Unstoppable Moses

by Author Tyler James Smith

  THIRTY-SEVEN: COIN TOSS

  AFTER WE CHECKED AND RECHECKED all the cabins, we headed into the black woods toward the lake that would be no problem for an adult to swim across and even less of a problem for a lost child to drown in.

  The exhaustion was starting to set in. None of us talked if we didn’t have to. We looked where we had to look, which was anywhere except each other.

  The first place we came to was the rope wall.

  Nothing.

  We kept moving and nobody said anything for a couple of minutes until we got to the archery range. We did our best to not talk about the weird itching that we were all feeling in the backs of our guts. That distant, nagging, dreadfully slow sense that somewhere, at some point, a joke had stopped being a joke.

  The archery range was devoid of all children, but the bull’s-eye targets were still set up against the hay bales. While they were discussing where we should look next, I ran my hand along the rough burlap edge of one of the targets.

  Michael hugged Matty from behind and said, “We’re not going to find her because we’re going to be out here looking everywhere and freezing our collective tits off while she sneaks back to her cabin. She’s probably back there now. Matty, it’s going to be all right.”

  She was holding his coat sleeve between her thumb and forefinger but she was looking off into the night, not smiling or saying anything back.

  I was thinking about pressure and how it ends up defining a relationship when I looked over at Faisal who was craning his head down to the target next to him. Whatever he was reading was written at hero-child level in small hero-child handwriting. I pushed off the target I was leaning on and dropped next to him.

  It said:

  6225 59 7315 56 2211 55 91226 32226

  And it was glowing green.

  “You think she wrote it?” he asked.

  It was the same type of numerical grouping as the text I’d gotten.

  “Yeah. It was her. That’s my marker.”

  I took my phone out and brought up the text she’d sent. “Look at the 55. Look how the rest of them are grouped together. They’re similar.”

  “Dude.”

  “Yeah.”

  “She wrote another one?” Michael asked. They crowded around us to read it. “What does it say?”

  “Lump!” Matty whisper-called.

  We waited but the only response we got was nighttime camp ambiance and Matty saying “shitshitshit” under her breath.

  “I don’t know,” I said, even though I felt like I should know—knowing how to think through something, how to figure it all out, that’s what I was always good at. And even though I’d only known them a couple of days, I could tell they thought so as well. For some stupid goddamn reason they had that look in their eyes like I was the hero who knew what should be done or what the hidden message was because I was supposed to be smart and the more I looked at it and the more I didn’t understand what she was trying to say, the more I wanted to say, “We aren’t even friends! Why did you have to start treating me like one of your friends?” but instead I just stared at the string of numbers that might have been able to tell us exactly where she was while that itching, scratching feeling in the pit of my stomach worked its way higher through my back like it was slithering around the rungs of my spine, clawing its way up and up and up.

  * * *

  We headed for the icy maintenance roads that would wind us around the small lake.

  “If you could invent anything, what would it be?” Michael asked, using his second wind to try to make light of the situation.

  As much as I appreciated the idea in theory, I appreciated it more when Matty said, “Not right now, Mike,” without looking at him.

  He persisted. “Because me, I would invent a media player that had a shuffle kind of function. Like you would play a movie and it would shuffle around a hundred different endings and a hundred different outcomes for each character. It would revolutionize movies.”

  “Lump!” Matty called into the woods.

  Every twenty or thirty feet we would pass a clearing where we could see tiny frozen ponds. You could tell that they were only a few inches deep by the sticks poking out of them but something about them made my stomach bunch up.25

  “Because what’s the worst part of any horror movie?” Michael went on. “Or action movie. Really, just about any movie. Any time you see James Bond getting lowered into a tank of sharks, you know he’s going to get out of it somehow. Any time Bruce Willis is trapped and surrounded by terrorists, all you have to do is think about how far into the movie you are. Oh, I’ve still got forty-five minutes left? There is absolutely nothing for me to worry about.”

