With or Without You

by Brian Farrey

  But something happened.

  As Davis’s laughter gets louder, the cop I talked to earlier steps into the room. He glares at Davis. I smile weakly. This sort of attention is the last thing we need. I grab Davis’s face.

  “Listen,” I whisper, “I need you to just calm down. Okay? Erik will be out soon, we’ll all go back to Shan’s for the night, and tomorrow we’ll head home.”

  “Home? What is that exactly? Home to Mommy and Daddy’s store? Home to a secret boyfriend? Home to what, Ev?” he seethes.

  I don’t have an answer to this. I swallow. “We’ll figure that out.”

  Davis guffaws loudly. The cop starts toward us and I shrug an apology to him. I hold up the bottle and give it a shake, hoping this says, I just need to give him his meds. Cop nods but doesn’t take his eyes off Davis. I make like I’m opening the bottle.

  “Oh, that’s fucking great, Ev. We will figure it out. You, me, and … Erik? He into threesomes?”

  “You and me,” I reply evenly. “We will figure this—”

  “Why? Why would I want to figure anything out? Especially with you? What is there to figure out, Ev? Better yet, just tell me what it is that you have to contribute?”

  His hands ball, his breaths escape in howitzered bursts. As he shifts in his seat, he winces in pain, favoring his right side. Tear in the anal wall. Risk of infection.

  “C’mon, Ev,” he continues through bared teeth, “I want to know why you came here. What you thought you’d save me from.”

  “Sable—”

  “Sable saved me!” he spits, cauterizing what remains of our friendship. “From Madison. From my dad. From you.”

  Just like that, I’m back at the Orpheum, in line for Rocky Horror, being rejected. Back then, it stung. Tonight, it decimates.

  “Sable,” Davis says, “gets me. He knows a lot and he’s got a lot to say and you just never wanted to listen to him. He could have saved you too if you’d given him the chance. We could have come to New York together, you and me. But you had your little secret. Erik.”

  Never say Erik’s name with that tone again.

  Davis leans forward. “I got saved. What did you get?”

  “Sable is weapons-grade crazy!” I finally retort. “He hates the world. He’s pissed off that he got HIV and all he wants to do is infect everybody he can.”

  I’ve given him what he wants. Davis eats my fury and regurgitates a smile. “God, I feel so stupid. You know, I stood up for you. Sable said you didn’t understand HIV, what a gift it is.”

  “It is not a gift!” Cop shoots me a look when I shout. I’m shaking with rage. More softly, I say, “And deliberately infecting someone—”

  “I wanted it!” Davis is calmer than ever now, as if some sedative has kicked in. “I asked for it, Ev. He didn’t trick me into coming to New York. I asked for what you and I always wanted. Acceptance. And now I got it. Having HIV means I’m somebody.”

  He puts his hand on my knee. I nearly jerk away.

  He whispers, “It’s what we wanted, Ev. You can still have it.”

  I think about Mr. Benton, choking down countless pills, doing whatever it takes to fend off the virus. This was nothing Mr. Benton asked for. It was not a gift, a status symbol.

  I make one more attempt to reach Davis. “Did we want the same thing? Did we really?”

  Davis slinks down in his chair, shaking his head. “I can’t believe I tried to tell Sable you’d come around. He read you better than I could. I told him you’d get it. But you don’t. You won’t. This is just like you.”

  He waves his hands in front of his face and makes an explosion sound.

  “What are you talking about?” I ask.

  He jerks his thumb toward the ER. “How soon before you screw things up with Lover Boy? Wanna take bets? I mean, if you haven’t already. He didn’t seem too happy back in the park in Madison.”

  “You don’t know anything about Erik,” I counter.

  He holds up a hand. “But I know you, Evan. You’re going to do what you always do. Hide behind your paintings, your windows. ‘Look at me! I make pictures so I don’t have to deal with real life! I copy other people’s work and that makes me special.’ Hell of a lot of good it did you. At the end of the day, you still don’t belong. You’re pathetic.”

  I can’t respond because a short doctor pushes through the swinging brown door and surveys the room. He’s gripping a clipboard. Dark stains mar the front of his purple scrubs.

  “Evan Weiss?”

  I go numb and I hear every TV medical drama I’ve ever seen play out in my head. I’m sorry. We did everything we could. He lost too much blood.

  I stand, trembling. The doctor smiles and motions me over with a nod of his head. When I approach, he shakes my hand and for the first time in this hellhole, I feel reassured.

  “I’m Dr. Munro,” he says with a bass so potent I could swear it’s James Earl Jones. “Sorry we kept you waiting so long. Erik begged me to come tell you he’d be out soon.”

  My lungs ache and I realize it’s because I’d momentarily stopped breathing.

  “He’s okay?”

