Together We Will Go

by J. Michael Straczynski

  I didn’t move for a long time, just sat there, breathing hard, in case whatever happened might happen again, but it didn’t, so I called Carolyn to say I had to work late and spent the next couple of hours putting it back the way it was. I picked up the cabinets, pulled the blinds all the way up so you couldn’t tell they were torn, threw the broken glass into the recycling bin, then walked the two blocks home and tried really hard never to think about it again.

  My folks passed away just after I turned fifty. My mother went first of complications from pneumonia—she was always fragile that way—and my father passed a year later of a stroke. Not long after that, Carolyn’s folks also started doing poorly. Sunsetting, the doctors call it. So we sold the company, cashed out a pretty decent retirement fund, and moved to Alexandria to look after them. Back when Carolyn and I got married, we used to talk about growing old together and facing the end side by side with love and courage. When our conversations got too serious, she’d sing, to the tune of that old nursery rhyme “A-Hunting We Will Go”: “Together we will go, together we will go, heigh-ho the derry-o, together we will go.” It made her laugh every time. And sure enough, here we were, together on a road that was a lot shorter in front of us than it was behind us.

  Carolyn’s dad died about a year after we moved to Alexandria, and her mom two years later. Once they were gone, I thought we might travel a bit. We had the money, we could have afforded it, and neither of us had been much farther than Chicago. I talked to her about Bali and Hawaii and Rome and Berlin, but, see, Carolyn had allergies and bronchial problems that never quite cleared up after a bout of pneumonia a few years earlier, and she thought it was too risky to go messing around with airplanes and recycled hotel air, and I couldn’t leave her to go traipsing around the world by myself, so—

  Okay. Stop it.

  I need to stop dancing around this, quit trying to justify why I did what I did like I’m in a courtroom. That’s all I’ve been doing since it happened, running the reasons through my head over and over as if they’d make a difference.

  Just get to the point. Say the words. You can do it.

  Okay. Here it is.

  I killed my wife.

  I killed Carolyn.

  Seeing it written out like that somehow makes it seem smaller than it is. I thought it’d feel more like an explosion. But it’s a relief to finally admit it.

  The turn started when Carolyn got real sick two years ago. I won’t go into what it was and how she got diagnosed and how we reacted to the news because once you hit sixty, there’s really only two kinds of illness: ones where you get better and ones where you don’t. This was the latter. She declined pretty fast, and by the end of the year she couldn’t get out of bed anymore. I put in a respirator beside the bed to help her breathe, and paid a nurse to come in twice a day to keep track of her condition and help out with feeding, bathing, and other necessities.

  After a while, Carolyn stopped talking. She’d just lie there and sleep. Sometimes her eyes would flutter open for a few seconds, but they were always focused somewhere past the wall, not on me or the nurse. Most days I don’t think she even knew we were there. When animals know they’re going to die, they go somewhere quiet where they can be alone. Carolyn couldn’t go somewhere quiet, so I think she found that alone-place somewhere inside her head.

  The night it happened, I’d finished turning her and tucking her back in for the night. When someone’s bedridden, you have to turn them twice a day so they don’t get bedsores, because the sores can form underneath, where you might not see them, and when they break they can get infected and you won’t know there’s a problem until they get septic. I was going to head to my room and get some sleep, but instead I stood by the bed for a while. Her eyes were closed, cheeks pale, and the only sounds in the room were the beep of the respirator and her forced breathing.

  “We probably should’ve traveled after all,” I said, though I knew she couldn’t hear me, “before all this happened. Yeah, you might’ve gotten sick from the travel, but it wouldn’t have made much difference since this started pretty soon afterward.”

  And the more I thought about that, the more I got mad.

  We could have traveled, could have gone places and done things, but she always said no, it was too risky.

  I could’ve gone to college out of state to study architecture, or pursued a job as commercial designer for that big firm in Los Angeles, but she said no, it was too risky.

  Everything I ever wanted to do, she was right there to say no, be sensible, take the safe route, stay here, don’t put yourself on the line, don’t take a chance because you might fail.

  And if you’re wondering why no always trumps yes, it’s because when you’re married it takes two to say yes but only one to say no. Besides, there’s no risk in saying no. No means everything stays the same, you’re in control, and you don’t feel like you’ve lost out on anything. No is safe, no is always safe, but saying yes is dangerous because anything can happen.

  For coming onto fifty years, my life had been one great big pile of no. Anything I wanted to do or try, any place I wanted to go, anything that meant anything to me, it was all no, no, no, no, no, no, and no.

  And for the first time since that day at the office, I felt my blood pounding in my veins and my hands were shaking and suddenly all those years of lost opportunities rose up inside me with a fury I can’t even describe. I’d wasted my life in a job I never wanted in the first place. If I’d been the one who was afraid to take chances, that’d be one thing, but I wasn’t. She was the one who was always afraid! Her parents, they were afraid! And I listened to them and went along with it even when I knew in my heart that I was making a mistake, because I was trying to do the right thing, so yes, I have to take my share of blame for that, but it’s not fair! It’s not right to be in your sixties and realize that everything in your life that could have taken you to new places, everything that mattered, everything that could have made you matter, has passed you by and now it’s too late and your life is one big catalog of missed opportunities and there’s no going back. You’re done and it’s over and there’s just the not-very-long wait until the game is called on account of darkness and they shovel dirt over you.

