Ivyland

by Miles Klee

“Anybody been to visit Leo?” Bertrand then has the nerve to ask.

  “Bertrand,” I say, “you owe me five bucks.”

  “Burned,” says Ed.

  “It’s a Small World” was played at top volume on repeat in the station’s holding cell, and Bertrand failed to successfully masturbate—classic style—in said cell without lubricant or visual stimuli within seven minutes. Easy money. Bert claimed he was just rusty that way. “He’ll buy you a slice,” Jack says. “Not hungry,” I say. “Fine,” says Jack, “he’ll cover you at the diner.” There is something Jack is not, and that is a listener. He wants to go up to the Reservation and bust some homos, some gas-heads. Ed says leave the gas-heads be, only hurting themselves, poor fucks. Homos too. They drive like that, I say, the gas-heads, and all raged up when they can’t get it. You’re too drunk to have this argument, says Jack, and we end up hitting the Res at primetime.

  There’s a ton of people parked, too many to walk through and terrorize, so we flip on the high beams and slow to a crawl. Most of the cars back out and peel away, but at the end of the lot a black kid bails from a station wagon and bolts for the woods.

  “Good thing he’s fat,” says Jack, and sprints after.

  “I want to sit up front,” Ed says after we’ve waited a while. “Hate that I can’t open my own door.”

  Jack and his runner come panting back into the headlights, the kid understandably crying as he gets stuffed in the back with Ed and Bert.

  “My mom’s going to find out,” he wails. “They’ll take my scholarship. Please.”

  “Even worse,” says Jack. “You’ll be the freshest virgin asshole New Jersey’s correctional system ever dismantled.”

  This gets a big wail.

  “Unless you can spare pills,” says Bertrand.

  “Take it all,” weeps the kid.

  And Jesus was he holding.

  “Liked him,” Ed says when we’re back on the streets. “Reminds me of me at that age. But blacker. Fatter.” “Hardly fatter,” says Bertrand. Jack tells me to pull over when he sees a bike propped on a yield sign by the train station. Fetching a chain from the trunk, he locks it to the signpost. Then he tears the basket from the handlebars and hops back in with it under his arm. Reminds me of junior year, Ed says. Remember all those bomb threats? So easy to ditch during evac and take your pick of the bikes. Well, says Jack, everything reminds you of everything. What’s your beat, Memory Lane? Just trying to help a guy out. Someone’ll cut it tomorrow, I say. Money says it’ll be there for months, Bertrand goes. We’ll forget.

  Smooth Larry comes on the radio and we tell him to die. “Have some more gingersnaps,” Bertrand says to the radio. “Eat them till you puke,” adds Ed, because Smooth Larry did do that at a department Christmas thing.

  Vince gets on, saying he has multiple 594s, asking do we realize we’re the only units on tonight and are supposed to be in separate cars?

  “We are?” I ask.

  “Don’t worry about those 594s,” a pissed Jack radios while trying to pinch my nipple, “we took good care of them.”

  “I wouldn’t worry if you weren’t shitting on my face, Officer Duffy.”

  “By the way, how’s that open homicide going, sir?” Jack radios. “The Volvo crash and shooting—two bodies, wasn’t it? Any leads in that clusterfuck?”

  “I will beat you with the biggest blunt object in evidence,” Vince declares, and his voice pops off.

  Ed has the bright idea to put yellow tape around Vince’s house so he thinks his wife got murdered. If he’s even married. “But,” says Bertrand, “we’d have to call it in, otherwise he’d know for sure that nothing happened. Screw it, then.” We swing by Fong Friday’s Chinese takeout, which bribes us, too dumb to know we’re not health inspectors.

  Afterward it’s back on the highway, past the next-door black-on-black that used to be Viking Putt, whose plastic dragon had its eye clubbed to shit by yours truly the night before the whole place got torched. An arson Ed actually tried to take credit for—until the real story came out. We stop to skeleton-key into the abandoned Luckbolster Vid and have a fluorescent light swordfight that ends when they’re in a million pieces, some bloody.

