George
SUNDAY
The old man crosses a date on his calendar. A painted portrait of Mother Teresa looks upon him as he does. He sits on his side of his empty bed, and he says a prayer. His daughters crack open his door, and say goodnight. He rolls in his bed, strokes a shape that isn’t there. Death has casted its scent onto him. He thinks, I know the end is coming. It always has been.
“91 days remaining”
On the drive home, Elly asks me questions. She asks me if she can see Mom. I tell her no, not today. She asks me where Mom is going. She says, if Mom isn’t riding shotgun anymore, can she? Francesca pulls on her hair, she tells her to stop asking stupid questions, and shows her a game on her phone. I attempt to put together memories that are not in the places I remember leaving them. Where did I go last night? Was it you? You told me something, and I’m picking up the pieces.
“65 days remaining”
It was the same dream again, I’m an inch closer to the words you mouth. I’m in the fourth from the front pew, in front of the So family, where we always sit. She’s kneeling on my right, our daughters on my left. When I finish my prayer and look up, she’s there, on the altar. She’s sick in her hospital bed. Tonight, you’re wearing a lab coat, she calls you Doctor So. Your mouth opens. I cannot stand up. The last thing I remember are the words,
“37 days remaining”
The young, beautiful woman whose name I did not catch watches me pull out my wallet to pay for her drinks. She sees the photo of me, Michelle, Francesca in her middle school uniform, Elly just a baby, still in her stroller.
“You’re married?” she asks, but I’m not looking at her. The world is slow, my hand crawling up her arm is slow, and the man behind the bar is staring at me, he mouths the words, “You’re reckless,”
I blink, and he’s a foot from us, not talking to me, shaking drinks. I want her pity. I want her to roll around in my sin. Hear this, strike me down, let it be me instead so that she might stay in this world a little longer.
“18 days remaining”
Elly’s strapped in the car, we’re ready to leave. I’m in the kitchen turning off the coffee machine when Francesca pulls me aside.
“Dad, where were you last night?” Her voice is hushed.
Heaven and back.
“Is that where you went last week?”
I’ve been further.
We make it to the appointment. Francesca and Elly are waiting in the car. Doctor So asks me to sign some papers. I see her name on the document. I watch her slowly go. “I didn’t see you at mass on Sunday,” He says. Like in the dreams, only his lips make sound when they move.
There are things you’re trying to tell me. There are things I’m not telling you. If I close my heart to you, will the world still end?
“1 week remaining”
I’m walking down the stairs. I get a glass of water. The microwave’s clock says 2:34 AM. The curtains are drawn, and I see the backyard, unlit, rain catching little stars. It’s dark, but I know what is there. I wake up in the yard. My hands are wrapped around the neck of a shovel. I’m standing inside a human shaped grave, the bottom of it filling with mud.
3 days remaining
“George, girls”
Her voice is dry and hoarse. I try to let it sound like how she sounds in my dreams. How she did.
“Come closer,”
She whispers.
I tell her,
“The world is ending tomorrow and they’re all going up to Heaven with you.”
Tomorrow
She breathes her last breath, her soul taking flight as it nests in the stars. She will leave and I will be here. At the end of the world.
11:59 PM
Lights coming in through the living room window are strange, on, then off, scattering through the blinds, turning red. I’m heavy. I rub my eyes. I’m in the kitchen. I’m in our bed. In the bathroom mirror, I see my face, wrinkled and fading into gray. A feeling crawls towards the center of my face, a burning itch in the corner of my left eye. When I look closer, the corner isn’t pink, but slick and black. The muscle rolls in itself. I feel it growing larger. I turn to open the door, when she grabs my shoulders. I imagine her mouth moving, her voice locking me in place,
“It’s already begun.”
Dasha
She’s connected in all the right ways. all the ways the world needs her to be. and if anyone looked closer, they’d see the tether that straps her in place, and it’s running thin. She’d walk the edge of that night. She walks it again and again. She imagines reaching out in all the ways she failed to do. She pushes firm on her gas, even firmer on her steering. She taps the ashes from the butt of her cigarette. She’s waiting for the day she doesn’t stick the landing. She’s waiting for the day she can find her again. She might’ve been an assortment of bones held together by exhaust and kerosene, but today she sat in the auto shop garage, held down by this, and holding tenderly, her helmet, a patchwork of the remainders. Two letters on the backside of the helmet, M<3D inscribed poorly with Mel’s house keys.
