We All Looked Up

by Tommy Wallach

  “Stop it, Bobo.”

  “I always wanted you,” he said. His voice had that thickness that Eliza knew so well, the voice of a man who was past the point of reason.

  “You don’t want to do this.”

  His hands were at her waist, unhooking the top button of her jeans. Of Misery’s jeans. “You’re so fucking beautiful,” he said.

  Eliza thought about the stranger who’d climbed into her bed at the navy base barracks. He’d been a thousand times sweeter and gentler than Bobo, but were they really so different? A couple of sad ­little boys, both desperate for love, both trying to get it any way they could. And it wouldn’t have been that hard to let it happen. If she just lay back and went still as a corpse and thought about something else, she’d survive it. How much worse could it really be than getting plastered and sleeping with some guy she’d just met in a bar? A few numb minutes and everything would be over.

  But then her free right hand, scrabbling wildly at the sheets, happened on the warm wooden handle of Peter’s knife. And it seemed the culmination of his love for her, that it should be right there when she reached for it, like a miracle. All the time they’d spent together came to her in a single bright burst of memory—not just the last few days, but the whole year of silence, when she pretended not to see him even though his very presence in a room was like a highlighted sentence in a textbook or an overexposed section of a photograph. You don’t need to sleep with a guy to make him sublimely happy, Anita had said. And it was true. After all, Peter had loved her after a single kiss. Maybe she’d loved him since then too. Maybe she’d been put on this Earth to love him, and their love would be the only thing in their short, stupid lives that mattered at all.

  Bobo pulled her shirt up over her head; the knife caught on the fabric and tore it. “For the last time,” she said, “don’t do this.”

  He unzipped his pants. She could feel the skin of his belly on hers, and his breath was like a lit match in her ear. “We’re all doomed anyway,” he said.

  It wasn’t like she’d expected, hardly any resistance at all, and from the darkness came one small human noise, just a quiet moan—ohhhh—like a last-minute revelation. He slid off her, onto the floor, and she jumped on top of him, preparing for the next assault. But he didn’t move. She’d aimed for the heart and she’d found it.

  A moment of silence, then a gunshot sounded just outside the apartment. Eliza leaped up and flattened herself against the wall. She wasn’t about to pull that knife out of Bobo, but she still had her nails and her teeth. She’d tear Golden’s throat out with her bare hands if she had to.

  “Eliza! Eliza!”

  A chorus of voices: her friends. She rushed out into the hall. Andy was the first to see her. His gaze dropped to the red stain on her stomach.

  “What happened, Eliza?”

  “I’m sorry,” she said, “but I had to.”

  “Had to what?”

  “I had to!”

  Andy ran past her, into the apartment. The others were standing close behind him—Anita, Misery, and a stranger. Even in the weak light, Eliza could see that his face was disfigured somehow. He was coming toward her now, a travesty of a smile twisting his mouth.

  And she forgot about everything else as she recognized him, falling into his battered arms, sobbing.

  In the echoey silence of the stairwell, Peter’s breathing was painfully loud. It rasped and stuttered and gasped. They had to get him to a hospital, only there were no hospitals left open. Maybe the day after tomorrow there’d be hospitals again. It was possible. Anything was possible.

  “What happened to Golden?” Peter asked.

  “I shot him,” Anita said, and there was no remorse in her voice.

  They saw him for just a second outside the Independent, lurching around a corner. Maybe he’d survive, and maybe he wouldn’t. It hardly mattered now.

  “He’ll be sad if there’s no one there to catch his last words,” Andy said. “He always loved to hear himself talk.”

  “That’s not how people go,” Peter said. “Most of us don’t get last words.”

  Eliza wondered if he was thinking about his older brother, who’d died in that car accident. Or maybe he was talking about all of them. How quickly would the end come when it came? Would it hurt? Now that they were all together again, the fog lifted. Nothing stood between them and Ardor anymore but a few million miles of vacuum.

  Andy climbed into the driver’s seat of the station wagon. “Should we try and find a hospital?” he asked.

  “Just take me home,” Peter said.

  They drove in silence through the dark, deserted Seattle streets. Peter was growing paler by the minute. Long coughing fits left his palm spritzed with blood, but he was still conscious when they pulled into his driveway.

  Eliza squeezed his shoulder. “You ready to get up?”

  “Can I rest a little first? Mom and Dad are going to freak out when they see me.”

  “Of course.” She looked around the car, at the worried faces of her friends. “Do you guys mind going in without us? Say we’re on our way.”

  “Do you want me to stay too?” Misery asked.

  Peter shook his head. “Thanks, though. I love you, Samantha.”

  “I love you, too.”

  Eliza watched them go. Then she lifted up Peter’s head and placed it gently on her lap. She waited for the coughing to stop.

  “I wish we had more time,” he finally said.

  Peter

  “MORE TIME? DON’T BE GREEDY, Peter. What would we do with it?”

  “I’m serious.”

  “I know. But don’t be. I’ll lose my shit.”

  “I’m not saying decades or anything. Just a year, maybe. Enough to give us a history.”

  “We have a history! Remember making out in the photo lab? Remember how we were at that riot together? Remember our first pancake breakfast with your family?”

