You’re bad for people, he told himself. It wouldn’t be long before she realized she was happier without him. The worst part was how she looked at him, not like someone who shouldn’t have been out all day doing the terrible things he’d done but like someone who could no longer be understood or even helped. In the mirror, as he dried off, he saw himself first as a muscle-wrought growing boy that men wanted all to themselves, and second as a pale malformed monster who chewed up and spit out those who tried to help him. He was the boy who’d made a man groan and the boy who’d made a man die. He imagined the smashed-up skull where once his father’s brain and being had sat safe and intact. You loaded the gun, he told his naked reflection. In Colin’s own skull was something just as fragile, a coil of every mean thing he’d ever done. There was nothing in the bathroom he could use to kill himself, and he didn’t bother to imagine how he would’ve proceeded had things turned out differently, nor what his mother would’ve done, driving back alone.
His clothes were in a heap on the floor—not fresh, exactly, but the cleanest ones he could find. For a long time he sat wrapped in his towel. The mirror was losing its last scallops of fog and he could tell it was late, that people in the other rooms were asleep. After sex, he thought, and grinned like an idiot at the word, at the experience he’d acquired. It was only two weeks ago that he was terrified of all of this, that he prayed for God to set him straight, and now he craved, confidently, the feel of a man inside of him; he couldn’t wait to be Allie’s accessory, paraded around town at a series of parties with more and more men. It seemed like a lifetime ago that he’d wanted something like a family, a carbon copy of his grandfather’s house but full of kids, a wife to take care of him.
In those words, it wasn’t funny anymore. All that loss suddenly felt like someone’s death. The good Colin’s death. The room was starting to cool, the shower’s heat long gone and the desert air crawling in through the crack under the door. He’d begun to shiver but couldn’t convince himself to get dressed. What he wanted was for her to knock on the door, to ask if he was okay, to give him an excuse not to kill himself or cry. Let’s go somewhere, she could tell him, as though this was just another dead end and they could turn around and keep driving. If anything’s infinite it’s a list of excuses, his father had written. Of possibilities. Hopes. Colin imagined that he could cut his own throat and die here on the floor. Or he could get dressed and go through with his plan, to try this other life and live as the evil Colin. He pulled on a T-shirt and jeans and stepped out into the hotel room. She was out on the balcony. Soon you’ll be free, he thought. About himself or his mother, he wasn’t sure.
He flipped on the television and muted the sound, not wanting her to hear. It was some show about the ice caps melting. Captions came out garbled on the bottom of the screen. Mr. Ostrowski hat bent studying the glacier cents 1987 and Only a few more degrease wood be catastrophic. He left it on to feel like he wasn’t alone, to see the movement out of the corner of his eye. His mother’s laptop was on her bed and he cracked it open to distract himself. She’d been searching for information on missing persons—what to do in an emergency and how long you were supposed to wait—and he felt like carving himself up with the dullest, rustiest knife he could find. He clicked out of it and, without thinking, opened his messaging program. Chelsea was online and he hoped she wasn’t paying attention, that she wouldn’t notice his name. Andy, too, was awake. Over two thousand miles away, and all Colin had to do was type hi, remember me? that piece of trash you threw away? In the morning, none of this would matter. None of these people would hurt him again. They would never understand who he was or what he intended to become. He was about to close out of the app when a box popped up on the screen. Mr. miller’s in jail was all it said, just beneath Andy’s name.
Colin stared at the screen. In a hotel room in Los Angeles, in his bedroom in Minnesota, alone on an asteroid hurtling through space—wherever he was no longer mattered. His heart, his body and brain, jumped through space and time to be with Andy; and it was in Andy’s voice that he heard those words—Mr. Miller’s in jail—lying next to him on a sleeping bag, just any other boring night as though nothing had gone wrong. He wanted to respond but it felt like another trap, a way to confess what he’d done with Victor when they were alone.
