Together We Will Go

by J. Michael Straczynski

  And you know what? Maybe that’s true sometimes. But it’s not true all the time. Some of us tell you we’re going to kill ourselves because we’re serious, not because we’re looking for attention, we just want to say Goodbye, or I love you, or You’ve been a really good friend and I’ll miss you. And some people—people like me—say it because we want to make goddamn sure that when you find out we actually did it, you’ll remember exactly where you were and what you were doing when we told you what we were gonna do. We want to bookmark the moment in your brain so that while you’re busy pumping out tears on the outside you’ll know on the inside who you really were the day we told you the most intimate and important thing we’ve ever told anyone… and you shrugged and laughed and looked away.

  So yeah, me and Crazy Lisa, we’re just tired of it. Both of us.

  At least we finally agree on something, right?

  * * *

  TylerW1998

  In addition to writing introductions about why we’re here, Mark asked if we could journal the journey, if that’s not redundant, talking about what we see and feel and experience, so here we go. And yeah, I probably could’ve just gone straight into this without a long preamble, but OCD is the language all programmers learn before they ever get to coding. There are some people in this world who, if you ask them what time it is, will give you a history of the watch, and apparently I’m at least six of them.

  I was able to breathe a little easier last night than the day before. I think sleeping sitting up in the bus seats helps a little, so I may stick with that. Besides, the bunk beds in the back are pretty tight, I’ve always been a little claustrophobic, and they’re right next to the bathroom (more like a porta potty with delusions of grandeur) and I’m very sensitive to certain kinds of smells.

  Of everybody on the bus so far, I think Karen is the most interesting. She doesn’t talk much, so when she does say something, you pay attention. When someone talks or yells all the time, after a while it doesn’t mean anything anymore, it’s just background noise and you tune out. But if most of the time you’re quiet, when you finally do let loose everybody looks up, like holy shit, now what do we do? That’s how Karen is. She doesn’t say a lot, but when she does, we pay attention. Which is maybe the point.

  After leaving Ohio, we stopped in Indianapolis to pick up a new rider, but nobody showed, which pissed off Mark, so rather than stop for the night at a motel he told Dylan to keep going to the next stop in Cloverdale, which turned into another no-show.

  By this time we were way in the middle of nowhere, no cities, no towns, no hotels or motels anywhere nearby, just miles and miles of miles and miles, and everybody was bushed, so we pulled into a “scenic rest stop” that looked out over nothing but scrub and dry grass.

  After Dylan killed all the lights except the personal lamps, Lisa crawled into one of the bunks and pulled the shade. I figured Karen and maybe Vaughn would do the same, but they stayed in their seats, like they were too tired to sleep, if that makes any sense. We were just these little islands of light, staring out at the low hills, and I noticed that Karen looked like she wanted to say something. She’d open her mouth like she was about to make a comment, frown, purse her lips, and try again a second later. Karen’s one of those people who says one thing for every ten things she thinks and I guess she had to run through the other nine before she found the one she liked and started talking about her experience in the glass museum back in Cambridge: what she saw, and what she felt about what she saw.

  “It was just one of those little moments of perfect beauty,” she said at the end. “You know what I mean?”

  “Yeah, I do,” Dylan said. He was still sitting in the driver’s seat, turned so his arm was draped over the back as he leaned against the side window. “Had one of those during my senior year in high school. A bunch of us were staying with a friend whose family owned a beach house in this little town called Cayucos, halfway between LA and San Francisco. Literally a one-street town. One night we were sitting on the beach, just hanging out and talking and smoking weed, and it was warm and I must’ve dozed off because when I looked up, everyone was back inside and I was all alone. I was about to get up when I saw something that knocked the breath out of me. The moon was huge, the way it gets when it’s real low, and it was just barely touching the edge of the horizon, creating this ribbon of moonlight that came all the way down the water to where I was sitting. It was like the moon was melting into liquid light. I put my head down low to the water until I could see it coming almost all the way to my face, and when I touched the water, it was like I was touching the moon.”

