Topics About Which I Know Nothing

by Patrick Ness

  ‘You have no way of knowing whether I’ll tell them or not.’

  ‘Yes, I do,’ Peter said and smiled. ‘Mom and Dad were always blind to your lies, but I could always tell. Do they know you’re queer yet, by the way?’

  He smiled, but not unkindly. Drew decided to take it in stride.

  ‘But even if I did tell them, they’d know you were alive which is a lot different than thinking you were dead.’

  Peter frowned. ‘What would they do? Come looking for me? They wouldn’t find me. They wouldn’t find any trace. They would end up either thinking you were lying or resenting you for taking their peace of mind away. Either way, you lose.’

  Drew’s stomach sank.

  ‘I hate to be like this,’ Peter said, ‘but I can’t compromise here. I’ll see you, but you can’t tell. Not anyone, not ever. Okay?’

  Bewildered and, it seemed now, bewilderingly, Drew accepted the offer and meant it. Peter wrote down his phone number and told Drew to call him at seven. They parted and that was that. It was only the paper on which the number was written that gave Drew any hard proof that their meeting had occurred at all.

  Damn, he thought, damn, damn, damn. Drew moved down Oxford Street. Lies, he thought.

  There had been Thandie, around whom Drew managed to produce enough ambiguous smoke to throw his parents off the Happy Trail during his adolescence. They would ask with hungry eyes, ‘Why don’t you ask that Thandie out on a regular date instead of all this “friends” stuff?’ Drew would answer truthfully, ‘I prefer her as a friend. She’s a great friend.’ But he would very slightly double the meaning, sparkling his eyes a bit. His parents would smile to themselves knowingly (hopefully) and leave the subject be. So Drew managed to become quite good at equivocation, which was less brave and less defensible than lying, but give the guy a break. The truth (‘Mom, Dad, I’m fucking Mark Walters from down the street right under your noses.’) was an amusing but completely untenable option.

  The fact that Thandie was black helped. The parents could never really extend their approval, old teachings dying hard, but neither, in their relief at a female in their son’s life and in their Christian wish to be colorblind, could they object. About and around Thandie, they were effectively paralyzed. Check and checkmate. Drew couldn’t have been more fortunate had he gotten married.

  It takes two parties for a lie, doesn’t it? Drew thought under the day’s cold, white sun. The liar and the believer. Damn, I think I just made a huge mistake.

  He ran back to the cafe, pushing Australian pedestrians aside and experiencing his first rudeness. He reached the cafe door and looked around. Of course Peter was gone. Of course he was. The meeting was over, he would have gone home or wherever, he would be expecting Drew to call him tonight.

  Shit. The next five and a half hours lay before him like staticky white noise.

  He killed time in the worst way: television. He watched Australian news and tried to figure out the temperature conversions (Was thirty-one hot or merely warm?). He watched a documentary on art and was surprised to see full-frontal male nudity at five in the afternoon (although still not quite as surprising as seeing a documentary on at five in the afternoon). He watched a rerun of The Jeffersons (George is put under hypnosis). He watched the Australian version of Wheel of Fortune in horrified awe. There wasn’t enough tension in the clicker that slowed the wheel down, so a contestant would spin and the wheel would go and go and go and go while everyone smiled and clapped and said ‘Big Money!’ in Australian accents.

  It was all boring enough to keep his mind off what he was sure was a fumble about Peter. Although at commercials: He’s not going to be there. The number is made-up. He said just enough to get away from me and now he’s gone again. He knows no one would believe me and that it would just upset them. Worst of all, he knows that if I never see him again, I’ll convince myself that it was all some imagined thing. I hate it that he knows that about me. Shit shit shit shit. Et cetera. Drew is not much help to us at this moment. He is mostly incoherent, and when he’s not, he’s saying ‘United States President Gerald Ford’ to the television screen.

  Ring. Skepticism. Ring. Self-flagellation (‘You fucking imbecile.’). Ring. More obscenities, tut tut (‘Godammit.’). Ring. ‘Hello.’ Redemption.

  ‘Peter?’

  ‘No, hold on.’ A shout to the back of the room. ‘Peter! Phone!’

