The Gospel of Winter

by Brendan Kiely

  When the ball dropped and the room exploded, Sophie leapt off our shoulders and showered the crowd with the contents of her cup. She kissed Mark with an open mouth, and then she kissed me the same way. I was jealous of her freedom and her liberty to celebrate, as if sadness was an illness she was immune to. Josie watched us. I leaned close to her, but she turned her cheek. She pulled away, flipped her hair to the side, looked around the room, and then turned back to me and kissed me on the lips. She laughed nervously and looked at Mark. He pushed toward her and she accepted his kiss too. Mark glanced at me when he pulled back. He put his arm around my neck and said, “Donovan, you are all right, man.”

  “Kowolski,” I said, mimicking his voice, “you’re all right too. Seriously,” I added. I pulled him into a hug. My hand reached a little high and I got the base of his neck as I brought him in close. He was damp with sweat.

  For a second or two we hesitated awkwardly. Then he broke free. “This is the world we live in, man!” he shouted. “It’s totally fucked. All the wrong people are in charge. Welcome to 2002. We’re Generation Fucked—everyone’s fucking us.”

  “Especially the ones who say they have our best interests in mind,” I said.

  “Yeah,” Mark agreed. He lost some of the ironic joy in his face. “Yeah. They are.”

  “At least we have what we have,” I said.

  “What’s that?” Mark asked.

  I pulled Josie into the conversation by looping my arm through hers. “At least we have this. Us, I mean. Something.”

  Josie raised her cup and tapped it against mine. “Here’s to us. All of us. Where’s Sophie?” We drank and looked around for her. She pressed back through the crowd with two glowing bands wrapped around her wrists.

  “This is the best party!” she screamed as she ducked forward and surfaced between other people’s limbs. She had lost her cup but gained a bottle of wine. She poured too much into my cup as the stereo kicked back on with a funk song that got everyone dancing.

  I passed Mark my cup, but he waved it off. “Have you seen Feingold anywhere?” he asked. The rest of us were bopping up and down, but I saw the look on his face and stopped.

  “Let’s go find him,” I said.

  He led the way as we weaved through the room and out to the front, where there were other people dancing too. We asked around, but nobody seemed to have seen him, although it occurred to me that few of the people we asked even knew who he was. Fewer and fewer of the people at the party looked familiar to me. I stuck my head out the front door and surveyed the porch. Feingold wasn’t there. Mark walked upstairs, and we followed him. A couple was making out at the top and didn’t stop as we passed. In the hall, Riggs leaned against the wall beside the closed door to the bathroom. His eyes were open but droopy, and he didn’t notice us. His lips were parted, and he nodded as if he was being pushed around by a weak breeze. At the far end of the hall, a door was ajar, and I had a sinking feeling as Mark charged toward it.

  Dustin and two other guys from the CDA baseball team circled the bed with their crimped and fraying ball caps pointed down at a naked Feingold spread-eagled across the beige comforter. He was tattooed in permanent marker—FAGGOTS FALL FIRST was scrawled up his arms and legs, and a series of cheap doodles of shit and piss were drawn on his stomach. Toothpaste streaked his hair. The bed was soaked around his waist and beneath his legs, and his crotch was painted with stripes of lipstick. The tube was jammed in his belly button. Dustin, laughing, pointed a camera toward his friends, Nick and Andre, who hovered over Feingold. Nick held a Bic razor poised over Feingold’s eyebrow, and Andre gave a thumbs-up and held a marker in his other hand. They both smiled for the shot, and Dustin snapped it as we entered. He turned to us, and when he saw Josie he lifted his cap and wiped the thin blond hair back on his head. The boyish giddiness in his face dropped immediately into guilt. He turned back to his buddies. Nick was about to begin with the razor. “Hey, hold it!” Dustin yelled.

  It happened quickly. Mark sprinted toward Nick. He pushed Nick away from the bed, into the dresser, but as he looked down onto Feingold’s closed eyes, he was pulled back by Andre and pinned with his arms behind him. Sophie and Josie yelled at them. Nick got up in Mark’s face. “Take it easy,” Nick said. “We’re just fucking around. It’s his own fault. He passed out. He passed out first.” On the other side of the bed, Dustin tried to comfort Josie, but she shook her head and backed away.

