Ivyland (5 page)

“Nope, no God,” says Jack.

“Sick,” says Bertrand. “Why would any guy do it, knowing the risks?”

“Does it matter?” I ask.

“Would've been a lot worse if he'd got the gas as a kid,” Bertrand says, “for VV. Imagine that.”

“Being poor is a blessing, sometimes,” Ed says, rubbing the back of his neck.

“Rather die of H12 than go through what his poor ass is,” Jack says.

“Mind shutting up if this is all a joke to you?” I yell, suddenly furious, and it feels like a knife fight in my lungs. So none of us say anything for a bit, and we listen to the heart monitor beeping.

“Can't be like this,” Jack says, yanking out Leo's IV.

“The fuck are you doing?” Bertrand says.

Jack doesn't answer, just drops to the ground, trying to get at the plugs of all the computers flashing Leo's vitals.

“Stop!” Bertrand screams.

Ed stares.

“Jack,” I say with all my calm. “Don't.”

He snorts, writhing on his belly, still pulling at cords under the bed. I kick him in the ribs so he rolls over and then place my shoe squarely on his chest, applying more and more weight, and I can see his teeth grinding.

“Don't.”

*

At home I sit out in the thawed yard, listening to the night, wishing all Leo'd done was ignore me. Wishing I hadn't run blubbering to Jack after they took him, me so sloppy drunk. Wishing hardest that I didn't need his help.

But he'd listened and nodded and said, unbelievably: “It's not your fault.”

“He wanted to try,” I'd cried. “I said to be careful.”

“How did he know you had any?”

“I don't know, I didn't tell him.”

“Did you?”

“I've never done it either, I just took it from the evidence locker.”

“So how did he know?”

“I don't know. I didn't say anything.”

“Maybe you said something.”

Fireflies have come out, a lazy yellow fog. Must've got their signals crossed in the warm snap. I see a bunch dead on the ground already. They have an agenda, but you wouldn't know it. They'd always been too trusting, too easy to catch, not like normal bugs that swoop and roll when you go to swat them—what is it their sensors don't say when the hand is coming?

I get up and find the twig I used as a marker when Jack wasn't looking. It sticks out of brown grass that rustles like paper. I get the shovel from under the porch stairs and cut into dirt that should be January-hard, dig till I hit the metal gas container that we put underground on New Year's after everyone left. I pull the Hallorax tank out, brush dirt off the Endless Φ. Back-to-back Ds? A circle cut in half? I try eating up time with all the wrong answers, but there are only so many. Lips already dry. I scrub the mouthpiece with my shirt, turn the valve up higher than normal, bring the mask to my face, and take the first deep breath of relief in a week.

CAL /// LUNAR ORBIT

Truth is, Emma Reyes and I are NASA's first to die in space. More arbitrary a milestone I can't imagine. Worse than burning alive on a botched dry run? Breaking up on launch, re-entry? It's something.

And we'll know in advance how this thing runs its course—”mild case of celebrity amplified by death,” as my brother Aidan once said of a starlet who came to a lurid, newsworthy end. An actress with Emma's sort of look, in fact. Could be that everyone doomed shares a face.

“I'm scared, Cal,” she says.

Whether Emma's accepted our lot remains a mystery from where I'm floating. She spends these hours staring out windows, cycling through all three. Terror and boredom are totals.

We don't know what happened; I assure myself that no one does. Malfunction. Nonfunction. It began with the lights dozing, dimming away. Preoccupied, we blamed our minds. Lines of communication scraped away to useless hums, hums then exchanged for thicker silence. We had acclimated to a thin, numbing drone, and the final switch shook us out of fake sleep. Without the melancholy note of white noise sustained, our voices clanged, blunt in stale air.

*

I screwed Emma once, long before all this, in a sleazy motel outside Cape Canaveral. The beaten town of Andronicus, Florida. A dip in the swamp where lizards that walk upright should evolve. Reminded me of home.

Neon VACANCY staining the room an arrhythmic lime. Passing traffic washed over her back. Headlights warped shadows into monstrous rhomboids, flying tombstones.

Strictly forbidden. Professional courtesies, teamwork concerns. Of course, we never quite expected a mission to materialize—evidently there's a space nut writing congressional budgets, and no one has seen fit to stop them. Nor had we begun to fret we'd be bumped up. But the first two teams fell to old-fashioned flu, and the public abhors unnecessary delay. We launched, our secret a stowaway.

