waiting for the bell. “Okay. I’m gonna have one or two or six more drinks, then I’m gonna make my move. Wish me luck.”

  “Good luck.”

  And as Anita watched Andy skip across the room, she finally felt it, rumbling like a bone-deep hunger she’d been ignoring for weeks. A sensation somehow totally new and totally familiar at once. It was the glistening green blossom of jealousy, and deeper down, beyond the place where the stem met the dirt, the parched and greedy roots: love.

  Eliza

  IN THE SPACE OF FIFTEEN minutes, the dormitory had been completely transformed. The place was still reverberatingly loud—echoes lingering in the corners of the room like cobwebs—and nothing could totally disperse the horrifying bouquet of a few hundred teenage boys packed into a small space. But by taping a couple of dozen flashlights to the walls (covered with sheets to diffuse the light), setting up a halfway decent DJ with a halfway decent PA system, and pushing the bunk beds back from the center of the room to create a dance floor, Golden’s crew had actually managed to give the place a bit of atmosphere. An overturned bed frame served as a makeshift bar, where a great leaning tower of red plastic Solo cups was pared down one layer at a time as volunteer bartenders prepared drinks with a consummate ignorance of mixology. A stranger handed Eliza a brimming cup of tequila.

  The music twitched like a tweaker coming down, thrummed like a subconscious thought. People began to dance, but Eliza stayed close to the bar, where there was a bit more light. She watched as Anita snuck up behind the “bartenders” and disappeared with a whole ­bottle of bourbon (and wasn’t that a little bit out of character?). Soon after, Andy showed up to wait in line for his own drink. Eliza almost stepped out of the shadows to say hello, but some animal instinct told her to hang back. There was a wildness in his eyes that she didn’t trust.

  The tequila was already beginning to work its way around her body—loosening the muscles and lubricating the joints. She let herself sink down into the strange mixture of numbness and sensuousness that alcohol always brought on, and felt a familiar craving begin to assert itself, throbbing somewhere in the deepest, darkest crevices of her body. It was the same craving that occasionally led her out to the Crocodile to sit alone at the bar, waiting for one of the moony hormone synthesizers always revolving around her to break loose from his orbit and buy her a drink. The need to see some boy lose his shit because he wanted her so bad. Her sudden freedom was every bit as intoxicating as the liquor, and though she could pretend she was just wandering around, checking the scene, her eyes had an agenda. She knew she should get home to see her dad as soon as possible, but she couldn’t leave yet. Not before she’d found Peter.

  Of course, it was possible that he wasn’t even here. Maybe someone else had worked out the location of the detention center and managed this whole rescue operation. Only that would have been such a gigantic failure on the part of the universe, Eliza refused to even consider it.

  It was another two drinks and forty-five minutes before she spotted him, engaged in what looked to be a pretty violent argument with his sister. Eliza couldn’t hear most of what they were saying, but it seemed like Peter was trying to get Misery to leave the party, and Misery was refusing. She grudgingly surrendered her beer (“God, it’s not like I’ve never had a drink before!”), then darted off toward the dance floor. Peter moved to follow her, but Eliza caught hold of his elbow.

  And then there they were, together at last. The darkness of the dormitory brought back memories of that day in the photo lab. She could remember the feel of his mouth on hers—rough with stubble but clean, clean as the good, clean boy that he was.

  “Peter,” she said. His flesh pulsed warm against her palm.

  “I need to get my sister,” he said, pulling himself out of her grasp and beginning to walk away.

  “What’s the rush?”

  “Golden’s here, for one thing. And Bobo. I just wanna get home with Miz, okay?”

  Eliza followed him down a narrow path between two rows of bunk beds, past a couple talking in hushed tones in a bottom bunk.

  “Peter, just wait up a second!”

  He turned on her so suddenly that she flinched. “Why should I wait? What else could you want from me? I got you out, okay? Isn’t that enough?”

  They were alone now, hemmed in by beds and everything that beds stood for. Eliza had no idea why Peter was so angry, but she did know there was one way to make it
all better. Grabbing him by the shoulders, she shoved him back against the frame of a bunk bed with the rough confidence of someone who’d never taken no for an answer, who’d never needed to. Peter dropped the bottle of beer, and the sound of it crashing down coincided with the crash of her lips against his. She slid her tongue along the tiles of his teeth, the taste of him weirdly familiar, even though it had been more than a year since the last time they’d kissed. She waited for his arms around her body, the pull tight and the tilt of the head, and then they would fall inward onto the bed and finish what they’d started in that darkroom. Only his arms weren’t pulling her in; they were pushing her away.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked.

  “What’s wrong with you?” he spat back. “You think Ardor means you can treat people however you want?”

  “No. I don’t even know what you’re talking about.”

  “Have you been with someone else, Eliza? Since we found out about Ardor?”

  “I’m not sure I—” Her words caught in her throat. How could Peter know about the boy she’d hooked up with in the detention center? Or had he just guessed? Either way, he had no right to judge her for it. She’d been lonely and terrified, isolated from her dad and her home and what few friends she had, as the world outside kept spinning madly toward destruction. And so she’d allowed herself a moment of intimacy with a stranger. So what? Eliza felt herself ballooning with a sense of righteous anger.

  “You’re one to talk. You had a girlfriend when we first kissed.”

  “I know. And that was a mistake. But I broke up with Stacy a month ago—for you!”

  “Then why didn’t you say something? You had a million chances to talk to me and you never did! I’m the one who ended up writing to you!”

  Peter slid out of her arms. “Well, it doesn’t matter now, does it? Andy’s my friend. I wouldn’t go behind his back.”

  Eliza shook her head, confused. “Wait . . . this is about Andy?”

  “Of course it is.”

  “But that’s stupid. I don’t care about Andy!”