We All Looked Up

by Tommy Wallach

  “Have you seen her?” Bobo whispered.

  “No.”

  Golden thumped Bobo on the back. “Then she’s probably long gone. Oh well. Let’s get you a drink, slugger. I keep the good stuff in my room.”

  “I’ll meet you up there,” Andy said. “I’m just gonna take a piss.”

  “Watch out for the occupied stall,” Golden said. He laughed, and for once, Bobo didn’t laugh along with him.

  Andy already knew what he would find, even before he saw the wide swathe of smeared blood leading from the sauna to the bathroom. Peter was inside the rightmost stall, propped up against the toilet seat. He’d been fucked up in a way that Andy had only seen before in movies. One eye was swollen shut, and the other flew at half-mast. Dried blood caked the bottom half of his face. He wasn’t wearing a shirt, and there were black bruises all over his ribs, each one haloed with a speckled starburst of vermillion. A string of gory perforations wrapped around both of his wrists. Worst of all was the wide patch of raw, ravaged flesh on his right bicep. At the edges, Andy could make out the flecks of black ink that had once been a tattoo.

  Peter looked up at him, no emotion readable in his tumid features.

  “I’m here to help,” Andy said, and knelt down. They stood up together, as gently as Andy could manage. Peter groaned with each step. It took fifteen minutes just to get him back up to the lobby.

  “Peter, I need you to stay here, okay? I’m going to get the girls, and then we can leave.”

  “Eliza’s here?” Peter said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Then I’m coming.”

  “But you—”

  The whip crack of a gunshot from somewhere overhead. Andy had forgotten that Golden’s apartment was also on the second floor. He’d just sent Anita and Eliza up there. . . .

  He ran for the stairway, Peter limping along just behind him. As he reached for the door, it swung open from the inside. Golden came out, hunched over, holding tightly to a ruby wetness around his belly. He breathed out a constant stream of obscenity as he stumbled past them, oblivious to anything but pain, and out of the Independent.

  Andy mounted the stairs in great blind leaps and threw open the door to the second floor.

  Blackness, then a nebulous prickle of stars shining through the window at the end of the hallway. A couple of them disappeared, blocked out by someone’s silhouette. What if it was Bobo? What if he had the gun? Andy ran at the shadow, full-tilt, taking it down to the ground with him. Hands clawed at his face, knees slammed around the sensitive target between his legs. He was about to start throwing punches himself when something caught his attention: a scent, of all things, familiar even in these unfamiliar surroundings.

  “Anita,” he said, trying to pin down her surprisingly strong arms, “stop mauling me!”

  “Andy?”

  He took his weight off her, put out a hand to help her up. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t know who it was—”

  He hadn’t planned to do it. He’d only been trying to get her to her feet. Only they were closer together than he realized, and her face was coming right up at his face and in that split second he knew he had to, because what if they never got another chance? The kiss didn’t last more than a few seconds, but that was time enough to open his mouth and breathe in a wisp of her breath. Time enough for everything terrible that had happened up to that moment—Bobo and Golden and even Ardor itself—to float a little ways out into space, for a few precious seconds.

  “Is that Andy?” some other voice said. An orange-tipped ball crouched in a doorway just a few feet away.

  “Misery?” Andy said. “Thank God.” He reached out and hugged her in along with Anita.

  “Who’s out there?” Peter called from the stairway.

  “It’s Anita,” Andy said, “and Misery, too.”

  “And Eliza?”

  “I thought she ran out of the apartment with me and Misery,” Anita said. “But I lost track of her in the dark.”

  “Eliza!” Peter cried out, then lost his voice in a coughing fit. The rest of them took up the call: “Eliza! Eliza!”

  After a few seconds, the door to apartment 212 squeaked slowly open. Moonlight followed her out into the hall, illuminating the bare skin of her shoulders and stomach, reflecting off the lacy fabric of her bra. At first Andy thought it was just a trick of the light—that rusty shadow stretching across her abdomen and darkening the top of her jeans. But when he got closer, he recognized it for what it was.