Andy was typing, Colin could see from the animated icon. He was really there, existing across the continent. He was thinking about him. Told u he was a pedo, raping some 7th grader who told his parents. He’s totes fucked.
That old image—Victor hauled away in handcuffs—felt more fiction than fact now that he’d seen it in his head so many times. It was absurd to think it had come true. Was he on some bunk now, calling Colin’s house with his one phone call? Colin pictured their kitchen phone ringing and ringing, nobody there to pick it up, nobody to hear Victor’s poison. Andy’s words on the screen began to tremble and blur into the white space, as though he’d never typed them. There was a noise in the room he mistook for something outside of himself, a door creaking open or the TV no longer muted, but it was only his throat as it let out a long, slow groan like the wind had been knocked out of him. He wanted to crush something, to kill something. He wanted to squeeze the life out of a living creature with his bare hands. Why hadn’t he foreseen rage like this? Why hadn’t he seen this coming?
u there dude?
Knowing what it felt like—knowing how it worked—Colin pictured himself below Victor’s frame, pinned to his desk or the seat of his car. Had Victor loved this other boy, too? Had he called him at home and told him about the human heart and its limitations? Had he dreamt of him? Did the boy feel, as Victor flooded into him, that it was all his fault? There in his head was Victor’s classroom, its rows of desks and lab benches, microscopes, charts, and Bunsen burners, its order and warmth. I knew a boy who wrote poems, Victor had said. How many others had he tricked? How many, like Colin, were stupid enough to pity someone so paralyzed by what seemed like love, so charmed by the body’s symphony of blood and come?
Colin wrote only i’m here, and right away Andy was typing again. was he weird with u? did he make u suck his dick? guess the police r lookin 4 more witnesses or whatever. like it’s…a big fuckin deal. Just thought i’d ask.
In Victor’s eyes, Colin was only another piece of fruit to be plucked and eaten, the core of him tossed aside. Nothing Colin could have done would have changed this. Victor had played all the right notes. He’d long learned what notes to play.
I hope ur not still mad at me over that joke, Andy said.
He’d last seen them both on the same day, Colin realized—Andy outside of the school and Victor in his car, as he’d driven him home. It was easy to see the streets and the trees, the houses of his neighborhood, and the school itself. How badly he’d wanted Andy to love him, and how easily Andy had sold him out for a laugh, for a chance at being talked about. What would they have done, all those boys, had Colin—the little fag they derided and pitied and would never view as equal—leapt for Andy’s throat, knocked him down, and bashed his skull against the concrete? What would they have called him then?
Colin felt his hands fill with hot steel as though he’d use them, as though he’d leap across all the states between here and home and pummel the boy he loved into pulp. Instead he began to type, and he relished typing slowly, one letter at a time so Andy could sit and wait. If you ever talk to me again I will kill you. He clicked out of the app before Andy could respond and leaned back against the hotel pillows. It felt like he’d closed the door to a room. Here he was again, a boy about to run away. He closed his eyes and tried to see his new life, curled up in bed with Allie or hand in hand as they walked along Hollywood Boulevard. Instead he saw his bed at home, the maples of the street where he lived. Either I do this or I don’t, his father had written.
It was almost an hour before his mother came back inside. The TV was still muted, transcribing a show about an island of garbage somewhere in the Pacific. He’d eaten several
candy bars and their wrappers fluttered to the floor with the breeze. It was still difficult to look at her, this person who wouldn’t give up loving him. She sat down on the bed and put her hand on his back, just between his shoulder blades. “What’re you watching?”
“Some show.”
“A show, huh?”
“It’s dumb.”
“Looks dumb.”
With her hands on his back he knew she could feel him trembling. He knew she could feel his breath cut in and out of him like a saw. It wasn’t fear he felt so much as relief, as he knew what she was going to say. He couldn’t wait for her to say it. “Colin,” she said, touching the spot where his muscles always tied themselves in knots. Such a tense little boy, she used to call him.
“Hmm?”
“We’ve been gone a long time.”
