Authors: Emil Ostrovski
Away We Go (3 page)
Alex studied my face, my silence. “You know I'm right.”
“I think I'll pass,” I said. I didn't want him to be right. “You said you missed your parents' lake house.”
“More than my parents. Mom was always working and Dad was always mad that Mom was always working.”
“But you remember them?” I could hardly remember mine. We weren't allowed direct contact with them, in light of past incidents, which was government speak for kidnappings, runaway attempts, highway chases, terrorist attacks, contamination alerts. Seven years ago, a few months before I got sick, the entire city of Houston was put under quarantine after a handful of armed and desperate Texan parents raided the South Houston Boys' Recovery Center. A hundred infected
youths escaped into the general population; the mayor of Houston declared a state of emergency, and Governor Johnson called up the National Guard.
From beside me, a snort. “Yeah, whoop-dee-doo.” But I could tell he didn't mean it. He rubbed at his eye angrily with a knuckle.
“Pinkeye?”
“Shut up,” he said, and kicked me lightly in the shin.
“Hey,” I said after a time, to break the silence that had settled over us. “Can I ask you for something weird?”
He pitched his head forward in a nod and listened to my request, and said “Oh, No,” in agreement, in the softest voice I'd ever heard him use. In the recovery center's second floor bathroom, across from the dormitory, he let me wash his hands with warm water and soap. They were coarse. I worked intently, finger by finger, until his nails were clean.
SEVEN WEEKS BEFORE THE CATACLYSMIC, FIERY, KIND OF CLICHÃD END OF ALL THINGS (OR NOT)
WESTING CAMPUS
1 - Main Gate
2 - Galloway Hall
3 - Teacher's Lot
4 - Wellness Center
5 - Chapel
6 - Library
7 - Cafeteria
8 - Bullsworth Hall
9 - Gates Hall
10 - Lombardy Hall
11 - Greenhouse
12 - Dorlan House
13 - Violet House
14 - Clover House
15 - Turner House
16 - Lakeside Apartments
17 - Galloway Lawn
18 - Westing Lake
19 - Sunset Hill
20 - Galloway Gardens
21 - The Westing Wall
Atoms are mostly empty space.
I
am mostly empty space.
I have been thinking about this a lot.
I am thinking about this as I step into the shallows of the Westing Lake, the apartments on the far shore white and blinding in the August sun. Beyond the Lakeside Apartments are the walls that enclose the Westing campus.
I do not remember a time when I wasn't surrounded by walls.
The water is surprisingly cool. Another step and it will be up to my balls. I may be empty, but I am not ready for that shock just yet. I leave my clothes on so, if worst comes to worst, I can comfort myself with the thought that my modesty won't be compromised as I sink to the bottom of the lake.
I've been thinking a lot about Alex. He was older, must've wanted me gone before he got bad. I'm a week short of seventeen now, running on borrowed time myself. I've sat for hours on the Internet, searching for Alex in a place I know I won't find him, AwayWeGo's DEPARTEES section. Got to hand it to whoever came up with the idea of a social network for the terminally ill. The site's in its trial stages now, restricted to Westing students, but they're going to make a killing on usâhaâwhen in a few years it gets rolled out to recovery centers across the whole country.
That is, if we're still here in a few years.
If Apep, the mile-long asteroid I refer to as the Great Cliché, passes us by.
Maybe at that point, if we're still here, and if someone cares, someone who is decent, they will take the time to revise the names that fill the DEPARTEES pages, and add Alex to the list. By then I'll probably be a departee myself.
I rush forward into the water.
But maybeâ
stroke
âbefore that happensâ
stroke
âI'll find out where it is that the sick kids go, and why we never hear from them again.
For now, I swim, even though I'm supposed to be staying out of the sun. The side effects of the meds we choke down at our weekly checkups are different for everyone. For me, the meds dry my skin out, make it peel. Sometimes it bleeds.
I call it my minor case of leprosy.
The sky is unflaggingly blue, the light of day hiding a thousand thousand stars, and another thousand thousand beyond thoseâstars I'll never see even in the night. Something to do with dust and the acceleration of the universe, with galaxies hurtling ever more quickly away, away, always away. Or so the scientists say. Once they told us the galaxies would fly together, dragged by gravity to relight a primordial fire, on and on and on again. Now the galaxies are fleeing.
Somewhere up there, too, is The Great Cliché, with its one-in-ten-thousand chance of hitting the Earth this September twenty-sixth at 11:37 p.m.
It is the ultimate proof that life is a joke, as empty and fleeting as a walking shadow.
Out, out, brief candle!
All human civilization, the Pyramids of Giza, the
Bhagavad
Gita,
the Noble Eightfold Path, Beethoven's
Moonlight Sonata,
Groucho Marx's pithy grouchiness, cheese fries, all of it so fragile as to be reduced to nothing by a really big rock sling-shotting randomly through space. An end so banal it's featured in at least a dozen AwayWeWatch movies starring large-muscled men who shout, “Get it together, man!” at their panicked teammates during times of high apocalyptic stress.
Yes,
the world is full of clichés.
Pandemics, killer comets.
All that's missing is a zombie or two.
Before we add zombies to our end-of-the-world recipe, though, I must visit the most confusing person in the world.
His name is Zach, and he is the main reason I stick around.
