We Still Live

by Sara Dobie Bauer

  Chapter Thirteen

  IN A STRIPED shirt and blazer, John leaned against the classroom’s front desk and crossed his arms. All staff members of Being Frank waited silently, even Janelle and Anthony, because they knew John was not one for standing in front of the class, lecturing. With the exuberance of a hormonal teen, he usually walked up and down rows, throwing out ideas until students picked up the thread. Not today apparently—and there was the matter of the vote. Isaac stood off to the side against a wall, giving John space.

  “I’d like to apologize for my behavior last week,” he said. “I was completely unprofessional. I let these yahoos—” Janelle and Anthony ducked their heads. “—get a little out of hand. I know a bad day is no excuse, but I was having a really bad day.”

  Janelle frowned. “Are you feeling better now?”

  “Yeah, I’m fine. But we have more important business to deal with.” He paused for a long, slow breath. “We all have access to the shared documents in Google Docs, so we’ve all been able to read some of the submissions. So far, we’ve received a lot of submissions that suck, but it’s very early. I have no doubt this could be the coolest thing we’ve ever done in the English Department—bravest thing, at least. However, as we so vocally debated last Tuesday, there’s an issue of politics. Agenda.” He crossed his ankles, imitating a nervous human pretzel. “Do you want my opinion, or do you just want to vote?”

  “We want to hear what you think, man,” Anthony said.

  John’s eyes flickered just once to Isaac. “Every piece we receive is going to have an opinion, either intentional or not. That’s the blessing and curse of this medium. We put a little of ourselves into everything we write, agreed?”

  A crowd of nods.

  “We have to be open to…everyone.” He sighed. “Liberal, conservative, Christian, atheist. Anger, sadness, love, hate; I don’t feel right censoring any of that. But the format is another issue entirely, okay? The essay that brought about this discussion is academic in nature, no matter how well written the argument. I don’t feel comfortable making Being Frank a platform for debate; we have a newspaper for that. I want this to be a safe space for students to express their emotions. They might not feel safe out there.” He pointed to the window, to College Green. “But maybe they can feel safe on the page. Does that make sense?”

  Janelle nodded. “You’re right, John. That essay has no place in a literary magazine. I was wrong last week.”

  “Wait.” Anthony dug around in his bag. “I need to get my phone to record. Can you say that again slowly? The part about you being wrong?”

  She rolled her eyes, and Isaac hid a smile behind his hand.

  “This isn’t up to Janelle and me,” John said. “I want to hear from all of you. I want to hear what you think about this.”

  A girl with glasses and a ponytail raised her hand. “We can’t judge. Quality, yes, but content?” She shook her head. “We have to keep a distance.”

  “Very good. Yes.” John gripped the desk and looked at his feet. “I think we have to keep a distance in general. For the next few months, we’re going to be reading repeatedly about what happened in June. I haven’t recovered yet; I don’t know if you have. If you need to step away, step away. If there’s something that really bothers you…” He snapped his fingers. “Look, okay, we’ll create a system. Like a checklist. If a submission hits you too hard, pass it on. Someone else can read it.”

  “If it hits us hard, isn’t that the point?” Janelle asked.

  “Hitting hard and hitting too hard are different things,” Isaac added. He was beginning to feel like a creeper, lurking against the wall.

  “I’m not a child,” she said.

  John clicked his tongue. “Yes, you are. I know you all went through something you didn’t deserve, but don’t be callous. Don’t bury what happened. Feel it. Put it on the page. Don’t put on a tough front, not for me.” He eyed each of them in turn. “We decided to do something radical with the literary magazine this year. Radical is never easy. The deeper we go, the harder things are going to get. The more phone calls from parents I’m going to have to deal with and angry students and angry faculty. But if this is what we want to do—give voices to the grieving and the dead—I will fight for you.” His voice lost its power. “As much as I can.”

  “Me too,” Isaac said.

  John smiled. “See? And no one’s going to mess with Isaac because he’s a giant. Does anyone else have anything they’d like to say?”

  No one answered.