I will find you again.
-
“OK boys, let’s review it before any idiots get off course and crash head first into the radio station.”
Whoops and hollers, a man with unwashed hair gesturing towards himself and his victorious feat from the week before.
“Starting point is over there, that exact stoplight at the Walmart exit. Not before, not after, we line up right there.” He taps furiously on a map print out, tracing his finger down the rest of the poorly highlighted course, “We take over Copper hill, run it down all the way. Last week we stopped just after the Tesoro bridge but we’ve got it all closed off this time, we’re going further.”
The crowd of men gasp and yell to each other again, like monkeys, spitting demeaning jokes at the other, ‘do you have the balls for that?’ It was near midnight, the air cold, but the tension and testosterone of the crowd set a fire underneath them all.
“When the road splits into Bouquet, and trails off towards Vasquez.” Vasquez rocks was the infamous peculiar rock formation in the valley they called home, a large stone jutting out from the surface, creating angled jagged points in almost three distinct triangles. As seen in many sci fi films, a tourist attraction for most, the destination of this race for them. Rock that had been carved into for billions of years. Teeth craving for the sky.
“No more street lights. No more houses. Pure desert. Everyone got it? All racers get your asses to the starting point. We’re gonna begin in 5.”
“And one more thing,” says the MC,
“Try not to crash.”
-
“Brake check? Gas check? Everything good–”
“Yeah yeah I got it Sid,” Erik yawns, scratching at his heavy, bagged eyes. “You better, if it’s whatever happened last time. I can’t be posting that shit. It’s embarrassing”
“You don’t need to worry about me,” He flashes a smirk. Sid finds it stupid and smug. “5”
Sid leans into the open window, checking the car’s interior for anything he might’ve missed.
“Erik,”
He points to the blatant empty space between Erik’s seat and the passenger’s. Traces of dirt leftover napkins, and whatever else had fallen between the seats exposed. “4”
“The console! Did you take it out???”
“3”
“Too much weight man, it slows me down. don’t be mad~”
“2”
A brilliant revving of a motorbike engine. A last minute racer. No one sees who exactly, but before the flags are waved, dust steams the starting line. Beams of brake lights glow in the cloud.
“This is my dads car, dude. He has to go to work in 8 hours.”
“1”
Erik smiles at his friend, and takes off behind the nameless motorcycle.
-
Cavities of rock turning into dark and darker shapes, this is the feeling, this is the world winding into ghosts. Dasha cuts the walls of the valley into pieces, shredding down the two lane road. She doesn’t hear the cars behind her, she's stopped hearing anything except for wind tunneling across her body, her skin, taking it into her own lungs, down further, the beating of her own heart. The horizon empties from familiar suburban homes into untamed rock and dry landscape, her headlight eating the dark, black asphalt.
Erik pumps the gas, catching drift where he can, anything to pass up this nameless rider leaving him in their leftovers. He’s too focused, his window and car too low to the ground, to notice the low purple glowing streaks shooting above him, from beneath the dark overcast night sky. Dasha does.
A coyote that wasn’t supposed to be there, crossing the road, and Erik, too frightened to think of doing something else, careening off the road at a violent speed. With Sid’s father’s car too light and too fast to catch on anything else slides sideways before crushing its passengers side against the trunk of an unknowing, dying tree.
She jams the brakes on her motorcycle, scrambling back to his direction and then scrambling off it. When she takes off her helmet, the grating teeth of Vasquez rocks eat into a vibrantly purple night sky. Every detail of the darkened landscape lifted into purple, like someone had put a filter on it. Her hands purple, the back of the dying tree lit by it, the wreckage, fire from the gas cap’s end pushing the colors into paranormal shades. If seen from a distance, a distance that she imagines far enough for the other racers to have not caught up from, or something far worse, her shadow shifting too, long against the side of the road. Five thousand versions of panic adrenaline, of fight or of flight bring her towards the wreckage.
