“And then what happened?” Evan’s eyes were wide. “Do you have any stories?”
“We ran into a hitchhiker and actually picked him up,” Bart allowed after a moment. “Chris and I had been told so often that people outside of our faith were bad people. Maybe not intentionally, but they were different from us. After everything on this earth was done, they weren’t going to go to the same place as we were. So we wanted to test this theory and we gave him a ride. And you know, it was great. His name was Jack and he was really funny, actually. Bought us more coffee and food, chipped in for gas, and was so grateful we were there. It was…interesting. After he left, I realized it was one of the first times I felt alive. Like I was making my own decisions, and I realized how much I had already started to change. We had only been on the road for a week, but it was already enough. We had been so programmed to see bad in the world that finally trusting a stranger like that was monumental. I was different and I knew I would never go back.”
Bart paused, resting his cutlery on the side of his plate and staring off into space. The screen of the television had grown dim with the pause screen of the game. Inside the reflection, Evan noticed how he and Bart looked on the couch together. He saw his own chest leaning in towards Bart as he zoned off, waiting for the next sentence as if it would provide him with his final answer.
“You know, in all those road stories, writers want you to think it’s some spiritual quest,” Bart went on. “You drive and you drive and you drive, waiting for enlightenment. And does it come?”
Bart waited and shifted in his seat. The pause was so long Evan had started to think it was a rhetorical question.
“No, not really,” Bart answered. “Not any more than the average occurrences. What happened with the hitchhiker could have happened anywhere. “
“Maybe we just have a lot of epiphanies when we’re young. The world is still new for us at that age, so it’s possible for the stars or whatever else people have epiphanies on to move us.”
“We’re not that old, you know.”
“I’m not,” Evan corrected with a smile on his face. He was only three months younger than Bart, but it was a point of contention between them and an area that he never let him forget. Being twenty-somethings, a vague age with vague restrictions or goals, weighed on both men. Evan didn’t even know how Bart managed, since he had pretty much started his life over at age eighteen.
“Is Bart really your name? You did have to run away. You could be hiding right now.”
“Come on,” Bart said. “No one else names their kid Bartholomew and no one picks it for themselves.”
“Fair enough.”
Bart set down his plate that still contained a few noodles. Leaning back on the couch, he took the controller in his hand and returned to the game from before. Evan picked at his food, not hungry but not sure of what to do next. As he watched Bart move around on the screen, he became aware of just how much waiting there was in video games. Especially with something like Fallout, where you have no idea what you’re mission is until you’re on it. Bart suddenly flinched when an enemy came into view between two sand dunes. He fired, leaning his body forward. As Bart was shot, he exclaimed, “Ow!” and jerked to the side. Evan stifled another laugh.
“What?”
“I like how into it you are. It’s also quite hysterical to see a former member of a Mormon community go nuts firing his gun.”
Just as the words left Evan’s mouth, the avatar on the screen went over to his latest victim and looted the corpse.
“There’s a completely different moral ethic to video games,” Evan mentioned, still in awe with the screen. He had to admit; Bart was a much better player and he got far more out of watching him loot, pillage, and raid certain areas than he could have on his own. “We all become kleptomaniacs and murderers. It’s kind of fun.”
“But it’s a game,” Bart said. “Just like the Bible is just a book.”
Bart winked again before he wrenched the controller into another rough fight. After a brief struggle, he dropped the controller on the couch and sighed.
“Another drink?” Bart asked. Before Evan could answer, Bart had already risen to his feet and made his way into the kitchen. The clock on the wall read nearly ten at night. Evan didn’t even let it faze him this time around. At least, he thought, there had been some type of contact between Liam. Everyone was where they needed to be for the time being, even if there were no real answers to the purpose of tonight’s meeting.
