Horatio: A Short Story
When you gonna give to me, a gift to me
Is it just a matter of time, Sharona?
Is it d-d-destiny, d-destiny
Or is it just a game in my mind, Sharona?
—The Knack ‘My Sharona’
Horatio
A Short Story
By Tj Klune
On October 15, 1979, two men take to the road, leaving their town behind, waiting for the peanut farmer president to come onto the radio to make an important announcement about the future of all mankind. In the hours leading up to the broadcast, Jamie and Harry will look back on their relationship, and what it means to live in defiance like there's no tomorrow.
Author’s note: This began as an exercise of wanting to tell a complete love story in under ten thousand words. It turned into something more than I could have predicted. This is my way of saying thank you for your patience and support over the past year. 2019 is almost over, and I’m going to take over the whole damn world in 2020. Just you wait and see.
love,
tj
(IT’S THE END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT, AND I FEEL FINE)
He looks over at me and smiles. “You see this?” He nods out the window.
Yes, I want to tell him. I see it. But I don’t. Because I’m looking at him, cool and relaxed in the driver’s seat, one hand on the steering wheel, the other laying on his thigh. Jamie is all lines: his legs, long and thin; his dark hair, hanging around his face and onto the collar of his Chambray shirt, the buttons mismatched, but we don’t care; the sharp relief of his jaw, the patchy stubble; bony fingers, the knuckles thick with wiry hair. He’s got that little smile on his face, the one that means trouble, the one that means he wouldn’t mind if I put my hand on his lap and squeezed until his face filled with blood, mouth open as he panted.
I don’t. I want to, but I don’t.
He says, “Harry, look, look, it’s right there.”
“Yeah,” I say, still looking at him. “I know. It’s been there for a while.”
He laughs in that big way he does. Anyone else, it’d be off-putting. It crawls from his belly up to his chest and throat and pours from his mouth, rusty and cracked and loud, lips pulled back over his teeth. The front two have a gap between them. I’m fascinated by it.
He says, “I’ve thought about what today means. For weeks, you know? It almost doesn’t matter what happens.”
It does. It doesn’t. He’s wrong. He’s right. Nothing matters, not anymore. “Tell me.”
He reaches out to one of the radio knobs. The Knack singing ‘My Sharona’ fades to barely audible levels. That’s okay. That’s fine. I’m tired of it, even if it’s only been out for a few months. But it’s the only song being played right now. Over and over again, in an endless cycle. I don’t know if anyone is even at the radio station anymore. They’ve all gone away. They forgot to turn it off with all the lights.
His hand goes back to his lap, palm up, fingers curled. “It’s like…I don’t know, man. Harry. Harry, listen, okay? It doesn’t matter. It was always going to be something. We’re not meant to last forever. We’re here, and it’s a flash of light before it fades away back into nothing. It’s all dark. Everything. You. Me.” He shakes his head. “We’re free. I know it doesn’t feel like it, but we are. Finally, at last, we’re free.”
Sartre. Kierkegaard. He’s read them over and over again. It’s called existentialism. I don’t always understand it. It’s too big, too wild. Free will as an individual. I don’t know if I believe it. I don’t know what I believe.
It gets his motor revving. If he goes on long enough, his hands will start flailing, his eyes wide, spittle on his lip. I could listen to him speak for hours. It doesn’t matter on what. He’s alive and bright and beautiful in ways I can’t always describe. There’s nothing like it when he’s worked up. There’s a fire burning in him.
“But we’re still here,” I tell him. Many aren’t. They’ve taken matters into their own hands.
He says, “Yeah, man. Because we choose to be. See it through, you know? All the way to the end.”
“And if the end doesn’t come?”
He shrugs. “Then it doesn’t. And we’ll go on and on until there’s nothing left. Of us. Or the world. It was always going to be something,” he says again, and I wonder if he’s trying to convince me or himself.
*****
I met Jamie six months ago. It was nothing. I thought it was nothing. It was nothing until it wasn’t.
I walked into a house at the end of a street, music blaring so loud that it rattled my teeth. I was alone. It’d taken me hours to work up the courage to go to the party. I was invited, at least tangentially. I can’t remember the guy’s name, but I’d been standing in a group and he’d said, “Hey, I’m having a party this weekend, y’all coming?” and everyone nodded. I did the same because I was trying to fit in. I was nineteen and lost. I’m still nineteen, but I don’t feel as lost anymore.
The house smelled like sweat and beer and weed. The crowd was immense, people dancing and singing at the tops of their lungs, writhing with each other. People sat on couches and chairs and the floor. On the stairs. On tops of tables. A woman was topless, her breasts bouncing as she jumped up and down. Her eyes were glazed over, and she was smiling, smiling.
Someone handed me a beer. I took a sip. It was bitter. I took another drink.
I moved through the crowd. Some people said my name, and I nodded in response, never stopping, never slowing. I didn’t know where to go. Home, maybe, to the apartment above the record store. But it was too quiet there. I could hear myself think. I didn’t want to think anymore.
I thought about going upstairs. I didn’t, only because people blocked it, a man and woman, her hand down the front of his pants, wrist slowly moving up and down. The man’s eyes were closed.
I went out back instead, walking through the kitchen to the sliding doors that led to a yard with a pool. People were splashing. Some were fully-clothed. Some were nude.
And there he was in all his glory, holding court on the brown and crunchy grass, his disciples laid out around him, their attention rapt. I’d learn later that he always did this when he got drunk or stoned. It made him want to talk, to explain the secrets of the universe as he saw them. People didn’t always understand what he was talking about—maybe they never understood any of it—but when he talked, when he got going, it was hard to look away. He used his entire body to make a point, hands punching the air to punctuate his words, pacing back and forth, head bowed as he talked and talked.