  “What the fuck?” Sophie said.

  Mark wrestled to free himself but couldn’t. Locked in Andre’s arms, he cursed the three of them. Nick yelled back at Mark, and I finally made a move, but Dustin caught me by the arm and pulled me back too.

  “Calm down,” Dustin said to all of us. “It’s not a big deal.”

  “Why would you do this to somebody?” Josie asked him.

  “Assholes,” Mark said.

  Nick squeezed tighter. “Shut the fuck up.”

  “Everybody, calm down!” Dustin shouted. “We’re just having a little fun.”

  “Fun?” Josie repeated. “Don’t you dare touch me,” she said to him as he stepped closer to her.

  “Oh, come on.” Dustin sighed. “What the fuck?”

  “No. What the fuck?” Mark said, nodding at Feingold. “You get off on this?”

  “I will fucking deck you if you don’t shut up,” Nick told him. “What’s the matter? You and Aidan coming to jerk Feiny off or something? Is that why you’re here, looking for him? I know what you are. I know what you like.”

  “You wish you knew something important,” Mark said. “You wish.”

  “Shut up, faggot,” Nick said. He punched him in the stomach.

  “That’s enough!” Dustin shouted at Nick. He eased his grip on me as he yelled. I broke free. “Calm down,” Dustin told the room again, but I didn’t need his direction. I didn’t think I was going to throw punches and knock anybody out. I’d never been in a fistfight before, but it didn’t matter. I could still do something.

  I went after Nick, but he pushed me to the side, and I fell toward the bed. He punched Mark in the stomach again, and I found my footing quickly and charged him. Nick turned, swung at me, and hit the side of my face hard. He grabbed me as I fell and hit me in the head again. I stumbled toward Mark, but with his arms pinned back he couldn’t catch me. I rolled off his shoulder and fell to the floor. The girls screamed, and I lost sense of where I was or what was happening for a few moments.

  When I came to, I was on my back. Dustin had Nick pinned up against the wall. My head throbbed, and Josie and Sophie were yelling at Andre. Mark was free again, and he stooped down to me on the floor, pulled me to the bed, and propped me up against it. To my right, Feingold’s fingers dangled in my peripheral vision, but I couldn’t see much to my left. I couldn’t open my eye any wider. There were more people in the room now, and though the chatter built to a louder and louder buzz, the room was calmer than it had been before. I looked up at Nick. I smiled. It stung, but I held it. Blood dripped off my chin to my lap.

  Josie and Sophie crouched down in front of me and asked if I was okay. I smiled again. “Cover Feingold,” I said. Mark leapt up immediately, and Sophie helped him.

  Josie touched my face and shook her head. She stood. “What the hell is wrong with you?” she asked Dustin. He let go of Nick and turned around.

  Nick stepped around him and pointed across the bed to Mark. “I’ll still floor you too.”

  “No one’s flooring anybody,” Dustin said.

  “Fuck you,” Nick said. “Change your tune the minute your girlfriend walks into the room. We were just talking about that guy.”

  “Seriously,” Dustin said. “Shut up.” Andre grabbed Nick by the shoulder and dragged him to the door. They pushed their way through the crowd to the hall. “Let’s find some place to talk,” Dustin said to Josie when they were gone.

  “I’m not talking to you,” she told him.

  He reached for her, and she batted his hand away. “Hey, come o
n,” he said. “It’s not what it looks like. You have to understand.”

  I tried to stand, to get between the two of them, but I was weak and dizzy, and he’d already stepped around me. He pursued her halfway around the room, begging her to take it easy. When I finally got to my feet and saw my swollen eye and bloody mouth in a mirror, I knew it wouldn’t heal quickly, but I wondered if it was still worth it. Two guys and a girl started tending to Feingold. I coughed. A girl I didn’t know came forward with a damp cloth from the bathroom and pressed it gently to my face. She was shorter than me and had a hairdo like a sponge. I wanted to lean down into it and fall asleep, but I still rocked with Adderall and adrenaline, and my pulse nearly kept pace with the thoughts exploding in my mind.

  Josie suddenly had me by the arm. “Do you want to get out of here?”

  “Nobody has to leave,” Dustin said in the background.

  “You should,” the sponge told him.