The limits mattered. We did it because it wasn't an option. Tell me that doesn't make someone irresistible. Unfairly so. I didn't even have to lie. My inner asshole flexed its sphincter. There are women who want that callous truth. Even as we neared the end, I was thinking of someone, anyone else. A honeycombed pattern of female parts, motions and sounds that fit the contours of my broke-down brain. She caught a glimmer of the impotent rages I've collected.

Couldn't sleep next to her. I went to get some ice from the machine to chew on. Padded through the oppressively humid hallway toward the machine, bucket in hand. A small blond child with a mushroom cut and soft features rounded a corner and collided with my knee. It stared up at me through a shiny film of tears. It wore a knee-length red T-shirt and that may have been all.

“I can't find my mom.”

“You checked the lost and found?”

“She left the room. When I woke up, she …”

“C'mon sport,” I said, and offered my hand, which felt parental enough. We walked in a direction. It had a way of holding in its many sneezes, making a private
huh-tunch
sound each time. Couldn't say if it was a boy or girl.

“Does your mom love you?” I asked.

“Yes. She gave me a dumb haircut today, but she loves me. Does yours?”

“Yes.”

“That's good.”

“The best.”

At the front desk I asked whether any moms had been seen about recently, explaining the situation to a twentyish acne-scarred girl who stopped whispering into her headset to listen. She smiled cravenly. The kid slunk off to push buttons on a Belltruvin vending machine.

“Prolly turning tricks, mister. Let the kid stay in the lobby if he wants.”

“I think it might be a she,” I said.

On the walk back to my room, we encountered the anachronism of an ice machine I'd been looking for, a huge silver chest of cubes that automatically refilled. You had to lift a heavy flap and dig it out. I put down the bucket and picked up the kid.

“Want to see something?”

I held it at an arm's distance and flew it into the open chest, skimming it across the ice and going
woosh
. I expected it to be distressed or disturbed, but it stared dully up at me, bored. With all the bizarre things adults had done to it, I realized, this was hardly worth noting. Pulling it out of the low arc and setting it on the carpet again, I said:

“Now everyone who has a drink at this hotel will get a little taste of you.”

Back in the one-room suite, Emma did her thing.

“Either he leaves or I do,” she said.

“I was hoping it would come to that,” I said.

“I'm a girl,” said the kid.

We watched a late night kung fu movie till she fell asleep on the sex-stained king-size, lips popping open soundlessly when unconsciousness came. She'd grow to be an object of obsession for sure, some fool's ridiculous symbol, a beauty who convinced you her beauty meant more.

I moved to the puke-colored floor. Sometime later the power went out. I noticed only because the surviving letters of VACANCY died and the muted TV infomercial for a revolutionary egg-cooker cut to black. Emma's absence made me feel better. I watched one corner of the blank hotel door and the light that bled through underneath before falling asleep. I knew she'd be gone when I woke. I tried not to think about it.

*

If you're already concluding that these are the toxic words of a man at stage three in some emotional trauma flowchart, stop it. I'm the disease that has got to be lived with. I can't be cured, but I'm quarantined.

These are not the thoughts of a man deranged with the idea of his fate as some unaccountable bounce of the dice, but one who half-expected a coda like this. And you, if you're even there, will just have to buck up and listen or not. These transmissions have no audience. Remember: I can't hear your helpless replies.

I can't hear you at all.

*

The ship is dying, dead. Glossing empty waves of space, we rotate to raw physics' tune. Sun: a maw of chilly blue light splitting starred fabric. Everywhere a tincture of this indifferent blue, of slipping glaciers. When the moon comes between us and the sun, there falls darkness so complete that escape is fantasy. A doomsayer would invoke the shadow of God. It's a solar eclipse without the halo, a circle of nothing cresting larger each time.

When we stray out of the ink, shadowlines pull blue over us again. The blue neither retreats nor returns. It's there the whole time, waiting to be drawn out and peeled away from impermeable sheets of dark. All that's left will be this blue. Dying bathed in its ancient tone. A parting trick of the eye.

I'm hunched in gut-blazing agony, sick, before a glass triangle that holds the Earth. An emptying like no other. I want to be dragged to a nameless field and shot in the head with no explanations. Nothing but a bare-bones execution. I'd lie in the field of swaying grasses, pink ruptured lobes lying close by, watch a stream of souls swim the width of the sky.

“I'm cold,” says Emma, improvised Russian dolls bouncing nervously in lap: her left hand wraps her right fist, which clenches an awful something tight.

“Put it away,” I advise.