I don’t normally like people like him. They talk without saying anything at all. He was handsome, sure, oddly so, but that wasn’t everything. Beautiful people were a dime a dozen, and when they spouted their college-learned philosophy, I stopped listening. It wasn’t important, no matter how much they thought it was.
I never went to college. I graduated high school, and immediately went to work at the mill. That was my job. That was what I did. It was inevitable. I didn’t need to learn anymore. I knew my lot in life. Roughneck. Blue collar. There was nothing else I could be.
And yet here I was, staring at him as he went off about absurdism, that the world didn’t have meaning beyond what we assigned to it. “You think any of this matters?” he ranted, beer sloshing from the longneck bottle onto his hand, droplets falling to the grass. “Who the fuck cares? We’re already dead, we just don’t know it yet.”
People murmured around him before a man spoke up, eyes bloodshot and heavy. “Then what’s the point?”
“Ah,” he said. He grinned and grabbed his crotch, leering at the group before him. “To do what we want when we want to. Good, bad, whatever. Screw all the rest.”
It was nothing until it was something.
I turned to leave when he said, “Hey. Hey, you.”
He wasn’t talking to me. I didn’t turn around.
I didn’t turn around until he grabbed my wrist, forcing me to stop.
From a distance, he was unremarkable. He looked like all the others. Everyone I’d ever met.
Up close was different.
Up close I could see the lines around his mouth. The curve of his eyebrows. He had a scar on his nose, a thin white line that he’d later tell me came from when his father broke a glass bottle on his face. And his crooked teeth when he grinned at me, sloppy and happy. Casually reckless, and I didn’t care. I pulled my hand away. He let me go.
But I didn’t walk away. Above all else, this is what I remember most. I didn’t walk away.
“I haven’t seen you before,” he whispered as if revealing a great secret. He looked pleased with himself. “Why is that? Where did you come from?”
“You weren’t looking,” I said, voice tinged with annoyance.
“Townie,” he said. “I can hear it in your voice.”
No derision. It wasn’t a slight, just a fact. Still, I bristled. “Why do you care?”
He said, “I care about curiosities. About mysteries. You’re both. Look at you.” He walked around me in slow circle. I was on display, and I couldn’t move. No one else paid us any attention, lost to their own revelry, and why not? We were all young and vital, a collection of atoms moving through the dark reaches of space on an impossible rock. I thought about how all the billions of years of evolution had led to me standing here, at this moment while this stranger looked me up and down. Insignificant. Monumental.
He came back around in front of me, hands on his hips. “There,” he said. “Now I see you.”
Dubious, uncaring. “You do.”
He cocked his head, eyes alight with something I couldn’t quite place. Mischief, maybe. And if I really thought hard enough, perhaps a low thrum of heat. He was like me. No one looked at me the way he was if they weren’t.
He leaned forward like he was going to kiss me.
I jerked my head back, looking around. Nobody watched us.
He rolled his eyes. “No one here cares. It’s whatever, man. We’re all people. We’re all animals.”
I snorted derisively. “Does that actually work on anyone?”
“I’ll tell you in the morning,” he said as his smile widened.
It was crass, careless. People hated us. The world hated us. We were sick, diseased, afflicted with a psychological malady of the mind. It shouldn’t have worked. It—he was ridiculous.
And yet.
We fucked in the front seat of his white Firebird, the car white, the seats red. His hands gripped my shoulders as he snapped his hips into me, my head hitting the T-bar again and again. It hurt, the fucking and the T-bar, but it didn’t matter, not then.
I came first, shooting onto his chest, his shirt rucked up under his chin. He grinned up at me as I slid off, taking him in hand, jerking him up and down until he spilled on top of the mess I’d made.
I moved back to the other seat, pulling up my pants.
“Thanks,” I said, wanting to leave. I reached for the door handle.
“What’s your name?”
I looked over to see him pulling his shirt off over his head. He used it to wipe away the evidence of our coupling and tossed it over his shoulder behind the seat. I watched as he stretched his arms above his head, fingers wiggling in the air as his back popped. His skin was flushed, sweat in the hair on his chest and stomach. He dropped his hands and waited.
I let go of the handle. “Harry.”
“Harry,” he said, chewing it slowly. “Harry. Good. That’s a good name. Strong. I’m Jamie.” He rubbed his hand against his chest. It wasn’t sexual, it wasn’t practiced. It was absentminded, like he was thinking. I couldn’t look away. “Harry,” he said again. “I’m Jamie.”
“Jamie,” I repeated. Then, “How old are you?”
“Twenty-one. You?”
“Nineteen.”
He nodded. “Good. Hey. Hey. Let’s go get breakfast.”
“It’s one in the morning.”
“I know,” he said. “Pancakes at one in the morning are my favorite kind of pancakes. Come on. I know a place. You have a car?”
I shook my head. “I walked. I’m a townie, remember?”
“That makes it easier,” he said seriously.
“What?”
“Everything.” He twisted the key. The Firebird rumbled to life.
The place he knew was a place everyone knew. A diner with neon signs and license plates hung on the wall from everywhere. The waitress smelled like cigarettes and regret, and she didn’t have time for our shit. She took our order and forgot about us for a long time. Eventually, the pancakes came.
And as much as I hated it, he was right. One in the morning pancakes were the best kind of pancakes.
He took me home, after. Not my home. His. He shared it with four others, but he said he never saw them. His room was small, mostly books, books piled everywhere. He shoved them off the bed and then collapsed on top of it. He reached for me.
