Together We Will Go

by J. Michael Straczynski

  MARK ANTONELLI: Is there anything you can do?

  ZEKE: Nope. I mean, if we’d found it earlier and I had a ton of money, maybe we could’ve done a few things, but by the time I got him in, it was too late.

  MARK ANTONELLI: Does he ever try to get out of the bag?

  ZEKE: Hey, that’s funny! Let the cat out of the bag. Nah. He’s a good cat. And you know, with the sickness and all, he’s basically like a rag doll, so he doesn’t move around much. He never saw much of the world, so I figured we’d take one last road trip together, show him what’s out there.

  MARK ANTONELLI: I’m sorry.

  ZEKE: It is what it is, man. I was kind of hoping we’d have more time, but from what the doctor told me to look for, I think all we have is about a week, maybe less.

  MARK ANTONELLI: How will you know?

  ZEKE: The same way I always know what he’s feeling. It’ll be in his eyes. Anyway, that’s why we’re here. One last ride, then we go out together, right, Soldier?

  MARK ANTONELLI: If you’re saying you want to kill yourself because your cat’s going to die—

  ZEKE: No, man, that’s not it.

  MARK ANTONELLI: Because everyone else here is serious, this isn’t some kind of—

  ZEKE: It’s not, I swear to god, okay? It’s not that. I’m not, like, what’s the word? Frivolous. I’m not frivolous. Or stupid. It’s just, I got some bad habits, okay? Heroin, meth, ice, crack, uppers, downers, I’m not a drug bigot, I’m open-minded. If I can shoot it or toot it, I’m there, you know? I’ve gone off the shit lots of times, and I can get by for a week or two, like now, or when I’m trying to find work or something, but then, bam, I’m right back in it again. I OD’d three times in the last two years. Almost didn’t come back from the last one, but I made it because I knew I had this little guy to look after. You and me against the world, right, pal?

  Then we found out he’s sick, and I mean, here’s the thing. This skinny little guy is all I have. Didn’t used to be skinny, used to be big as a bowling ball, but his heart’s still the same size, you know? I got no family that wants anything to do with me, friends bailed a long time ago, so now it’s just me and him. He’s the only thing that keeps me coming back when I OD.

  But sooner or later I’ll screw up and I won’t make it back even with him waiting for me. I know that as sure as I know I’m standing here, so who’s gonna take care of him if I’m dead on the floor? He’ll starve to death. Not that he’s eating much now, but still, he’d starve or die of thirst and I can’t let him die all alone in the dark, you know?

  The other side is, if he dies first and I keep going, when I OD again without having him waiting for me, giving me a reason to wake up, I’ll never find my way back, and then I’ll be the one dead on the floor all alone. It’s completely fucking inevitable, especially given how things went down the last time, when I almost died. Sometimes it feels like parts of me didn’t make it all the way back, and they’re in a hurry to hook back up with the rest of me.

  I’ve gone as far as I can, Mark, we both have, so when we go, we go together. He’s a good guy and he’s my friend and we look after each other, right to the end, don’t we, Soldier?

  Anyway, like I said, he doesn’t eat or drink much anymore, so he doesn’t poop a lot either. Sleeps most of the time. He won’t be any trouble. We’ll just hang and look out at the world and be with each other until it starts to get dark, you know? Is that okay?

  MARK ANTONELLI: Yeah. No, that’s okay, Zeke. We’re cool. Thanks for telling me.

  ZEKE: Okay. So can we get breakfast now? Soldier used to like waffles, so I’m thinking maybe I can get him to eat something.

  MARK ANTONELLI: Yeah. Sure thing. Let’s go.

  ZEKE: All right, come on, pal. Waffles!

  END RECORDING

  * * *

  Karen_Ortiz

  This journal entry will be longer than the others because something important happened today and I want to get every word down right.

