Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever (7 page)

Hurting him with the truth was one thing. This was a different case. Extreme and necessary, yes, but Jesus. I could hardly lift my head for the weight of my guilt.

We lit out early, and it was a good drive. We talked, but not too much; she studied. I never did understand how some people can read in a moving car. There were protesters outside the clinic. This had not been unexpected, but was still a fairly great shock to see. These people in their mad devotion. Old men with liver spots held up posters depicting things no less horrible for being mostly obvious fakes. Young people in their church bests. Enormous middle-aged women with short haircuts and fanny packs, heavy necklaces of colorful unprecious stone. The day was genius with sun, the kind of day that makes you want to say, God bless the sunny South forever, and not even be kidding at all. A man in a cheap suit stepped into our path and I let go of Cass’s hand and stepped out in front of her.

“Where are these children’s parents?” he shouted. Not to us, but past, addressing his own cohort, re-proving whatever it was they were all so sure they already knew. Cass, behind me, closed a hand over my fist and squeezed. I knew
she would never forgive my fulfilling what was right then my life’s one dream of seeing this weasel’s blood run down my knuckles. He looked about my father’s age. I let my hand slacken, and walked forward, leading her on. For a second I thought he was going to force me to walk into him, and if that happened it would be all bets off, for my patience was expired and Cass did not have the power to stop me twice. But the weasel was only playing chicken. He dodged.

She was woozy after, like the doctor had warned. He’d said that would last the day, and that there’d be some bleeding. All normal. I picked us up cold sandwiches and juice, so we’d have them if we wanted, then took us back to the room and made sure she was comfortable and asked if she felt like talking. I told her I had been scared for her, even though there’d been nothing to be scared of, really, because I’d read all about it beforehand and the folks there had told me, too. I told her she’d done the right thing, that
we
had—I wasn’t sure which was the correct one to say, or which way she preferred to hear it, if at all.

I told her she was the smartest girl I knew, maybe the all around best one.

“Those people are just sick,” I said, thinking again of the weasel, his pinched face with its lightless eyes. Cass said something, but it was muddled, and may have also trailed off. I thought I heard my name, but didn’t ask her to repeat herself. She slept, and didn’t wake up until the next day, during which same time I spent eternity wide awake and all alone.

I wanted to show her how nothing was changed between us—I hoped and was determined that it wouldn’t be—so late in the morning I woke her with a delicate stroking of her breasts, and then, as it was made clear that what I was doing was acceptable, I kissed a straight line from the top of her forehead and between the eyes clear on down to her thicket and buried my face there gently. Her fingers in my bed-frizzed hair. Neither of us finished. Finishing wasn’t the point, not this time, and knowing that made me feel like we were both of us older than we had ever been before. But then, in the bathroom, in the horrible motel light, I stared at the reflection in the mirror and felt like a stupid kid. A not unwelcome sensation. I had blood smeared on my lips and chin like some gnarly animal. I was wild-eyed, pasty-pale, with dime-size nipples and a shitty sprig of hair that didn’t nearly cover the space between them. I looked at this bedraggled figure and knew it as myself and saw myself seeing myself and knowing myself in this way, and I got started laughing so hard my whole body shook, and Cass came in to see what the matter was. I couldn’t tell her, didn’t know how, but it was enough, I think, for her to know that there was cause for laughter. She joined in, then grabbed me by my unabated hard-on, aimed it at the bathtub and set me free.

This is not to say everything was okay, painless and sweet every moment thereafter, only that it was those things right then. And that we deserved them. We showered together,
stood beneath the hot stream, took turns washing each other’s backs. We checked out of that awful, rundown place and started back a day early toward our shit town, which, it turned out, had let our absence pass largely unmarked.

The world is not brimming over with grace, but it does have some.