  “I mean real history. Like a language that nobody but us knew. My parents have that. I bet yours did too.”

  “You and I have a language.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Then say something to me in it.”

  “You have pretty eyes.”

  “That’s just English.”

  “Most of the words in our language are pronounced exactly the same as normal English words. That’s so people won’t notice when we’re speaking it.”

  “Are there any differences?”

  “A few. Like carrot.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “Pumpkin.”

  “What else?”

  “I love you.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means ‘I hate you.’ ”

  “Aha. And what does I hate you mean?”

  “Same thing as English. That one’s not different.”

  “I see.”

  “Do you want to know how to say ‘I love you’?”

  “Sure.”

  Eliza leaned down. Her hair made a little bower around his face, and for a second he could ignore the pain that lanced through his chest every time he inhaled. Quickly, like a cat lapping milk, she licked the tip of his nose.

  “Like that.”

  “That’s not words.”

  “Our language is half sign language, half actual words. It’s very complicated. That’s why we’re the only ones who speak it.”

  He heard the catch in her voice; somehow it seemed incredibly important that he keep her from crying for as long as possible.

  “Remind me. That philosophy you’ve got, about events? How does that work again?”

  Eliza shook her head. “I don’t have a philosophy anymore.”

  “So make up a new one.”

  “Make up a philosophy?”

 
“Yeah. Like a bedtime story. Only it has to be true.”

  “Oh, okay. A true philosophy, invented on the spot. That’s all.”

  “Yeah.”

  He waited. The pain in his chest was diffusing out to his whole torso now, weighing him down a little bit more with each exhalation, like the slow squeeze of a boa constrictor. He let his eyes close. It was all right. He’d protected them—his friends, his family, his karass. Even if it was only for a few extra hours, he’d kept them safe. No Pyrrhic victory, then, whatever happened. A real victory.

  An infinity seemed to pass before Eliza spoke again. Peter was beginning to wonder if she’d given up, or else fallen asleep.

  “So a really long time ago,” she said, “this really advanced civilization had a science lab, right? And this guy who worked in the lab, we’ll call him Todd, he was just an okay worker. Like, not totally moronic, but no genius, either. The specialty of this lab, I forgot to say, was making worlds. So Todd chose to make this world that was mostly water, which hadn’t been tried before because everyone knew that water destroyed everything it touched, if you gave it enough time, and this lab believed in making things that were more ­permanent—like out of rocks and stuff. And at first, nothing really happened in the water world, except a lot of erosion and rust and stuff being damp all the time, and Todd’s boss wasn’t very happy. But Todd kept working away at it, and after a while, something amazing happened. There was life. Just a little bit at first, then more. Like, a lot more. And it started evolving. And then these little monkey things started learning new stuff and getting smarter, and everything was looking pretty good for Todd. But then, over just a few thousand years, the whole thing got totally fucked up again. There were these wars and terrorists and nuclear weapons all over the place. Todd couldn’t understand it. It was like he’d built this really nice house for people to live in, but they’d decided to tear it down from the inside. And Todd’s company, which was all about the bottom line, decided to pull the plug. Not every world could be a winner.”

  Peter felt a drop of cold land on his cheek, but he was too tired to wipe it away. It slid slowly down his face, tickling a little as it went. Every breath now was a victory. Eliza had gone quiet. Fear swept in to fill the silence. Fear of disappearing, of the dark, of the unknown. Fear of being somewhere without this love to define him. Don’t stop talking, he tried to say.

  And as if she’d heard him, Eliza continued her story. “So Todd brought the world home and tossed it in the garbage, just like he said he would. But then his son, who’s called Chris, in a nod to your traditional Christian values, happened to find it. And right away, he fell in love with the little monkeys. So he pulled the world out of the trash and dusted it off and took it into his father’s office. ‘You can’t just give up on these little monkeys!’ he said. And his dad tried to explain about business and capitalism and everything, but Chris was having none of it. And here’s the really miraculous part, because I know how much you religious nuts love miracles—he’d just learned about mercy that week in school. So he begged his dad to give the world one more chance to get better. He even came up with an idea for how they could make it happen. ‘Let’s scare them,’ he said. ‘Let’s make them think it’s all over.’ And his dad was like, ‘You mean with some kind of flood?’ And Chris said, ‘Floods are so old school, Dad. Let’s do it with an asteroid. We’ll tell them they’re all about to die, but then, at the last second, we’ll save them.’ Then Chris’s dad listed every horrible thing that the little monkeys had done throughout history. ‘They don’t really deserve a second chance,’ he said. And Chris was like, ‘Well, it wouldn’t really count as mercy if they deserved it.’ And once he heard that, his dad totally folded, and they went ahead with the plan. And at first it didn’t seem like it was working. Actually, it seemed like things were getting even more horrible and ugly with every passing day. But Chris told his dad not to worry about the little monkeys. He said this amazing moment was going to come, when they all looked up from their tiny little lives at once, to see if that big fireball in the sky was really going to crush them. And maybe when they watched it pass them over, maybe when they felt that mercy, it would be just enough to convince them to change. Maybe . . .”

