Battleborn: Stories (20 page)

These are my friends. These are the funny, ironic things we do so we can be the kind of funny, ironic people who do them.

I stand way back with the camera, boozy and flushed, listening to the clicks of its machinery and the prerecorded metallic
ping, ping
of phantom coins emptied from the slot machines. Danny and Jules shift through the poses of old friends, figments of the way we were. I take another step back, trying to get the whole thing in frame.

•   •   •

J
ules and I were friends for a while before I introduced her to Danny. Danny and I had been friends forever, since we were kids. He used to joke that my new friend Jules was imaginary or—hilarious—my secret lover. I didn’t keep them apart on purpose; it seemed then that there was simply no opportunity for us all to get together. But now I know that somewhere in me I never wanted them to meet. I thought that if they had each other they wouldn’t need me. I didn’t want to be left behind.

But we three hit it off. On weekends we bought astronaut ice cream at the planetarium and lay in the grass with our heads resting on each other’s stomachs. We drank from Jules’s flask and felt the chalky sweetness of dehydrated ice cream dissolve on our tongues. Summers we went up to the lake. We swam fifty yards out to the broad flat boulders off Chimney Beach and felt the coarse glacier granite against our bare feet. We jumped into the warm green water, one by one by one. Sometimes Jules and I took off our tops. She flung hers aside and I kept mine balled in my hand. Danny pretended not to notice, or not to care. The three of us lay there on the rocks, letting the sun touch us dry.

Nights we went to little clubs—XOXO, the Green Room, Imperial, the Hideout. We danced together in the pulsing colored lights, shoulder to shoulder, a perfect triangle. We spilled out onto the street or into the alleys for a cigarette or a joint or a bump or just some air. When it was cold, I watched the steam rise from our sweat-soaked bodies, from Jules’s bare arms and shoulders, from the wet slope of Danny’s neck. We walked home together, crunching frost beneath our feet or listening to the early morning songs of birds.

Then, the beginning of our dissolving. Danny and I met up with Jules at a house party last Halloween. By the time we got there she was already wasted. She’d dressed as a robot and her cardboard body was crushed; most of the knobs and gauges that we’d pulled from the busted washing machine in the alley behind her studio and the gas stove in her apartment had been knocked off. She’d developed runs in her shimmery tights and her greasy silver face paint was smeared in places. The day before, Jules had convinced Danny to be Peter Pan. He had a green paper hat with a red feather, and a plastic dagger she’d lifted from a window display at Walgreens. I wasn’t dressed as anything, and all night people kept asking me, “What are you supposed to be?”

Toward the end of the night I found Danny and Jules in the empty kitchen, talking. I sat at the table with them and we had a round of shots from shot glasses shaped like skulls, which Jules later slipped into her purse. Danny and Jules talked about music and art and women Danny knew the year he lived in Berlin. That’s what he called them, women. I knew I shouldn’t, but I hated hearing him say things to her that he’d never said to me. I hated how she listened.

That night Jules went home with one of the sweet-smelling coffee boys from Café Bibo. Afterward, we got free fair-trade lattes for a few Sunday afternoons in a row. But after Jules left, Danny curled up on the rank-ass couch out on these kids’ porch with a bottle of green apple vodka that wasn’t his, saying, “Man, there’s just, fucking, there’s never any time.”

When I walked Danny down the hill to his apartment he was incoherent and stumbling, almost crushing me with his weight. The sun was coming up. I helped him inside and went to get him a glass of tap water and a slice of white bread. That’s all he had. When I came back he’d passed out in his costume. He’d lost his hat. Before I left I took a wet paper towel and in the half-light wiped silver face paint from his neck and hands and mouth. I’ve been waiting for them to leave me behind ever since.

•   •   •

I
can see why Danny’s mom thought even God wouldn’t be able to see her in this little chapel. It’s a secret place, situated in the far back corner of the smoky mirrored labyrinth of the Bonanza. Danny holds the heavy door open for us. I smell him as I walk inside. He looks beautiful in here, in this light.

The chapel is more cave than church. The walls are made of big cold hunks of stone, and the ceiling is so low that I can reach up and touch it. There’s an organ in the corner, two displays of yellowed silk flowers at the altar with milky white candles sticking out of them. There are maybe twenty khaki-colored metal folding chairs, separated by a bolt of threadbare red carpet. A dusty wooden crucifix hangs on the wall. The place probably hasn’t changed in thirty years.