There’s no great conclusion to me and Cass. We were bound by something that could neither break us nor lift us up. It did not make us other or better than we were. Why should it have? I took her to senior prom, which was real nice, and we sometimes talked about loving each other or being in love, but we were using the words just to use them, like practicing for when we’d really need them sometime in the future. I knew she’d gone back to messing around on me and I never gave her grief about that. After I finished school I had less patience for her studying, and we sort of both started to move on, though I always said hello when I saw her now and again, at parties, usually, except for the quarter she spent in perfect seclusion, studying to retake the SATs and boost her score into the very top percentile, which she damn well did, not that I was surprised to learn it. Soon enough after that she was gone. We became ourselves, is what happened, and whenever I miss her I remind myself of that. But don’t think this is a story about true love gained and then lost forever, because it’s not like I think about Cass often, and many times even when I do I don’t miss her at all. I’m happy for wherever she’s got to, if it’s anyplace good.

Joe Brown at first didn’t understand. He knew it was different between me and her, somehow, but his main concern was the fact that I would no longer tell him dirty stories about Cass McElroy’s sweet, sweet pussy that never got sore, or even say anything about my hot threeway.

He kept on pestering me.

I finally called him a fucking deviant to his face about it, one night in the sick grip of summer, when it’s so hot people are only living to find new ways to bring hate into the world. I thought of the weasel who had stood in our path, and put everything I’d had for that man onto Joe Brown, which wasn’t right, but it’s what happened. We had a fist fight, real serious too. Came out bruised, bloodied, and sore—more brothers than ever. Joe Brown might not have had a way with girls, but he lifted and he ran. He was strong. Whipped me, if the truth is to be told about it. A year later he said he had decided to enlist, and three months after they sent him over he was gone. He was in an unarmed Humvee, driving it, in fact, down a desert road and rolled right over an IED. We buried what they sent home.

And Judge should have died the night his trailer’s electric hookup faltered and sparked a whole box of M-80s, which set off a thundering like a movie drive-by and sent the whole place up. He was spared on account of not being home, though the mother of the twin boys and one of the twins were there, both asleep, which further suggested that Judge had been playing at his version of family man before slipping out to get away with one more damn thing. The other boy,
who had gone to have a sleepover at a friend’s house, now lives with his aunt’s family in Baltimore, and Judge lives to rave and spit for another season. He may outlast the rest of us yet.

But I don’t want to finish on a down note, so since I didn’t tell the rest about how it turned out with Ma and my sister and the drugs, let me get back to that now.

Ma found Kyra puking up all over herself, her bed, her room—and then Ma. There was an ambulance. Stomach pump plus IV drip. A three-day stay at the hospital and then six months of mandatory counseling sessions to see if she was lying about the accident and had maybe done the thing on purpose.

They say He works in mysterious ways. I used to not know what that meant but now I do. Not to say whether I believe it is the true case, but I understand what it means and why people say it. The aftermath of this ugly episode was a cleansing effect upon our household. Holding her own daughter’s head up by the hair, wearing the vomit, slapping the girl to keep her conscious until the ambulance men came—all these things got Ma a little bit more invested in the soul’s particular vessel here on earth and in earthly things in general. Not to say she didn’t take Kyra’s surviving for an obvious miracle, but still. Caring for her recovering daughter woke up her natural instinct to be kind. It shook her condition loose.

Kyra, meanwhile, in the midst of her close call, in her near-death state, saw the Lord, and He told her some things
that set her to rights. Belief-wise, each got knocked a few pegs in the other’s direction. If my old man ever came back this is what I would show him: his daughter and the mother of his daughter, how they are like sisters now. I would say, Forget everything else, this here is what you lost out on. This is what was once all yours.

Ma and Kyra, thick as thieves, go together to First Presbyterian, and if you do not engage them on the topic of queers or of Democrats you will see that they are good Southern women, full with love. I swear they mean the world no harm.

J
ennie is sleeping when it comes but I’m awake, in my underwear, face slick with sweat. Our air conditioner has stopped working. The brownouts had been ongoing for about a month when one day—
zap
. Too much starting and stopping, I guess. At least the power’s flowing right now. The TV and the Nintendo, I am thankful, still work. The Nintendo especially is a miracle on account of that it’s so old anyway.