“It is away.”

Daydreams like that, the thing in the field, I keep my mouth shut about. Years ago, after we successfully traded virginities (she convinced me to do it in Aidan's room after school, wanting neutral territory), I'd told Phoebe that I liked the idea of being hit by a car, that on my bike I was reckless to better those odds. She announced my death wish to the world. Wrong: I had to survive. That was crucial. I didn't imagine a well-attended funeral, or parades of pity along the hospital bedside. I got those when my appendix burst, along with garish flowers that made my roommate sneeze and sneeze, coating himself with bodily mists.

“Are you allergic?” I asked.

“Worse,” he went, between fits. He looked allergic to everything, really. A red grid on his face, the history of how they'd stitched it together. I learned through plastic privacy curtains that he came to the hospital every third week.

No. What I wanted was something else entirely. A moment beyond what we have to describe it, reverse-engineered from its own aftermath.

I was hoping to be changed.

AIDAN /// IVYLAND, NEW JERSEY

Early the next evening, Henri isn't bouncing about the kitchen, making the usual messes. I'm ready for work in record time.

Outside, Anastasio is showing the tree to an aged reverend who has to peer over his half-moon glasses to make out the Virgin, and I throw them a curt nod. Happily, there aren't as many spectators as yesterday. Whole miracle thing had run dry fast.

Doesn't bolster my optimism that the train sits in the station for a solid fifteen minutes, engineers flummoxed by standing water from last night's storm. Early in the rush hour, but it hardly seems to matter in terms of crowding—guy standing behind me has no choice but to sneeze directly on my shoulder.

This woman across the aisle gets hassled by a conductor because her ticket isn't a peak-hour, which costs a buck fifty more. The conductor faces three obstacles in trying to extract an additional one hundred fifty cents from this woman: she speaks no English, he speaks no Spanish, and she doesn't want to pay it.

“Why? No. No. Why?” she keeps going.

The conductor slows down his argument.

“This … [hands flapping to signify the train we're on] … is … [still flapping] … a …
peak
… train … rush hour. [pantomiming exchange of money] one … fifty … more.”

The woman shakes her head.

Outside, on the far end of the platform, a homeless man whose face can't be made out in the glare is brandishing a sign that says

 

HeLLO, NeeD to GET SOMTHING OF UR CHeST??

4 ONe DOLLAR I WILL LeT U TeLL Me OF Say ANY THiNG U

WANT U KeN CURSe. YeL AND SHOUT AT ME, PriTeND IM UR

BOSS. I PROMISS I WONT GeT MAD !?!

 

He's wearing draw-stringed plaid pajama pants that leave pale flaky shins exposed. I brush some hair from my eyes and tuck it behind my ear—what I do when I don't know what to do.

A nearby passenger who can at least fake some Spanish keeps saying “mas personas” in a feeble attempt to mediate between the woman and conductor. When his two-word vocab is exhausted, the conductor squeezes through clustered bodies to find a better translator.

Should've called the tree people myself. Christians make me nervous. Wonder if I can get out on the platform, tell the homeless man I don't belong here, and be back aboard the train before it leaves. A sticky-faced kid exits the car's bathroom; shortly after, a finger of piss seeps out from under the door. I start on my bowtie. As I fiddle for that elusive ratio in the knot, the wrinkled guy in camo and dreadlocks sitting next to me develops an expression I can't account for.

“What,” I say, starting fresh when my first bow comes out droopy.

“I knew it,” he smiles. “You're not going into space. Nobody is. Could never afford it. Some hoax.”

“Yep,” I tell him. Most crazies just want agreement. “You figured it out.”

The conductor returns to our car with a colleague and directs him toward the Spanish-speaking fare-beater.

“Un dollar y cincuenta,” the new conductor tells her.

*

When I get to Fieldcrest Manor, sprinting a few uphill blocks from the train station and sweating fiercely in my polyester tux, the bridal party has already arrived. Standard doomed couple, bit more attractive than the usual gargoyles. I make a couple of passes at the sign-in sheet, waiting for authority figures to disperse. When they finally wander off, I erase the name of a doofus busboy and scrawl mine next to his punch-in time, then badly forge his signature at the bottom of the list.

“Aidan, where the shit have you been, we're partners,” a voice chides. I turn around to receive a swift punch to the gut that doesn't hurt much. Still, wouldn't have volunteered. “For making me do the water glasses myself.”

“You hate everything.”

“Especially this.” She indicates all of me.

