We All Looked Up
Page 23
“Mmm. That’s nice. But kissing’s just an event too.”
“So is this event over? Should we get up?”
“Not yet.”
“But it’s morning. The music’s stopped. I think everybody’s gone.”
“Ten more minutes and I’ll be able to handle all that. Just talk to me. Tell me something. About yourself.”
“Like what?”
“The most horrible thing that’s ever happened to you. Before all this, I mean.”
“Seriously? That’s what you want to know? Horrible things?”
“We don’t have time to take it slow, Peter. How many more long conversations are we going to get? Twenty? Thirty? We gotta get to the deep stuff right away.”
“I guess that’s true. But I don’t know what to tell you.”
“Sure you do.”
“I guess that’s true too.”
“So?”
“My brother, my older brother.”
“What about him?”
“You know. He, uh, died.”
“How?”
“A car accident. His best friend was driving. He went through the windshield.”
“He was older than you?”
“Six years. What about you? What’s your horrible thing?”
“My dad’s dying.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Yeah.”
“Your parents are still together?”
“No. My mom lives in Hawaii with some other dude. We don’t talk. We, uh—shit, I’m sorry.”
“Hey. It’s okay.”
“I don’t know why I’m losing it now. It’s just—she kept trying to reach me, before the phones went down. I didn’t listen to her messages. There were, like, a hundred of them.”
“I’m sure she understands. And you’ve still got time.”
“No, I don’t.”
“You might.”
“Let’s change the subject, okay? Worst thing you’ve ever done.”
“The worst thing?”
“You’ve ever done, yeah.”
“Hmm.”
“You can’t even think of anything, can you? Mr. Goody-Goody—”
“Of course I can. It’s just weird to say.”
“Go on.”
“It’s you.”
“Me? You mean what happened in the photo lab last year? That’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?”
“It’s the most dishonest I’ve ever been. How are you laughing right now?”
“I’m sorry. It’s just so sweet.”
“Stacy didn’t seem to think so.”
“I’m sure. So are you going to ask me now?”
“I’m not sure I want to know.”
“I kissed Andy, Peter. Last night. I was so drunk, and you’d just shut me down. And I knew he wanted it so much, you know? He’s actually a good guy, just kinda fucked up. Like all of us.”
“Yeah. I probably would have done the same as he did. I mean, if I loved you and you didn’t love me back.”
“You know what, though? You wouldn’t have. I think you may be the only good person in the whole karass. Or maybe you and Anita. I’m still not sure about her.”
“Karass?”
“Oh, it’s Andy’s thing. Well, Kurt Vonnegut’s thing. It’s a group of people who are connected, but, like, spiritually. Andy thinks we’re all in a big karass together.”
“Even me? That’s kinda sweet, actually.”
“Yeah, he’s a little angel, that one. Anyway, I’m just glad you’re not mad.”
“Nah.”
“Then I guess I also wanna tell you one other thing. I hooked up with somebody else, here in the detention center. I didn’t have anyone to talk to, and I didn’t know if I’d ever see you again, and it wasn’t like we had sex or anything, but I feel really bad because—”
“Eliza?”
“Yeah?”
“You’re here with me now, right?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s all I care about.”
“Really? Are you sure? Because I’m describing some pretty serious sluttery right here.”
“Don’t say that. We all do what we have to do to get by, right?”
“I guess.”
“The only thing I’ll say is that you might feel better if you apologize.”
“I thought I did. You want it in writing?”
“Not to me.”
“Then to who? To Andy?”
“Yeah.”
“You want me to apologize to the guy who lied to you? The guy who tased you?”
“You kissed him. You led him on. I know how I’d feel if you did that to me and then ended up with somebody else. Why are you looking at me like that?”
“You’re just so fucking nice. It’s a little hard to believe.”
“I’m not that nice. I have all kinds of terrible thoughts.”
“Just thoughts, though. The rest of us have more than thoughts. Peter, are you religious?”
“Yeah.”
“Like, a Christian?”
“Like a Christian.”
“Seriously? That’s nuts!”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. It just is.”
“Okay.”
“You’re offended.”
“No.”
“You are.”
“I’m not. But do you want to hear why I believe, or don’t you care?”
“Let’s hear it, Reverend Roeslin.”
“You sure? I might convince you, and then you’ll have to start going to church and praying before all your meals and everything. It’ll ruin your Saturday nights.”
“I’m willing to take that risk.”
“Okay. So, like, way before Jesus, there were all these different gods that people worshipped, and you had to do stuff for them—like burn baby lambs or whatever—or they wouldn’t make your crops grow. And then all those gods became the one God, which made things simpler, but he still had all these rules—like you weren’t supposed to love anyone else as much you loved him. But then Jesus comes along, and he’s just a dude, but you were allowed to love him. You see?”
“Not really.”
“Jesus made it okay to love people. So it’s not really religion at all. It’s just—”
“Humanism.”