  John raised his right hand. “Opinion-based treatise.” He raised his left. “Or fearless emotional truth.”

  Every left hand rose. Fearless they would be.

  ISAAC WALKED UP the nighttime steps of Ellis Hall. On the third floor, he knocked on every door, but all were locked. The building was quiet because it was night, and no one hung around there at night. Candles flared to light, illuminating flowers and faces of the dead—a makeshift altar in the hall that belonged on College Green. He knelt when he recognized a picture of John, “RIP” written across his forehead. Blood poured from the base of his neck where the bullet would have been if Chris had pulled the trigger. But he hadn’t; John was alive.

  Where was John?

  Isaac hurried back down the candlelit hall and tried to go the way he’d come, but the door to the stairs was now locked too. He banged on it—bang, bang, bang.

  He kept knocking until the noise woke him, and he realized someone was actually knocking on his front door. Rolling over in bed, he groaned and grabbed his glowing cell: 3:00 a.m.

  “What the…” In nothing but boxers, he grabbed a shirt and pulled it over his head. “Who is it?”

  “Freddy Krueger.”

  Isaac opened the front door, lock fixed after Simon’s departure. “What are you doing here?”

  John leaned forward and back on his toes, hands in his jeans pockets. Eyes wide, he looked like he’d had too much coffee. “Couldn’t sleep.”

  “So now I can’t sleep.”

  “Yeah.” John walked in and headed for the kitchen.

  Isaac winced from the sudden white light while John opened and closed cabinets.

  “Where’s my whiskey?”

  “Shit.” Isaac wiped the sleep from his eyes and remembered that horrible night with Simon.

  “You drank all my whiskey?” John kicked a cupboard closed. “Dick.”

  “I owe you a bottle.”

  John walked back in and did a face-plant onto the couch, gangly legs hanging over the arm.

  Isaac crouched next to his face. “What’s going on?”

  John grumbled against the couch cushion. “I had a bad dream.”

  “I didn’t think you dreamed at all.” He sat on the floor, the better to touch John’s hair, still cold with November chill. “Maybe going off your meds isn’t a good idea.”

  “I told you I’m not going off them. Just cutting back.”

  “Well?”

  He shifted onto his back with a huff. “I can’t write on the drugs. They’re not good for me, and I hate them.”

  “But you need them.”

  John leaned up and crackled his knuckles. Where was all this energy coming from? “You know, one fucked-up thing happens in your life, and your brain just…” He put his hands by his head and mimicked the sound of an explosion. “You know that thing I told them tonight about keeping a distance from the work? That was for me. Reading all this shit, Isaac, seeing that day from all these different perspectives? It’s like playing it on repeat from different camera angles.”

  “Do you want to stop?”

  “No.” His voice sounded hoarse. “No, it’s just me. Dutifully carrying around my residual guilt.”

  Isaac joined him on the couch. “You have nothing to be guilty about.”

  John laughed, and the sound sent a shiver down Isaac’s spine.

  “I hate when you laugh like that,” he said. “It’s awful.”

  “Well, sometimes, I’m
awful.” And John looked it—exhausted but awake, fingers twitching against his knees like he hid insects in his skin.

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  He scratched his nose. His darting eyes studied the room but didn’t seem to focus on anything. “Let’s fuck.”

  Isaac coasted his hand up and down John’s back. “I don’t think that’s a good idea right now.”

  “Maybe Adam would be up for quickie.”

  “Fuck, John.” Isaac stood and circled the coffee table. “Why the hell are you mad at me?”

  He pulled his hair. “I need you to take me apart right now and put me back together with better parts.”

  “I love all your parts.”

  “Not…this.” He hugged himself. “Whatever this is.”

  “John, I’m out of my depth here. I don’t know what to say or do to make this better. I wish I knew. Maybe you should see your therapist tomorrow.”

  “No, I don’t want to talk about it. Talk, talk.” He squeezed his eyes shut and rubbed his forehead. “Please just take me to bed. And not for sleeping. I don’t want to sleep anymore.”