  “Bored, bored, super-bored,” sings Bertrand, gauzing a wrist in the backseat. “Helpful,” says Jack. We cruise around without the lights going, because what’s the rush? We drink in the squad car and finish Ed’s Belltruvin and the fat kid’s painkillers, crisscrossing town. “When is daylight saving time?” asks Ed. “Nobody cares,” I say. Jack is carefully unweaving the stolen bike basket, slipping strips out his cracked-open window one by one.

  “Really should visit Leo,” Bertrand says.

  “Novel idea,” Jack finally says, watching me.

  I mumble something and turn around, pointing us at Saint Barnabas. It gets quiet.

  “Visiting hours are over,” Ed says.

  “Be less stupid,” Jack says.

  “We didn’t even visit DH when he was in there,” says Bertrand.

  “He wasn’t even in our class, really,” Ed says.

  “Prolly the tard who gave Leo the gas,” I say.

  “Actually,” Jack goes, “DH skipped town.” Better find someone else to blame.

  “Leo should have known,” Ed says. “Happened to his older brother, didn’t it? That’s why he never had VV in the first place, figured he had the allergy too. Dumbass never thinks shit through.”

  This is why I swore off those nights-of-mayhem: it becomes hard to notice when a dumbass acquaintance of yours is heaving and frothing and dying in the bushes.

  “Cause I was thinking,” says Ed, “that when you spring ahead, there’s an hour you skip, so couldn’t you commit a crime in that theoretical hour and then create an alibi for that same hour and never get caught?” “No,” Bertrand says, “you’d need to do it when you fall back, so that the same hour would repeat twice and then you’d have, say, two different 3:30s. Man,” he goes, “that would seriously . . . ! It’d be a crime not to kill someone.”

  “That can’t work,” says Jack, which I suppose is fortunate, because even I’d started to believe it made sense. Better than heckling guys through broken doors at porn café booths so they can’t rub it out, or toying with a straight-edge like Smooth Larry. There’s something creepy about a town that won’t fight back. Impulse discovers you in places you refused to imagine. First it was popping pills and dumpster diving, a donut or two in parking lots. But you adapt to your prey, and secretly.

  “Ivyland: there’s never anything to do,” sighs Bertrand.

  Which I guess is how all this nonsense gets started.

  *

  At the hospital, not even a badge-tap is necessary to get into the ICU and Leo’s room, where he’s hidden by a white plastic curtain.

  “Y’all are his first visitors,” the nurse says.

  “Fucker’s been here a week,” Jack whispers.

  We stay huddled until the nurse leaves. Then Bertrand opens the curtain.

  It’s a mistake.

  Leo is as comatose as when the EMS dykes took him away from our New Year’s party, shaking their heads at me, at us all, like we’d never get the call one day and find our noses in their shit. His face is swollen and monster-big, fattened veins like rubber hoses glued onto his arm. Breathing tube and a goatee of drool on the chin. Worst of all, eyes stuck blindly open, a leggy device overhead letting drops of moisture fall in every few seconds.

  So this is what the gas allergy looks like. Bad to know.

  “Nope, no God,” says Jack.

  “Sick,” says Bertrand. “Why would any guy do it, knowing the risks?”

  “Does it matter?” I ask.

  “Would’ve been a lot worse if he’d got the gas as a kid,” Bertrand says, “for VV. Imagine that.”

  “Being poor is a blessing, sometimes,” Ed says, rubbing the back of his neck.

  “Rather die of H12 than go through what his poor ass is,” Jack says.

  “Mind shutt
ing up if this is all a joke to you?” I yell, suddenly furious, and it feels like a knife fight in my lungs. So none of us say anything for a bit, and we listen to the heart monitor beeping.

  “Can’t be like this,” Jack says, yanking out Leo’s IV.

  “The fuck are you doing?” Bertrand says.

  Jack doesn’t answer, just drops to the ground, trying to get at the plugs of all the computers flashing Leo’s vitals.

  “Stop!” Bertrand screams.

  Ed stares.

  “Jack,” I say with all my calm. “Don’t.”

  He snorts, writhing on his belly, still pulling at cords under the bed. I kick him in the ribs so he rolls over and then place my shoe squarely on his chest, applying more and more weight, and I can see his teeth grinding.

  “Don’t.”