He tried to shrug, as if time were no longer relevant or he hadn’t noticed at all. Instead he went from trembling to shaking, a creature she had to hug to keep still. She’d put on perfume that day, for the first time in weeks, and it was that smell more than anything that brought him home, perched on the edge of her bed as he watched her in her makeup mirror. How had he thought it was possible, to leave this life she’d given him?
“Pack up in the morning,” she told him. “I want to be on the road by noon. I want you in the seat next to me, telling me where to go. My navigator.”
That’s all it took. For days he’d thought about LA as his new home. He’d envisioned new schools, a new house. He pictured new friends as though he’d already made them. But when she squeezed his shoulder and said, “It’s time to go home,” he could tell home wasn’t this place. She cried as she held him, and he could tell it was for the same reason he was crying. His mother too had convinced herself that she no longer cared for the changing seasons, for the restaurants whose menus you could recite from memory, for the house they’d lived in his entire life—despite everything, in the last two years, that’d gone wrong inside of it. He could tell she too had tried to forget everything that was right and all that could turn out right, in the end. “I know it’s hard,” she said as he clutched her in his arms, terrified at how close he’d come to leaving this woman who cared for him at any cost.
Yes, people who loved other people were tied together, just as hopeless as the silk in a spider’s web, but that didn’t mean you could control them absolutely. Colin felt his mother hold on to him not out of obligation or parental duty but as her own choice. Sometimes there was little you could do, he realized, to damage or save another life. Andy was going to be Andy no matter how much he loved or hated him, no matter how much you worshipped his body; Victor would desire and pursue no matter how far you ran, a predator acting on instinct. They will all flourish without me, his father had written, having made up his mind long before Colin even came into the world. All Colin had done was tell him it was okay, the word his father had wanted to hear from the beginning. Yes, I relieve you of life. It’s okay for you to die.
The boy Colin wanted to be did flourish, but only briefly. Confident as he was—self-reliant, sex-starved, independent, and able to win the heart of any man—he was a boy without a future; he was a boy who wouldn’t last. Losing an imagined life was a small death—your own death, one of the many fragments you’d made of yourself unable to go on. This was the boy his sister had seen, and while he died ahead of schedule it felt right, all the same, to watch him go, to see him breathe his last breath on the sun-drenched streets of this unreal city. He knew his mother, too, was mourning her own failed version, the woman she wasn’t supposed to be.
During a lifetime, we all have those rare dreams that leave us shaken for hours afterward, sometimes days. Yet there’s no describing a dream like this, not to another person. The events themselves, when cleaved from the dream’s emotions, mean nothing—are often laughable. But when you first wake with your leftover terror, your lingering sorrow or melancholy joy, there’s no way to talk yourself out of that impression. You can’t articulate your way back into reality. Lately, his father had written, with more and more of these dreams behind me, I wonder if that isn’t death: waking from whatever lifelong dream this world is and being unable to rid yourself of its impression. Death, therefore, would not be an event so much as the ache one feels after the wound that was life, now finally able to heal. After all these years, his father had written, I am ready to heal.
In the books about death, survivors are advised to create a life as dissimilar to the old one as possible. They use seasonal metaphors and refer to natural cycles, natural order, natural chaos. In the few books about suicide, change was crucial. Survivors were to put the house up for sale. Routines must be undone and new ones established. These, Diane found, were written like instructions: you will notice and it will help you, as if she were a plant someone should move closer to the sun. The metaphors here invoked forests—the two of you wandering through this forest and only one making it out, the aftermath of the “accident” throwing the survivor deeper into the darkest parts of the forest through which you had to walk until you found the clearing, until you could see far ahead and find your way home. Then you were to find a new home.
After those first few weeks, when she began to read the books her friends and family had foisted on her, Diane couldn’t take any of this seriously. Once, Colin found her in the middle of the night, having mistaken her laughter for more of her same old sobbing. “This is so ridiculous,” she said. “Listen—” and she read passages aloud as though sex advice from bad magazines, enunciating words like journey and rainbow. “I’ve read all the books,” she told Shannon. “But I’m still miserable. What would you think if I had someone paint a forest on the walls?”