As Bart continued to play and drink, Evan continued to watch him play and drink himself. As the empty bottles began to pile up on the coffee table, Bart’s performance began to falter with many more erratic controller movements and “ows” uttered anytime bullets hit his avatar’s body. Eventually, his once successful game drew upon too many resources and Bart clearly favored drinking rather than looking out for the bad guys behind sand.
“This seems to be a typical problem for you,” Evan said a wry smile on his face. “Am I right?”
“I can’t just go in there guns blazing or try and kill hookers. We’re not playing Grand Theft Auto. There is a chance to rebuild the moral world after an apocalypse, whereas you just get sucked into the madness that is GTA.”
“Way to blame the other person,” Evan mentioned, picking up another bottle.
“Whatever,” Bart said. With a final kill shot, he put down the controller onto the table and shut the game off. “It’s been nice knowing you, Ezekiel. Maybe some other time.”
Evan laughed a bit, but stopped when he noticed Bart’s back stiffen.
“What’s up, Bart?”
“Evan,” Bart said slowly. He pointed towards their empties on the table and Evan just shook his head.
“Are you having drinker’s remorse already?”
“No, Evan,” Bart pointed to the recent bottle Evan had just set down. Next to it was Bart’s half-empty bottle. It took Evan a few moments of comparison to realize that the bottles were the same. As in, both alcoholic.
Evan drew in a quick breath. “Fucking hell. How long have I been doing this?”
Bart picked up both of their drinks and peered inside. He stared for a long time before he said, “I can’t tell what I’m looking for. I didn’t think I was drinking as much as I was. Maybe all of these aren’t mine?” He paused, biting his lip. “Maybe you took more than just one sip?”
Evan blushed under the sudden attention. His tongue felt too big in his mouth, his hands shaking slightly. Inside his mind, he tried to remember the best quips and phrases from the intervention. As his eyes scanned Liam’s living room, he could almost see the chairs set up in a semi-circle, including some folding ones, and Liam staring at him paternally.
“Oh, man…” Evan said, allowing his voice to trail off.
Chapter 4
The intervention had been a Tuesday. Evan was sure of at least that much. Normally, he worked the Tuesday produce shift at the local grocery store, but he had skipped his shift by sleeping late in the afternoon. When he did awake, Liam had sent him a text asking to pick him up some milk when he stopped by that night. Evan had known even then that the milk had been a ploy to see if he was at work. Evan didn’t reply. After another few more hours of sleep, he eventually threw on some clothing and shoes and bought a two-liter carton for Liam at the convenience store.
When Evan arrived, he nearly tripped over the pile of shoes in the front hallway. There were far more pairs than average, even for Liam who had a pair for every outfit. Evan walked faster into the apartment. Just as he placed the milk down on the counter, he knew what was going on. All the lights in the living area were flicked on as Evan closed his eyes. Before he opened them, he knew what he would see. He had watched enough daytime TV and TLC to understand what was happening.
“Oh, man…” he groaned. The chairs and people with stern faces overtook the room. Liam seemed to appear out of nowhere and placed a hand on his shoulder. He tried to pull him into the center of the room, but Evan
didn’t budge.
“Evan.”
“Liam,” Evan mocked, a sting of alcohol still on his voice. He cleared his throat. “Here, let me just put way the milk you so desperately fucking needed. And then I’ll be on my way.”
Evan slammed the fridge door, making all the glass jars inside of it jingle. When Evan tried to turn the corner and was stopped by Liam’s large forearm, he gave up and sat down. He folded his arms across his chest and wished he had his hat to pull down over his brow. After a few minutes of terrible silence, the intervention officially began.
“Evan, you can’t keep doing this to yourself,” Liam said.
“What? I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Drinking. Sleeping late and missing work.”
“No one misses me, Liam. That’s the point. Work always finds someone to cover my shifts. That’s just how life goes.”
“No,” Liam said.
“No what?”
“No, I’m not taking life advice from you right now.”
“I did study philosophy in college.”
“Yeah, and if you haven’t notice, they flunked you. Kicked you out. And now you owe back tuition.”