I took what was offered.
We fucked again.
As the sun began to rise, both of us drifting off, I heard him say, “See? It worked. I told you, Harry. I told you.”
I left him sleeping on the bed in the early afternoon. I hesitated after dressing, warring with myself. Eventually, I worked up the courage. I found a pen and scrap of paper, writing my phone number on it, sure he’d never call. I was a conquest, a one-night stand. He wouldn’t even remember my name in a week. If he called at all, it would be just to hook up again. There were worse things.
I was home for five minutes when the phone rang.
“Harry,” he breathed down the line.
I closed my eyes.
*****
We’re driving everywhere and nowhere. We’re aimless, no destination in mind. It’s fine. Some streets are empty. Others are filled with people running, running, arms full of luggage and groceries and children. Some are crying. Some are shouting. A woman is standing in the middle of a side street, head tilted back toward the sky. She’s screaming. I only see her for a second and then she’s gone.
We go past a church, so full I think it should burst. People spill out the front door, the crowd gathering on the front lawn. He slows as we go by, and we can hear an amplified voice speaking from somewhere inside. It says, “He has a plan, He has a purpose, and we must remember that. Whatever comes, whatever happens, it is God’s will, and we must trust in Him. We will return to the Garden, we will find peace and everlasting life in His glory. He waits for us with open arms, his children returning home at last, at last, our Lord, our Savior. Trust Him! Trust His divinity! We are not alone. We have never been alone, and here, in our greatest hour, we will heed His summons with a smile on our faces. Can I get an amen?”
Everyone cries AMEN! AMEN! AMEN!
“It helps,” Jamie says as we leave the church behind. “It’s not for me, but who I am to judge?”
“You know it’s not real,” I say, leaning my head back.
“Yeah,” he says. “But who cares if people want to believe in Sky Daddy? That’s their choice. They chose their faith. We have ours.”
I turn my head toward him. “What is it? What’s our faith?”
“Each other,” he replies, and it’s pretty, these words, and though they should be hollow, I know he’s right. I love him, impossibly, irrevocably, though I haven’t said the words. “We have each other, and that’s all we need.”
I look down at my watch. Three thirty-five. Less than two hours until we know. Five thirty, Eastern Standard Time. The clock is ticking, ticking.
He notices. He smiles. “Not yet.”
“No,” I say. “Not yet.”
We drive on into nothing.
*****
I saw him again that night after I left him in his bed. He asked for my address. I gave it to him. He showed up without letting me know he was coming. I should have known.
He leaned in the doorframe as I opened the door. “Hey,” he said. Then he pushed by me like it wasn’t the first time he’d been here. Like he’d always been here. He kicked off his boots and slid off his leather jacket. He wore jeans and a white shirt. It had a hole in the hem, the neckline stretched out.
He touched everything. My busted couch. The chipped coffee table. The stereo I’d spent too much on. He flipped through the cassettes stacked next to it, murmuring or scoffing at whatever he found. He went into the kitchen, flitting about like a little bird. He opened the fridge, took out a beer. He found the bottle opener and popped the lid off, letting it fall on the counter. He drank half of it in one long pull.
“Why are you here?” I asked him.
He burped, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “Where else would I go?”
“Somewhere. Anywhere.”
“You have work?”
I shook my head. “Not until tomorrow.”
“Good,” he said.
I trailed after him as he walked down the hallway. He poked his head into the small bathroom before moving on to the only other door that led to my bedroom. He went inside. I followed. I couldn’t do anything but. He had this gravity about him, pulling everything in wherever he went. I was caught in it.
He sat on my bed, the beer bottle dangling between his legs. He patted the empty space beside him. I hesitated before sitting down next to him. I startled when he leaned over and kissed my cheek, his breath full of hops. He hadn’t kissed me last night. Or this morning. They usually don’t. Fucking was one thing. Kissing was something else entirely.
I pulled away.
He laughed.
He was testing me, pushing against my perceived boundaries. I shredded them and kissed him on the mouth. He grunted in surprise, but it was brief. He kissed me back, his tongue against mine. I reached for his dick, the outline clear at the front of his jeans. He pushed my hand away.
“What?”
He said, “I don’t want you to think I’m easy.” His eyebrows raised up and down.
“You fucked me without knowing my name.”
He lay back on the bed, feet still on the floor. His shirt slid up, revealing the taut skin of his stomach, the curls of hair that disappeared into the front of his jeans. He closed his eyes. “I did. But I knew you. Even then. I may not have known your name, but I knew you. You’re like me, in a way. Not completely because you’re still you.”
“What are you talking about?”
He opened one eye, squinting at me. “You know.”
I did. I didn’t. “Why are you here?”
“I wanted to see you,” he said as if it were that easy.
“Why?”
“I like that. You ask a lot of questions. That’s good. Most people don’t. If there’s something they don’t understand, they just let it go. It’s easier. Nothing about you is easy.” He laughed. “Well. Most things about you aren’t easy.”
I slapped my hand against his stomach.
He grunted out a low oof and grabbed my hand, pulling me down until I lay next to him. His head was inches from my own, and when he turned to look at me, his nose brushed against mine. His eyes were deep and pale blue. They seemed to go on forever. I couldn’t look away.
He kissed me again before sighing. “Harry,” he said. “Harry, Harry, Harry. I woke up and you were gone. I thought, well, that’s that. And then I found your note. So I called. And here I am. It’s that simple. You left me a line, and I followed it.”
“But why?”
“Because I could,” he said as if it were that easy. “I wanted to. Hey.”