A hand to her face to stop the smell of something terrible, she pulls the driver's door open from its crumpled, half torn position. Smoke pours out, Dasha coughs and scatters the
particles of debris from her face. It clears. Erik is not in the driver's seat. Sitting in his place, what looks to her like a chicken’s head, poorly severed from its body, like a practical prank, like a demeaning joke one of his enemies had supplanted, only impossible. And the purple. Why did the sky turn?
When she stops hearing the wind pull at the fire and wreckage, she hears the desert breathing its own tune. Distant crickets the thin leaves of the dying tree blowing, and otherwise a deafening quiet. Her hands back to being lit by only the low fire, the night darker than before. There is no scream of a distant engine. There is no rubber burning the two lane road down the ways. The rest of the racers will never arrive.
Finch
The first time I saw the boy, he was crying. The reasons as for why are not ones I’m able to disclose. The next thought that I had, and the one that I could tell Claire, was that he was beautiful.
The ink of the pen Claire had gifted me months ago had finally emptied into the end of my annotation as one final stroke. I mourned for the end of it, there had never been a pen to slide out my thoughts as easily as this one had. Claire might have gotten me another if I asked, but she was asleep on my bed, and it was well past two in the morning. I opened a new one from a box of many, and it scratched into my notebook, sore and brutal. Not good enough. A click slid the nib back. A walk and then I’d pick my studying back up again. In the morning, I will invent new ways of feeling full.
I had always thought that it was easier for me to feel the arid California desert winds against me when it rose cool, dark, and empty. The daylight was different, in that it held the weight of rubber on roads too wide, friends too old, of men with trucks, and guns in the back of those trucks. And in the night, no matter how I walked it, the scarcely visible arms of the valley, now a rising blue against the black and cloudless sky, would never fall further or closer. The perfect length that kept me far away from everything, and entirely whole.
And another thing I had always thought, that even if I wasn’t beautiful to boys, I could find that they looked more beautiful crying, and that the shallow parking lot lights didn’t do enough to tell me more about him. This is what I could see; Besides the fact that there was a young and dark boy, now a street from me, seated on the curbside, held by his own arms and a cone of low orange light. And that his bag was peculiar, in that around its neck hung more keychains than I could bother remembering.
I was sure of 3 things; that it must have been close to four now, that if I had approached him from the shadows as a dark strange figure he might scream or run, or that he might have unhinged his elbows from his knees, and opened the way a flower would, and all his sweet and sorrowful secrets would be mine.
I turned in that shadow and left.
I would think it over for the days we would later spend together, what is there for him to wallow for? He could do nothing and the world could give him everything in return. It was as easy as it was for him to breathe, to shine me his teeth, hold his own fingers, all as a clever and thoughtless way of making himself a part of this place.
-
“And do you remember when…” “I hope that guy is…” “That reminds me of how you would…” “I saw Mr. Crane at Walmart…..”
It was our way of saying goodbye without having to say it outloud. A thousand mini goodbyes to fill the space between her mouth and mine, that she and I could otherwise close with a kiss. Just another wordless way.
It could be correct to say that I had known Claire since eighth grade, but it would be just to say that I had known her forever. And she had thought she had known me just the same. We allowed each other the company because, it might have seemed, no one else would have us. In her bed or mine, when our bodies were laid bare, everything that folded up during the day would undo themselves into the night. Transparency was inevitable, the girl online that she had met up with, the boy that turned my head during lunch. Each one a fluke. We were terrible alone, and just enough to bear together.
The things that I liked about Claire weighed equal to the ones I didn’t. I liked how clever she was, how her wit could meet mine. She was a rolling fire held firm in a superposition. She was unwavering in all things. She was another mountain on my horizon, carved by time, holding me indiscriminately. She was gorgeous that way, as if the wind could kick up flecks of her embers and scatter them, and she would be radiating still.
Breeze and afternoon light blew through a small crack we had opened in my living room window. My legs lounged on hers easily, the TV screen running a video of its own algorithmic decision. She was already scrolling on her phone when it buzzed, her dad. She shifted, my legs pushed to the side, her taking the call.