  After breakfast at a Denny’s in Omaha, Nebraska—which may be the saddest sentence ever written, no offense, Omaha, but seriously—Lisa said she had an idea. I think we all groaned inside given how well her last idea worked out, but she surprised everyone by saying she’d Googled the area and found out there was a botanical garden a few minutes away that was supposed to be pretty this time of year. Mark wasn’t into the idea because obviously, but I thought it would be fun and said so.

  Lisa appreciated my support. We still have our ups and downs, but overall it’s been easier with us since we had that big talk. Besides, she’s been kind of down the last couple of days, so I thought this could cheer her up a little.

  Mark kept trying to find some reason not to do it, but the place wasn’t far, and we’re not exactly on a schedule.

  “Everyone always says stop and smell the flowers,” I said, “so why not? I’ve always wanted to visit a botanical garden, so this is another item I can cross off the bucket list.”

  When Vaughn and Theo said they’d be open to checking the place out, Mark grumped about it but finally agreed to make a quick stop. “May as well,” he said, “because from here on out, the only thing worth seeing in Nebraska is the Colorado border.”

  See, Nebraska? It’s not just me. You really need to work on this place.

  Ten minutes later we pulled into the Lauritzen Gardens. The parking lot was almost empty, which we thought might be a bad sign but then we remembered that it was two o’clock on a weekday, and the kind of people who would go to a botanical garden are also the kind of people who have real jobs at real offices and can’t go until the weekend.

  Theresa said she was staying behind. “I didn’t get much sleep last night, so I’m going to try and get some rest. These so-called bunks are really uncomfortable.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “this place is gonna be the death of us yet.” Okay, a little bitchy, but there’s a time and a place, and this was both.

  She didn’t even look at me, being really pissy about it. I bet she never travels anything less than business or first class. Her boyfriend said he’d stay with her because of course he would.

  Lauritzen turned out to be bigger and nicer than I expected. (Full props, Omaha.) Lots of walking paths covering a hundred acres, rare flower conservatories, and a bird sanctuary. When Tyler saw on a map that the place had a railroad garden with seven functioning G-Scale (whatever that means) model trains, he took off down the path, huffing and puffing like I imagine the trains do. Then the rest of us split up and went our own way.

  I made it halfway down the main walk before the Spider said, That’s far enough, and we went into an old wooden gazebo to get out of the sun. Sometimes meditation helps with the pain, so I closed my eyes and sat for a bit, breathing slow. Then a shadow fell over me and I looked up to see Dylan with two ice cream cones.

  “Vanilla or chocolate?”

  “Chocolate,” I said firmly.

  “Crap,” he said, and handed me the cone. “I knew I should’ve gotten two of them.”

  He sat next to me in the shade and we looked out at the garden for a while without saying anything. The gazebo was big and brown and airy, surrounded by deep green trees and flower beds that were all kinds of colors. I recognized a few of them, like hydrangea, but the rest were a mystery and I wasn’t about to get up to look at the teeny-tiny signs.

  I pointed at one of the flowers. “I wonder what that one is?” I asked, more rhetorically than anything else. (I’ve always wanted to use the word “rhetorically” in a sentence without trying to force it but never had the chance. Another bucket item fulfilled!)

  Dylan squinted against the light. “Lenten Rose.”

  I sat up, surprised. “Seriously.”

  “Yep,” he said, and pointed to another flower bed. “Hydrangea.”

  “Okay, that one I know.”

  He kept going. “Viburnum. Astilbe. The long white one, that’s meadowsweet. Those other two are Jacob’s Ladder and Jack-in-the-Pulpit.”


  “Bullshit, those aren’t even flower names. You’re making that up.”

  He went outside, picked up one of the teeny-tiny signs, and handed it to me. Jack-in-the-Pulpit. Shit.

  “How do you know all that?” I asked.

  He put the sign back and brushed off his hands. He’s a big man so he has large hands, but they aren’t thick like most guys. His fingers are long and tapered thin, like a pianist. I hadn’t noticed that before.

  He leaned against one of the railings. “When I was a kid, my folks sent me off to stay with my aunt every summer so they could have some them-time. She was a florist, so she’d put me to work pulling flower stock from the cold-room. Whenever I got one wrong, she’d twist my ear and send me back in again, so I learned the name of every flower in her shop and a bunch more in self-defense.”