  “Mike, shut up,” Matty said, holding a hand out and facing the dark line of trees. Something in the woods cracked. It sounded like the thin white ice on the small ponds cracking underfoot.

  Their tension was familiar territory for me. It had usually been Charlie who I’d gotten mad at, until he made enough jokes that we’d both moved on. Nothing was ever really brought out into the open. Not enough.

  Michael was chewing on the inside of his lip. “Moses, you try. She probably thinks she’s in trouble.” And for a second it all made sense; of course we couldn’t find her. She was hiding. She was a kid out after lights-out and now the adults were looking for her.

  And I tried to make it sound like I believed that when I said, “Lump?” into the dark. “Lump, it’s us. It’s Moses. Come on, it’s okay, come out. You’re not in trouble.”

  For a few moments, while our bodies pumped gallons of adrenaline, we stopped being cold. Our veins gushed neon.

  “Lump?” I said again.

  There was this feeling like we were standing in front of a jury—like there was some huge, cosmic coin flip happening just past our line of sight. Heads: Lump comes out of the dark, pushing branches out of her way, dirty and cold and frustrated that we stopped her from finding Harriet Tubman the deer. Or, better: she comes out of the tree line leading the small, lost animal.

  Tails: nothing.

  Tails: we wait and wait and eventually we silently decide that whatever we heard was just the wind or the woods or some animal we couldn’t see and that we have to keep moving. Keep looking. Keep ignoring the terrible suspicion that nothing is right.

  The coin landed. We moved on.

  THIRTY-EIGHT: END TIMES

  “MIKE. STOP.” MATTY’S shoulders were hunched up when she said it, each word fully contained in an exhaled breath.

  “I’m just saying,” he said, smiling a Charlie smile. “That’s not a kid-shaped hole. That’s more like a baby-shaped hole.”

  We’d been working our way down the maintenance roads and talking about the lake that had a rim of ice when Matty saw a hole and started breathing fast and talking about how we had to call for help. She glared at him but he kept going, kept trying to salvage it by making more jokes. Jokes that none of us could laugh at. “Like if a baby was out here because it was drunk and decided it wanted to catch the reflection of the moon so it broke the ice with a big rock and then fell in.”

  “You aren’t funny. You’re being an asshole. Stop being an unfunny asshole.” She said the words I’d thought over and over for years before.

  Faisal and I tried to make ourselves invisible.

  “Jesus Christ, Matty, it’s fine. She’ll be okay.”

  “Don’t fucking talk down to me.”

  It was like watching old Hill–Baltimore home videos.

  Faisal and I hung back while they walked and argued. I took my phone out of my pocket and clicked it on, hoping there would be another message or a missed call, but there was nothing. I hit “call.”

  “Trying her again?”

  “Yeah.”

  After a few seconds, I hung up. The breathing exercises didn’t help. The fucking clues she’d left behind didn’t help. Nothing helped. There was no trump card to play that would just put an end to her being gone.

  “Nothing?” />
  “Voicemail.”

  “She probably turned her phone off to conserve battery. That seems like a Lump thing to do.”

  I pictured her phone smashed to pieces in the road, where she’d dropped it when she got hit by a mulch truck. I pictured her phone at the bottom of a freezing lake. Chewed to pieces by things with claws and needle-sharp teeth. I pictured her phone stripped of its SIM card and battery, burning in a stranger’s basement incinerator.

  I called again just because, and once again heard her mother’s recorded voice. Faisal pushed his hands into his pockets and shook some change around. The sky was black and the stars were white and the intermittent clouds were silver gray.

  Faisal and I started poking around in the surrounding clearing, checking for anything that might pass as a clue.

  “They’ve been fighting a lot lately,” Faisal said, looking off over the lake. “Maybe not more than usual, but more … loudly.”