  Munro nods. “He’s got quite a deep gash. Took a lot of stitches to patch him up.”

  “He lost … a lot of blood.”

  Munro scrunches up his face in a “naaah” sort of way, which makes me love this man. “I’m not saying it wasn’t a nasty wound but it looked a lot worse than it was. I’m sure it hurt like hell, though. But I’m supposed to tell you that he was very manly and didn’t cry or anything.” Then he mimes crying as if to say, Erik bawled like a baby.

  I laugh and that’s when I notice a set of rainbow-colored rings on a chain around the doctor’s neck. He gives my elbow a squeeze and says, “Give us about ten more minutes and I’ll have your boyfriend back where he belongs.”

  At the end of the day, you still don’t belong.

  Goosebumps prickle my skin and the color seems to spring back into the room. I plop down in a chair across from Davis, relieved and exhausted.

  “When we get home,” I say softly, “you should go see your mom. She panicked when you didn’t pick her up at Mendota. She misses you.”

  An aborted retort catches in his throat. It’s possibly the only bull’s-eye I’ll score tonight.

  As promised, Erik emerges from the emergency room minutes later, walking stiffly and wearing an ugly plaid shirt I’ve never seen before. But he’s got a tired smile on his face. I march up to him and say the only thing I can think of.

  “You suck at jiujitsu.”

  He shrugs. “Yeah, I’m thinking there’s a reason I never brought it up. Couldn’t have you thinking I was less than perfect, right?”

  I glare at the hideous shirt, yellow and green intersecting like a thousand crosshairs around his chest. It’s completely clean but I’m convinced that if I stare long enough, I’ll see the blood again. Erik’s blood. Sable’s blood?

  Erik models the shirt with a labored runway twirl. “You like? They gave it to me to replace my old shirt. It’s the newest from Milan. The pinnacle of hospital lost-and-found-box haute couture.”

  “Did he … ?” Bleed on you. I can’t even say it.

  I don’t have to. Erik gives my shoulder a weak squeeze. “I don’t think so. I don’t even know if he got cut. But I’ll get HIV tests for a while, just to be sure.”

  I throw my arms wide. He points at his wounded side.

  “Evan, I love you, but hugging me now is grounds for—”

  “Breaking up?”

  “Vivisection.”

  He hands me his cell phone.

  “There are, like, thirty messages from Shan. I would have answered but I’m on pain meds and might have accidentally told her what I think of her. Didn’t you call to tell her where we are?”

  No. No, I didn’t. When we get back to Shan’s place, we’re boned.

  The three of us catch a cab. My eyes never leave Erik, who winces every time he shifts to get more comfortable. Dav
is doesn’t say anything the rest of the night. We make it back to Shan and Brett’s around two in the morning. After a tongue-lashing from Shan, we bivouac down. Erik gets the spare bed to himself. My tossing and turning would aggravate his wound. Davis and I get sleeping bags on the living room floor. Davis is out cold when his head hits the pillow. I flash back to any number of nights we did this in my bedroom. I wonder if he’s dreaming the same thing.

  No. He’s not.

  As I drift to sleep, I keep hearing Davis tell me that I’m going to blow things with Erik. Like you always do.

  I think about Oxana. Where are you, Mr. Weiss? Where are you? Everything she said shoots through me. I’m a prism, each word splintering out in a spectrum of colors I alone can see. All this time I’ve been following. Painters. Chasers. I never stopped to think where it all led. Now it finally makes sense.

  At the end of the day, I can sweep my brush across the glass and capture a moment, but I’m stupid to think I’m in control. In shaping my art, I’m the one who’s shaped. In distilling what I know and what I want to be, I’m forming a path. To art. To yoga. To Erik.

  At the end of the day, the picture creates me.

  TITLE: You Are Here

  IMAGE:

  A street map of Madison with a large star

  labeled YOU ARE HERE

  INSPIRATION:

  Picasso’s Composition with Skull

  PALETTE:

  Background = dun

  Street lines = helio blue

  Street names = raw umber

  Star/YOU ARE HERE = magenta

  From early in Picasso’s Cubist period, the street blocks are deliberately misshapen, crooked and angled. By contrast, the streets themselves are almost unerringly straight. The star’s girth is exaggerated, the words are slanted and harshly sketched.

  When I was nine years old, I met Davis George Grayson.

  Not like we should have: in a class or on a playground. But in a gutter. Where he found me crying.

  I had run away. My one true rite of passage: the patient zero of childhood clichés. An impulsive decision over something Shan and I had fought about. Who knows what it was anymore? At the time, it was world ending. Mom sided with Shan so I stuffed a backpack with clothes and left.

  Tears in my eyes, I marched off into the August heat wave. I zigzagged down side streets and alleys, trying to lose anyone who might follow me. Not that anyone would, but I had an active imagination.