  The droplets were falling every few seconds now, though Peter felt each one a little more distantly, as if he were falling along with them. Eliza didn’t seem to know what else to say, so she just repeated herself, over and over, kissing him after each word, more and more lightly: “Maybe . . . maybe . . . maybe . . .”

  He didn’t feel anything when she licked her own tears off the bridge of his nose.

  Andy

  “HOW . . . ?” ANDY ASKED, BUT LOST track of his exact question as he stared out the window in astonishment.

  From the freeway, Boeing Field glittered like some impossible fantasy kingdom. Hundreds of flames—tiki torches and huge blazing bonfires and even the delicate curl and flicker of individual candles—lined a long, snaking pathway that stretched from the empty runways (now a single unbroken ocean of parked cars) toward an inconceivably enormous hangar. There were electric lights, too: thousands of pale-white Christmas lights strung up like phosphorescent spiderwebs in an old attic; spotlights crisscrossing the sky as if they were searching for something up above the clouds; an ever-changing kaleidoscope of dance-club color coming out of the hangar; the red twinkle of brake lights providing a monochromatic fireworks show all the way across the tarmac. Andy rolled down the window. You could hear the music even up on the freeway, and a faint whiff of diesel sweetened the air.

  If only the whole karass could have been there to see it.

  They’d been up until sunrise talking with Peter’s parents. Everybody had cried, though in his secret heart, Andy had been crying a little for Bobo, too. He couldn’t remember falling asleep, but when he woke up again, the sun was already high in the sky, blaring like a megaphone. Peter’s parents were passed out on the couch, looking grief-stricken even in sleep. Peter had been lucky to have them.

  Andy found Anita in the kitchen, talking quietly with Misery and Eliza.

  “Anita,” he said, “we need to go see your parents.”

  He’d expected an argument, but she just wiped the crust from her eyes and nodded.

  “Let me just get you something clean to wear, Eliza,” Misery said.

  Eliza looked down at her clothes and seemed surprised to find that the bloodstains were still there. “Right. Thanks.”

  It was past noon by the time they left Peter’s house. Misery said she’d try to show up at Boeing Field that night, but Andy knew it wasn’t true. Her parents needed her now, and she needed them, too.

  The intercom at Anita’s place wasn’t working, so Andy had to nudge the gate open with the station wagon’s bumper.

  “They’re probably not even here,” Anita said.

  But only a few seconds after she let go of the brass knocker, her mom answered the door. Wordlessly, she swept Anita up into her arms.

  Inside, Andy and Eliza met Anita’s dad, an imposing statue of a man with a hand like cold marble and very little to say. There was a ton of homemade food ready, almost as if Anita’s mom had been waiting for them. After they’d gorged themselves, they fell asleep all over again, in a little heap on the heavy pile carpet of the sitting room, exhausted by the combination of satiety and sadness and shock.

  They didn’t come to until after sunset.

  “Shit,” Andy said, stretching like a cat, “we have to go.”

  “Just let me change,” Anita said. “I don’t care if it’s vain. I’ve been wearing these clothes for two weeks.” She ran upstairs, and a few minutes later, came back transformed. She’d switched out her T-shirt and jeans for a formfitting red dress, black tights, and tall leather boots. Her hair was brushed and pulled back, and a wide silver necklace glittered at her throat. She looked gorgeous.

  “You look gorgeous,” El
iza said.

  Andy could only nod.

  At the door, Anita’s mom clung to her daughter like some kind of life preserver.

  “You and Dad can come with us,” Anita said.

  But her mom shook her head, wiping the tears out of her eyes. “You know your father,” she said.

  “That I do.”

  As the three of them were descending the steps between the front door and the driveway, they all saw it at the same time—a bright blue bird with marigold eyes bursting out from between the white blooms of a magnolia and disappearing into the night sky, as if it were carrying a message straight to Ardor.

  As the car approached the off-ramp, Andy was finally able to make out the shadows of people down on Boeing Field, walking two or three abreast toward the wide-open mouth of the hangar. They wore necklaces and bracelets of opalescent neon—the kind that you cracked over your knee to release the chemicals that made them glow—and tossed them through the air like Frisbees. They flicked open butane lighters and touched the pointed blue flames to the ends of joints and cigarettes. They made dancing white circles on the dirt with the cylindrical lightsaber beams of their flashlights. Beneath the dome of stars, they created their own constellations, like an endlessly variable reflection of the sky.

  Andy followed a line of cars past a spotlighted sign: WELCOME TO THE END OF THE WORLD. By now, the dubstep had become another presence in the car with them, heavy as humidity. It took a good fifteen minutes to park.

  The three of them walked toward the pathway that led to the hangar. Andy took Anita’s hand, then Eliza’s; if they got lost in a crowd like this, they’d never find each other again. As they passed one of the larger bonfires—a huge bowl of hammered bronze that glittered and danced with the flames inside it—Andy felt someone watching him. He glanced to his right, straight into a stranger’s eyes. She was in her late twenties, walking with a man of about the same age and wearing a papoose on her chest. Inside, a baby bounced and cooed and looked generally unconcerned about the imminent apocalypse.