Together We Will Go

by J. Michael Straczynski

  Then I heard someone say, “I made something for you.”

  I turned to see Theo holding a wreath of leaves freshly rescued from the ground. “Let me see how this looks on you.”

  “I can’t… I have a problem with pollen.”

  “I can fix that. Did you see a water fountain around here anywhere?”

  “Yeah, back that way.”

  Theo ran to the fountain, washed off the wreath, and ran back.

  “Pollen sticks when it’s dry. Washing should get rid of most of it. Give it a shot.”

  I put the laurel on top of my head, which summoned laughter. I can’t remember the last time I saw someone with so much easy joy.

  “You look like a Roman emperor! All bow before His Royal Magnificence Tyler Maximus Caesar, the emperor historians always forget to mention!”

  “Bastards!” I said.

  “Bastards, indeed! Any pollen awfulness?”

  “None.”

  “Then my work here is done. Enjoy the sun!”

  Then Theo bowed and ran off like a kid who just got out of school on the first day of summer vacation.

  So much life. So much laughter.

  I sat there, grinning like an idiot, water running down my temples from the laurel, bathing in the warm sunlight until Mark called everybody back to the bus. It was one of those moments of perfect beauty Karen talked about, and I tucked it into the back of my mind like a bird hiding something shiny in its nest so I can look at it whenever I want.

  * * *

  LIsa

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  * * *

  AdminMark

  It’s been a long day, so I told Dylan to stop at a motel so we could get a good night’s rest, maybe even take tomorrow to just chill since we don’t have a pickup for two days. Our penultimate stop in Nebraska is Bellevue University, where we’re supposed to meet the next rider at a dorm party on Betz Road. Rather than send Dylan or go alone, I said that anyone who wanted to come along was welcome since it’s a university and we’ll all blend in (well, except for Vaughn). Might be a good chance to blow off some steam.

  Honestly, I could use a break as much as anyone else. Don’t know why but I’m feeling a little down, like I got sideswiped by a bug, or maybe the road is starting to get to me.

  As I read back that sentence, it occurs to me that anyone else might look at it and think, You’re on a bus with a bunch of people planning to commit suicide. Why would you look anywhere else for a reason to be depressed?

  Because that’s honestly not a factor. Let me explain.

  During my freshman year in college, a guy in my History of English Literature class committed suicide one night by jumping off the campus bell tower. Unfortunately he bounced off a ledge into a garden thick with trees and bushes and nobody found his body until that weekend, when the gardeners came in to do cleanup.

  The staff and instructors were worried about how we’d take the news, so that Monday, after the dean told everyone what happened, I walked into EngLit to find a grief counselor waiting for us. She talked about how upset and confused we must be, and wanted us to know that we were in a safe place, free to express our feelings. She expected us to react the way she’d been trained to expect: with tears, sobbing, and incomprehension.

  She got none of those things. I mean, yeah, the guy who jumped wasn’t a jerk, so we were sad that he was gone, and for sure some of us missed him more than others, but on the tears/sobbing/incomprehension scale of one to ten, we were hovering at about two, tops.

  I guess she thought we hadn’t understood her when she said it was okay to let it all out, so she tried broadening the discussion to ask how many of us knew someone who had committed suicide or attempted it. I think she expected maybe one or two hands to go up.

  We all raised our hands.

  We tried to explain that suicide had become so common in our demo that it just doesn’t have the same shock value anymore. It’s like, Shit, I got hacked and I failed my midterm and Bobby from PE class blew his brains out. I won’t say it’s an everyday occurrence because that’s overstating the case, but it’s not too far from the truth either. Five thousand millennials commit suicide every year. It’s our second biggest cause of death, and the way things are going by next year it’ll probably be number one. Or, like radio DJs used to say back in the day, number one with a bullet, right?

  That’s half the reason we weren’t drowning in tears.

  Here’s the other half.

  My grandfather used to talk about how he had to do these Duck and Cover drills when he was in the second grade. They’d be studying math or history and suddenly the teacher would shout “Bomb!” and everyone would dive under their desks and cover their heads because of course that would save them from a thermonuclear fucking weapon. And there he is, sixty years old, and he’s still not over it. A thing like that changes you forever, he’d say.

  But here’s the thing: nobody ever nuked the second grade. Yeah, I’m sure it was scary as shit to prepare for that, but it never actually happened.

  By contrast, everybody I know grew up with school shootings. We’re the first bunch who came up knowing for an absolute, stone-certain fact that at any moment, somebody could walk into the cafeteria and execute us. It wasn’t a vague, formless idea or an abstract possibility, it was real. Every time we saw another school get hit, it was like, Well, I guess I’m next.

  No disrespect to my grandfather, who was actually a pretty nice guy, but seeing news reports about kids your own age getting their faces blown off on a monthly, sometimes weekly basis changes you and how you look at death. It’s there with us every day. As terrible as this is going to sound, we’re used to it, and we try not to be scared by it.

