Together We Will Go

by J. Michael Straczynski

  “Fuck you,” I said, out loud this time, and closed my eyes as tight as I could, mentally stitching my face back onto the reflection.

  When I opened them again, the Spider was gone.

  As I stepped back into the suite, Dylan came toward me. “You were in there a long time,” he said, “I was starting to get worried. Are you okay?”

  “I’m all right,” I said, and surprised both of us when I leaned against his chest and whispered up at him, “I love you. You don’t have to say anything about it or do anything. You don’t have to respond, you don’t even have to acknowledge that I said anything. I just want you to know. I love you.”

  “I love you too,” he said, and I think he was as surprised and pleased by that as I was. Then he put his arms around me and pulled me to him, hard.

  And this time the Spider had nothing to say about it.

  * * *

  IamTheo

  Gray dawn was starting to come through the windows by the time the last of the acid wore off, and we’d fallen into that very familiar post-trip dorm-room tradition of talking about the Big Things. Also the stupid things, like, What’s the strangest place you’ve ever had sex? and Did you ever get so drunk that you threw up and shit yourself at the same time? That one in particular was a lot of fun, but I’m not sure the answers bear repeating. Most of the other questions were light and easy.

  Then this happened.

  “Predestination or free will?” Peter asked, and everyone groaned.

  “What the fuck?” Lisa said from her position on the floor. Exhausted by dancing all night, she had retreated into a fetal position beneath the coffee table, and her voice drifted up to us as if we were holding a séance. “How do you go from ‘Let’s classify different kinds of farts’ to freaking predestination?”

  “I was just thinking—”

  “Okay, mistake number one,” Shanelle said.

  He kept going anyway. “Most of the people who believe that everything is predestined, that it’s all God’s will, are also against suicide. Now, I don’t believe in predestination, but just for the sake of argument, let’s say that predestination is a real thing. That means everyone in this room was meant to check out early, so why would anyone who believes in God have a problem with that?”

  “It’s not that black-and-white,” Vaughn said. He’d lost the jacket and tie and was curled up in a chair across from the big sofa where most of us were sitting. His eyes were still jackpotting a little from his time with Lucy, but that just made him more eager to dive in. “I was a church-going man for a long time, and predestination is for big-picture stuff; free will is for small-picture stuff.”

  “But don’t they interweave?” Dylan asked. “I mean, the guys who killed JFK or Gandhi were working off individual free will, but what they did changed the world.”

  “Then the pastor would argue that that’s predetermined.”

  “But if those guys had to do it, if they were destined to do it,” Mark said, “then they didn’t have free will, did they?”

  Vaughn rubbed at his face. “Shit, Mark, how the hell should I know? I’m not God. I’m just saying the point isn’t as cut-and-dried as Peter’s suggesting.”

  I finished the last of a glass of white wine and dove into the fray. “I think free will is all about purpose, about doing what we were meant to do while we’re here. Some people might say that by taking our own lives, we’re defeating that purpose by cutting it short.”

  “Unless doing this is our purpose,” Karen said. Dylan was sitting next to her on the couch, his arm draped around her, but he let the cushion take most of the weight. “Maybe this whole thing, the journey, the journals we’re leaving for the world, maybe that’s what we were put here to create.”

  “So you’re saying Mark is doing God’s work?” Dylan asked.

  “Fuck! My! Life!” Lisa yelled from beneath the coffee table, her voice echoing through the room like it was coming from the bottom of the Mariana Trench. “Dylan, if you give this asshole even one inch of credit for any of this, I will crawl out of here and kick your ass.”

  “Sitting right here,” Mark said.

  “Also an asshole,” Lisa said.

  “Okay, enough with the heavy questions,” Dylan said. “Let’s go back to the funner ones.”

  “Did you seriously just say ‘the funner ones’?” Peter asked.

  “I did, and by the way, fuck you.”

  “The man’s a trained soldier,” Mark said, “so I’d for sure fuck off if I was you.”