  A tupperware party of milliseconds.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Peter? It’s Drew.’

  ‘Drew. You’re half an hour early.’

  ‘Yeah, well.’

  ‘No problem. We should meet.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘I’ll pick you up in twenty minutes.’

  ‘Great. Terrific.’

  ‘Bye.’

  ‘Bye.’

  A black hole, an airless, dustless, thoughtless vacuum of nothing. Nineteen minutes to go. It briefly occurred to Drew that this was ruining his vacation.

  The car was a brick-brown Honda. Peter got out as Drew walked up.

  ‘Hey,’ Peter greeted.

  ‘Hi,’ Drew said, ‘glad you came.’

  ‘Uh, listen,’ Peter said, ‘I brought a few friends along. Hope you don’t mind.’

  Getting in the car, ‘Drew, this is Dan and Arthur. Guys, this is my friend Drew from America.’

  Drew locked eyes with Peter. Peter raised his eyebrows, and the car sped off into Sydney traffic.

  Well.

  At dinner:

  ‘So,’ Dan asked, ‘how long have you two Yanks known each other?’

  Drew had no response to this.

  ‘Since we were kids,’ Peter said. ‘Our parents were mutual friends.’

  He glanced over to Drew, forcibly passing the baton. Hand it back? or …

  ‘The age difference was a little much for us to be really close, but our families kept kind of intertwining,’ Drew sighed complicitly.

  Peter didn’t smile or offer any overt thanks, but his body settled in a satisfied way.

  ‘So when I was planning my trip, I thought I’d look Peter up.’

  ‘Well, that’s great,’ said Arthur. ‘It’s always nice to have friends overseas.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Dan continued, ‘we’ve got a friend in Germany we always stay with when we go …’

  And off they all went to Europe, and the tapestry for the evening began to be woven, until it got thick enough to smother. The rest of the dinner conversation was the same charade with only one noteworthy exchange. Arthur was speaking: ‘And then out of the record store walks Nathan, this guy Peter used to date, and he …’ Drew looked across at Peter. Peter smiled and shrugged. Drew sighed. Uncle, he thought and surrendered.

  Drew looked back over the years and it seemed absurdly impossible that he could have missed it. Missing Dan and Arthur was one thing, his mind had been on other things entirely. But not once in the admittedly staccato times that Drew and Peter had spent together had Drew sensed anything. At all. Peter hadn’t even mentioned it at lunch, even after he had pretty much nailed Drew’s own private truths to his forehead. Maybe it was because Drew had never expected it, had never gone looking.

  What’s going on? Drew thought. Have I lost every one of my bearings?

  Loud. And loud. And loud. They had gone to a club.

  ‘What?!’

  ‘What did you say!?’

  ‘This is hopeless!’

  It was all crash, clamor and silence.

  And then of course it was late. And of course Peter was tired. And of course the evening was over. The drive to Drew’s hotel passed in the same silence that had muffled the past two hours. Drew accepted that he’d been defeated and tried to be gracious. As they approached, he said, ‘I’ve got another day here in Sydney, want to try to get together tomorrow?’

  Peter made a half-wince of apology. Drew was surprised when he said, ‘Yeah, sure.’ There was a contradiction there somewhere.

  ‘I’ll call you in the morning,’ Pete
r said.

  ‘Oh,’ Drew said, getting out of the car.

  ‘I will,’ Peter insisted, but only slightly. ‘We’ll go to the beach. Or something.’

  Drew smiled to mask the importance of this to Dan and Arthur. ‘Nice meeting you both; it was fun.’ And to Peter: ‘If I don’t hear from you by ten, you’ll know I’ll have given up.’

  He shut the car door, turned, and went into the hotel, shellshocked.

  What happened just there?

  IV

  Up by six. Showered and groomed by six-thirty. Body clenched tight as a fist by 6:45. The jetlag had dwindled to the point of making Drew simply an early-rising Sydneysider. He breakfasted at the hotel café after explaining in quite annoying detail just how important it was for him to be retrieved if anyone called. He forced his way through his coffee, purposely black, and therefore undrinkable, to encourage deliberation. After nearly two hours, he looked at his watch. It was 7:25. Fucking hell, he thought.