The sunlight is indirect—our house has good tree cover—but the temperature is high. Jennie’s naked. She is tall, solid, pretty, and currently not speaking to me—I mean she wouldn’t be if she were awake. We’ve been arguing lately because she says I don’t do anything but play Tetris anymore and I always ask what the fuck else would she like me to do. Sometimes she picks up the Bible and thumbs through it. She doesn’t know this, but I stole that Bible from a motel, one
night way back before all the trouble started. Weird lights in the sky and nobody sure what was happening, if it was God or the government responsible, i.e., who to blame or praise. The book is inscrutable to her, though she’s become steadily more convinced it is trying to tell her something. She’s mad at me because I took a few religion courses in college but I won’t help. I won’t even look at the damned thing. Earlier today I told her (again) that I studied Islam and modernity, not Christian anything, and that if she wanted to go loot a Koran from the already ransacked Books-A-Million down the street, then I would gladly give her my class notes and term papers when she got back.

It was a cruel comment, I knew even as I said it, but it did what I needed it to do—truncated the discussion so I could play this game, which has muted colors and I can mute the music, thus exercising forms, degrees, of control. I lose at the game when I get caught up staring into the background—that radiating black that can be generated only by a back-lit screen. Or when it gets just too fast. When I lose the game the screen fills with candy-colored snow.

Jennie said that between the two of us I have more experience with religion, even if what I know is basically about something else.
At least,
she said,
it’s something
. And when I still wouldn’t take the soft-sided white book from her trembling hands she called me a whole string of bad names and curled up on the floor with it, beside the couch. She cried into the ball she’d made of herself and once I tried to stroke her hair but she wouldn’t be touched so I just sat down close to
her and fired up the game. Eventually she fell asleep and her breathing is the only sound in this room, along with the tiny sexual slaps of my thumbs on the plastic buttons.

Snow again. I lose. This game is designed to end, not to be beaten; I doubt they even programmed a graphic for the
YOU WIN
screen. Once you hit level eighteen the pieces are falling almost quicker than hand-eye coordination can trace, and it can go faster and faster. It outlasts you.

I play again and at level eighteen reach a sort of ecstasy of self-and-game where we are as close to becoming one being as we ever will and this lasts some amount of time and then ends. Snow again. I enter my initials on the high-score screen, ranked number one. The list erases every time you shut the Nintendo off.

Outside the window there is a fiery brightness that fills the world, a limitless wave, jellying up the street towards us.

When people think about the Apocalypse they imagine knowing what it is that will bring them down. Ask the shades of Hiroshima about that one. The assumption of knowledge is one part of the fantasy of mastery, by which I mean the hope against all damned hope of survival. I never thought about what time of year the End might come, but looking back, I guess I always figured it would be in the crush of summer. And I was right.

I watch Jennie, whom sleep has loosened from her furious ball. She is stretched out across the floor, and how beautiful she is. I wish the world wouldn’t end before we could make up and die holding each other.

I glance out the window at the bright wall. It seems closer, but slower. I notice the watch on my wrist and the clock on the TV have both gone to 88:88. I wonder what that means, if it tips the scales in my mind concerning who/Who is responsible. When it occurs to me that Jennie will most likely die in her sleep I almost wake her but then I don’t. I am calmed by watching her steady breathing and there isn’t time to reconcile anyway, what with the way she gets when she’s sulking. I’m going to let her sleep through it, through whatever exactly is out the front window, reclaiming the driveway, the sidewalk not dissolved but disappeared. For all its luminosity, the wall is not painful to look upon—it is oddly soothing. It leaves no trace or shadow of what is behind or within. It is perfectly opaque. I see it the same way that Jennie sees the Scriptures, and also like Jennie, I get madder and sadder and madder again, but I won’t look away.