“Hey,” I said. I took the beer from him and lifted my head. The angle was awkward, but I got a couple of swallows down before handing it back. He drank too, right after. Strangely intimate, this. My mouth. His mouth.
“Hey,” he said again. “I was thinking.”
“Should I be scared?”
“Probably. But can I tell you what I was thinking about?”
“If I say no?”
He shrugged. “Then you do.”
I looked up at the ceiling. Popcorn, a wet stain in the corner that had always been there. “Tell me.”
He said, “I was thinking about what this means. What the point is. Why our paths crossed at the moment they did. Any action in all our years could have set us on a different path, but there’s a reason we ended up where we did.”
“What happened to free will?”
He snorted inelegantly. “Who knows? It’s one of the great secrets of the universe. Maybe it was fate, maybe it was destiny, or maybe it was nothing at all and we’re just two people in the middle of cosmic nonsense clinging to each other because we can.” He waved his hand dismissively, almost hitting me in the face. “It doesn’t matter. Here you are. Here I am. And there’s no other place I’d rather be. You intrigue me.”
“You don’t know me.”
“I will,” he said, and it was a promise he would keep.
*****
The light in the sky is brighter than it’s ever been. It’s almost like a second sun, burning against a deep blue. I watch it until it hurts my eyes. I look away, the afterimage dancing, dancing. ‘My Sharona’ has started over. Neither of us think to change it to another station or put a cassette into the deck. We’re waiting for five-thirty for the peanut farmer to tell us what’s going to happen. Just like everyone else.
The town has fallen away behind us. The main roads out of town are gridlocked, horns honking, people trying to flee even though it won’t matter. We stay away from those roads, sticking to the backroads that only we know about. Sometimes, the pavement gives away to dirt and gravel before picking up again a mile later. We’re heading into the hills. The trees are trapped in autumn, the leaves red and gold and falling. The air is cooler in the season of the witch. It’s growing late.
I say, “Did you call your parents?”
He shakes his head. “What’s the point? They would have said I was blasphemous, that I need to repent while there’s still time. I’ve heard it all before.” I know that. I do. They thought him sin incarnate. A deviant. Words hurt, but so do fists. His daddy had seen to that. He barely mentions them.
Still. “Things are different now.”
“How?” he asks. He’s not mad, just taking it all in, chewing it over like he does. “What could I possibly tell them to make them understand?” He’s right, of course. He’ll never be what they want him to be, even now. It’s one of the things I notice most about him. He doesn’t care what anyone thinks about him, aside from me. It’s a strength. It’s a weakness. When we’re out, he’ll put his arm around me in defiance, saying we had just as much a right as anyone else. I hated it at first, hated the way people stared at us, the way they would whisper and laugh. I always shoved him away. It hurt him, I could see it in his eyes, there and gone in a flash. I’m getting better about it. At least I was. It’s different now.
“Okay,” I say quietly, and he reaches over and takes my hand in his. My hands are bigger than his. I engulf him. He holds me in place. It’s not an act of defiance now. It’s just the two of us.
“Did you call yours?”
I breathe and breathe. “Yeah. Yesterday. The day before. Last week. The week before that. This last time was just Mom. Dad was too busy packing.”
“They have a place to go?”
“She thinks so.”
“Is it good enough?”
No. It’s not. Like the people packing the streets, it doesn’t matter. They could drive for hours and hours and still not get far enough. We all waited too long, had too much faith. They begged me to come to them. I told them there wasn’t enough time. Mom cried. I said goodbye. My father screamed as I hung up the phone. It rang again almost immediately, but I didn’t pick up.
“They’re going to try,” I say.
“Yeah,” he says just as the Knack say m-m-m-my Sharona! “I hope they do. Your mom likes me.”
She does. She doesn’t know what he is to me, only thinks he’s my friend. She wouldn’t understand. It’s better this way. She calls him, sometimes. He likes her. She likes him. Maybe she knows. Maybe she doesn’t.
“She asked about you,” I say. “She said she’s happy we’re together now with all that’s going on.”
He smiles, the real smile that he only shows a few select people. It makes him look younger, more innocent. “Good. She knows we’ll take care of each other. It’s for the best.” His smile fades. “Did you want…” He shakes his head.
“What?” I ask, squeezing his hand, marveling—not for the first time—how we fit together like two pieces of a puzzle. The picture isn’t complete, but it’s enough to see it for what it is.
“Did you wanna go to them?”
I look out the window. “It doesn’t matter now, does it?”
“It could.”
He’s testing me. Pushing. “No. I’m where I’m supposed to be.”
I can feel the happiness radiating from him. Jamie is an enigma to most people. He’s a curiosity, able to speak for hours about anything. He’s fascinated by everything. The world is big, he says sometimes, and he needs to know all that he can.
I know him, though. I see through to the heart of him, that thunderous heart that beats in his chest, but only because he let me in. He says he’s never had that before, had never met anyone like me.
I’m not anything. But to him, I’m something. That has to count.
He says, “Here we go, here we go,” as we crest a large hill. Below us, a valley stretches out, covered in trees. We’ve made this trip before because we like to drive and talk and think and sing. But it’s different now. The colors are brighter. The air sharper. I can taste autumn on my tongue.
He lifts his arms in the air as we start to descend the hill. I do the same.
We shout our happiness into the world because we’re alive, alive, alive, and if nothing else, I know it hears us. It has to. It owes us that much.
*****
We never fight, not really. Nothing big. Nothing major. We have our disagreements—everyone does—but we let them go even if we know we’re right and the other is not. “Life’s too short to be pissed off all the time,” he told me. “You can’t survive on a diet of outrage alone. You’ll starve even if you think you’re full.”