  I grunted in a way that I hoped conveyed, “Hm, what’s going on with them?” After a moment, I added actual words. “Has the Dalton stuff come up before?”

  “No. It very specifically never did.” He bent over, quick, and grabbed a candy wrapper. He slowed down as he stood back up and realized how old it was. He held it out to me anyway, without much enthusiasm. “This probably isn’t a clue.”

  “Probably not, no.”

  He wedged the trash in his back pocket like he planned to get rid of it later.

  “But he knew they dated, right?” I asked, steering us back to Dalton.

  “Yeah, but—” He paused like he wasn’t sure he was supposed to tell me any more. “Dalton’s one of the biggest pieces of shit I’ve ever seen Matty hang around with. Guy’s a manipulative little douchebag. And eventually Matty left his douchey little drug-dealing ass behind and got with Mike, who’s a fucking sweetheart that never pressured her into anything. But when the night finally did come, Mike got real nervous since it was his first time and Matty didn’t want him to feel bad or anxious so she said it was her first time too.”

  “How do you know all this?” It didn’t seem right hearing this story from a third party, even if the third party was Faisal.

  “Third-wheel privileges. Like I said, I’m a load-bearing friend. Which, so, hey: fourth-wheel privileges, huh? Got ourselves a proper structure,” he said. Paused. “Just so you know, either one of them would tell you any of this stuff. Especially now.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “You looked uncomfortable,” he said, scooting some leaves around, looking for any sign of Lump.

  “Ah.” I thought, for a second, about how to phrase my next question. “What abou—”

  “He never asked. It’s not hard to fake losing your virginity to another virgin. And, as far as I know, they just never really talked about it. She just kind of became the myth, you know?”

  “I’ve only known you guys for a couple of days, but is this the kind of thing that would set them off? They don’t seem like the public-fighting type.”

  He laughed a small humorless laugh under his breath. I looked at him and said, “What?”

  “Relationship drama,” he said, shrugging. “That’s what we’re talking about right now. While a kid is—”

  “Yeah.”

  “I guess it’s that or go crazy, right? Anyway. This whole shit between Matty and Mike wouldn’t have been the kind of thing to set them off—even if he did have to find out from Dalton. Dalton was just a stupid, dead-eyed catalyst. Matty sent out her application to Northwestern a few weeks ago and, of course, Mike waited until last month to even start thinking about the idea of applying to college. Which isn’t a huge deal because there’s still time to apply, but he decided to apply to Northwestern too. Thing is, nobody ever really expected Mike to do the whole hyper-competitive college thing. He’s great and I love him but he spent the first three years of high school being professionally good at dodging work and responsibility. Years of bullshit and he has one talk with the guidance counselor who tells him he should apply, and he does. Gets all kinds of fired up about it.”

  The more we talked about Michael, the more of Charlie I saw in him.

  “She’s mad because he’s getting his shit together? That doesn’t sound like Matty,” I said, like I knew something—anything—about her. The words were like a litmus test for the conversation. To find out if it was bullshit small talk or something more real and more human. He’d answer like we were acquaintances or like we were friends.

  I could see Charlie’s face whenever the topic of college came up. Like it was a topic that made his mouth go dry. After all, who was I to want to leave our hometown?

  Faisal squinted one eye shut and shrugged, dipping his head a little like he was weighing his response. “No, not really. That’s not it. I mean, you’d expect her to be a little pissed about how she’s spent four years crushing all of her classes, legitimately earning her way, making early enrollment deadlines, and”—he hesitated for half a breath, almost course-correcting away from it before choosing to say—“it was the school her mom went to.” For a second, he looked me in the eyes to see if that registered. It did. “Then to have Mike decide on a random Tuesday afternoon a few weeks before the deadline—it just got to her, you know?”

  The fight before us kept sending up fragments like mortar shells that we couldn’t help but overhear. Words like “honesty” and “love” and “hurt” burst outward and upward like bombs hurled up into the dark.