  “What happened, Eliza?”

  “I’m sorry,” she said, “but I had to.”

  “Had to what?”

  She said it again, desperate this time, almost hysterical. “I had to!”

  Anita

  THE FREEWAY WAS BUSIER THAN she’d seen it in weeks, and almost every car was headed in the same direction. If one of them got in an accident, there might even have been a traffic jam, just like in the good old days. Anita could remember hot summer afternoons gridlocked on I-5, air conditioner and KUBE 93 blasting.

  Was it really possible to feel nostalgic about traffic jams?

  “Do you think it’s for the party?” she asked. “I mean, it’s not supposed to be until tomorrow, but maybe they all wanna get there early.”

  “I don’t know,” Eliza said, distracted. “Can you drive any faster?”

  “I’ll try.”

  They’d been slow to get on the road. After Peter had torn off in the Jeep, Eliza had marched straight into the house and demanded the keys to Peter’s mom’s Jetta, but all she got in response was a barrage of anxiety-ridden Mom questions: Why isn’t Peter here? Is he with Samantha? Why doesn’t he ask me for the car himself? What are you going to do with it? Is it safe? Eliza raised her voice, and then Peter’s mom raised her voice back, and then Peter’s dad made both of them even angrier by refusing to take a side. While everyone else was arguing, Anita rifled through the drawers near the kitchen sink until she happened upon a familiar VW logo.

  “Never mind, Mrs. Roeslin,” she said, dragging Eliza out of the house. “We’ll just walk.”

  Just past the turnoff to 520, Seattle opened across their windshield like a pop-up picture book. My city, Anita thought. It was a shame that she’d never gotten to explore the wide margins of the planet—Paris and Rome and Timbuktu. But on another level, it made for a sweet sort of intimacy to have only lived in one place: geographic monogamy. She saw everything differently now, from the polychromatic nightmare of the Experience Music Project—a museum designed as an homage to Jimi Hendrix’s melted guitar, but that better ­resembled what a kid would vomit up after eating a box of crayons—to the iconic Space Needle, looking even more solid and monumental now that those elevators weren’t constantly inching up and down its sides like little golden pill bugs. So many memories: field trips to the Pacific Science Center, nights spent studying in the huge glassy greenhouse of the Seattle Public Library, austere family dinners at the expensive restaurants around the Market. She couldn’t help but love it all now—even her parents, who’d been swept up in the general reminiscence and imbued with the golden light of retrospect. It occurred to Anita that hatred and dislike and even indifference were all luxuries, born of the mistaken belief that anything could last forever. She felt a pang of remorse. In spite of everything, she hoped her mom and dad were doing all right.

  The white tablet of the sun sank beneath the watery pinkness of the horizon.

  “I’m gonna miss this shit,” Eliza said.

  “I was just thinking the same thing.”

  The sky gave up its last bit of light just as they pulled up in front of the Independent. Stepping out of the car, Anita glanced up at Ardor. They’d all learned where in the sky to find it, just a few stars below the trough of the Big Dipper. It would never look particularly big, Anita could remember hearing, because it wasn’t very big. More like a bullet than
a bomb, they’d said. But a bullet could kill you just as easily as a bomb.

  The lobby of the Independent was a throwback to another age. It would have been a particularly shabby sort of chic, if not for the piles of trash and the foul, enigmatic odor.

  “Where are we?” Eliza asked.

  “Feels like hell.”

  A door on the other side of the lobby swung open. Someone came sprinting out so fast that Anita raised her fists on instinct.

  “Andy!”

  He screeched to a stop like some kind of cartoon character.

  “Is Peter here?” Eliza immediately demanded. “Have you seen him?”

  “You need to leave, Eliza. Go back to Peter’s house. I promise I’ll bring him and Misery as soon as I can.”

  “We’re not going anywhere,” Eliza said.

  “You don’t understand. It’s dangerous here.”