He’s right. He’s wrong. It’s healthy to argue. We can’t agree on everything. But I don’t want to survive on outrage. I never have. There are bigger things than just us. War and famine, disease and hatred. The color of my skin shouldn’t matter, but it does. We’re here, we’re queer, and that’s a lot. But he’s white and I’m Black. Somehow, that makes it worse for others. One or the other is fine but both? If we were just friends, most wouldn’t bat an eye. But we’re not. We’re more than that. And that just won’t do.
For all that he is, he’s still naïve about certain things. “Racism,” he’ll rant. “What’s the point of it? Why does it still exist? Who the fuck cares?”
“Spoken like a white man,” I’ll tell him. “You don’t know. You can’t. My dad couldn’t sit at the same lunch counter as others. My mother was spit on for going to a school where everyone else was white. They burned a cross on her parents’ lawn.”
“God,” he’ll say. “Religion. It ruins everything.”
“It’s not about the cross,” I’ll tell him. “It’s not about God and religion. It’s because they see us as lesser. I’m beneath them.”
“You’re not,” he’ll reply. “You’re not.”
“You’re eating your outrage,” I’ll say.
And he’ll look at me, wide-eyed, mouth opening and closing like a dying fish. Then he’ll laugh.
It’s nice. It’s trite.
This isn’t what we fought about. This wasn’t our big fight.
It happened three months in. The newness of him was still there, exciting like a lightning storm on the horizon. I was addicted to his words, his movements. He was a chaotic symphony, a conductor on the verge of losing control but hanging on by the skin of his teeth. He said he didn’t care I worked in a mill. But I could see it bothered him, sometimes.
One day, he said, “Why didn’t you go to college?”
We were laying naked on the floor of my living room. We’d been fooling around, but it’d been going on for hours, edging and teasing. I was tired, but it was a good tired. The carpet was itching against our bare skin. His hand touched mine, tracing the veins and tendons. The air was hot. The windows were open, but it didn’t help. Sweat trickled down my cheek to my ear.
“Didn’t want to,” I said. I was loose and happy. I didn’t want to think. I wanted to lay on top of him, to cover him. I was bigger than he was, more weight, more height. I could cover him completely, smother him until he could only breathe my air.
“Why?” he asked, and I knew he wasn’t going to let this go. “You’re smart, smarter than most everyone I know.” He grabbed my hand. He squeezed until my bones creaked. He was stressing his point. I pulled my hand away. He let me go. “Don’t you want more for yourself?”
“I have what I want,” I said. The happiness was fading. I was waking up, the fog of lust and desire dissipating into startling clarity. It felt like the real world just outside my door. “I make money. I don’t count on anyone but myself. I go to work. I come home. I pay my bills. I have a little left over. It’s enough.”
“Is it?” he asked, and he turned his head to look at me. I ignored him. He poked my shoulder. “Think about it, Harry. You could be anything you wanted to be. You could be a doctor. Or a lawyer. Or—”
“Or I can work in a mill because I’m good at it,” I said, and there was a sharpness in my voice. He was on dangerous ground, the ice cracking beneath his feet. But he was daring, an explorer, wanting to push and push until he fell through to the cold water below.
“Don’t you want to be better at something else?”
I sat up. My back cracked. I didn’t look at him. “Why does it matter?”
He was frustrated, hands going into his hair and tugging. “Because I want more for you. The world needs to know who you are.”
He was in school, even though it was summer. He wanted to learn all he could. He wanted to be an author. An astronaut. A scientist. He was like a kid, dreaming big, big, bigger than his head could contain. He wanted everything. He would go to class and then come to me, telling me all he’d heard. I listened, of course I did. But it wasn’t for me.
“I know my place,” I told him, trying to keep the anger from my voice. “I know what I’m capable of. This is who I am. This is what I do. You know that.”
He sat up too, going to his knees. He shifted until he was in front of me. He cupped my face in his hands. I did not flinch. “I know,” he said seriously. “But the mill isn’t the world.”
“It’s my world,” I snapped as his thumbs brushed the skin under my eyes. “It’s for me. I work hard. I’m good at it.”
“Your back hurts,” he said. “You get blisters on your palms that harden and turn to calluses. I feel them when you touch me. I like them. They make me feel safe. But I want you to dream bigger. There’s so much more that you could—”
I jerked my head back. His hands fell as I stood up and began to pace. “It’s so easy for you. You think because you do what you do, everyone else should too. We aren’t all like you. You hate where you came from, but you still take their money. You don’t worry about rent or food on your table because you don’t have to. I’ve been working since I was twelve years old. You’ve never had a job in your life.” I’ve been told when I get angry, my eyes darken until they’re almost black. I felt like that then. Dark, darker, darkest.
He said, “That’s not fair.”
I laughed. It was cracked and broken. “Of course it’s not. But that’s the way it is. You knew what you were getting into. You can do whatever you want, but don’t you try and mold me into something you want me to be.”
He pushed himself off the ground. He looked ridiculous, dick hanging between his legs, hands on his hips as he glared at me. “I’m not trying to change—”
“You are,” I said coldly, thinking about how just minutes before, we’d been sucking on each other’s skin. “I’ve heard this all before from people like you. Try, you all say. Do better. Be better. Be more. This is me. This is all I’ve got. I’m good with it. Or I was until you started trying to make me feel small.”
His cheeks reddened. He was embarrassed and angry, an awful combination. One or the other, and we could work through it. But both? Both makes a person say things they don’t mean. Or maybe they do, in their secret hearts.