I sit in the front row and try to imagine Lucy and Dick at the altar. They were younger then than we are now. Did Lucy think, as she said her vows, of her old beau Wally, strapped to a bed in his father’s house?

Danny fiddles on the organ. He hardly plays anymore, and his fingers are clumsy. Plus, he says, half the keys don’t work. Jules plucks a spray of fake flowers from its Styrofoam holder and takes it to the back of the room. She motions to him. Danny does his best at “Here Comes the Bride,” though some of the notes are dead. Jules begins a slow, stumbling walk down the aisle.

Danny motions me to the altar. This is a nowhere place, the stone walls too thick for jilted seers, the door too heavy for cuckold ghosts. I stand and fold my hands, solemn as a groom. I sway ever so slightly, awaiting my bride.

Jules arrives and Danny joins us. We three stand quiet for a moment at the altar where his parents were joined, at the place that made all this possible. Jules drops the bouquet on the floor behind her. She takes my hands in hers.

We are quiet; then Danny says, “Jules, do you take Iris to be your lawfully wedded wife, to have and to hold, as long as you both shall live?”

“I do,” she whispers.

“And Iris, do you take Jules for better and for worse, in sickness and in health, until death do you part?”

“I do.”

Jules squeezes my hands.

Danny sweeps his arms into the air triumphantly. He says, “You may kiss the bride.” The air is gone from the room.

Jules pulls me to her, firmly. She kisses me. Her breath is hot and her lips are keen. Her tongue moves over the front of my teeth like the ocean might, or like someone beckoning, saying,
Come here
.

I kiss her back and we are weightless with the warmth of the mouth, floating in the taste of bloody meat and horseradish. My hands holding her hips lightly, her fingers pressing on the back of my neck, her bottom lip held ever so softly between my teeth. This means something, I think. It has to. She pulls away.

“Dudes,” Danny says, “that was fucking beautiful.”

A laugh spreads across Jules’s big bright face, ravenous the way a wildfire is. “I know, right?”

I laugh too. These are my friends. These are the funny, empty things we do so we can be the kind of funny, empty people who do them.

•   •   •

A
t the Bonanza’s glassy bar we switch to whiskey and video poker. We hit the buttons as slow as possible, like Jules taught us, trying to stretch our money long enough to get a few free drinks, long enough to make it worth our while. Willie Nelson is on the jukebox, a muted soccer game on TV. We pluck olives and cherries and slices of lemon and lime out of their plastic bins when the bartender isn’t looking. The front doors are propped open, and outside the wind is picking up. “It’s because you grew up in Reno,” Jules says, answering a question I don’t remember asking. “You don’t know how great this town is.”

There are plenty of good reasons to find yourself in Virginia City. The first time we came, we came because Jules wanted to stand in the spot where Mark Twain stood. She wanted to see what Mark Twain saw. Danny and I watched her. She stood on that plank walkway, quiet and reverent, looking out over the foothills, searching for something. I’d never seen her like that, before or since. There was none of that reverence in the chapel and it seems now that there should have been. Yes, today is a day for reverence, for some goddamn sincerity of emotion. I’m drunk. When did today become that day?

Jules comes close to a flush, and calls us over for luck. We each put a finger on the red plastic
draw
button. This is our ritual. How many times have we layered our three hands atop the last card, stacked our fists like totems on the lever of a slot machine, laid our hopeful fingertips on one last deal?

Danny says,
Wait
. He pops a maraschino cherry into his mouth, then one into Jules’s. Her teeth glow pink with cherry brine. Poor sweet Danny. We can’t help who we love.

The wind blows a swarm of golden mesquite leaves inside. Jules says, “One. Two. Three.”

The queen we needed winks up at us. The payout is close to four hundred dollars.

Jules and Danny scream and throw their arms around each other. They slap the bar. They say,
Fuck, yeah
. They say,
You like that?
I’m feeling severe. Danny stands on his stool and fishes the last olive from the bin. He is less and less himself these days. He holds the olive in front of Jules, the juice dribbling down his wrist. She reaches for it gleefully but he pulls it away and slips it into his mouth.

“We should cash out,” I say.