The distant sound of an aircraft passing overhead then hovered close, suddenly clinging to the walls of the apartment, thumping the air outside and everything within it. Only, the blinds shaked viciously in the sound and did not easily part to show us what was creating it. I held a pillow to my head to quiet it some, and craned my neck attempting to look. Not unusual, usually, but this is too long and too close to be a regular cop helicopter or something of that nature, is it not? Claire’s voice, uninterested, lifted to compete with it, an estimation of her time to be home chopped up by the blades of that unnamed vehicle. A minute must have passed before she ended the call, and the beating sound ascended onto its path, away from our walls. I gave her a look, to say, was that not weird? She must not have read it right, or neglected it for a different reason, because she replied to me with,
“I have to head out now. Bye. I’ll see you later.”
A goodbye made of words, and one of the last ones at that.
Her parents were pilots, and she was leaving for the Air Force Academy in Colorado within the month.
This could have been the part I liked the least. That the only thing that filled this desolate valley could just as well empty it, and I would still be here. We could call or text, but were words enough? I thought of that boy, crying beneath the street light. And then the ground shaking, the light flickering, and then nothing after that.
-
The second time I saw him, he was unfamiliar at first. This would be some weeks later, I hadn’t been particular about keeping track, but I found ways to fill time by playing games with Claire while thinking of him. Wondering about the stranger who had gusted through my night, and might live forever in me as only a memory. I was wondering about this last Friday, in one of my special spots on campus. There I was, a boy seated alone on a stone bench, in the space that the back folds of the Social and Neuroscience building made room for. Another place for me to soak in the quiet, and let the time pass with my own busy work.
I would not have recognized him if it weren’t for the this-and-thats fastened to the zippers of his backpack. He was going the way I would see him go every time, in union with the air above and the ground below, each laugh tracked seamlessly between a joke of his friend’s making and the cued expression on his face. I thought, this boy is even more beautiful smiling.
Are encounters ever fated? There wasn’t a good enough reason to pull him into me. I was as good as an observer that night, and though it was not this exactly, there is nothing poetic about a bear who stalks a vulnerable deer in the dark. I didn’t have to wonder, because the answer was that I wasn’t good enough. The better answer was that he was. Maybe because I was looking lonely, or that my eyes had already met his, maybe meeting strangers is something he does all the time and that’s why he had a string of friends in his orbit, or that he saw me the same way that I saw him. They waved and hollered goodbyes, and his friends streamed out of the pathway, and out into the parking lot. He approached me.
As if an unidentified aircraft had pushed him down a chute, and he had fallen right out of the sky, now fresh and climbing to reach me. The encounter was not fated, but something else.
He told me his name was Dev. I told him mine was Finch. We got to talking some more. -
I started from the bag and worked my way up. He told me the details of every little thing. This was the way about him, how he picked up pieces of the world and made them a part of himself. The mementos he carried were of people and places I would never know. Now see them, two boys on that little stone bench.
Closer and sharing air, I took in every detail about him that he didn't speak. The salt beaded on the rims of his curled hairline. Whatever sweat slicked across him was dried to the twilight cool. A sweatband holding the rest of his wild hair back, his body framed by gym sweats a size too big. I didn’t mind it. The length of his arms ended in a pile of bands and beads, another number of things I called bracelets, him, memories. He told me he had just dropped by the community college to use the climbing gym. I thought this; climbing is a gay sport. And he was as brilliant as he looked.
How had he seen me? I was not a particular impressive collage of things. I had to take my glasses off to see him clearly, every angle and blemish of my face made naked to whatever scrutiny I imagined. My black hair was overgrown now in thick strokes, pulling too long and too close down the side of my face. I was taller than him, though, and that was one impression of sorts.
“What are you studying?”
I closed the cover of the folder in on my notes. Let me show him rather than tell. The sight of him and crying that night, and him in front of me now, and the mystery of the distance between those two things was a line I was eager to draw. It caught in my snare, behind each of my words, where did those tears that night begin?
“Here’s a better question, what was the last dream you remember?”
“Hm.”