  “Does that mean you’re going to Northwestern too?”

  “Fuck no,” he said, laughing a little.

  “Really?”

  “I mean, maybe someday. My parents would love it, but I’m doing Community before I do anything else.” He said it easily. He said it like there was nothing to be scared of. Like it was okay to stay close to home. “What about you? Harvard? Princeton? Yale? Big … Science School One?”

  “Honestly, I have no fucking idea.”26 The fucked-up part of me wanted to smile and laugh—a deep and real smile over an honest laugh—because I really did have no fucking clue. In the midst of Charlie’s fallout, the idea of Duke had been a life preserver. It had been a tangible Somewhere Else I could be that would put the rest of my life behind me.

  But now I was in the woods, hundreds of miles from Chicago or my family or Charlie, and it was all still right behind me all of the time. Why would Duke be any different?

  “I know that feeling. But you know, honestly, fuck it. Things’ll work out. Or, I guess, they won’t. Hundred years from now, we’ll be dead and we’ll have made all the choices we were going to make.”

  My phone went off in my pocket and I had it out before it finished its first vibration. It didn’t go off again because it was just a text from my dad using binary telling me that he loved me too.

  When I shook my head and muttered, “Fuck,” Faisal said, “Not her, then?” I could tell by the look on his face that his heart had started beating as hard as mine when the phone buzzed.

  “No. Just my dad.”

  After a few seconds of silence, he said, “Anyway, Mikey getting his shit lined up to apply: that’s not it. I know you just met us and all, so this probably doesn’t mean a lot, but she almost cried, she was so proud of him. Matty Gable almost cried. So no, that wasn’t it. It was because nobody—not even Mikey—expected Mikey to do college. They had this sort of proverbial cliff they were heading toward once school ended and college started. It was this urgent, pathetic romance that was going to end in an explosion of hormones and shitty poetry but the cliff kind of just disappeared.”

  They were trying to be polite by not arguing in front of us, but the night was quiet except for the light wind that carried the majority of their fight toward us.

  “Remember when the world was going to end in 2012?” he asked me.

  “Because of the bullshit with the Mayan calendar?”

  “Yeah. It’s kind of like that.”

  “A fake end of the world.”

&n
bsp; “No, I mean suddenly it’s like New Years 2013. How productive were you in 2012?”

  “How productive as opposed to other, less apocalyptic, years?”

  “Right.”

  “Probably a little more productive than usual. Depending on what qualifies as productive.”

  “Everyone—at least as far as I can tell—felt a lot more, what? Urgent, I guess? About things. Like even though it only took five minutes’ worth of Googling to know that nothing anywhere ever said the world was going to end at the stroke of midnight, everyone felt like they had to get it all done before the literal end of the world.

  “They wanted to think the world was going to end. Even though most people had to know, somewhere, on some basic level, that the world wasn’t going anywhere, Hollywood still made movies about it. Writers wrote novels about it.” He started ticking off examples on his fingers. “TV shows, blogs, shirts, Facebook groups, everyone. Everyone got in on the end of the world.” He swiped his hand in front of him like he was ushering the past by. He cleared his throat and spit a wad at the freezing lake. “People went nuts for it.”

  He smiled a little. “They lost their apocalypse, I think,” he said, nodding toward Matty and Michael. “Without the world coming down around them, they had to face some things about themselves.”

  This was the apocalyptic fallout that Charlie and I hadn’t had. After everything, when the sky fell, we never got the day after. We just ended. They’d found out that they had to really and honestly start being around each other. Like all the people who woke up the morning after their night-long, end-of-the-world, orgy riots to find that the sun was still there and there were still nothing but commercials on the radio and who had to start honestly dealing with who they’d found out they were.

  “I guess you add that to the thing with Dalton, and now…” He shrugged at the situation around us. “They don’t know what to do.” He took a breath and cracked his neck. “So, what do you think?”27