  *

  At home I sit out in the thawed yard, listening to the night, wishing all Leo’d done was ignore me. Wishing I hadn’t run blubbering to Jack after they took him, me so sloppy drunk. Wishing hardest that I didn’t need his help.

  But he’d listened and nodded and said, unbelievably: “It’s not your fault.”

  “He wanted to try,” I’d cried. “I said to be careful.”

  “How did he know you had any?”

  “I don’t know, I didn’t tell him.”

  “Did you?”

  “I’ve never done it either, I just took it from the evidence locker.”

  “So how did he know?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t say anything.”

  “Maybe you said something.”

  Fireflies have come out, a lazy yellow fog. Must’ve got their signals crossed in the warm snap. I see a bunch dead on the ground already. They have an agenda, but you wouldn’t know it. They’d always been too trusting, too easy to catch, not like normal bugs that swoop and roll when you go to swat them—what is it their sensors don’t say when the hand is coming?

  I get up and find the twig I used as a marker when Jack wasn’t looking. It sticks out of brown grass that rustles like paper. I get the shovel from under the porch stairs and cut into dirt that should be January-hard, dig till I hit the metal gas container that we put underground on New Year’s after everyone left. I pull the Hallorax tank out, brush dirt off the Endless Φ. Back-to-back Ds? A circle cut in half? I try eating up time with all the wrong answers, but there are only so many. Lips already dry. I scrub the mouthpiece with my shirt, turn the valve up higher than normal, bring the mask to my face, and take the first deep breath of relief in a week.

  CAL /// LUNAR ORBIT

  Truth is, Emma Reyes and I are NASA’s first to die in space. More arbitrary a milestone I can’t imagine. Worse than burning alive on a botched dry run? Breaking up on launch, re-entry? It’s something.

  And we’ll know in advance how this thing runs its course—”mild case of celebrity amplified by death,” as my brother Aidan once said of a starlet who came to a lurid, newsworthy end. An actress with Emma’s sort of look, in fact. Could be that everyone doomed shares a face.

  “I’m scared, Cal,” she says.

  Whether Emma’s accepted our lot remains a mystery from where I’m floating. She spends these hours staring out windows, cycling through all three. Terror and boredom are totals.

  We don’t know what happened; I assure myself that no one does. Malfunction. Nonfunction. It began with the lights dozing, dimming away. Preoccupied, we blamed our minds. Lines of communication scraped away to useless hums, hums then exchanged for thicker silence. We had acclimated to a thin, numbing drone, and the final switch shook us out of fake sleep. Without the melancholy note of white noise sustained, our voices clanged, blunt in stale air.

  *

  I screwed Emma once, long before all this, in a sleazy motel outside Cape Canaveral. The beaten town of Andronicus, Florida. A dip in the swamp where lizards that walk upright should evolve. Reminded me of home.

  Neon VACANCY staining the room an arrhythmic lime. Passing traffic washed over her back. Headlights warped shadows into monstrous rhomboids, flying tombstones.

  Strictly forbidden. Professional courtesies, teamwork concerns. Of course, we never quite expected a mission to materialize—evidently there’s a space nut writing congressional budgets, and no one has seen fit to stop them. Nor had we begun to fret we’d be bumped up. But the first two teams fell to old-fashioned flu, and the public abhors unnecessary delay. We launched, our secret a stowaway.

  The limits mattered. We did it because it wasn’t an option. Tell me that doesn’t make someone irresistible. Unfairly so. I didn’t even have to lie. My inner asshole flexed its sphincter. There are women who want that callous truth. Even as we neared the end, I was thinking of someone, anyone else. A honeycombed pattern of female parts, motions and sounds that fit the contours of my broke-down brain. She caught a glimmer of the impotent rages I’ve collected.

  Couldn’t sleep next to her. I went to get some ice from the machine to chew on. Padded through the oppressively humid hallway toward the machine, bucket in hand. A small blond child with a mushroom cut and soft features rounded a corner and collided with my knee. It stared up at me through a shiny film of tears. It wore a knee-length red T-shirt and that may have been all.

  “I can’t find my mom.”

  “You checked the lost and found?”

  “She left the room. When I woke up, she …”

  “C’mon sport,” I said, and offered my hand, which felt parental enough. We walked in a direction. It had a way of holding in its many sneezes, making a private huh-tunch sound each time. Couldn’t say if it was a boy or girl.