  His overwhelming impression of the previous night was of sudden entropy. As if, after blithely running through dandelion seeds, he had suddenly found himself immersed in salt, only able to move millimeters although not really at all. If you know what he means. Drew is clearly becoming useless to us again but fortunately, there is a phone call:

  ‘It’s Mom,’ smiled the hotel counter girl who, up until now, had seemed so kind.

  For a moment, Drew considered excuses. (Tell her I’m out. Tell her I’m sleeping. Tell her I hate her, for Christ’s sake.) Then Malevolent Counter Girl said into the receiver, ‘He’s right here.’ She offered the phone to Drew.

  Deep breath. Another. Swallow.

  ‘Mom?’

  ‘Hi, son! How’s it going? Are you having a good time?’

  ‘Hi, mom.’

  ‘How’s the weather? We got your postcard! Can’t believe it got here so fast!’

  ‘Six days isn’t long plus remember -’

  ‘Yes, the dateline, I know. Isn’t that just the weirdest thing?’

  ‘Um …’

  ‘Did you get to the opera like you planned?’

  ‘Yeah, Don Giovanni.’

  ‘Means nothing to me. Is the opera house as neat as it looks on TV?’

  Drew saw the girl pick up Line 2 out of the corner of his eye.

  ‘Mom …’

  ‘Your father’s in the hospital again.’

  (‘Powell Sydney Hotel, can I help you?’)

  ‘What?’

  (‘Actually, he’s standing right here on another line. Isn’t that funny? Can I take a message and have him call you?’)

  ‘His toe again. He’ll be okay, but it’s sure got him down.’

  (’Six o’clock. Sure.’)

  ‘Look, Mom, I’ve …,’ frantically waving his hands.

  (‘I’ll give him the message.’)

  ‘Yeah, I know, this is costing me a fortune. Call us when you get back.’

  (‘Bye.’)

  ‘Bye, Mom.’ He hung up before he heard her reply. ‘Wait!’ He lunged at the girl as she hung up the phone.

  ‘Shit!’ he said, too loudly. Heads turned in the lobby.

  ‘Oh, sorry,’ she smiled at him, oblivious to all despair inflicted. ‘Well, he seemed in quite a hurry anyway. Here’s the message. He’ll pick you up at six, something’s come up.’

  Drew took the message. It said, Peter says he’ll pick you up at six, something’s come up.

  ‘Pick me up here?’ Drew asked.

  ‘Presumably,’ she said with enough good cheer to blind. Drew looked at his watch. Ten hours, twenty-two minutes to go. He grabbed his hair with both hands.

  ‘Oh, man,’ he said.

  And there it sat. The day. Having made no real itinerary from the beginning, he was faced with the common mistake of novices on vacation: nothing to do. His only formulated plan from a few days ago was ‘the beach or something, it’s Australia for Christ’s sake, someone will come up and offer me things.’

  Instead, he walked.

  There was a sort of path, not more than an undeveloped block really, near where Drew lived as a child called the Cherry Tree Trail. A purely functional title; simple, nothing haunted. Drew wouldn’t have known a cherry tree from a telephone pole, so he had no idea of the accuracy of the name, but it was a place to go on those rare occasions when enough children in the neighborhood coalesced to do something as a group. If pressed, Drew could only have actually recalled a single time that this happened, but whole childhoods are built around less. It suffices.

  This is the memory: No common enemy, no bully from which to hide, and no common goal either, no hunt. Just four or five (or seven or eight) children slowly moving through waxy underbrush and the thick wholesome dirt smell of towering conifers that successfully blotted out signs of suburbia. There is an attention-needer in the group, as always, but he is satisfied by an audience of only two, leaving the others to keep to their own conversations (so there must be more than four, but certainly not more than ten or one group would become two). Weaving under and over tree branches, not everyone always speaks to everyone else but no one leaves the gravitational pull of the group. There is no point to the group, really, except to exist together like water molecules pulled into a drop. The key here is not individuality, because in the burn-and-rest lives of the very young, the different one always remains the different one. After a time, the group bivouacs, and whole bolts of nothing occur. Then splinters of two and the quick wait for sunset. Then each goes home alone, whittled down into exhaustion.