  “I’m not going anywhere. Everybody is fine. Let’s just get back down to the party.”

  “Look around you,” I said. “Nobody’s fine.” He made a move toward me, but Mark grabbed his arm. Two other guys charged Dustin and held him back too.

  Sophie walked up to him and pointed her finger in his face. “You are who your friends are,” she told him.

  Then she stepped over to me. With my arms draped over Josie and Sophie, I shuffled to the door. They called to Mark, and the four of us squeezed down the now-crowded hall to the stairs. He spoke to a few other guys from the swim team and sent them back to look after Feingold. Then we found our coats and a bag of frozen peas for my busted face and made our way out to the front porch, where, with a little indulgent flourish, I milked the injury and bummed a couple of cigarettes for the road. Everyone was eager to share.

  Back in the car, Josie and Sophie kept saying I should go home, but I didn’t want to. When they finally consented, Mark said he could take us to the beach where he had done lifeguard training the past summer, and I reminded them that the party didn’t have to end. I was still loaded with liquor and pharmaceuticals. “Maybe we could watch the sunrise,” I suggested. “I’ve never seen the sunrise, and we live right on the damn ocean. It’d be a hell of a way to start the year.” I popped a Vicodin, leaned back in the front seat, and let them discuss it.

  It wasn’t too long before we made it to the coast. Mark cut the lights and pulled into the shadows of a parking lot down the road. We walked quickly along a path that ran beside a few dark and quiet houses and emerged onto the beach. The surf roared, and a freezing wind shot along the shore. The moon had been full the night before, and even though it was high and distant in the sky, it still cast a pale luminescence over the beach. Milky waves tumbled up the sand, and we walked only a few feet above the tide line, in order to not draw attention from the road. The noise drowned out any conversation, and we were too cold to talk anyway. Josie took my arm and huddled against me. Her thin arm squeezed mine through the jackets and guided me across the hard-packed sand. I was half-blind and listing back and forth between pain and delirium, and her support didn’t correct my steps as much as lift me from within.

  We were heading to the lifeguard station, and when we got there, Mark ducked under a ramp that led to the short porch. I peered into the window. The room was big enough to hold a couple of chairs, a narrow table, and a row of floating tubes and boards. When Mark reemerged and let us in, we were grateful to get out of the cold. It blocked the wind at least. Once we had all stamped our feet a few times and gotten the blood flowing again, I pulled a small bottle of Midori from my inside pocket and passed it around. Its sticky sweetness tasted awful, but the heat that came with it made it worth it.

  The wind found its way through a few cracks in the flimsy house and whistled in the corners. “The house is creaking,” Sophie said. “I feel like I’m on a boat.”

  Mark lit a joint and passed it to Sophie. She took a hit and beckoned Josie closer. They kissed and recycled. Josie took a hit and leaned toward me. Her tongue moved gently into my mouth, and though my jaw throbbed, I didn’t pull away. The smoke leaked out, and we kissed for what I thought seemed a long time, though I only realized that when we’d finished. Sophie grinned, and Josie’s eyes sparkled back at me. I was a little embarrassed. I took a big hit, and with it all down in my lungs I leaned toward Mark. I kissed him and exhaled as quickly as I could. He took it in and worked his cheeks like bellows on the other end. His lips weren’t all that much different from Josie’s, a little thinner and tighter, but he worked back against mine as Josie had. He pulled away and exhaled the recycled smoke in a thin stream through the corner of his mouth. He smiled and looked away. Sophie and Josie giggled.

  “Yeah!” Sophie said.

  “Can’t leave anybody out, dude,” I said.

  “Left out?” Mark laughed. “Thanks, man, for caring.” He reached for me, and we gripped hands. He laughed harder and pulled me into a one-armed hug. “Seriously. Thanks, man. I should be the one with a black eye tomorrow.” He kept smiling, and I wasn’t sure, but I thought he was going to kiss me again. The room tilted around me, and I held on to him for balance. “You okay?” he asked me.

  “Yeah. I could use some water, though. My throat kind of burns.” I took another sip of Midori, which didn’t help, then wobbled over to the table by the wall and scrambled onto it so I could lie down and look out the window. The moon was high enough that some stars were visible too. “I’m okay,” I told them. “Don’t worry.”