  “We don’t care.”

  Andy sighed. “Then just go up to the second floor, okay? Apartment 212 should be unlocked. It’s where I sleep when I’m here.”

  “Is Peter there?”

  “He will be.”

  “Did he seem weird to you?” Eliza asked, after Andy had disappeared through some door marked FITNESS CENTER.

  “He’s always a little weird. But I’m sure he knows what he’s doing. Come on.”

  They’d made it halfway across the lobby when something creaked over by the couches. A mop of orange hair lifted itself up from behind a patchy velvet settee: Misery. There was something deathly serious in her expression.

  “What the hell are you doing over there?” Anita asked.

  “You can’t go upstairs,” Misery said.

  “What? Why not?”

  She came out from behind the couch. Shadows slid off her skin, revealing where her pale arms had been studded with bruises, each one a little watercolor painting of a sunrise. She’d aged five years since the last time Anita had seen her.

  “Bobo,” Misery said, then shook her head. “He locked me in. And Andy must have known about it. They’re in on it together. They have to be.”

  “Andy would never hurt you, Miz,” Anita said.

  “Oh yeah? He hurt Peter.”

  “I know. But that was a mistake.”

  “If you’re wrong, and we go up to his apartment, he could lock all of us in. Or worse.”

  “He won’t.”

  “How do you know?”

  Because he’s not Bobo, Anita wanted to say, but she didn’t want to hurt Misery’s feelings. Bobo’s capability for cruelty had always been there, pooled just beneath the surface, like tattoo ink. But Andy was different. He was good. If there was one thing in the world that Anita knew for certain, it was that. She shrugged. “I just do.”

  “Me too,” Eliza said, and Anita was grateful for that.

  Together, they climbed the stairs to the second floor and entered apartment 212. It was decorated like a cheap hotel room, with the usual twin beds spread with the usual pinkish-red quilts laundered to a thready pulp, the usual two-seater couch, and the usual pointlessly gigantic flat-screen television on the wall. The only light came in through a semitransparent shade over the window. Anita pulled it open.

  A lone white speedboat cruised Puget Sound like a symbol of something. Almost everything else that moved was moving south, toward Boeing Field. Cars passed behind the big sports arenas at the edge of the city as if crossing over into another world. Once upon a time, the Kingdome had sat over there, wide and squat as a cupcake, its segmented white top like the ribs of some enormous umbrella. Anita had only seen it in pictures; they’d knocked it down and replaced it with some other expensive athletic monstrosity when she was only three. Now Ardor would probably knock that one down too. There was some cosmic justice for you.

  Anita turned away from the window. Misery lay across the bed with her head in Eliza’s lap. She had a tragic grace to her, pallid perpendicular lines for limbs and a faraway, traumatized stare. Strange to think that Bobo wouldn’t have done what he did if he hadn’t found her beautiful. Beauty always made a target of its possessor. Every other human quality was hidden easily enough—intelligence, talent, selfishness, even madness—but beauty would not be concealed.

  “Do you ever wish you didn’t look the way you did?” Anita asked.

  “All the time,” Misery said. “I hate the way I look.”

  Anita smiled at the misunderstanding. She could remember what it was like to be sixteen—so uncomfortable in your body that sometimes it didn’t feel like your body at all. Even at eighteen, she was only just beginning to be able to look at herself in the mirror without totally freaking out.

  “No, I don’t mean like that. I just meant—”

  “Having to be afraid,” Eliza said.

  “Yeah.”

  No need to say more. No need to describe all the things you had to do to keep the eyes away. No need to discuss how hard it was to get the attention of the person you wanted attention from without being seen as desperate for everyone’s attention. No need to catalog all the walls you had to put up; not just the walls that protected you from physical danger—though there were plenty of those, too—but the walls you had to build around your heart. They said no man was an island, and Anita figured that was probably true. But women were; they had to be. And even if someone bothered to sail over and disembark, he’d soon discover that there was always a castle at the center of the island, surrounded by a deep moat, with a rickety drawbridge and archers manning the battlements and a big pot of oil poised above the gate, ready to boil alive anyone who dared to cross the threshold.