  “Who asked you?!” several of us said at exactly the same time, and it turned out to be the funniest thing ever.

  “Copy that,” Mark said.

  “Okay, next question,” I said. “Pizza: Plain or with toppings? For me, it’s bell peppers.”

  “Nope,” Peter said. “Put anything on a pizza and you can’t tell how good it is or isn’t. It’s gotta be just plain-plain-plain.”

  “Were you a monk in a previous life?” Dylan asked.

  “Maybe.”

  “Mushrooms and sausage or I go home,” Karen said.

  “Bell peppers, onions, and olives,” Shanelle said.

  “I don’t care,” Lisa said. “If it’s round, has cheese on it, and it’s a pizza, I’m eating it.”

  “Pineapple,” Mark said, and there wasn’t one of us surprised to hear it.

  “Sausage and pepperoni,” Dylan said. “Vaughn? How about you?”

  “At the risk of agreeing with Peter, I think plain’s the way to go.”

  Peter glowered at him. “What do you mean, ‘At risk of agreeing with Peter’? When did I become the goat? I thought that was Mark’s job.”

  “Still sitting right here,” Mark said.

  “Still an asshole,” Lisa called out.

  “Okay, lightning round,” I said. “You can wish for just one thing, but it can’t have anything to do with why we’re here. Quick answers only. Ready, and… go!”

  “Superpowers,” Peter said, “flight and invisibility.”

  “Shit, he stole my answer,” Shanelle said. “Um… to meet everyone in the world and hear their story and make them feel better about themselves!”

  “So, Super-Psychologist!” Vaughn said.

  Shanelle nodded. “Exactly!”

  “To be president of the United States for twenty-four hours,” Dylan said, “just so I could look at the UFO files.”

  “I want to be able to dance like a ballerina,” Karen said.

  “A big-ass pineapple pizza,” Mark said.

  “Mark and his fucking pineapple pizza getting thrown off the balcony,” Lisa said.

  “I’d want to see the aurora borealis,” Vaughn said.

  “A visit to the Library of Alexandria before it burned down,” I said. “For all those lost secrets and incredible stories.”

  By now everyone was tired and starting to glaze over, so I was about to suggest we call it a night—or a day, since it was now fully tomorrow—when Vaughn stood and tapped on his glass for attention.

  “I don’t know if making a toast is something you bunch still do,” he said, “but I’d like to propose two of them. The first one, I don’t think you’re going to like. The second… well, we’ll have to see.

  “I think we can all agree that Mark leaves a lot to be desired as a human being. His intentions when he started this were wrong, and by misleading us, he hurt us. But on the other side of that great hurt is the fact that he brought all of us together on this journey, and I would not trade having that time with you for anything on this good Earth. So I would like to suggest that we forgive him for his transgressions—just a little, and just for tonight—and raise a glass to thank him as our host and the inspiration for our travels. To Mark Antonelli!”

  Some of us hesitated, but as much as we hated to admit it, Vaughn was right, so we raised our glasses. “To Mark!”

  Vaughn kicked the coffee table. “To Mark!”

  “YeahwhatevercanIgotosleepnow?”

  “As t
o the second toast,” Vaughn said, refilling his glass, “this one’s a little more personal.

  “When I got on the bus and you saw me, you probably went Oh shit the same way I went Oh shit when I saw you. I’d assumed my fellow passengers would be a bunch of old farts like me who’d come to the end of the line because I couldn’t imagine… well, I couldn’t imagine you. So I don’t think either of us quite knew what to make of each other. But the more I talked to you, the more I listened to you, I began to see the beauty in you… in all of you… and I have been moved and humbled by it. I wish you could see yourselves as I do.

  “I was married for longer than all of you have been alive, and for most of that time I thought I knew what love was,” he said, and I noticed a glance between him and Shanelle as he said it, and wondered what it meant. “But it took me until now, until you, to understand what that word really means. We’ve got a big decision waiting for us when we hit the Utah border. Once we make that decision, there may not be a lot of time for talk, so I want you to know now that I am proud and honored to be among you, that you are beautiful, and that I love you all.