  “So you were stoned,” Mark said, because sometimes he’s a dick.

  “No,” Dylan said. “The weed had pretty much worn off by then. It was just a simple thing, it was just the moon, but it was the most amazing thing I’d ever seen. Even though it was cold and I was shivering, I didn’t want to go inside. I just lay there on the sand, grinning like an idiot until the moon dropped below the horizon and the light went out. I can see it in my head right now like I saw it then. Just beautiful.”

  “How about you, Mark?” Karen asked. “Any moments of perfect beauty?”

  “Nothing that’s worth anybody’s time,” he said, arms crossed over his chest as in, I don’t want to talk about it.

  “Why don’t you let us decide if it’s worth our time?” Vaughn said.

  “Hello?!” Lisa called from behind the shade. “Trying to sleep back here!”

  “It’s not like we have anything else to do,” Dylan said, ignoring the orc in the back of the bus. “We can’t even get a cell signal.”

  Mark sighed like he’d just been asked to donate blood. “Okay, fine. So during my junior year at college, I was dating this girl named Tracy.”

  “Nobody cares!” Lisa called out.

  “Fuck off,” Karen yelled back. “Keep going, Mark.”

  He crossed his arms tighter. “I was taking animal biology to meet my science requirements, and for homework one weekend we had to go to the zoo and monitor different animals, writing down everything they did for a four-hour period. Each of us was assigned a different animal: zebras, chimpanzees, sloths… I got stuck with geckos.

  “So when I went to the zoo that Saturday, Tracy came along to keep me company. But it turned out that the only geckos they had were the nocturnal kind that spend their days sleeping. I mean, yeah, sometimes they’ll lick a leaf, or turn around to the sun, but the rest of the time there was just nothing going on.

  “But I still had to write it all down, so I’m sitting on this low wall by the lizard cage, and it’s hot, and after a while we’re both sleepy and Tracy leans against my back because there’s nowhere else to lean. And she falls asleep like that, her arms around me from behind, her head on my shoulder, and…”

  He frowned and looked off. “I know it sounds stupid, but as I sat there in the warm sun, with her asleep against my back, it was just kind of perfect, you know? I could feel her breath on the back of my neck, real slow and soft, and I didn’t move even though I was cramping up because I didn’t want to wake her, and I thought, y’know, for all the shit that’s going on in my life, for this one moment, everything’s okay, everything’s good, everything’s beautiful.

  “So like D said, it wasn’t like this big moment, or a revelation, or looking at some painting and having it blow the back of your head off, it’s just… I was happy, and it was perfect, you know?”

  After that it got quiet for a bit, then Karen looked at me, and I knew it was my turn in the barrel.

  “Up until a year ago,” I said, “I used to cosplay as Sage Eregon at a local anime convention.”

  “Who’s Sage Eregon?” Vaughn asked.

  “It’s from an online RPG.”

  “What’s an RPG?”

  “Oh, fuck me,” Lisa said from the bunk.

  “RPG stands for role-playing game,” I explained. “In this case, it’s a video game called Brighthaven. Sage Eregon is a master-level ne
cromancer and he wears a mask with a veil over his face, so you only see his eyes. I found a pretty good replica of his outfit online and cosplayed him at cons because when I was behind that mask, nobody saw the blue. Yeah, people stared, but they weren’t staring at me because I was different, they were looking at everybody who was in costume. Oh, look, it’s Sage Eregon, cool. I got to be just some guy instead of that guy.”

  “Love that,” Dylan said.

  And now there were just two of us left to speak up.

  “Lisa?” Karen called. No reply. “Lisa, come on. You ever had a moment of perfect beauty?”

  And from the bunk came a stream of curses and insults so loud, so profane, but so intricately constructed that all we could do was listen in absolute no-kidding awe, like if Notre Dame Cathedral was made entirely of fucks, and it just blasted through the bus, line after line assembled in waves so breathtaking that it would’ve made even the best coder in the business kill himself and it just kept going, rolling and roiling and filling the bus like a big black cloud until we could barely see each other.