  “If you know so much about this stuff, why didn’t you want to see the gardens?”

  “I mentioned the part about her twisting my ear, right?”

  “Got it.”

  Then he looked back at the garden and held up one of those long, elegant fingers. “Just a second.”

  He stepped out and came back with some of the white flowers he’d identified as meadowsweet, pausing to wash them off with a hose. “I don’t think you’re supposed to pick those,” I said.

  He shrugged as he sat next to me. “They’ll grow back, and I don’t see any cameras,” he said, then handed one of them to me. “They’re edible. Try one.”

  “Now you are making stuff up.”

  “My aunt used to make tea out of them. Said it helped with heartburn, arthritis, bronchitis… worked as good as aspirin but didn’t upset the stomach.”

  “You seriously want me to put this in my mouth,” I said, and grinned. I just pitched you an easy one, go ahead and hit it back, I double-dare you.

  “That would be the general idea,” he said. “Here, I’ll go first.”

  I’ll admit I screamed a little as he chomped down on the flower.

  “Try it,” he said.

  I hesitated, but since he didn’t spit it out or turn green, I sniffed it, touched it, then took a little nibble off the edge of a cluster of white flowers. It was surprisingly sweet. Then I remembered it was called meadowsweet, so Miss Obvious, right? The more I chewed, the sweeter it got.

  “This is actually pretty good,” I said.

  “Told you. Also, yours had some ants on it, so there’s added protein.”

  I moved to elbow him but stopped at the last second. I didn’t want to give the Spider a reason to ruin the moment.

  “You okay?” Dylan asked when he saw me pull back. I’d told him all about the Spider the night we spent talking in the parking lot of the strip club. The way he stood there with his arms around me but not touching me, without moving or trying to take advantage, just warming me by his closeness, meant a lot to me.

  “I’m good,” I said, though he could tell I wasn’t being one hundred percent honest. “Can I ask you a question?”

  “No, I don’t know why they call the other one Jack-in-the-Pulpit.”

  “Not about that,” I said, and for a second I hesitated, not sure how to bring the subject up, then decided to just go for it. “I was wondering about the night when you took on that asshole outside the motel who was hitting his girlfriend, and later at the festival when you tackled that guy who was on top of Lisa—”

  “Yeah, Mark and I had a talk about that,” he said, looking down at his shoes. “I lost my temper. It won’t happen again.”

  “No, it’s okay, I was just asking because you didn’t have to jump into either of those, and you could’ve been hurt, so, you know…” I left it there, not sure what else to say.

  He nodded silently long enough that I was just about to say I didn’t mean to pry when he looked up again.

  “My sister, Carrie, is four years older than me,” he said. “There was a brother in between, but he got sick when he was six months old and passed away. Carrie and I grew up in this broken-down old house at the far end of a small town in Wyoming. We didn’t have a lot of money for food or clothes, but we got by, you know? Behind where we lived there was just woods and gullies. You could walk for almost two miles before hitting another house. Lots of people wanted to build there, but it’d cost too much to level the area, so it stayed undeveloped. We used to go in there a lot. We’d walk and walk until we got tired, then we’d walk and walk back home again. That’s what Carrie used to say when my mom asked where we were going. ‘For a walk-and-a-walk.’ After a while she started saying it like Fozzie Bear, so it came out ‘For a wakka-wakka!’

  “Anyway, one day we went for a walk while we were waiting for Dad to come home so we could go out for pizza. I was eleven, she was fifteen. We got about half a mile in and were about to turn back when we heard voices. We knew that some of the other kids used to hang out in the woods, it wasn’t like it was our personal forest, but any time we saw them we’d hide in the shadows until they left so nobody would bother us.

  “But this time, they saw us first. Eight of them, all guys, seniors at the same high school where Carrie was going. They came down the side of the hill toward us, asking what we were doing there and giving us shit for how we were dressed. I was scared, but the thing about my sister is, she’s fucking fearless. Sometimes I think the more scared I got, the braver she got to make up the difference. So she told them to fuck off, grabbed my hand hard, and started up the hill.