  “To you!” Vaughn said, and raised his glass. “To us!”

  “To us!” we said, even Lisa, and as we threw back our drinks, I could see that I wasn’t the only one whose eyes welled up at Vaughn’s words. I don’t think many of us had ever been called beautiful before.

  “Now get the fuck out,” Vaughn said, “so I can get some sleep.”

  As the others filed out, I hit the bathroom because I’d had a lot to drink and there was no way I could make it back to my floor without courting catastrophe.

  When I emerged, everyone was gone except for Lisa, who had fallen asleep beneath the coffee table, and Shanelle, who was kissing Vaughn.

  Good for her, I thought as I tiptoed toward the door. And good for him.

  I’m glad they found each other.

  * * *

  VaughnR

  I was trying to figure out how to drag Lisa out from under the coffee table without getting too personal when I saw Shanelle standing next to me. “You’re beautiful too, you know.”

  “I appreciate the sentiment, but I am way too old and ugly to be beautiful.”

  “Not true,” she said. “You know what makes you beautiful?”

  “Natural style and charisma?”

  “When you look at me, I don’t feel like you’re looking at a black girl, or a fat girl. You’re just looking at me.”

  “Who you are is all that matters.”

  “And that’s what makes you beautiful.”

  And she kissed me.

  When we came up for air, I took a moment to study her face. “Are you really sure you want to get involved with someone like me?”

  “Why wouldn’t I?”

  “Because of what happened with Carolyn.”

  “I saw what you wrote, Vaughn, and it doesn’t change a thing. You’ve done nothing but feel bad about what happened ever since it happened, and as far as I’m concerned there’s no reason for it.”

  “Shanelle—”

  “Let’s pretend for a second that you didn’t do it. How much longer do you think she would’ve hung on?”

  “I don’t know… one doctor said weeks, another said maybe a couple of months.”

  “And knowing that, you really think what you did was so bad?”

  “My point is that I did it.”

  “And my point is I don’t care. I know who you are inside, Vaughn, and you’re just what I said you are, a good man. You cared for her and put up with her bullshit longer than anybody else would’ve ever done. You had one moment of weakness in a lifetime of trying to do the right thing.”

  She leaned in and kissed me again. “You’re a good, kind man, Vaughn, and I’ve never had sex with a good, kind man before. Someone who saw me for exactly who I am, and liked me just the same.”

  “I’m just not sure this is the right time.”

  “This is as right as we can make it, and we are all out of time, right, wrong, or whatever. This moment is all we have, and I want to have that with you, right now.”

  Then she kissed me again, very softly, and pulled me into the bedroom. And we made love.

  And when I started crying, and couldn’t stop, she held me until I could.

  And she healed me.

  Then she went to sleep in my arms, and I stroked her hair and studied her face for what felt like hours. Just looking at her.

  Beautiful. My God, so beautiful.

  * * *

  Mark

  I knew this moment was coming, but that didn’t make it any easier when the hammer fell.

  I came down from my room this morning to find everyone else already on the bus except Dylan, who was waiting outside. “End of the road, boss,” he said.

  “So soon? I was hoping we could stay together for a little longer.”

  “They want to go the rest of the way alone. Like Vaughn said last night, they appreciate you getting everyone together, but from here on out, it’s about them and what they want to do when they decide to do it.”

  “What about you?” I asked. “If I’m not involved anymore, then you’re technically off the clock. You don’t have to go any further.”

  “Yeah, we talked about that. Lisa and Peter said they can drive if I want to get off the bus, but I said I’d stick around for a while, see where it all goes.”

  “Also, Karen,” I said.

  He nodded soberly. “Also, Karen. Whatever time is left, I’d like to spend it with her.”