“I remember…”
He looked past me, into the horizon. There in new and old shapes, the vague silhouette of a tennis court, shedding across the bluing concrete every minute and further, and the mountains attempting a climb towards the setting sun. Or maybe he didn’t see it that way, and I wouldn’t know, because I was looking straight at him. He rubbed his thumb along his palms, and then folded his fingers into themselves.
“What I remember first was the sky. The color was like… a lavender sighing into orange. A little bit like right now.” And looking he was.
“But I could see the stars for the night already budding up. I remember looking to my right, and seeing the sun dip into the sea below, and the sky looking back at itself. I realized I was a great distance above it too, right on the edge of a cliff.”
“The sun was setting on my right, so the coast must’ve been facing…”
His eyes oriented themselves to a direction, his face followed
“somewhere south.”
“I don’t think you'll find a place like that here. we’re probably at least 40 minutes away from any beaches. and that’s all facing west.”
“You think so?” I didn’t answer. Quiet filled the air. The evening filled into the air, the sky, the world dimming blue.
“I'll find it one day.”
“How long have you lived here?”
“Since I was born. you?”
“My family moved here almost a year ago. will be a year at the beginning of august. oh, that’s gonna be next week.”
“The running joke is that there’s nothing to do here. Just... Commute to work. Go to church on Sunday. Be home before 6.”
“I think you're looking in the wrong places”
A change in the wind, like it stopped in its current completely. I know this well, the folly of the scientist. Talking was a thousand different ways of giving me a thousand secret words, with another thousand more meanings. I wanted to pick him apart, lie him down clean and take record of each nerve and thought. For me, there was no work without love. “Then, show me the right ones.”
-
Here they were, well into the night, in the industrial zone that was close enough to wander into Finch’s midnight walks, and just another part of the town that endlessly fascinated Dev. Buildings that looked nothing like the rest of the city designated architectural styles, yet were indistinguishable from one another. The same rows and blocks of gray boxes he’d never been inside of. There were aerospace companies here, print shops possibly, film studios, even a church, anyone who needed a building for people to be in without it needing to look important, without needing to water the grass, without needing sidewalks.
“Isn’t it fascinating,” said Dev, taking photographs on his film camera of the building’s exteriors.
“At night, the lights are on, the television screen in this waiting room is running their wallpaper, and no one is inside of them.”
“Have you ever been inside of one? Or know anyone who works in these? My answer to both of those questions is no.”
As they walk down the block, finding footing on hilly grass, Dev continues shooting new angles of the same buildings. Finch watches him.
“Dev, can I tell you something?”
“Shoot.”
He braces for the worst to happen. He braces for the world to open up beneath him. He’s looking for his body language, something to anticipate the future. He reads nothing. Dev continues to take pictures. A stray swirl of wind picks a loose piece of tossed paper into the road. It stays like that, standing up on its side. The wind picks up in an enormous way, slowly. The buildings begin to unhinge from the ground, lampposts lifted, paper and trash suspended, as if the wind was a string pulling it just off the edge of the world. A spider threading upwards. All of them, tethered to the precipice. Was this it? Finally? After all the signs? the turn taken for the worst, finally? The world opening up-wards? How fitting, Finch thinks. Here we are, even if in the wrong version of our world, pushing up the right words to say.
“I’m really in love with you.”
He can’t see Dev when he tells him. He’s looking into the viewfinder of his camera, but he sees him smile beneath it.
Dev watches the invisible strings pull the world from its feet. Floating is what it is, and floating is what we are. In this never-place, with this never-boy, pushing up and pushing off. As if someone had heard Dev and his intrigue with the monotonous industrial complex, the landscape was opening upwards, rearranged, a tree now sideways, doors opening and closing, every light turned on, a car cruising at the second story level, listening to their conversation and pulling the world away.
“Dev, hey Dev,” Finch pinned his attention singularly to Dev, the changing surroundings meaning nothing to him.
Dev grabs Finch’s hand, taking him up as he climbs the lamp post, up a firm branch, taking their weight more easily than he imagined. Higher and higher from the ground, gravity having as much logic as they allow it to.
“Where are we going? Did you hear me?”
“I did.”
He pulls him in through an open door, from an office space he doesn’t bother to read the sign for, outside the same building where Dev first saw him. The door closes. The world falls back into place.