  People grieve over someone getting killed when it comes as a surprise, when it’s rare, when it’s not supposed to happen. If you wanted us to grieve, then you should have made it rare in the first place, fixed things so you’d stop killing us and we wouldn’t have to be killing ourselves. But you didn’t, and we know you didn’t, so yeah, when one of us goes down we don’t grieve about it the way you did, the way you want us to.

  And don’t you dare fucking judge us for it.

  * * *

  VaughnR

  I’ve never been much of a drinker, usually just a beer or a glass of wine with dinner, but the motel where we stopped for the night was across from a bar and it was still early and there was nothing else to do, so I decided to go for a quick drink, then head back and get some sleep.

  It was one of those little taverns you see a lot in Nebraska that’s probably been there as long as the town, with lots of old wood and leather booths, a dart board that hasn’t been used in a long time, and a pool table that’s missing a few balls. But at my age, I should talk, right?

  I was about to take a seat at the bar when I saw Theresa and Jim in one of the booths. Wasn’t sure what I should do about it, but Carolyn would say it’s bad form to ignore someone you know, and so far they hadn’t done anything to of
fend me, so when Jim waved to join them, I headed for the booth.

  “What can we get you?” he asked. I told him a beer and he repeated it to the waitress.

  We talked for a while about nothing in particular, that kind of conversation you get at a party where nobody knows anybody else and you’re probably never going to see them again, so it’s okay to be dull or stupid or both. But while both of them were a little dull, neither of them were stupid, and they seemed happy for the diversion.

  “Sometimes the bus feels a little like high school,” Theresa said. “Cliques, right? ‘Don’t talk to those guys, they have cooties.’ ”

  I told her I hadn’t heard anyone say cooties in a long time, and she said it was her mother’s favorite expression and it stuck. It didn’t take much prodding to get her to talk about her family some more. Apparently her father was a real piece of work. Racist. Violent. A drunk. Even though he’d inherited all his money instead of working for it, he turned around and said she wouldn’t get a penny of it if she married an African-American.

  “I told him I’d rather be dead than live in that house with him a second longer,” she said. “That’s when he told me he was ‘connected’ to some really bad people, that he had Jim’s license plate number, and if I went with Jim he’d hire someone to find us and Jim would get hurt, or worse.”

  “Maybe he was bluffing,” Jim said, “but just to be safe I ditched the car after picking up Theresa and we looked for a way out that wouldn’t leave a trail for anyone to find later. We thought about getting bus or train tickets, because you can buy those for cash, but then Theresa showed me Mark’s ad and I thought, well, why not?”

  “Sounds like you’re running away more than looking to kill yourselves.”

  “We just want to find the right place to do it, that’s all,” Theresa said, “because it needs to be done in a way that’s beautiful.” I could tell she was getting her back up about it. “You don’t think we’re serious, do you? You think this is just a game to us, same as Lisa and the others?”

  “Not my place to say,” I told her, but that only pissed her off more.

  “Show him,” she told Jim.

  He started to say “We don’t have to prove any—” but she cut him off.

  “Show him.”

  He reached into his backpack, pulled out an unmarked bottle of pills, and opened the top so I could look inside. The pills were blue and pink, with the number 45 printed on them.

  “Medical-grade arsenic,” she said. “Jim was going to med school when we met and he was able to go back and get them from the university lab. We could do this today, right here, but what Mark described, driving over a cliff in San Francisco at sunset… like I said, it’s beautiful and if I have to pick a way to go, I’d rather do it that way. But if anything goes wrong, or my dad finds us before we can make it to San Francisco, this is our way out.”

  Jim was getting uncomfortable with the conversation, and changed the subject to happier topics, like the day they met and how much they were in love with each other. Then Theresa excused herself to go to the bathroom.

  Once she was gone, I leaned in to Jim so we could talk quietly. “She doesn’t know, does she?” I said.

  “Know what?”

  “Jim, when you’re twenty, trying to get sleeping pills or Vicodin takes an act of Congress, but when you’re sixty-five they back up the truck and give you pretty much anything you want. They throw it at you like candy because at that age, why not? So I’ve seen pretty much every kind of pill there is, and while I was looking after my wife during her decline I learned to recognize every pill by sight to make sure she didn’t get the wrong one.

  “And I know amoxicillin when I see it. Blue and pink, with 45 stamped on the pink side.”

  His face fell when he saw I had him dead to rights. “Please don’t tell her,” he said. “Saying I had poison was the only way I could stop her from doing something stupid on her own.”

  “So Lisa got it right, you don’t want to kill yourself.”

  “Me? Fuck no.”

  “Then why pretend otherwise?”

  “Because she’s got a temper like you wouldn’t believe, Vaughn. If I try and talk her out of killing herself while she’s this mad at her father, she’ll just turn around and do it. So I’m trying to keep the situation from escalating until she calms down enough for us to figure out how to deal with her dad.”