Kidding. I think. Being partners with Phoebe, object of a cyclical schoolboy crush, will at least afford me someone to talk to. It also means I'll be punched more.

It falls to me to distribute the party favors, mix CDs of the couple's favorite songs, and lacy bags of candy. I pocket four bags and open a fifth, strewing the rest haphazardly over a table, knocking over the floral centerpiece and soaking some dinner rolls with vase water.

“Is ‘Celebration!' the band tonight?” I ask.

“I've had a shattering premonition they are.”

“You know, Phoebe, some people see the glass as half-full. Ours, however, are half empty, being that you suck at your job.” I pop a candy and spit it out instantly.

“Was gonna warn you how bad those candies were.”

“Thanks,” I mutter, kicking the nasty menthol thing under a chair. “Virgin sex on the beach?”

“Always,” Phoebe beams, and we race over to the bar.

*

A meaningful stride should make you untouchable. This is how I typically walk around Donald, a ranking ass who made me a pet project after I spilled goat-cheese salad on three extremely bearded Macedonians at a raucous wedding some weeks past. Tonight the stride backfires: Don clotheslines me in the chest.

“Stop. You're doing buffet plates.”

It would be fair to call this a thinly veiled punishment. Fieldcrest has this practice of putting its china plates in a huge metal box that heats them to scalding temperatures, and you don't want to be the flammable chump who takes them out.

Donald is a balding control freak, obsessed with everything I find unimportant, shorter than me by a head and a half. I strive to make him painfully aware of this last fact, eliminating my slouch in his presence—puts him all the more on edge. So he enjoys his brief vertical advantage here, hovering over me as I struggle to remove dishes from the heater, fanning his face with a hairy hand, listing everything that hasn't been done.

“More champagne out, four more place settings at table twelve, [sound of several dishes breaking] be
care
ful, will you? O.
My.
God. This father of the bride is an awful one, he's already complaining that the band isn't set up, not that we have any real authority over them, of course, but they don't know that. People are coming down late to the reception anyhow, probably watching the shuttle launch in their rooms right now. Would be nice to see that, though. Don't carry so many plates at once, for God's sake! And where's your nametag?”

“Still haven't given me one.”

“We'll get you one tomorrow,” Donald promises, as he has every day since I got here. “Did you spill alfredo sauce on your tux already?”

“Must be from last week.”

“Niiice. Taking a little pride in your appearance?”

“Can't be proud to be a slob?”

“Real cute. I'll tell you who won't think it's so cute is Sam: you'd better not jerk him around, boyo.” I slam some more plates on the counter and open the next enormous sliding door. The head boss is Donald's empty threat of choice—the man wouldn't bother to acknowledge me if I got caught whacking off on a cake.

“Also, Aidan, Sam was telling me that you need to lose the facial hair, that's the policy, you know that. You're scruffy.” The heavy metal door breaks off its hinges and lands on my foot.

“Fucking
cunt
!” I spit.

“Hey!” Donald barks, “I'm serious, he's spoken to me on several occasions about how scruffy you're looking.” I drop another plate.

“Would you stop!”

“Sorry.”

Donald mops his brow with a pilfered dinner napkin. His head looks waxed. I put another searing hot tower of plates on the counter and bend to retie a shoelace. It snaps off in my hand.

*

After work I'm the kind of tired where you can't make a convincing fist. Exhaustion is a tipping factor in my decision to let Henri pick a 24-hour place to eat. I regret it: he drives us to the closest MexiLickin'SurfHog.

“Here?” I ask. A wide customer is exiting the place with some difficulty.

“What?” says Henri. “Should be empty this late.”

“You never go to these places.”

“Not the ones with kiddie ball pits.”

I mope up to the counter after him. A pale girl about our age waits patiently for orders, leaning on her register with one hand and examining the sparkly nails of the other.

“Man,” Henri exhales, “decisions.” He makes a satisfied grunt and strides dramatically up to the counter.

“I'll have the Hogwash breakfast sandwich,” he announces with gusto. “And a Forest Steppe Adderade.”

“No breakfast served after 11 AM.” The girl doesn't have to look at the backlit menu to quote it verbatim.

“The small-mindedness,” Henri says, sincerely. “Why are you serving Hang Ten Donuts, then?” He points at this scary woman hunched over a table, coughing food back into the colorful box she ate it out of.

“Because they're already made?”

“Don't they count as breakfast?”

“Could eat a donut for lunch.”

“And yet I can't have a bagel for dinner? This policy seems to paper over relevant semantic issues.”