Danny only smiles, revealing the little plug of olive pinched between his teeth. Jules laughs that helium laugh of hers and takes Danny’s face in her hands. She presses her mouth to his. I watch. I expect their kiss to be urgent and ambitious but they’re unhurried, dreamy. She moans gently as he arches her back against the bar. He slips one hand under her shirt and holds his whiskey in his other, like he’s been doing this his whole fucking life. Afterward, he’s slack-jawed and electric eyed and Jules munches happily on whatever is left of their olive. “We should cash out,” I say again.

Jules mumbles, “Yeah,” and at the same time Danny says, “Fuck that,” and taps
deal
again.

“What are you doing?” I say.

He laughs and says, “Having fun.”

“No.” I grab his wrist. “Cash out.”

Jules says, “Hey, hey.”

“Get off me,” says Danny. A bit of whiskey slops onto his shirt. He pries my hand from his arm. “This isn’t about you.”

“It doesn’t mean anything,” I say. “You. Me. Nothing she does means anything. Tell him, Jules.”

The machine blinks below us. Jules looks at me pityingly. The little mesquite leaves are whirling in the doorway like insects hungry for light. Suddenly there is that sincerity I thought I’d never see again; there is a glimpse of that foothill searching. “Don’t do this,” she says softly. A tiny golden leaf flutters and lands on her cheek.

“Do what you want,” I say. “You don’t mean anything to me.” I walk outside, wishing it were true.

It seems impossible that it’s still daylight but here is the sun, reaching behind my eyes, stinging the place where cords meet brain, where meaning is made out of light and the absence of light. I need to sober up.

Last year, the day after Halloween, we came to Virginia City. Danny wanted to go to church. “It’s Sunday,” was all he said. Jules and I teased him about this, because Sunday didn’t mean a damn thing to us. But we went, telling ourselves we were going for the same reason we did anything back then, for the fuck of it. We walked along the gravel road to Saint Mary’s, bumping into each other, trying to kick the same rock out in front of us, pretending nothing had happened, that nothing would ever happen.

Inside, the church was eerie quiet and smelled like melted wax. Danny put a dollar in the box and crossed himself. He showed us where to kneel and how to touch the soft tip of our longest fingers to our heads and hearts and shoulders. The sun came through the stained glass and it was warm and so beautiful. In the light Mary was weeping in yellows and blues and Jesus was weeping in reds and one guy was holding a big key and another half a loaf of bread and another a lamb. I didn’t know what that meant and still don’t. I wish I were Catholic. I remember kneeling, thinking,
More of this.
That’s all. That’s what I prayed for then: divine preservation of something I would never understand, the safeguarding of something I’d already lost.

I have to drive us home. I’m sick of Reno, sick of going to the same bars and seeing the same bands. I’m sick of eating the same two-dollar slices of pizza and buying the same sworn-off cigarettes from the same glass-faced machines. Sober up.

I can’t get us back, I know, but I wanted to have lost something that meant
.
Danny and Jules come outside as if summoned, blinking and bewildered. Jules says, “Iris.” It’s like I’ve never heard her say my name before. How tender it sounds coming from her. How pitiful.

I say, “I need to walk.” We stagger through Virginia City, against the wind. The commotion in town has subsided. It’s cold.

There’s a fence around the cemetery. We climb it. Danny trips and stumbles in the dirt. He takes Jules’s hand and helps her over. The graves here are old; lots of them are babies’ graves. I’m sorry for everything, even the things that had nothing to do with me. Especially those. We weave up the hill through the headstones, calling out deaths to each other like we’re trying to find our way in a storm.

“Consumption.”

“Scarlet fever.”

“Flu.”

“Pneumonia.”

“Consumption.”

“Whooping cough.”

“Childbed.”

“Consumption.”

“Cholera.”

“Drowned.”

“Consumption.”

There are plenty of good reasons to find yourself in Virginia City, if you need one. It used to be people came for the silver, but the silver’s long gone. In summer we come for the swap meet, for the camel races, for the cheap DVDs and the overweight belly dancers and the figures etched in crystals by lasers. For the gray-haired Indian who wears a feather headdress and who for a dollar will let you take a picture with the old fucked-up-looking panther he keeps chained to the back of his truck. There are plenty of good reasons to find yourself in Virginia City, but there’s only one reason. We came to time-travel.