  “They dragged us back and surrounded us like a pack of fucking wolves. I thought they were gonna beat us up, but then I saw Carrie’s eyes and they were big and wide and for the first time scared because she knew where this was going. ‘Run!’ she said.

  “I wasn’t gonna leave her, but it didn’t matter because two of them grabbed me before I could move and pinned me to the ground. I fought back but these were big guys, football players, they had six years and a hundred pounds on me.

  “One of them grabbed Carrie and she hit him as hard as she could and then they were all over her, trying to bring her down. She fought so hard. I’ve never seen anyone fight that hard before. But there were too many of them, and they slammed her to the ground and started ripping her clothes off. I was kicking and screaming, trying to get out from under the other guys, but they held me down and—”

  Dylan stopped and looked off, and I could see that his eyes were wet. “They raped her. Right in front of me. Even switched places with the guys holding me down so they could get their turn. When they were done, they said if we told anybody what happened nobody would believe us and they’d kill us. When they let me go I started screaming and hitting them and I guess one of them knocked me out because that’s all I remember until I looked up to see my sister standing over me, her face bruised, bleeding between her legs.

  “Well, she did tell our parents, and we did tell the cops, and the jury did believe us, and every goddamn one of those assholes did go to jail because they didn’t understand that my sister was fucking fearless. Once it was all over, my folks sent her to live with my other aunt, and that fall she enrolled in a school in the area, far away from where it all happened and all the kids who were friends with the guys who raped her, who said she was a slut and a whore and she had it coming.

  “A year later she transferred to a college out of state. I didn’t see her much after that, and when we did meet up it was hard, you know? She wasn’t the same, my parents were never the same, nothing was. There was a distance between us that hadn’t been there before, partly because I could never forgive myself for not stopping them.”

  “Dylan, you were eleven, there was nothing you could’ve done.”

  “Logically I know that, but emotionally that doesn’t change a goddamn thing. I will never, ever stop thinking that I could’ve done something to save her. So yeah, when I see some asshole hurting a woman, the part of me that wasn’t able to help my sister goes out of its fucking mind and there’s nothing I can do about it and nothing I want to do about it except beat the guy�
�s head in until there’s nothing left but bits of bone and blood and…”

  He pushed down the anger until his voice leveled off. “Sorry to drop all that on you, but you asked.”

  “It’s okay,” I said, and noticed that I was resting my hand on his arm. I didn’t remember having put it there, but I let it stay anyway. “Do you think that’s why you joined the army? So you’d have a way to hit back at the bad guys?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Never really thought about it.”

  “And your sister? How’s she doing?”

  He managed to serve up a grin. “She got her Master’s in Social Work, then signed on as a counselor with a battered women’s shelter in Boston. Every day she has to hear stories like what she went through, face all that emotion and turn it into something good so she can help people. I couldn’t save her, but goddamn if she didn’t save herself and everybody she meets in that place. Sometimes, when one of the residents needs to go back for her property, Carrie goes with her, just daring the guy to try something so she can put him away. Like I said: totally fucking fearless.”

  “Hey, you two!” Mark called over from the path. “We’re heading back to the bus. Five minutes or we leave without you.”

  “Okay,” Dylan said, then turned back to me. “Guess we should head back.”

  As we started walking, I wondered what it must be like to live life totally fucking fearless. I also realized to my surprise that the Spider was being fairly quiet. The meadowsweet had helped a little, which Dylan almost certainly knew would happen when he got it for me in the first place.

  He’s always trying to save someone, I thought.

  * * *

  TylerW1998

  I’ve never been much of a plants-and-flowers guy… the pollen messes up my lungs and I have enough trouble breathing as it is… but I’ve never seen model trains up close, so that was fun. Then I went for a walk until I started to get dizzy, and sat on a bench to catch my breath. The sun was warm on my skin and made me feel better. Anything to get the blood flowing.