  Drew could only remember the names of two friends from this far back in childhood: Angela, whose father was black and mother was white, and Jeremy, who lived in an A-frame house that, if nothing else, was singular. Drew turned around. He half-expected to see one of them getting out of a cab. There was only a man and his young son playing chess on a park bench.

  Where was he? The Royal Botanical Gardens again. It was a crisp October spring day, pulled taut by its own length. The sky was a gorgeous asphyxiated-child blue with some saliva foam clouds spat here and there. It was like a really bright and lovely funeral. Drew could have cried. Odd. He hadn’t cried at his brother’s funeral. Looking back on it again, Drew could see the closed coffin, a (pseudo-, it’s turned out) military-issue dark brown, some flowers, a few relatives, scads of just people who felt they should show up. And all the while Drew sitting, itching, craving, dying to leave, to get out, to flee. So now he finally had, only his brother had beaten him to it.

  There it was. Well, goddamn it, there it was.

  ‘Hold on a minute, let me check.’

  A pause.

  ‘There’s no answer in his room. Can I take a message?’

  ‘Yeah, tell him Peter called, and I’m sorry but I won’t be able to make it.’

  ‘All righty.’

  She wrote the message and scrawled 314 at its top. The other girl behind the counter watched her put it in the message box.

  ‘314?’ the second girl said.

  ‘Yeh.’

  ‘The American fellow?’

  ‘Yeh?’

  ‘He checked out half an hour ago. You were at lunch.’

  ‘Really? But he was real keen on seeing this Peter fellow earlier.’

  ‘Guess he isn’t now. He took a cab to the airport. Then it’s off to Alice, I think he said.’

  ‘Hm.’ She crumpled the note and tossed it in the garbage.

  And we race through them because, although lovely, they’re nothing exceptional (well, to anyone but Drew) …

  Alice Springs and Uluru were heat-blasted, blinding, and thrumming with purpose. At sunrise, it really and truly did change colors. Cairns was lots of rowdy, touristy fun: kangaroos, wallabies, koalas, and wombats; a Great Barrier Reef dive off a sailboat chartered especially for a group of homos; a chance for another smiling indiscretion. Then to Brisbane for the international flight and a seat next to a young Australian man who would not stop bouncing.

  ‘First time out of Australia,’ h
e said without prompting, rubbing his hands on his pant legs.

  ‘Oh, really?’ Drew said, feeling genuinely good. ‘How exciting. Just a holiday?’

  ‘Yeh, off on an adventure, I guess.’ He lowered his voice to a conspiratorial level, ‘I’m so excited, I’m about to piss my pants.’ He snorted, embarrassed, and bounced some more unconsciously.

  ‘Just out of college?’ Drew asked.

  ‘Yup, just done, well, not quite done. Didn’t actually finish. Didn’t really actually start. Not really. Wasn’t real good at it, you know? At uni? Trip’s a present from my folks. Reckon they think I’ll get my head in line or find myself or something.’

  He laughed again.

  ‘And what would you do if you found yourself?’ Drew asked.

  ‘Dunno,’ he said, and stopped moving for the first time. He smiled again. ‘Buy myself a beer, maybe? Kick my ass for being such a layabout?’

  They laughed easily, warmly.

  ‘You?’ the young man asked back.

  ‘If I found myself?’

  ‘Yeh.’

  Drew exhaled through his nose and considered. The plane roared forward and upward. Away and away and away.

  2,115 opportunities

  Reality 1, 22 July, 12:48–53pm

  The ‘first’ time, Ryan (Subject 1) sits alone at the booth, nodding his head absently to The Ramones on the jukebox (some joker has inexplicably selected ‘Pet Sematary’ over a live ‘I Wanna Be Sedated’ from the CD offerings), looking through the window to the outdoor tables on the other side, angling his view just so in order to appear not to be staring at four rich-looking teenagers (dusted leather sandals, gold necklaces out-expensing ugly) sharing an afternoon bite with a dog (labrador, chocolate), no doubt on their way to or from the beach during the current summer break, sitting out in the sunny afternoon under a blue sky that looks badly in need of a wipe with a damp cloth.