“What’s humanism?”
“It’s what you’re talking about.”
“Oh. Cool.”
“All right, fine. You convinced me. I mean, I’m not giving up my Sunday morning cartoons or anything, but I will allow you to continue believing what you believe.”
“How generous of you.”
“You’re welcome.”
“We should probably go.”
“Just a little longer. Just a little more of this . . .”
“Wait. I have a question for you now.”
“So ask it while I’m kissing you. . . .”
“It’s an important question! Stop doing that!”
“Making out and important questions are not mutually exclusive, Peter.”
“Just listen for a second. This philosophy of yours, that everything is just an event, does that mean Ardor is just an event too?”
“Yep.”
“Death?”
“Yep.”
“Love?”
“Yep.”
“I’m not sure I like that. It makes this all feel kinda meaningless.”
“Well, let’s be realistic. If Ardor lands, that’s the end of you and me right there. And if not, then I’m going to New York in a few months, and you’re going to Stanford. And you don’t know me at all if you think a long-distance relationship is in our future. So yeah, this is just an event.”
“Grea
t. That’s fucking great.”
“Peter? Peter, lie back down. There’s no reason to get worked up about it.”
“So then what’s the point? Do I even matter to you?”
“Of course! I’m not saying this event matters any less than any other event.”
“Which just means you don’t think any of it matters at all. It matters to me!”
“Okay, think of it another way. It also means you and me together, here, in this office, is every bit as important as a mountain. It’s as important as the end of the fucking world.”
“Yeah?”
“So come back to bed.”
“You mean floor?”
“Bed, floor—what’s the difference? Come back to me.”
“Fine.”
“Now kiss me one more time, Peter.”
“Okay.”
“One more.”
“Okay.”
“One more.”
The barracks were empty but for the few people who’d stayed behind out of physical necessity. Peter did a quick sweep of the room but didn’t see anyone left that he recognized. It was the first crack to appear in his newfound happiness, and he’d only been out of bed for a few minutes. Misery was gone. Hopefully, she’d gotten a ride home. He had no idea what he’d say to his parents if he had to show up without her. Sorry, but I got distracted having sex with this girl I cheated on Stacy with last year. You’re going to love her.
Outside, the sky was a blank slate, and the air had that after-storm clarity to it. Peter let go of Eliza’s hand only long enough to climb into the driver’s seat of the Jeep.
“I have to go home,” Eliza said. “I wanna see my dad.”
“I should too.” He put the key in the ignition but didn’t turn it right away. “You know what’s weird? After last night, I kinda thought it was all over. I thought if I could just be with you, everything would turn out fine. Did you think that too?”
She squeezed his hand. “Will you love me less if I say no?”
“Maybe a little.”
“Then yes. I thought that too.”
On the way to Eliza’s house, they were stopped by a police officer in a battered cruiser. He looked like he hadn’t shaved in a week, or maybe even slept. He told them to stay wherever they were going once they got there.
But that was easier said than done. As soon as Peter turned onto Eliza’s street, she threw open the passenger-side door, crying out wordlessly. If he hadn’t slammed on the brakes, she probably would have jumped out of the car while it was still moving. He undid his seat belt and ran after her, toward the burned-out husk of a three-story apartment building.
Police tape was stretched across the doorless doorway like a thick yellow spiderweb. Eliza tore it away, revealing the ravaged interior. Everything in sight was scorched and crumbling, and the ceiling above the stairs had collapsed in a pile of burned wood and blackened masonry.
“My dad was up there.”
“I’m sure he’s fine,” Peter said.
Eliza turned on him. “You don’t know that! I should have come home right away! What was I thinking?”
“This fire is at least a day old, Eliza. It wouldn’t have made a difference.”
“But what if I can’t find him? What if I never see him again?”
Peter didn’t know what to say. All he could do was stand there, on a bed of ashes, and hold her.
Andy
“TOSS IT, YO!”
Bobo’s eyes were transformed by the flame of the Molotov cocktail into a pair of fiery asteroids. He was almost too drunk to make the shot. The neck of the bottle hit the edge of the window, but momentum carried it on into the store. It landed just next to a burial mound of building blocks and plastic figurines that they’d erected on the other side. A dozen SpongeBob SquarePants began to crinkle and blacken, sending up a plume of chemical smoke. The bottle exploded. A moment later the fire caught scent of the gasoline they’d poured all over the carpet. Orange streamers wrapped around the racks of candy-colored board games and Rubik’s Cubes. They watched from the sidewalk as the place lit up like one giant firework.
“‘Virtue needs some cheaper thrills,’” Bobo said.
Andy recognized the quote. “Calvin and Hobbes.”
“Damn straight.”
They drove back to the ma-in-law with their headlights on, fearless. It was past curfew, but there were basically zero cops left on the beat these days; why risk your life just to make the world infinitesimally safer for a couple more days?
“So, I know this may be a sore subject,” Bobo said, “but now that you’ve blown it with Eliza, how are we gonna get you laid?”