  I never even had the courage to confront her because I didn’t want to hurt her and she knew it. She knew I would always let no trump yes because it was easiest and safest for her. So I smiled and shrugged and said I’m totally fine with that and It’s not important and day after day denied the anger that was eating me alive instead of telling her what this was doing to me or saying, Fine, then I’ll go without you.

  And as I stood beside the bed, my breath coming fast and shallow, hands shaking with decades of unspoken anger, I realized that there was a way for me to show her exactly how I felt about a lifetime of no, and before I had a chance to think about it, I reached for the respirator valve and turned off the air.

  For a moment, nothing happened. The life signs monitor was the only sound in the room, beeping every ten seconds.

  Then she gasped and arched her back, fingers stretched out and clawing the air, eyes wide, mouth open, trying to suck air with lungs that refused to obey. She couldn’t scream, so the monitors did it for her, shrieking in the rack behind me.

  Her terrified eyes found mine, saying, What are you doing, turn the valve back on, there’s still time, don’t do this, save me!

  I reflexively reached for the valve to turn the air back on, but then everything inside me got real quiet. I lowered my hand and looked down at her. “No,” I said.

  It was the first time I’d ever said it to her.

  “How do you like it for a change? No! You hear me?! No! NO!”

  Her eyes clouded over as she arched again, body trembling, gasping for air, hands clenched into tight fists, opening and closing over and over, faster and faster and then—

  And then she just stopped. She was still looking at me, but after a bit I realized she wasn’t blinking. It felt less like she
’d died and more that she just kind of forgot to keep living, the way a thought gets away from you. The monitors screamed that there was a problem, but I waited another five minutes before opening the respirator valve and dialing 9-1-1, just to be sure.

  When the ambulance came out, they checked to confirm she was dead, then ran back the data from the monitors to figure out what happened. That’s when I began to get scared and I looked at Carolyn, her eyes still open. Thought you’d get away with it, didn’t you? Told you it was too risky.

  But when they finished reading back the charts, they said it looked like she’d died of cardiorespiratory failure. They said they could do a full autopsy if I wanted more information, but I said no for obvious reasons. Most folks don’t know this, but once you’re past a certain age, coroners only perform autopsies if somebody in the family asks for one. When you’re old and wired up to a machine that breathes for you and keeps you alive second by second, nobody’s especially mystified if you fall over dead one day. PARSON THOMAS, 83, DIED IN HIS BED TODAY, FOUL PLAY SUSPECTED is a headline no one has ever published and never will.

  Her funeral a week later was a small affair because neither of us had any relatives closer than second cousins. After we put her in the ground I walked from the cemetery to the house, about two miles in all. Not really thinking about anything. Just numb, I guess. When I finally got home, I sat on the bed, hands folded, and looked at myself in the vanity mirror where Carolyn used to sit and do her makeup.

  Well, now what do I do? I thought.

  And I didn’t have an answer.

  When the life insurance check came a month later, I walked it down to the bank. I must’ve been preoccupied thinking back to what happened that night because I didn’t hear the teller when she said “Checking or savings?”

  “Checking or savings?” she asked again when I glanced up. “God knows you don’t want to take it in cash,” she joked. “Way too risky!”

  An hour later, after being referred to the head teller, the assistant bank manager, then finally his boss, I walked out the door with eighty-two thousand dollars in cash just to spite her.

  I already had enough in my savings account to get by for whatever time was left to me, so I decided to treat the cash as mad money. I stacked it on the kitchen counter and just looked at it for a few days while I tried to figure out what to do next. I wanted to use the money for something good, and thought about donating it to the church Carolyn and I joined after moving to Alexandria, but they’d never gone out of their way to make us feel at home. The minister even forgot Carolyn’s name twice during the funeral. So I made some charitable donations to a food kitchen, a homeless shelter outside town, and a few other places, but that barely touched the total.

  I could travel, I thought, finally see some of those places I always wanted to visit. But there’s not much fun in going alone, so that option kind of dried up on the frying pan. I took a couple of classes in self-defense, mainly to tone the old muscles up a bit because when you live alone it never hurts to know you can take care of things if there’s a problem, like with what happened at the concert. Even thought about going back to school for that architecture degree, but there wasn’t much point since I’m too old for anybody to hire me as a first-time designer. Buying a fancy car didn’t make sense because there was no place for a hundred miles in any direction worth driving to in a Ferrari or a Porsche, and it’d probably get stolen anyway.

  Then the guilt started showing up in force, creeping in during the night when I was trying to sleep, then coming back the next day when I thought I could distract myself with TV or movies or reading. Her eyes were all I could see.

  Ending Carolyn’s life had not begun my own, it just removed the routine of years without providing anything new in its place. I’d been trained not to do what I wanted; now that I had the time, the money, and the opportunity, I couldn’t think of one goddamned thing I wanted to do.