She did change, though, and certain things did help as the books had said. There were parts of her life she began to notice. Eventually she could notice things without crying about them.
That morning, on her way to meet Liam—her last morning in California, she kept thinking—she threw away the gun. It was something she decided the night before, and it helped to think she brought it for this exact reason. She felt its weight in her purse like ashes in an urn. After Alan had gone into the ground she read something about cremation, how it allows you to find the right time to say good-bye, and she lamented one more thing—as she told Shannon—she’d fucked up. At three in the morning, while Colin snored in the other bed, she stepped out to the balcony. She wasn’t in the mood but out of ceremony she lit a cigarette. With her free hand she reached into her purse, the cold barrel, the familiar trigger. She couldn’t believe she’d kept it. She couldn’t believe she’d considered it. There was too much to love. Even if she left Los Angeles after all, watching that other Diane come to life and die off was enough. While she always laughed—and laughed even now—at the big bad forest in those books on suicide, she imagined, right then, that the blanket of streetlights beneath the mountains was the starlit meadow at that forest’s edge. I’m healed, she let herself think. After all this time, that’s all it took.
There would always be a void, Tim had assured her. So had her mother. Even Shannon, who’d lost no one as far as she knew, had warned that things would never be the same. You will always feel the loss, the books instructed, but at least, over the last few months, she could feel more than loss. Only yesterday she’d made love that felt like genuine love, even if it wasn’t. That morning, on her way to meet him at some old mansion, she accepted the sunlight and the rustling palms as pleasures she’d soon give up. How she’d explain it to Tim, in their next session, was by outlining the choice she made. I didn’t hold on to everything, she could tell him. I wasn’t trying to hoard emotions, like you said. The previous night, she’d pictured herself tossing the gun into some sewer or over the edge of a steep hill, standing for a moment in the breeze to say good-bye before going on with her life. Instead, her entire walk to the park was adjacent to rush-hour traffic, never alone. It wasn’t until she got to the park gates that she felt everyone else disappear. There were h
andprints on the stone, just beneath the address number. They weren’t imprinted in the rock, and in fact looked more like stains, but definitely stains in the shape of hands. Something stirred in her memory but crept out of sight before she could see it. She shook her head and walked through the gates. When no one was looking she took the gun from her purse and wiped it down with the sleeve of her blouse. Halfway up the walk she felt lightheaded. It was good for her, she promised herself, and chucked the gun into an overgrowth of ferns and flowers. It would look wrong to someone if she lingered, and she continued on. There wasn’t much time to mourn as she walked up the hill to meet the man who would soon be just one more person she’d met on her way through the forest. She laughed out loud despite the looks people gave her.
The way Liam talked about the mansion was through movies. She noticed this about the people she met in Los Angeles. It wasn’t only the tour guides and the shop owners; everyone shared a little of the secretly starstruck. It was their version of bringing up the weather. As Liam walked her through the grounds he kept gesturing toward the windows, inviting her to peer inside. “Do you recognize this room?” he asked, and when she shook her head he named the film and the scene. It wasn’t like the museum trips. She didn’t feel as though she was learning anything. She didn’t feel as if there were worlds she was peering into. Instead he was showing her just how fake those worlds were. “It’s amazing what they do with this place,” he said, leading her through the flower garden where they filmed the shoot-out at the end of Beverly Hills Cop. It made it easier to fall out of love with him, if love you could call it. She felt as if she could leave with a bittersweet satisfaction, as if it were nothing but a delicious meal ending in a cup of coffee.
The plan was to have a picnic brunch. Already the shade was growing scarce but they found a place between the hedges that was still cool, under a large stone obelisk. Liam had made sandwiches. “Are you sure we can just sit down on the grass? This is like a museum.”
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