“What?” She abandons her nails, squinting.

“Here,” I'm compelled to interrupt. “I'll pay you an extra five to make him that sandwich.” The girl palms the crumpled bill and shuffles into the back.

“I could have handled that,” Henri starts in.

“That what you were doing?”

“Hold up. I
know
her.” At first I assume he means the cashier. But he's staring at the woman with the box of donuts. She's paused, gaze lost in a faraway corner of the fluorescent room. Trying to remember the original restaurants that combined to make this Frankenstein chain, I imagine. Then the pose breaks and she pulls at her nose, apparently irritated by an itch within.

“Let me guess—she's the next Grady? Gonna turn her life around, too?” I should've known why we wound up here. More free-floating guilt to latch on to. More steamrolling tragedy to challenge and be flattened by. He's sitting at her table before I say, “Wait.”

“Ms. Hecuba?” he asks. She goes in for another donut. “Ms. Hec? It's Henri. Grown up, now.”

“Henri …” she says, spewing powder. Henri nods.

“Come on, man,” I tell him.

“You used to drive the bus to school. And for camp! Remember Aidan?”

“She doesn't. Leave her alone.”

“I drive the city bus,” she says, and wipes a dirty finger on her teeth. “Endless one. Not a school bus.”

“You used to … so you switched jobs, then. Congrats! Did you go through Second Chance, then?”

“Henri, it's not her, cut it out.”

“What is this?” the woman wants to know. She sways and grinds her teeth like an angry sleep will come any second. “I don't know you.”

“You sure do. How's DH?”

Wrong question. The woman snaps to, shoving the donut box across the table and into Henri's lap, and stands, knocking her chair over. She squeezes Henri's face between two trembling hands and speaks into his eye.

“Not well. You can just stay the fuck away from him.”

“Miss,” I say.

“No people like you. Nothing like that.”

“He didn't mean anything,” I say.

She faces me and stares.

“Aren't you supposed to be in space?” she asks.

*

“It
was
her, though,” Henri says as he swings his weight through the open car door and bounces into the driver's seat.

“So what. She was insane. Could've admitted it and snapped your neck right after.”

“Just being friendly.” The ignition harrumphs a few times before turning over. Henri tears open his bag of food and downs half the sandwich in one bite before backing out of the parking space. I fog the window with my breath.

“Not everyone wants you to save them. Or be in your hypothetical band.”

“I dunno. I see so much tunnel vision around here. Specially after the takeover. Carrying on with life as usual.”

“They should. That's the only thing you can do. That's what the last person alive would do.”

“Not me. I'd teach myself to swim or something.”

“In the newly radioactive oceans?” I ask. He laughs and polishes off the sandwich. We speed through one of those stretches where most of the buildings are already gone, grass reclaiming the earth square by square.

“Okay, then, learn another instrument. To improve my solo act.”

“Did you call the tree guys?” I ask.

“I think so.”

Henri takes both hands off the wheel for a second to simultaneously scratch his balls and turn on the radio. A Beach Boys song seeps from speakers, and I up the volume. Commercial, it turns out. Henri slows for a red light, and we idle at a deserted corner where the church I grew up with sits in that curmudgeonly pose. “Here you are,” it chants, “here you are.” Ivyland. Stirring only when somebody tries to pry you loose. Maybe not even then. The light goes green, then flickers and dies completely. Henri pretends not to notice, massages his forehead with a knuckle as he hits the gas.

“Why wouldn't you drop it with Ms. Hec? Can't believe you were so set on something. Can't believe she thought I was
Cal
. Had to happen two times today before I got it.”

“You don't look that different.”

“Didn't think he'd ever go up. Never much wanted to.”

“When'd you talk to him last?”

“He came for graduation last year when mom and dad couldn't make it out from Phoenix. All he said was I sure took my time. Shook my hand.”

“You still holding onto that grudge? Because it's rightfully mine, I've just been letting you borrow it for years.”

“He always seems worse than before.”

“I imagine he thinks the same way,” Henri says, brown eyes swerving with a current of blue before he goes stiff and his head hooks left. The steering wheel, in a mirrored gesture, gets spun so we cut across the wrong lane and lose the driver's-side mirror to an abandoned junk car in a burst of sparks that jolts Henri back to attention. He pulls hard right and overcorrects into a 180º spin, squealing to a stop against the opposite curb. We sit in electric silence until Henri mentions he might cry. I tell him he has a bloody nose.