  Isaac didn’t move any closer. He kept his distance because he thought touching John might break them both. “What did you dream about tonight?”

  John held himself tighter and rocked forward and back. “Everyone was dead. Except for me. Why was I still alive?”

  Isaac sat on the coffee table and grabbed John by the shoulders. He stopped the rocking, but it took a minute for John to look up. He was used to feeling John’s gaze, but in that moment, he remembered the first time they’d met—the way that, despite Isaac’s greater height, John had somehow made him feel small with just a look. It was the bottomless nature of those eyes, those drowning pools of green, emotive enough to transfer despair, confusion, and fear, like a frigid wind to the face.

  “I don’t know why, John, but you are. You’re still alive.”

  “Prove it,” he said. He stood, took Isaac’s hand, and dragged him to the bedroom.

  ISAAC’S ALARM AT seven might as well have been a damn rooster in his tiny bedroom. He cussed and clawed for his cell phone only to be met by a news alert received at five a.m. John, blessedly, still dozed behind him, wedged between Isaac and the wall in his twin bed. It was a good thing John was so thin, or they never would have fit.

  Quietly, Isaac climbed out of bed and went to the living room. He turned on the TV and kept the volume on mute as he scrolled through a couple news stations, eventually settling on one, and turned up the volume a bit. Words scrolled across the screen above a backdrop of police light in the Miami night.

  Forty-nine killed in gay club. Shooter has suspected terrorist ties.

  He pressed his lips together—hard—as his eyes burned.

  No, not this, not another one. It was getting worse and fast. Isaac glanced toward his front window, dread curling his hands into fists, as if he could feel them—the would-be shooters, the kids waiting to go crazy. But there were too many. They were everywhere.

  A pretty newscaster with a fake tan spoke softly. “Gunfire was first reported at one thirty in the morning at Metro nightclub, although the standoff continued for three hours with over two hundred hostages trapped inside. The police aren’t sure—”

  Isaac turned off the TV as soon as he heard John behind him.

  Hair askew, he snarled, “Don’t you dare turn that off.” He snatched the remote and turned the TV back on, volume up. Side by side, they watched the carnage, the screaming, the 911 recordings, and dead bodies under sheets. “Is that Miami?”

  “Yeah.”

  John dropped the remote. “Oh, my God. Where’s my phone?”

  “Your phone?”

  “My phone!” He ran back to the bedroom, where Isaac heard the telltale sound of clothes being thrown about.

  Isaac moved to follow, but before he could cross the threshold into his room, John smacked into his chest coming back out. His phone went flying. He cussed and chased it, scooping it up in shaking hands.

  “John? What—”

  He dialed and held the phone to his ear. “Pick up. Pick up, you son of a bitch. Don’t be dead.” John’s eyes never left the TV.

  Isaac took a step away. John must know someone in Miami—probably a gay someone, a someone who frequented bars like Metro—so Isaac, despite his ignorance, repeated Don’t be dead in his own head.

  The volume was up so loud on John’s phone, Isaac heard an unfamiliar male voice answer on the line, followed by John’s panicked voice. “Ben, are you okay?”

  “Yeah, we didn’t go out last night.”

  Isaac’s own phone buzzed in his hand with a text from Tommy. Don’t let John watch the news.

  “Christ.” John leaned his forehead against the nearest doorframe. “Did you…is everyone all right? I mean…”

  “We don’t know yet, sweetie.” Ben, whoever Ben was, used pet names? “Everyone’s calling everyone, and people aren’t picking up, and the cops aren’t releasing anything. It’s a mess.”

  John knocked his forehead into the door once. “That’s what you get for moving to Florida.”

  Ben’s exhale crackled the connection. “I miss you.”

  “Miss you too. Call me later?”

  They hung up. John poked at a drip of thick, dried paint—evidence of a cheap job. “Ben’s a friend of mine from college. He moved to Florida after graduation. He didn’t like the cold.”

  Now, Isaac remembered. “I thought he was your boyfriend in college.”