“Starving artist, then. You know yourself that the school system is flawed.”
“Yes,” Liam said slowly. “But just because all the great artists and thinkers drown their sorrows until they disappear doesn’t mean that it was good. People have faults. Drinking that much is not helping or an outlet to your creative energies—especially when you don’t produce anything at all.”
Evan looked around the room. Most of the people there were ones he barely knew. Nate, with his stylish hair and nice suit, had even brought his boyfriend that Evan had met twice. And Nate was Liam’s friend, too. Not his. Why did they care so much? Why bother spending an entire Saturday in someone else’s dirty apartment while they tried to clean up a booze bag? Evan looked at them all with a curl of his lip and visible disdain. He wanted them to leave.
“Carpe diem,” he said with a flick of his wrist. “Come on, seize the day. You shouldn’t spend it here with me. Go.”
No one in the room moved.
“What?” Evan said. “Do you need me to die for you to get on with your lives? Because that’s what it feels like.”
Liam laid a hand on his shoulder and shook Evan gently until he looked up at him.
“I know that wasn’t a suicide plot,” Liam said. “But tell me what you mean?”
“No,” Evan said right away. “I don’t want to.”
“And I don’t want to give you an intervention,” Liam quipped. “But I like covering for you or cleaning up your vomit even less. Sometimes we make tough choices. But we make them.”
“That’s your decision,” Evan said, looking down. “Not mine.”
“Okay,” Liam let out a low breath. He pulled a chair from the corner over to where Evan sat. He leaned in on his knees, so they were close. Almost kissing distance, Evan thought in a gleeful, maniacal way. If he kissed Liam, he might balk at this whole scenario and never come back to it. Showing love, Evan had thought up until this point, was the best way to scare anyone away. It seemed to have work with his family so far.
Evan smiled. “Hi, Liam. Come here…”
He leaned forward, placing his hands over Liam’s fingers. Liam’s face didn’t change, even as Evan got close enough for their noses to touch. Evan eyed Sarah next to Liam, who also didn’t seem to move or care.
Well, Evan thought, may as well since I’m here. He licked his lips before pressing them against Liam’s. Liam didn’t move. Not even the people inside the room seemed to care at what was going on. As if they had expected it, Evan thought. As if this was one of those typical behaviors and patterns they had spent so much time observing and recounting to him during this lovely rite of passage.
Evan pressed into Liam a little harder, running his hands over his, before he pulled away. Liam still had his eyes open.
“Jesus, man. That’s creepy. You need to close your eyes when you kiss. It’s more polite.”
Evan crossed his arms across his chest. While he had always thought Liam was attractive, the straight factor had always blocked him off from his mind and fantasies. Now that he knew what Liam tasted like, the feel of his stubble against his face, he twisted inside his sweater, unsure of what to do with the desire. He looked out at the other people there, focusing in on Lindsey, one of Sarah’s friends and coworkers, who smiled.
“What?”
“Nothing,” she said, raising her red nails. “I just had a bet going. And thank you, Evan. I am now ten dollars richer.”
Daniel next to her handed over a crumpled up bill.
“On whether or not I’d kiss Liam? Nice try,” Evan said, his anger coming through in surly words. “I could have told you that would happen.”
“Oh, I know,” Lindsey said. “But my bet was for the first hour. When you were uncomfortable enough.”
“Wait,” Evan said, eyeing the clock in the kitchen. “You set this all up?”
Liam sighed and, at his feet again, put a hand on Evan’s shoulder. “We organized this because we care about you. We wanted you to know that your behavior has gotten out of control.”
“The kissing thing,” Lindsey said. “Well, we just know you. We figured we had to spend some time guessing.”
Liam shot her a small look. She nodded and then drew her lips tight against her mouth again.
“So…?” Evan asked, his eyes wide.