POSSIBLY THE MOST CONFUSING PERSON IN THE WORLD
Possibly the most confusing person in the world is lying in bed with his laptop on his lap top, listening to an audiobook through AwayWeRead. He grins weakly upon seeing my face. He's pale and sweaty, sometimes has difficulty catching his breath. We end up talking about vegetables while an adolescent narrator named Winston describes in a haunted tone a seemingly utopian city called City, the last bastion of human civilization on a ruined earth.
“Today's a good day,” Zach says, playing with his shirt collar. He's the only guy I know who doesn't look like an asshole with the top couple buttons undone. “I ate a baby heirloom tomato. Managed to hold it down, too.”
“A baby tomato,” I repeat.
“A baby heirloom tomato, kid, just popped it in my mouth. Someone had them in the fridge down in the multipurpose roomâ”
“You stole someone else's baby tomato?”
“Baby heirloom tomato,” he says, nodding vigorously. “I know, I know, I
know.
I'm a monster.”
“You always were a bad role model.”
“The worst!” he exclaims in triumph. “I'm a madman.”
“Lovecraft called. He wants his Mountains of Madness back.”
He laughs, and his laugh pokes a small hole in my heart, as does each line of banter, each repartee. He is trying heroically to pretend things aren't awkward between us, and I am trying
heroically not to make things more awkward by asking him why they have to be awkward in the first place, when his presence gives me, I don't know, such an ease of being. He makes the emptiness lift, briefly, makes me feelâ
tangible.
It doesn't hurt that, even sickly and soon to depart, he is beautiful in the morning light. He pushes himself up a bit and presses a key on his laptop to pause the audiobook's narration, leans back against his headrest with a sigh.
I want to say something memorable, to do something other than make him laugh. I want to make him feel something more dangerous than amusement.
“What were you listening to?” is what I ask instead, even though I already know. Dystopians are the latest craze on AwayWeRead. Everyone at Westing, myself included, reads every dystopian they can get their hands on and then talks shit about anyone who reads every dystopian they can get their hands on, since what we're supposed to be doing is paging through Thomas Mann's
Buddenbrooks
or Henry James's
The Turn of the Screw
. But who is to say that some stories are better than others? When your time is limited, who is to say you should spend seven hundred pages trodding through the decline of an infuriatingly mediocre family of German merchants when Winston's adventures are so much more fun, and better paced? And if there is no such authority who decides which stories are better and which worse, then does that mean all stories are equal? And if all stories are equal, what does it mean to live a good life? Is there such a thing? And if there isn't, then you start to feel like a whole lot of nothing, again. . . .
“You'll make fun of me,” he says with a smile. “God, you'll make fun of me. Promise me you won't?”
“I make no guarantees.”
He laughs again, and there goes the pain in my chest.
“The City of Light,”
he says, and eyes me with expectation, waiting for me to crack. He adds, “You can't tell anyone. Especially not our fellow Polo aficionados. What would they say about their glorious leader?”
“I made no guarantees,” I remind him.
“We've established I'm a monster, though, kid. Do you want to mess with a monster?”
“Do your worst.”
“Don't make me eat another baby heirloom tomato, Noah.”
“Say baby heirloom tomato. One. More. Time. Zach.”
Before he can say what I know he wants to say one more time, my phone buzzes. I ignore it, but he nods at my pocket.
“Could be important.”
“Sometimes,” I say, hesitating. Dangerous. I need to say something dangerous. “Sometimes, when my phone rings, I think for a second it might be my parents.”
It's crazy to even mention getting a call from outside Westing. It's not like I even want to talk to my parents, not like I even know who they are, anymore. And yet. . .
“Is that crazy?” I ask.
He's fingering his collar. “No,” he says softly. “Or rather, crazy normal, I think.”
I don't quite know how to respond, so I check my phone.
where are you??
are you sleeping again??
how much sleep do you need??
i never see you doing work??
All from my old roommate and current best friend Marty,
whom I was supposed to meet for a late breakfast.
I glance at the time and suppress a groan. People were never late until time was invented to tell them otherwise.
“Shit,” I say, and throw Zach an apologetic look, but a part of me is relieved.
Zach and I are most manageable to each other in small doses.
I'm at his door when he calls me back.
“Wait.”
He reaches into his nightstand, breathing hard. His hand shakes a little as he takes something out.
“Come here.”
He watches me with a bemused expression as I approach him warily.
“Hold out your hand.”
I hesitate. “Are you going to give me a baby heirloom tomato?”
He laughs, but the laugh turns into a grimace.
I've caused him pain. So I try to make up for it. I hold out my hand.
He drops a key into it.
Polo Club's key.
The one we stole.
My hand closes around it.
“You'll be the keeper of the key from now on. A most esteemed position within the ranks of our noble order. My way of saying sorry.”
I don't know why he's giving it to me.
I don't know what it means that he's giving it to me.
I want things to be simple.
I want an ease of being, because when it's easy to be alive, it
feels like you're doing something right. It feels like you're adding up to something.
I want to lean in and brush his sweat-slick hair out of his eyes, fall into bed together, share his sickness, his fatigue, listen to sixteen-year-old Winston in
The City of Light
discover that his utopian city runs on the backs of thousands of slaves who are born, work, and die in underground factories without ever once stepping foot into the light.
Yes, I've read it.
Yes, in one sitting.
Yes, till three a.m.
That's not the point.
The point is I want him to banter into my chest and to be unable to make his words out, but laugh anyway, out of certainty that if I had heard, it would've been funny, and also, of course, because his breath would tickle.
Instead, I thank him, and leave him to his city of light.