  John shrugged. “As much as I did boyfriends back then, I guess.” He turned and slid down the wall to sit just as his phone vibrated. He lifted the screen. “Christ, it’s my mom. Maman? Oui, je sais.”

  Isaac didn’t understand the rest of it, but it sounded at first quiet, then louder, then faster.

  He texted Tommy. He already knows.

  Shit.

  John’s French flowed like a fountain, alternating between tense to sad to soft to back again. Isaac was beginning to suspect John’s relationship with his European mother resembled a volcano—very warm but prone to explosion—further demonstrated when John hung up the phone suddenly and threw it across the room.

  “She wants me home in Wisconsin.”

  “Because of Ben?”

  “What? No. She says nothing feels safe.” He stood and tugged his fingers through his hair, getting it out of his face just as Isaac saw the time.

  He spoke slowly, hating every word. “I need to get ready for class.”

  “Fine. Can I stay here today?”

  “John—”

  “I could have Cleo bring my computer and school work from my house on her way to campus, drop them here.”

  “Jesus, John, she can’t know you’re here. She can’t know about us at all.”

  John covered his mouth. “Shit, I’m sorry. I don’t know what I was thinking.”

  And that was worrisome. John knew the rules of their relationship. Their covert behaviors were second nature by then. If John was rattled enough to forget the furtive nature of their affair, what else might he forget? What else might he let slide? If Isaac asked him to tell him the truth, the whole truth, about June 6 on College Green right that very moment, he probably would.

  John studied the sun-soaked curtains. “I don’t want to go out there.”

  “Look, I understand. Come here.” Isaac grabbed him by the wrist and pulled him close. “But we can’t do this, John. Every time something bad happens, we can’t hide in our houses, because lots of bad things are happening. You can’t shut down every time some madman shoots up a bar or a school, or you’ll be shutting down every day.”

  “I can’t believe we have to say that.”

  Like ripping off a Band-Aid, Isaac said, “I want you to keep taking your meds.”

  John pushed his hands away. “I am taking them. I’m just cutting back.”

  “I don’t want you to cut back.”

  John stood. “Well, that’s nice, but it’s no
t your fucking decision.” He brushed more hair from his face, but it was like he had fidgeting follicles. They tumbled back and shaded his eyes. “I’m going home.”

  “Let me shower. I’ll walk you.”

  “No.” He disappeared back into the bedroom and stumbled out, tugging on his clothes. “I’ll be fine. What’s the worst that can happen?” He smiled in the fake way that made Isaac’s stomach churn.

  “You don’t look okay.”

  “I’m fine. Hey, Wisconsin’s playing this Saturday night. Big Ten game. Was thinking of watching it with the boys at Joe’s Pub. Do you want to go?”

  “You’re changing the subject.”

  John held his hands up and grinned. “There’s nothing else to talk about. A bunch of gay kids got shot in Miami last night, and my friend is fine, and we have to work, so…” He kissed Isaac on the cheek.

  Isaac grabbed him by the upper arm before he could dash. “Love you.”

  He studied Isaac’s lips. “I know.” Outside the front door, his light footsteps danced down Isaac’s steps.

  Isaac texted Tommy. Keep an eye on John today.

  Is he okay?

  I don’t think so.

  He should have told Tommy about the drugs, about how John was dreaming again—about how in bed last night, he’d clutched and clawed, and once, tried to hide his crying. But maybe that was too intimate. It felt too intimate. No mystery, John had secrets. If John wanted to share things with Tommy, he would. They were best friends, after all. Isaac was just the boyfriend.

  CLEO SANG AT Crocodile Lounge that night, so attendance was more mandatory than suggested. Isaac knew John loved hearing her sing; maybe it would make him feel better. When Isaac arrived after a late class, the show was in full swing, as was the bar and dance floor, packed with people. Cleo wore a gauzy, baby-blue dress and bright-red beehive. She waved from the stage and sang “Blue Moon.”

  John and Tommy shouted at him from the bar, glowing in shades of red and purple from the overhead mood lights. Known for its Creole food, the place smelled like butter and spicy sausage. Isaac itched his nose to prevent a sneeze.