“So,” Liam added. “We care, Evan. You know we do, but you push us away. Now, tell me more of what you meant before? About feeling dead?”
Evan’s face went down to his shoes, his dark skater pants, and the beginning of a shitty tattoo on the inside of his ankle. When he sat upright in his chair, the necklace under the red shirt moved. Sometimes it tangled in his chest hair, sometimes it was too cold in the morning, but he always kept it with him. This saint—and really, all the saints—had made Evan feel as if he could escape the death that seemed to be present inside his family, through constant silence and ignoring.
“I used to want to be dead—or that my mother and father to die,” Evan started, still looking at the ground. “I wanted that so I could feel better. But I never meant kill. Not really.”
“I get it,” Liam offered. “It’s an emotion more than anything. A metaphor we overuse to the point where it becomes part of our everyday language. When we get stuck in traffic, we say it’s torture. But that’s not quite right. Torture happens all the time, right under our very nose, but waiting for a light to change is just boredom. I get what you’re saying.”
“Yeah, exactly.”
“So what’s underneath?” Liam asked, turning his head to the side. “If you don’t really want to die or kill them, what are you trying to say?”
Evan clenched his jaw. “Nothing. That’s the problem. They don’t acknowledge me. I send an email with good news about a job or a grade and they don’t really respond. I send an email with bad news and they don’t respond. But, my mother will find me on Facebook and add me and think she’s doing enough. She’ll deposit money into my account if she thinks I need some. I mean, how the hell do you think I’ve been able to afford drinking if I don’t really go to work anymore?”
The room nodded, understanding.
“I know I shouldn’t be complaining. So many kids are kicked out and deprived of the resources that I have. But I feel like that’s the problem, you know? There is nothing good or bad here, so I actually have nothing. I may as well be dead to them. It’s as if they treat me like a body, but they don’t acknowledge me as a person. I’m a burden on money and food and anything else. But they don’t care if I’m gay. If I’m happy or if I’m promoted at work or even if I’m fired. That’s the problem. Not caring is actually killing me.”
Evan’s voice broke then. He turned his palms up on his legs and buried his face in his hands. Liam sighed and placed another palm on his shoulder.
“We know, Evan. It’s really easy to see your parents aren’t good for you. If this was a boyfriend, we’d be telling you to leave.”
“But nothing bad has really happened. And they’re family.”
“Nothing good as really happened, either,” Liam countered. “And they are family. That makes it worse, because there is built-in expectation.”
Evan nodded. The expectation was what killed him each and every time he got psyched about something. He would imagine the big loving arms he could walk into, the praise and the wonderful words, only to get an asinine question about the weather where he was living and whether or not he needed rent money back as a response. He had been sick of it. To numb the disappointment afterwards, he turned to drinking. The equation was so simple and so complicated at the same time.
“We’re not your family,” Liam stated slowly. Everyone rose to their feet and stood around Evan in the chair. “But we try. We care about you and we will give you feedback, Evan. The good and the bad. You’ve been waiting in silence for too long—and you need to actually see us for what we’re worth.”
Evan nodded. When he had first opened Liam’s door and found all the lights off, he thought the whole intervention thing was a joke. He walked into the living room and then been bombarded. He was angry, sure, but he went into the situation willingly. He knew that he had a problem and that no one was mentioning it. The cry for help cliché was actually true for him—but that didn’t mean it was bad. His friends were telling him cries for help were good, and absolutely necessary for him, because he had never been answered before. Now that he was being paid attention to, Evan was relieved and also confused. He had no idea what the next step was. That, in itself, was enough to make him want to drink to lessen the blow of the real world.
“Now,” Liam stated, taking direction of the room again. “We don’t want you drinking anymore. But life is rarely that simple.”
Evan laughed, far too much. He bunched his fists up and tried to listen. His mouth was still dry and, in seeing him fidget and look around the room, Sarah suddenly appeared by his side and passed him some coffee and water.
Divine Intervention Page 4