  It. Was. Amazing.

  When she finally stopped, I wasn’t sure if we should applaud or bury her in the desert with a stake through her heart to keep her from rising again.

  “Now, that,” Vaughn said, breaking the silence, “that has just become my moment of perfect beauty!”

  And everyone laughed. Even Lisa.

  * * *

  Karen_Ortiz

  We hit Chicago around noon and were scoping out the area for the next pickup when we found a clean truck stop with showers and OMG did we need it. The water was so amazing and hot that Lisa decided to stage a revolutionary Occupy Shower movement and refused to come out and I’m getting texts from Mark saying where the hell are we and we need to get going to the next pickup point or we’ll be late, and the lady in charge of the women’s showers has people waiting to use them and Lisa won’t leave until she’s practically dragged out of the stall trailing fingernails and we finally do get back on the road and we do make it to the address on time but Mark and Dylan take one look at the guy, decide that he’s got a weird vibe, and ditch him.

  Meanwhile Lisa looks like she got in a fight with a feral raccoon which is pretty much what happened when that lady came after her, and I just realized that the more time I spend around Lisa the less I use punctuation. I don’t think she ever met a comma she liked.

  By now we were desperate for something to eat, but just as we walked into this little Italian café on the South Side Lisa flipped out when she saw a poster on the door for Virtual Daylight, an EDM festival going on tonight in Union Park. I’ve never been to a rave but apparently she’s seriously addicted and put it to a vote. Based on what happened in the shower I was going to vote no just on principle until I found out that Barnbirds and Yucca Flats were going to be there. It’s the first tour for both bands in almost two years and it turns out most of us are fans, except for Vaughn, who needed us to explain what a rave was and that EDM stands for electronic dance music. He never seems embarrassed to ask about this stuff, if anything he’s very cute about it and I think he’s slowly winning over the others.

  At first Mark “We Need to Keep Moving” Antonelli was against the idea, but Dylan reminded him (again) that this isn’t supposed to be an express. If we were in a rush we could just buy a plane ticket to San Francisco to end things, or stay home and do it there. We signed on to have some fun on the way out, and if we’re not doing that then what’s the point? I don’t understand why Mark’s such a pill sometimes, it’s like he’s running from something.

  The only problem is going to be cost. Virtual Daylight is one of the biggest festivals in the Midwest, and they sold out months ago. We’ll have to find someone scalping tickets, and those can go for a ton of money.

  Lisa said no problem, she could carry the cost. “I have three bottomless credit cards and I’m not afraid to use them.”

  So I guess we’re doing this.

  * * *

  Hi, I’m Audio Recorder!

  Tap the icon to start recording.

  MARK ANTONELLI: Okay, well, this isn’t going as planned but totally as expected.

  LISA: You’re not helping and stop recording this, what the fuck.

  VOICE 7: Look, if you can’t pay I got to find another buyer—

  LISA: The cards are good.

  VOICE 7: FeePay doesn’t agree. Nothing I can do. Sorry.

  VAUGHN: What did you say the tickets cost?

  VOICE 7: I don’t have time for this.

  VAUGHN: I’m just asking.

  DYLAN: He said two hundred fifty a ticket. Some of us have it, some don’t.

  KAREN: It’s okay, let’s just go.

  VAUGHN: I can cover it.

  TYLER: Vaughn.

  VAUGHN: How much does FeePay charge for its service?

  VOICE 7: Ten percent. Why?

  VAUGHN: Ten percent of fifteen hundred total means you’re losing a hundred and fifty bucks. How about we pay for the tickets in cash and you knock down the price to fourteen hundred? We pay less, but you end up with fifty dollars more.

  MARK ANTONELLI: Vaughn, you don’t have to do this.

  VAUGHN: It’s okay.

  VOICE 7: You’ve got the cash?

  VAUGHN: I can get it.

  VOICE 7: Okay, you get it, we’re cool.

  DYLAN: I’ll go with you.

  VAUGHN: Dylan.