He said, “If you just applied yourself, you could…” He knew he’d made a mistake. I could see it on his face.
“Out,” I said. “Get out.”
I thought he’d argue. I thought he’d try and say, “No, Harry, no, come on, man, don’t be like that.” He didn’t. Instead, he bent over, picking up his jeans that had been dropped to the floor. One leg in, then the other. He left them unbuttoned, a tuft of his pubic hair sticking out the top. It was sexy. I’d never felt less aroused in my life.
He pulled on his shirt. He got stuck, trying to put his head through the arm hole. He grunted as he figured it out. He pointed at me. “You’re so goddamn stubborn.”
I stared at him.
He shook his head as he shoved his feet into his boots. “Fuck this. Fuck it. I don’t care.”
“Good,” I said. “Then that makes it easier.”
He scowled as he fished his keys from his pocket. He twirled the key ring on his finger. “Fine. Fine. Do what you want. Stay at the mill. Go to the moon. I’m trying to help you.”
“I never asked for your help,” I reminded him. “I don’t need you to save me. I’ve already saved myself.”
He left, slamming the door behind him. It rattled in its frame, shaking the window.
For the next hour, I prowled my apartment, listening to the thump, thump, thump of music from the record store below. It vibrated through the floor, buzzing up my feet and legs and hips until it settled like a hive of bees in my chest. I wanted to crack it open and let it swallow me whole.
I almost punched the wall. I didn’t, because then I’d have to patch it up. The landlord was a stickler about such things.
Four hours later, he came back.
He looked sheepish, standing there in the afternoon sun, staring down at his feet as he scratched the back of his neck.
“What?” I asked. “More to say?”
He shook his head. “Will you come with me?”
“Why?”
“I want to show you something.”
“And if I don’t want to?”
He shrugged. “Then you don’t have to. I’m not going to make you do something you don’t want. But I hope you will.”
I waited a beat, letting him dangle hook, line and sinker. He fidgeted like a fish with a hook in its mouth. I reeled him in as I said, “I need to put on shoes.”
I closed the door in his face.
I leaned my forehead against it, breathing in.
He was near the stairs when I came out. He nodded at me but didn’t speak. I followed him down to his ridiculous car. He drove us out of town. We didn’t talk. We didn’t try to touch each other. The only sound was the wind blowing around us, and the radio, playing low in the background, the disc jockey talking about space and rocks and how it’d be a sight to see the world over.
He stopped a while later in the middle of a thin forest. The sun beat down on us. He climbed out first, rounding the front of the car. I followed him. I gave him a little bit. I touched the back of his hand. He nodded and moved toward the trees.
We didn’t go far. Grass and dead leaves from the previous winter crunched underneath our shoes. I was about to ask where we were going when he stopped in front of an old oak, the trunk too big for me to wrap my arms around.
“Here,” he said quietly. “This is it.”
“What is?”
He nodded toward the tree. I stepped closer. The limbs provided shade, shadows that danced along the ground. The wood and leaves creaked and shivered. I never really thought about how trees are alive until that moment. Not alive like you and me, but alive all the same. They breathe and drink and grow and bleed. They can get sick and die.
I started to say I didn’t see anything, but it died before it was born. There, carved into the trunk of a tree were the words: HARRY + JAMIE 4EVER.
I reached up and traced the letters, the tips of my fingers becoming sticky with sap. I’d never had that before. It was a sign, a declaration, an apology. I stuck my finger into my mouth, sucking the sap down, bitter and warm, a vampire drinking blood.
“I did it for you,” he said. “No matter what happens to us, no matter where we go or what we do, this moment will be here forever. Even if the world burns, we’ll know we were here. I don’t need you to be anything else. I shouldn’t have said that. I’m sorry, Harry. You deserve better than what I said. You deserve everything.”
“You did this,” I whispered. I didn’t cry. I can’t remember the last time I’d cried. But my voice was still rough, still choked. “For me.”
“Yeah, man,” he said. “It’s nothing. It’s small.”
I looked at him. “It feels big.”
He grinned, relieved. “Yeah?”
I shrugged. “Yeah.”
“Cool.”
I never forgot that day when he carved our names into a tree and called it art. He said I was his muse. I laughed at him until I realized he was serious. I’d never been anyone’s anything before, much less a muse. I was a speck of sand on an infinite beach, waiting for the tide to come in and wash me away. And here he was, the ocean, the waves, and I drowned in him.
*****
We’re deeper into the hills, far away from anything else. The Knack are still at it, but I don’t care. I hate the song, but it’s circled back enough where it doesn’t grate my ears. It’s nearing five in the afternoon. Only a little bit longer to go. Five thirty, Eastern Standard Time. It’s weird to think about. On the other side of the world, five thirty has come and gone and nothing has happened. They’re waiting for a different time, there in the future. Today is Tuesday. For some, it’s Wednesday. They don’t have to worry about tomorrow, because for them, tomorrow has already happened. It’s almost like time travel.
He says, “I think about what comes after.”
“After,” I say as I look over at him. His hair his whipping around his head. It looks like a crown. A king surveying his kingdom.
“After,” he repeats. “After this. After all of this. Sky Daddy isn’t waiting for us.”
“So it’s…what. Nothingness?”
He shakes his head. “I don’t know. I hope not. But what if it is? Wouldn’t it just be the greatest joke with the most devastating punchline? Here we are, everything that has come before leading to this moment. We crawled from the oceans as little blobby fish onto dry land. We grew legs. We stood upright. We moved through the trees. We built. We created. We destroyed. And then it’s…nothing?”