  Josie followed me. “You talking to yourself?” she teased.

  “No. I don’t know. Maybe. I think it runs in the family.”

  She hopped up next to me. She sat crossed-legged, lifted my head, and scooted closer. I put my head back down on her thigh and smiled up at her. She took the bottle from me, sipped again, and we stared out the window in silence for a while. She put her hand down through my open coat to my chest and rubbed gently.

  “Are you in a lot of pain?” she eventually asked.

  “Not a lot,” I lied.

  “Another painkiller?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t have any idea how much of all this stuff I’ve had tonight. I guess not too much.”

  “Maybe I’ll have one too—just ’cause. I feel like I’m floating. I don’t want it to end.”

  “Don’t take too much. You’ve been drinking.”

  “Wow.” She laughed. “You sound like you care or something.”

  “I do. I mean, it’s like sliding over ice. It’s hilarious and fun until it suddenly isn’t and you crash down into the water.”

  “And you might die.”

  “Don’t do that,” I said. “We’re just getting to know each other.”

  She leaned down and kissed me softly on the lips. “You’re going to look like a monster tomorrow. You realize that? Like, really bad.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “But if you kiss me again, I won’t care.”

  “Oh my God,” Sophie whined. She was across the room, standing next to the other window. “I can hear you from over here. Please.”

  “Seriously, dude,” Mark said. He broke into a cough. Sophie patted him on the back. “Seriously, dude,” he wheezed again. She laughed and took another hit.

  Josie smiled. “Don’t mind them.”

  “I don’t,” I said. “This is perfect.”

  “Yes,” she said. She looked up toward the darker waves farther out to sea. “We could stay out here forever, except we’d freeze to death.”

  “Not if we stayed this close together,” I said. I enjoyed saying it and liked the sound of my voice with hers, but I began to have the strange feeling that it was someone else speaking, that I was, in fact, hiding under the table, listening to this other puppet talk, because the me that was under the table had a premonition of things to come, as though somewhere, just beyond where I could see, something or someone was waiting for me, coming to take this all away from me, and it was inevitable.

  I lit a cigaret
te. We shared it and listened to the surf thump and hiss along the shoreline. I wondered if I could somehow erase all the events of my life so far, as though I could call in a flood, wash it all away, and begin anew. I imagined the ocean rushing up the beach, surrounding the little house, submerging the neighborhoods and towns behind us, the water level rising and lifting us up above the tumult. I’d save two of the important things: two joints, two martinis, two girls, two boys. We’d stare out the window, watching the dark water slog and gurgle, our boat creaking and groaning above it, moaning, writhing over the water with a slap and a splash in the crests of the waves. We’d purge all the junk overboard, the shelves loaded with bullshit trinkets at home, our computers, sheets of practice music, our clothes and uniforms, the whole Latin language, our worst memories. What else was necessary other than the glow of Mark’s skin, the hum in Josie’s lips, and the way Sophie squinted when she laughed? When it all subsided, everything else would be washed away and we could emerge from the muck and bloom. And something new might grow.

  But there wasn’t any flood, and we didn’t even stay for the sunrise. At a certain point, Josie slipped out from underneath me. She kissed me on the forehead and went over to the others. I dozed off while they talked, and soon I found myself dragged out into the freezing wind and marched along the beach to the road. Mark staggered like the rest of us. I thought he was only having trouble in the sand, but I noticed his steps were heavy on the sidewalk, too. I smoked a cigarette to wake up, and I finished it before we got to the car. On the way home the girls fell asleep, and Mark and I talked about Feingold a little. He was sure nobody else had fucked with him for the rest of the night, but he was worried for the state of the house. “Nobody was in charge,” he kept saying. “It was total fucking chaos.”

  Mark took his corners too widely, and my nerves kept me awake. Twice I rolled down the window to blast my face with cold air, and Mark did the same. He dropped Josie and Sophie at Josie’s, and they stumbled up the rest of the driveway after barely saying good night. Mark and I didn’t say much as he turned out of her neighborhood and headed back to our side of town. As he came around the corner at the bottom of the hill we found ourselves on the wrong side of the road. Another pair of headlights blinded us. I yelled, and Mark jerked the wheel just in time, but we swung into the shoulder of the road and bounced up into the wooded patch beyond the sidewalk.