  “Boys never understand anything,” Anita said, and though it didn’t technically follow from what they’d been talking about, it was the kind of statement that was always appropriate—at least in a roomful of girls.

  “Tell me about it,” Eliza said.

  “They understand boobs,” Misery said sarcastically.

  “That’s the worst part. They actually don’t.”

  And there in the darkness of the hotel room, scarcely more than twenty-four hours before the maybe end of the world, the three of them managed to laugh together. It turned out that no amount of terror could stop the great human need to connect. Or maybe, Anita thought, terror was actually at the heart of that need. After all, every life ended in apocalypse, in one way or another. And when that apoca­lypse arrived, it would be pretty cold comfort to think: Well, at least I don’t have that much to lose. You didn’t win the game of life by losing the least. That would be one of those—what were they called again?—Pyrrhic victories. Real winning was having the most to lose, even if it meant you might lose it all. Even though it meant you would lose it all, sooner or later.

  And so they waited, together, for whatever was coming next.

  Eliza

  ELIZA SAT ON THE EDGE of the bed, fingering the pointy end of the bowie knife and wondering what it might feel like to stab someone with it. Like testing the temperature of a cooked turkey? Cracking the shell of an egg? Slicing the forgiving red flesh of a watermelon? Peter had given it to her this morning, just before they left the house. Just in case, he’d said. Light from Ardor glittered prettily on the blade. Eliza glanced out the window, to the wide, star-drenched sky. The asteroid looked as insignificant as it ever had—a tiny twinkle in the eye of a righteous god, the celestial equivalent of a sucker punch, practically invisible until the moment it smashed you in the face. A lot of things in life were like that: apocalyptic asteroids, late-stage cancer, love.

  There was the sound of clumping feet out in the hallway.

  “Peter!” Eliza said, running for the door.

  “Hold up,” Anita said.

  Eliza opened the door, but it was so dark she couldn’t make out who was there. “Hello?”

  “Eliza?”

  It was Bobo, and behind him stood a short, th
ick-limbed silhouette, dense as a neutron star: Golden, with a gun ostentatiously tucked into the front of his jeans.

  Eliza improvised. “I came here to find Andy.”

  “He’s downstairs. I can take you.”

  “Thanks.”

  She tried to slip out the door without opening it too widely, but some movement behind her must have given the game away.

  “There’s somebody else in there,” Golden said.

  “Run!” Eliza shouted, grabbing Golden’s gun and chucking it as hard as she could down the hall. He took a wild swing at her, clipping her shoulder, but then Anita and Misery were there too, and everything got confused. Eliza bounced one way and another and ended up spinning back into the bedroom. There was the sound of a struggle in the doorway, then the door slammed shut. People running outside in the hallway, and somewhere much closer, a human sound, wet and whistly.

  “Bobo?”

  “It’s all gone to shit,” he said.

  Eliza quietly slid the knife out of her waistband. “What has?”

  “She hates me now.”

  “Misery? Did you lock her up, Bobo?”

  “Only because she wouldn’t talk to me. I just wanted her to talk to me, like a human being!”

  In spite of herself, Eliza felt a little sorry for him. She’d heard his whole history from Andy—the alcoholic parents, the suicide pact, the antidepressants with their grab bag of side effects.

  “You shouldn’t have done that,” she said.

  “I know.”

  “But it doesn’t make you a bad person.”

  “It does, though. We both know that. I’m just shit now.”

  The whimpering grew louder, closer, and then Bobo was hugging her, sniveling into her shoulder. His clothes smelled like gasoline, and his cheek was rough against the skin of her neck. He squeezed her uncomfortably hard, pinning her arms to her sides, and she realized too late that he was putting his weight into her, forcing her backward onto the bed. She had to let go of the knife to avoid plunging it into her own back.