“Who said I blew it with Eliza?”
“Well, it’s been almost a week since you two hooked up, and you haven’t seen or spoken to her. Plus, the world is ending next Tuesday. All of which means you’ve got about as much chance of nailing her as I do of nailing Taylor Swift.”
“One man’s opinion.”
“One genius’s opinion, yo.”
Andy still hadn’t told Bobo the whole story of the morning after the party. How he’d looked everywhere for Eliza, hoping that they might finish what they’d started on that piano bench. How he’d found the staircase to the upper floor. How he’d found her asleep in the pale light of sunrise, curled into Peter’s chest. How he’d barely made it back out into the hallway before going down on his knees and vomiting up the whole night’s worth of drinking—a seemingly endless cascade of all the hatred and sadness and rage that was inside him. He thought he would choke to death on it, on the harsh truth he’d been trying to ignore his entire life: that no matter how bad he wanted it or how he hard he tried to get it, he would never be worthy of anyone’s love.
But he didn’t choke. And when he rose to his feet again, he felt newly baptized in bitterness—the religion of Bobo and Golden and everyone else who’d discovered that there was no point or meaning to anything anymore. The karass was finished. Misery hated him. Peter hated him. Eliza hated him. Anita hated him. All he had left was Bobo.
They spent the next couple of days walking aimlessly around the city and smoking the rest of Bobo’s weed. One night, just a few blocks from Andy’s place, they found a house that someone had just set on fire. Crimson flowers bloomed from the windows, and the roof was one wide crown of orange and gold.
“It’s kinda beautiful,” Andy said.
“Yeah.”
“If Ardor lands, the whole world may look like that. Could be worse.”
The next day they’d started making their own flower arrangements.
Their first target was a Christian bookstore in Greenlake. Say what you would about the Bible, but it made for damned good kindling. They stood staring at the inferno for over an hour, passing a flask of Jack Daniel’s back and forth and singing Pogues songs. Andy couldn’t believe how long everything took to be consumed. You could almost imagine that you were liberating the material world somehow, as if every object had a secret desire to transcend its physical form and become light and heat, even if only for a few seconds. When everything was burning up right in front of you, you could imagine parts of yourself burning along with it—all your disappointments, all the things you’d done that you wished you hadn’t, even all the bad memories (for example, things you might have seen on the top floor of a navy-base barracks). In his short time as a professional arsonist, Andy had become a lot less worried about the end of the world, because he’d become an agent of it. There was nothing quite like the feeling you got walking away from something on fire, knowing that it was disintegrating back into nothing, the way everything eventually did.
And it wasn’t just the physical world they were burning up. It was time. Six days had gone by since the end of the protest. That meant there were only seven days left until the end.
“And a week without sex j
ust ain’t right,” Bobo said. “I’m not gonna let you die as the Virgin Mary. Let’s get Misery and Eliza off our minds tonight.”
“And how are we going to do that?”
“The Independent, yo. Golden’s always got girls around who are ready to go.”
Since the collapse of the quest, Andy had stopped caring whether he managed to get laid before Ardor came, and he had no particular desire to hang out with the thugs downtown just for the hell of it. But he didn’t have any desire to do anything else, either. “Why not?” he said. “It beats the shit out of sitting here.”
Golden’s home and place of business was well known to anyone who’d bought product from him: the Independent, one of Seattle’s oldest apartment buildings—low-rent but with its own brand of faded glamour. Usually its name was lit up in bright-green neon above the awning over the front door, but without power, the tubes had gone dead and gray. Someone had decorated the lobby with about a million long white candles. Along with the high arched ceilings, the gaping maw of the marble fireplace, and a whole lot of dusky paintings and velveteen couches, they lent the place a distinctly Gothic feel. It would have been swank, if not for the fact that every single object and surface looked as if someone had gone at it with an electric sander. The sofas were all decrepit and moth-eaten, the Oriental rugs threadbare, the wood beneath them marred with scuffs and peeling varnish.
“Where do you think everybody is?” Andy said.
“Dunno. Upstairs probably.”
The elevators weren’t running, but there was a candle or two burning on every landing of the stairwell, like beacon fires. Andy opened the roof door to a blast of chill air.
“Hot damn,” Bobo said.
A makeshift living room had been set up outside—shabby couches and coffee tables and beanbag chairs—all of which must have been sourced from abandoned apartments downstairs. There were a dozen gas-powered heat lamps, burning bright orange. A large generator was protected by a white canvas tent, with cables running directly to a nearby sound system and a couple of tripod-mounted speakers. Just outside the stairwell, a guy with a big red beard and a Slayer T-shirt stood smoking.
“Bleeder?” Andy said.
The lead singer of the Bloody Tuesdays grinned. “Fucking Andy? And Bobo! What’s up?” They all bumped fists. “Welcome to the casa! There should still be some beers left in the cooler.”