  “I understand,” I said, and repeated it a few times as I tried to decide what to say next. When they took over, I wanted nothing more than to walk away and let them go off on their own and crash and burn for all I cared. Now, I was surprised to realize that I would miss them terribly. “Listen, I know you need to get going, so tell the others I won’t cause any problems for them about borrowing the bus. I won’t get in the way.”

  “I appreciate that,” Dylan said, and extended his hand. “Thanks for giving me the job, Mark. It’s been one hell of a ride.”

  “One hell of a ride,” I said, and shook it. “Good luck, D.”

  A few minutes later I watched as Dylan put the bus into gear, made a long turn in the circular hotel driveway, and headed out. Theo and Vaughn in the back waved goodbye.

  And then they were gone.

  I went back inside, extended my stay for another day, and took the elevator to my room to write this since I can still upload to the cloud even though the bus is out of range. Not sure what I’ll do next. Wait to hear what happens, I guess. Either way, I’ve decided that this will be my last entry.

  It’s all down to them now.

  * * *

  PeterWilliamRouth

  After we left the hotel, Karen moved up front to be near Dylan while Shanelle and Vaughn sat together a few rows back. I was pretty much by myself on the other side, across from Theo, who was spread over two seats to write, while Lisa crashed out in one of the bunks, all of us quiet, lost in our own thoughts. I don’t want to say it’s because ditching Mark and heading for Utah made things real, because it’s been real for a long time, but there’s real and there’s more real, and this was the latter. So I shut the door to what I was feeling and turned my attention out the window. Living more inside my head than in my body is something I learned to do early on. My dad was a drunk, violent and racist, an awful human being in every way you can imagine. The sampler platter of evil. I used to come home from school to find him passed out on the sofa, blitzed out of his mind, or worse still, find him awake and beating the hell out of my mom. If I said anything about it or tried to stop him, he’d turn that rage around on me, so I learned early on how to take the violence, hide the bruises, and make it all go away inside.

  But every day as I walked home from school I’d get more and more anxious the closer I got, never knowing what version of the monster was going to be waiting for me. Sometimes I’d have this overwhelming urge to turn around and run
until I reached a place where he could never find me. But I knew what would happen to my mom and me if I even tried it, so every day I shoved down my emotions, fought the urge to flee and walked through the front door.

  By the time I hit college I prided myself on being a brainiac, for being more about thinking than feeling, for staying calm when everybody else freaked out, and for being able to rationally talk myself out of anything that went wrong. The only problem is that after you spend years shutting down the bad emotions, you realize one day that you’ve also shut down all the good ones. Yeah, I wasn’t sad anymore, but I wasn’t happy, either; I wasn’t afraid every minute like I’d been in the past, but joy was just something I read about or saw in other people. I’d built a wall around my heart that was so thick and so high that even I couldn’t get over it to the other side.

  It’s no secret that some of the others on the bus aren’t impressed with my reasons for wanting to end it. They think it’s just an intellectual decision, not an emotional one. (This of course means accepting the premise that an emotional decision to commit suicide is more rational than a rational decision, which is just being emotional, and that doesn’t make any kind of sense.) They don’t understand that rationality is all I have, so you can imagine my surprise this afternoon when after all these years I finally discovered real, true awe.

  The Arapaho National Forest west of Georgetown was the first time any of us had seen trees and mountains that big, and we couldn’t get enough of them. I must’ve looked like a grinning idiot as I craned my neck out the little bus window for a better look, but the tops of both were way past my line of sight. The others were having the same problem, so after Theo checked the map for a place to stop, we pulled over into Silverthorne, between a forest to the north and Dillon Bay to the south.

  Everybody piled out except Shanelle, who was taking advantage of a good cell signal to FaceTime with her mom, and we walked around for almost an hour just looking at everything. The sky was crazy wide and deep blue, and the wind was so fresh from all the trees and the water that it knocked us back on our heels a little. Even Lisa didn’t know what to say; she just kept looking from forest to mountain to lake, muttering So cool over and over.