He’s scared. He’s trying not to show it, but I know him better than anyone. He’s not talking to me as much as he’s talking to himself. He doesn’t sound convinced. “Then what else could there be?”
“I don’t know,” he says, knuckles turning white on the steering wheel. “Not Heaven. Not Hell. Those are manmade ideas. We slot everything into good and bad, with nothing in between. You could live a life of sin and so long as you repent by the end, it doesn’t matter? How on earth is that realistic?”
“We tell ourselves it is to make us feel better.”
“Maybe,” he says. “But that can’t be it. This can’t be all there is. I don’t know what it could be, but I refuse to think we just flicker out into nothing.”
“What if we do?”
He says, “Then what’s the point? What is the point of all of this?”
I think hard for a moment. “To do what we have with the time we have. To put as much good out into the universe as possible.”
He laughs. It sounds like a sob. “Have we?”
“I don’t know,” I say as honestly as I can. “I like to think we have. Even if it’s just been between us, we’re happy. We have each other. That has to count for something, if someone’s keeping score.”
“Harry,” he says. “Harry. Oh my god. You’re right. You’re right, of course you’re right. What was I thinking?” He slaps his hand against the horn. It blares into the trees, causing birds to take flight above us. He does it again and again. “Take that!” he cries. “You hear that, world? This is us! We have each other, and we matter!”
M-m-m-my Sharona! the Knack screams.
*****
It’s the size of Oregon.
That’s what they said in early August. It was roughly the size of Oregon, and they didn’t know how they hadn’t seen it until it was too late. The one that had killed the dinosaurs was thought to be eight to ten miles wide, and this one was far, far, bigger.
They called the asteroid 1 Thanatos. Thanatos is the Greek god of Death. The name was too literal, but they didn’t care. They were too excited about the discovery.
It would miss us, they said. It would pass us by. It would seem close, but it’d pass by thousands and thousands of miles away.
“Nothing to worry about,” they said in the middle of August, even though they were sweating. “We’re going to be fine.”
Then in late September, they said we weren’t going to be fine.
It was going to hit us unless it could be stopped. The Earth would be destroyed. It didn’t matter where it struck, the result would be catastrophic, exploding with the force of billions of atomic bombs. If it hit the ocean, tidal waves would swallow countries whole and nothing would recover. If it hit land, waves of fire would roll over everything. They thought the moon had been created that way, though by a much smaller impact.
“We have a chance,” they told us. “The people of the world are no longer defined by their borders. We’re coming together to try and stop it.”
They said they’d used atomic bombs to try and divert it off course. Lasers from satellites that weren’t supposed to exist. Something. Anything. We’ll figure it out, they said. There’s no need to panic. Not yet. The problem with that is if someone tells you not to panic, it’s probably time to do just that.
So everyone did.
Chaos descended. The rich and important were whisked away into bunkers deep under mountains. Stores were looted and ransacked. Fires burned. In Texas, a group of four thousand people—men, women, children, the old and the young— drank juice laced with poison. In the Middle East, millions of people gathered and sang prayers that sounded like they were wailing. Mexico closed off the border to the United States when a rumor came that the rock would strike in Kansas. Too many people were trying to cross, they said.
I called Jamie.
“I know,” he said when I asked if he was seeing this. Hearing this. “We’re going to be fine. We’ve just begun. We’re going to be fine.”
I wanted to believe him. I did, more than anything. I tried my hardest.
Regardless of the chaos, people did come together to launch an offensive to save us all. We would know if it worked, they told us, by Tuesday, October 15. At five thirty Eastern Standard Time, they would make an announcement. They called it Operation Hope.
The peanut farmer ended his last speech in a hidden bunker with, “May God have mercy on us all.”
*****
It’s bright, in the sky. I think I’ve said that once already. It’s bright like a second sun. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s burning. Maybe it’s reflecting light from our star. It doesn’t matter.
We’re away from town, now, away from all the fear and traffic and horns that never stop honking. Everyone waited until the last second. We did too, but in the end, we know it doesn’t matter. It’s supposed to strike Africa. The fallout will reach us when it does.
Jamie doesn’t switch the Firebird off before he gets out. Instead, he turns up the radio as loud as it’ll go so we’ll hear it when the announcement comes. The Knack are bellowing about their Sharona. I watch him through the windshield. He goes to the tree. Our tree. He touches HARRY + JAMIE 4EVER with his fingers.
I have to force my hands and legs to work. They’re jelly, wobbly and soft. The door creaks as I push it open. I don’t close it. I stop a few feet away from him.
He’s stiff, in his shoulders and back. His movements are almost mechanical, like a machine, jerking in fits and starts. He bows his head.
He says, “Hey.”
I say, “Hey.”
He doesn’t turn around. “I love you, you know.”
I’m surprised. I’m not surprised. I know this, though he’s never said it before. Neither of us have. And so I say, “I love you, too.” It’s easier than I expect it to be. And even more so, it’s true. I feel it down to my bones.
His face is wet when he turns around. I go to him and kiss the tears away. “It’s not fair,” he mutters. “It’s not fair. I just found you.”
“We’re together,” I tell him. “We’re together now, and we’ll be together later.”
“You promise?”
“Yeah,” I say, and I mean it with everything I have. “I promise.”
He laughs. It’s hollow. “I didn’t think I’d be this scared. I always thought that when the time came, whatever it was, I’d be ready for it. This is just a body. A husk that houses a soul. Maybe there’s nothing after. Maybe there’s everything. But I haven’t learned all I wanted to learn. There’s still so much left to see.”