  “Does your mom love you?” I asked.

  “Yes. She gave me a dumb haircut today, but she loves me. Does yours?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s good.”

  “The best.”

  At the front desk I asked whether any moms had been seen about recently, explaining the situation to a twentyish acne-scarred girl who stopped whispering into her headset to listen. She smiled cravenly. The kid slunk off to push buttons on a Belltruvin vending machine.

  “Prolly turning tricks, mister. Let the kid stay in the lobby if he wants.”

  “I think it might be a she,” I said.

  On the walk back to my room, we encountered the anachronism of an ice machine I’d been looking for, a huge silver chest of cubes that automatically refilled. You had to lift a heavy flap and dig it out. I put down the bucket and picked up the kid.

  “Want to see something?”

  I held it at an arm’s distance and flew it into the open chest, skimming it across the ice and going woosh. I expected it to be distressed or disturbed, but it stared dully up at me, bored. With all the bizarre things adults had done to it, I realized, this was hardly worth noting. Pulling it out of the low arc and setting it on the carpet again, I said:

  “Now everyone who has a drink at this hotel will get a little taste of you.”

  Back in the one-room suite, Emma did her thing.

  “Either he leaves or I do,” she said.

  “I was hoping it would come to that,” I said.

  “I’m a girl,” said the kid.

  We watched a late night kung fu movie till she fell asleep on the sex-stained king-size, lips popping open soundlessly when unconsciousness came. She’d grow to be an object of obsession for sure, some fool’s ridiculous symbol, a beauty who convinced you her beauty meant more.

  I moved to the puke-colored floor. Sometime later the power went out. I noticed only because the surviving letters of VACANCY died and the muted TV infomercial for a revolutionary egg-cooker cut to black. Emma’s absence made me feel better. I watched one corner of the blank hotel door and the light that bled through underneath before falling asleep. I knew she’d be gone when I woke. I tried not to think about it.

  *

  If you’re already concluding that these are the toxic words of a man at stage three in some emotional trauma flowchart, stop it. I’m the disease that has got t
o be lived with. I can’t be cured, but I’m quarantined.

  These are not the thoughts of a man deranged with the idea of his fate as some unaccountable bounce of the dice, but one who half-expected a coda like this. And you, if you’re even there, will just have to buck up and listen or not. These transmissions have no audience. Remember: I can’t hear your helpless replies.

  I can’t hear you at all.

  *

  The ship is dying, dead. Glossing empty waves of space, we rotate to raw physics’ tune. Sun: a maw of chilly blue light splitting starred fabric. Everywhere a tincture of this indifferent blue, of slipping glaciers. When the moon comes between us and the sun, there falls darkness so complete that escape is fantasy. A doomsayer would invoke the shadow of God. It’s a solar eclipse without the halo, a circle of nothing cresting larger each time.

  When we stray out of the ink, shadowlines pull blue over us again. The blue neither retreats nor returns. It’s there the whole time, waiting to be drawn out and peeled away from impermeable sheets of dark. All that’s left will be this blue. Dying bathed in its ancient tone. A parting trick of the eye.

  I’m hunched in gut-blazing agony, sick, before a glass triangle that holds the Earth. An emptying like no other. I want to be dragged to a nameless field and shot in the head with no explanations. Nothing but a bare-bones execution. I’d lie in the field of swaying grasses, pink ruptured lobes lying close by, watch a stream of souls swim the width of the sky.

  “I’m cold,” says Emma, improvised Russian dolls bouncing nervously in lap: her left hand wraps her right fist, which clenches an awful something tight.

  “Put it away,” I advise.

  “It is away.”

  Daydreams like that, the thing in the field, I keep my mouth shut about. Years ago, after we successfully traded virginities (she convinced me to do it in Aidan’s room after school, wanting neutral territory), I’d told Phoebe that I liked the idea of being hit by a car, that on my bike I was reckless to better those odds. She announced my death wish to the world. Wrong: I had to survive. That was crucial. I didn’t imagine a well-attended funeral, or parades of pity along the hospital bedside. I got those when my appendix burst, along with garish flowers that made my roommate sneeze and sneeze, coating himself with bodily mists.