  When I was a kid, there was a pony ride in a vacant lot downtown. For a dime a shot, you could ride the pony five times around a circular track bordered inside and out by guard rails. It was a pretty good deal at the time, but I always felt bad for the pony, penned up all day every day, just going round and round in circles.

  One afternoon, I was coming home late from school and saw the owner unlock the guard rails and walk the pony to a holding area at the back of the lot. I ran over to the fence, all excited. At last the pony would be free, and he could do anything he wanted.

  So what’d he do?

  He walked round and round in circles. Because that’s all he knew.

  Saddest goddamn thing I ever saw.

  And I decided that if that’s going to be my life, a pony going around in circles until I fall over dead, then I might as well end it now and be done with it.

  I’d just started going on the internet, researching ways to kill myself that wouldn’t hurt or be too messy, when I saw Mark’s ad. I figured if I’m gonna go, I may as well do it with a bunch of like-minded folks. As I fired off the email, I could hear Carolyn’s voice in my head saying that this was probably some kind of scam, that once I got to the rendezvous whoever was behind this ad would show up to kill me or steal the life insurance money I’d decided to bring along as an emergency fund.

  It’s dangerous, I thought. It means taking a risk.

  Good, and long overdue. Let’s do it. Finally. Let’s take a risk.

  Live dangerous, die young.

  Well, one out of two, anyway.

  * * *

  AdminMark

  * * *

  Karen_Ortiz

  We stopped for the night at this cute little hotel called the Cozy Up 2 Us Inn. Since by now there was a lot of personal stuff on board, Mark said that some of us should always sleep on the bus, so Dylan, Theo, Zeke, and Mark took the bunks while the rest of us went inside. We were all pretty tired, and the mattress pad on my bed was so thick and soft that even the Spider was happy to call it a night.

  After breakfast (noon again… do suicidal people like to sleep late even when they’re not depressed?), Mark said he had a surprise for us. We drove twenty minutes to the River Wild Shopping Mall, which had closed down a few months earlier and was going to be demolished so the state could build a high-tech prison. That feels a little redundant, but maybe that’s just me.

  I’d never been inside a shopping mall that was completely empty. Even in the early mornings when there usually aren’t a lot of shoppers, there were still salesclerks getting ready for the day and food-court employees and music coming from the PA system. Now there was just us and Peter’s security guard friend who was the only one on duty because the owners didn’t want to spend money for more than that since the place was going to be torn down soon anyway.

  The strangest part was that there were still Christmas decorations up and signs announcing sales, and the stores hadn’t been completely emptied. The guard said that the big, expensive stuff like TVs and furniture had been taken out, but there was no point in moving the rest because by the time it got counted, boxed, and shipped to other stores, the perishable stuff would have expired and the extra moves would’ve damaged the rest too much to sell. It was cheaper to bulldoze it along with the mall and write off the loss. I found that really annoying. I mean, they could’ve donated it to charity or a homeless shelter that would’ve picked it up for free, but I suppose that’s against the rules of capitalism. Easier to throw up the fences and pay a guard to keep people out.

  “Here’s the deal,” Mark said, “and just so everyone’s clear, this was Peter’s idea, so if it sucks, blame him. It’s half performance art, half psychodrama, and half letting off steam.”

  “That’s one hundred and fifty percent,” Tyler said, because nerd.

  “My degree is in Creative Writing, not Math, so as long as it works in a sentence, I’m fine.” I was glad to see Mark was having fun with this. He’d seemed kind of down the last few days, and this was a nice break in routine. Besides, it’s good for him to let someone
else have an idea once in a while.

  “It’s all about closure,” Peter said, walking toward us with a baseball bat he’d liberated from one of the stores. “In counseling sessions, when the patient needs to take out their anger at somebody they can’t hit or who’s dead, the therapist will substitute a pillow, a punching bag, or one of those weighted inflatable balloons that look like clowns, the kind you can hit all you want and they keep coming up—”

  “Weebles!” Zeke said, cradling his cat inside his army jacket. “I found one in my uncle’s basement under a bunch of magazines from the seventies. That’s what was written on the box. ‘Weebles wobble, but they don’t fall down!’ ”

  “That works,” Peter said. “Your boss being a dick? Hit the Weeble. Mad at your sister? Hit the Weeble. Got a bunch of repressed rage at your dead father? Beat the shit out of that Weeble. We’ve all got Weebles, and some of them put us on the road to where we are today. So why not vent some of that anger on our way out?”

  He went on from there. Like, a lot, because Peter really loves the sound of his own voice. Running it through the Can we please just get to the point filter, he said this was less about expressing our anger against individual people and more about striking out at the symbols of all the things that had hurt us or let us down. So yeah: performance art. Therapy. Acting out.

  Vengeance.

  Vaughn thought it was a stupid idea and said so. Thank you, Vaughn! “I’m not going to beat up a shopping mall,” he said.

  “Then don’t. Anybody who wants to pass, not a problem. For those who want to come and play”—and here he hefted the baseball bat—“there’s a sporting goods store with baseball bats and hockey sticks, and some leftover two-by-fours, pipes, and rebar in the maintenance office.”