“We’ll see it,” I say. “You’ll see. When it’s over, when we’re fine and it’s right as rain, we’ll go wherever you want to go. To the ocean. To the mountains. To the moon. I don’t know how, but I’ll make sure it happens.”
He says “Yeah” and “The moon” and “I’d like that, Harry, I’d really like that.”
He hugs me as hard as he can. I do the same, trying to squeeze us both together until we’re one person, merged together. My thoughts are his thoughts. My heart is his heart. We breathe the same air.
He sags against me. I help him back to the car. He sits down in the driver’s seat. I make sure he won’t fall over before going back to the passenger side and sitting down. He lowers the volume on the radio. That’s real good. I fucking hate that song.
He lowers the back of his seat until he’s laying almost flat. I do the same. We look up at the sky. It’s already beginning to darken. I think I see a couple of stars coming out. The sun is lowering, and the leaves on the trees look like they’re on fire.
He reaches over and takes my hand in his. The puzzle pieces fit together.
“What do you want to do tomorrow?” he asks, and he sounds calmer now. Almost serene.
“I’ll probably go to work,” I say. “The mill will be reopened. I’ll get back to work and then I’ll come home.”
“I’ll wait for you,” he says. “I’ll stay at your house tonight. And tomorrow. I’ll make you food. Pancakes, maybe. There’s always time for pancakes.”
And because I can, I say, “You could stay there forever, if you want.”
He turns his head to look at me. A single tear trickles down his cheek. “Are you asking me to move in with you?”
I scratch my jaw, suddenly nervous. “I…think I am.”
“Okay,” he says. “Yeah. Yeah, I’d like that. I snore.”
“I know that already.”
“And I have a lot of books.”
“I know that too.”
He laughs. It’s loud in the quiet forest. “And maybe one day, we’ll get a house.”
“Yeah,” I tell him. “A nice house. Not too big, though. Single story.”
“How many bedrooms? How many bathrooms?”
I think for a moment. “Three bedrooms. Ours. One for all your books. And another for guests. Two bathrooms.”
He’s nodding. “Okay. And a backyard. With grass and a fence. We can get a dog. I’ve never had a dog before. Not one of those little yappy dogs, but a big one with big paws and big ears.”
“Here?”
“Yeah. Or anywhere. We can stay. We can go. The world is ours.”
I want it so bad I can taste it. “It’ll be blue,” I tell him. “This house. It’ll be blue with lots of windows that let in the sunlight. And in the winter, when it snows, we’ll light a fire in the fireplace to keep warm. We’ll have a blanket that no one else can use, because it’s ours. It smells like us. We’ll wrap it around us and huddle close to the fire. We’ll decorate for Christmas.”
“Every holiday,” he says. “Halloween. Thanksgiving. Christmas. The Fourth of July. Arbor Day. I don’t care. We’ll have decorations for all of them.”
Yeah, that sounds good. “We’ll need a garage then, to store all of it. Or an attic. Or both.”
He says, “When I was a kid, I used to think about death all the time. Not in a way that I was thinking about hurting myself, but just about what it would mean. The ramifications. I wondered if I cared about leaving a mark behind. A legacy. Through my free will, the choices I made, would they reverberate through the world? Would people remember me when I was gone? I thought about that all the time.”
“What did you decide?”
His brow furrowed before smoothing out. “I don’t know. I still haven’t made up my mind. But I think it doesn’t matter anymore. This, here, this is my legacy. This is our moment. You and me, you know?”
“You chose to talk to me at that party.”
“I did.” He chuckles. Then, “I was nervous.”
I hadn’t known that. “You were? Why?”
He shrugs, squeezing my hand again and again like the beat of a heart. “You were this…light. Beautiful. Mysterious. Devastating. I was entranced by you. The way you moved. I’d never seen anyone like you before. And I remember thinking, who are you? How did you come to be here? Where have you been before now? I didn’t need anyone to complete me, but then I didn’t know I was missing anything to begin with. I was, though. I was missing you. It’s big. This. You and me. It’s bigger than the world. I thought I always had a philosophical understanding of the way things were supposed to be. You upended that. You changed everything for me. I—”
The music stops. The Knack are cut off mid-song.
We both look at the radio as it crackles.
It’s five thirty, Eastern Standard Time.
We wait.
But for what? We have our dreams, we know where we want to go, what sort of life we want to have. We’ll be together, and maybe it’s just a fantasy, but if we hope hard enough, it could be real, even if we never leave this forest.
He reaches to turn it up, and does it matter? Does it really?
Before his fingers touch the knob, I say, “There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
The peanut farmer says, “My fellow Americans, I—”
He turns the radio off and settles back into his seat. He looks over at me. He’s not crying. He looks peaceful. He squeezes my hand again. “Shakespeare.”
I nod. “I read it in one of the books you gave me. It stuck with me. It reminded me of you.”
Jamie smiles, that smile that’s only meant for me. “I get it. I do. I hear you, Harry. I always have.”
I lean over and kiss him. He’s still smiling when I do. He laughs against my mouth, and I swallow it down, making it part of me.
When I pull away, he says, “Tell me more about our house. Leave nothing out.”
I do as he asks.
*****
I don’t know what’s going to happen next. Maybe nothing. Maybe everything. There is no in-between. But I think it all comes down to this: in the end, we found each other. Through all the chaos, through all the bluster and noise, we found each other. In this little corner of the world, we cling together because we choose to, fate or destiny or happenstance be damned. There are more things in Heaven and Earth than we could possibly know, but I know the endless universe that is Jamie. And he knows me. It’s all I need.
Let the fire come, if it does.
It won’t matter.
We’re already burning.