  “So why get on the bus?”

  “I thought if she could see a bunch of people who really are serious about taking their own lives, she might decide she’s not one of them. Meanwhile, it’ll show her that I’m listening to her, which buys me time to try and change her mind.

  “So don’t tell the others, okay? Because like I said, she’s got a temper and if one of them says something about it… trust me, you don’t want to be on the other side of what happens next.”

  “I promise,” I said, just in time to see Theresa coming out of the bathroom. As she sat back down, Jim changed the subject to their relationship and how great it was. I smiled and nodded until I finished my beer, then thanked Jim for picking up the tab and headed to my room.

  I came back with a lot more respect for Jim. He’s trying to save her, preserve their relationship, and find some way to reconcile with a man who clearly hates his guts and can’t be trusted. That’s a lot of weight for anyone to carry, but he’s doing the best he can with it.

  I hope things work out with them better than they did with me.

  God knows they couldn’t do any worse.

  * * *

  IamTheo

  After being blocked the last few days due to the excitement of signing on for this expedition, I was finally able to get some writing done tonight on the stories, filling up most of my last notebook before deciding to get some sleep. Unfortunately, when my brain is in writing mode, it’s incapable of shutting down on command—it just takes all that energy and turns it inward, projecting random thoughts and bits of dialogue on the inside of my eyelids until I surrender to the inevitable and get back up again. So with the sun starting to peek through the curtains I decided to put some of that free-floating energy to work and write a bit about why I’m here.

  At risk of overthinking everything—and as someone who got a BA in Gender Studies and made it halfway through the Master’s program for Political Theory, that’s apparently something I do all the time—I think there are two ways that people commit suicide.

  The first way people kill themselves is a kind of spontaneous combustion. It comes out of rage or shock or sudden deep depression and catches you by surprise, and before you even realize you’re doing it, you’re reaching for the gun or the knife or the pills. It’s as if something inside you gets too sad or too angry to survive anymore and it explodes, taking you with it. I think it happens most often to the very people who don’t think they could ever kill themselves, because they’re not paying attention when their switch gets flipped in the middle of something awful.

  The second is more like a time-delay fuse. It comes when you’ve been wounded for days or weeks or years and you finally reach a point when your heart gets very quiet and very still and you realize that you simply cannot live in the world anymore, when you say, I have no purpose here, no place, no function, no reason to keep going. Why stick around when you’re not free to be yourself, you’re not wanted, your future isn’t what you thought it was going to be and every day you’re being elbowed a little further off the planet? It’s not that you can’t take it anymore, it’s that you refuse to take it anymore. The decision doesn’t come like a lightning bolt out of anger, despair, or self-pity; it’s more like standing up on your hind legs and announcing to the world, You’re all a bunch of assholes and I never asked to be invited to this stupid party in the first place so I’m outta here.

  Last year, a friend of mine decided she’d had enough of the bullshit and wanted out. Rather than go the spontaneous combustion route, she spent weeks hand-writing letters to everyone who mattered, tel
ling them what she was going to do, and why, and how it wasn’t their fault. She could’ve just written emails and timed them to go out when appropriate, but she wanted a more personal touch. When she was done, she packed up a picnic lunch, dropped the letters in the mail, and went to her favorite park to sit by the lake. As the sun went down, she sorted the trash into the appropriate bins, strolled over to a walking path where she knew her body would be found the next morning, sat with her back against a tree to minimize the mess, put the business end of a gun in her mouth, and pulled the trigger.

  I don’t belong in this world. I could go into a million reasons why I’ve come to that conclusion, starting with all the bullying earlier in my life, to my screwed-up family and the fact that I’ll never have the kind of job or life that would make sticking around worthwhile, but it all adds up to the same thing. I don’t belong here. Could I have an easier time if I embraced a more conventional approach to my life and my gender? Sure, but then I wouldn’t be me. If I have to choose between being allowed to live in this world by being false to everything I believe in, or going to a world I’ve created in my own head, even if it’s not real, where I can be myself, I’ll pick the latter every time.

  That’s what I’ve done, and what I’m doing, and with all due respect for the process and the (not exactly enforceable) agreement I signed when I got on the bus, I don’t feel the need to describe the proverbial final straw that broke the equally proverbial camel’s back. It would just give people the ammunition they need to say Aha! That’s why it happened, that one very specific thing and dismiss everything else, letting themselves off the hook for whatever role they played in this process.

  I read once about a man who was getting dressed one morning, and as he bent to tie his shoes, one of the laces snapped. He looked at the shoes for a moment, then got up, walked to the window, and jumped twelve stories to his death. Clearly he wasn’t distraught about the shoelace, that’s ridiculous. It was all the things that the shoelace represented, everything that led up to that one singular moment when the shoelaces became the One More Thing he couldn’t handle and he dove out the window.