  DYLAN: It’s safer if we’re doing cash, that’s a lot of money.

  VAUGHN: Okay. We’ll be back in five.

  MARK ANTONELLI: Listen, I was thinking, how about once we get inside, everybody journals about the festival in real time? You can use the voice app—

  KAREN: Seriously? You’re giving us homework?

  MARK ANTONELLI: Well, you’re getting in free.

  LISA: You’re getting in free too, Mark, I didn’t see you reaching for your wallet.

  MARK ANTONELLI: Look, nobody has to do anything they don’t want to do, so if you’re not into the journal thing, that’s fine, just thought it would be—

  LISA: Here they come!

  (LOUD NOISE)

  END RECORDING

  * * *

  Hi, I’m Audio Recorder!

  Tap the icon to start recording.

  UNIDENTIFIED MUSIC. LAUNCH LYRICMASTER? Y/N Y

  SONG FOUND: CLUSTERFUK, “DRY EYES.” DOWNLOAD? Y/N N

  MARK ANTONELLI: Okay, so Barnbirds opened the festival and since we were late getting in we missed a few songs at the start, but most of those were from their new release, they hit all the good songs in the second half.

  One of the security guys said there’s seventy-five thousand people here tonight, and they expect a total of two hundred K over the weekend. We’re packed in tits to backs and balls to butts. Frottage paradise. Chicks in rompers, cat-ears, corsets, capes, G-strings, bras, veils and bigfoot fuzzy boots. Guys in glow-in-the-dark tiger shorts, unicorn hoodies, ballet costumes, ninja masks, raver-swing jackets, and for some reason I’m seeing a lot of panda onesies in the crowd. Must be some new anime thing.

  I used to think raver costumes were just another kind of cosplay, like dressing up to look like Thor or Scarlet Witch or one of the guys from Mortal Kombat, but when I said that to a girl I was dating last year, she reamed me a new one. She said cosplay is dressing up to look like someone else. Raver wear is about dressing up to look like your real self, the one you can’t let out anywhere else if you want to get a job or a degree. So it’s kind of like they’re wearing the inside on the outside. You’ve got death-metal fairies and—

  LISA: Hi! What are you doing?

  MARK ANTONELLI: I’m—

  LISA: Dance with me!

  MARK ANTONELLI: I’m in the middle of—

  LISA: You can do that later! Dance with me!

  MARK ANTONELLI: In a minute—

  VOICE 8: Excuse me, is this your drink?

  LISA: Oh, hey, sorry, here, let me—

  VOICE 8: I almost trippe
d over it.

  LISA: Thanks.

  VOICE 9: Why aren’t you dressed up?

  LISA: I am! I’m dressed as a living dead girl!

  VOICE 9: You look normal to me, but cool.

  VOICE 8: Hey, as shitfaced as I am right now, we’re all living dead, right?

  VOICE 9: Living dead Delta Gamma Epsilon!

  LISA: Frats!

  VOICE 8: Fucking A! All of us, man. Came down in a group.

  MARK ANTONELLI: Screw it.

  END RECORDING

  * * *

  Hi, I’m Audio Recorder!

  Tap the icon to start recording.

  VAUGHN: Not sure what I should say about all this. It’s pretty loud. Didn’t realize it was a costume party. Normally this wouldn’t be my kind of music, I like classic rock and jazz, but what I’m hearing is not bad. Funny thing is I had several young women come up and ask how I got in here and was I lost? Probably think I wandered out of an old folks’ home and I’ve got Alzheimer’s and there’s a bunch of people out looking for me. When I said I was fine, just here for the music, they smiled so big, just lit right up. They said their folks hated their music and could they take a picture with me to put on “Insta,” I think? I said sure and we all laughed as they took the photo. They were about as surprised by me as I was by them, and that’s what made it fun. I’ve wasted so much time being scared of stuff like this.

  Think I’ll move a bit farther back from the speakers, though. I have perfect pitch hearing, but if I keep standing here I don’t know if I’ll have it much longer.

  So much time. Now so little.

  END RECORDING