  Then I lost myself. In a strange neighborhood and getting hungrier by the minute. I tried to head home, but I had no clue where I was.

  Exhausted, I sat on a curb and cried, hoping someone would take pity on me, tell me to click my heels three times, and this would all be over. Then, a small shadow fell over me.

  “Hey,” said a squeaky voice.

  I looked up and caught my first sight of Davis. His hair, a farrago of sandy curls, fell down into his eyes. He hid his small frame under a bright lemon-colored San Francisco T-shirt. His jean shorts and sandals did little to mask his willow-branch legs. I wouldn’t have guessed he was my age—he was short back then, too. But he was talking to me and that was all that mattered.

  “Anything to do around here?”

  I expected taunts. “Crybaby!” “Whiner!” He didn’t seem to care that I was obviously bawling my eyes out. Already, he was special.

  I sniffed back more tears and said, “What?”

  He sat down next to me and jerked his thumb over his shoulder to where a teal moving truck was backed up to a beautiful house.

  “We just moved here and I’m bored out of my skull. If we were still back in California, I’d go to the Boys and Girls Club or something. But I don’t know what there is to do around here. They won’t let me help unload the truck and I’m going apeshit.”

  It wasn’t the first time I’d heard someone my age curse but it was the coolest swear I’d ever heard. Apeshit? Awesome.

  I smeared my tears with the heel of my hand and gave it a thought. “There’s a Chuck E. Cheese over by East Towne Mall,” I suggested.

  He nodded. “That’s cool. I rock at air hockey. Is East Towne far?”

  I had to admit: “I have no clue where I am. I … took a wrong turn.”

  Davis didn’t even blink. Instead, he pulled a neatly folded brochure from his back pocket, opening it to reveal a Madison street map. “Mom’s terrified I’ll get lost so she makes me carry this,” he explained, pointing to the map. “She even marked our house on it.” A lopsided star, crudely drawn in red marker, branded a spot on Wells Drive. He tapped it with his finger and said in a mock deep, authoritarian voice, “You … are … here.”

  I traced the streets and found Pinckney and Gamble, the corner of our store. It was embarrassingly close, only a few blocks. I must have spent the better part of the afternoon going around in circles. I thought I’d gone an incredible distance, only to realize I was practically back where I’d started.

  “Come on,” Davis announced, standing. “It looks pretty easy.”

  “I can find it.” I stood, securing my backpack to my shoulder. “You don’t have to—”

  But he was already walking down the sidewalk, holding the map out in front of him like he was following a compass. As I scrambled to catch up, we were stopped by a high, wavering voice. “Davis?”

  Mrs. Grayson hasn’t changed much since I met her. She was barely real, even back then.

  Mrs. Grayson moved with tentative steps to the edge of the driveway, eyes darting nervously for unseen predators.

  “It’s okay, Mom,” Davis called, then whispered to me. “What’s your name?”

  “Evan,” I whispered back.

  “Ev here is just showing me around the neighborhood.”

  Mrs. Grayson’s eyes raked over me but I’m not sure she actually saw me. I must have passed inspection because she nodded absently and said, “Don’t go far.”

  Davis smiled, and there was something gentle and reassuring in the gesture. Just about to start third grade and already taking care of Mom. “We won’t.”

  We turned and made our way up the sidewalk. Davis heaved a sigh. “She’s getting better. Her therapist got on her case to give me a little more space. Back in California, I practically wore a leash.”

  And it all came out during the walk back to my house. Everything. His life in San Francisco. His mother’s emotional descent mirroring his father’s growing distance from the family. I can’t imagine that kind of candor now; I have no idea how Davis managed it at nine. But I also couldn’t shake the feeling that he needed to share all this. And he’d decided I could be trusted. Me. I never told him but that’s when I first felt love for Davis.

  When we got back to the store, I invited him in.

  “You live over a grocery store?” Davis asked, grinning. “That is so cool. It’s like your own personal buffet.” In fact, it wasn’t like that at all. Anything we wanted from the stock was taken out of our allowance. But why explain and ruin my newly instated coolness?

  Dad was at the register reading the paper. He looked up long enough to see it was me before going back to his reading. I grabbed us each a Dr Pepper from the cold case and we sat outside on the steps of the store.

  I don’t know how long we talked. He told me about living in California and I tried to indoctrinate him into the concept of cheese and brats, two staples he was going to need to embrace to make it in Wisconsin. I told him about Grant School, where we’d both be starting third grade in a few weeks. When it looked like it might be getting dark, Davis got up to leave.

  “So, I guess I’ll see you in school?” I asked.

  Davis scrunched up his face. Here it was at last. The admission that he didn’t want to be caught dead with me, like everyone else. But then he said, “What’s wrong with tomorrow? I have some unpacking to do in the morning. We should do something when I’m done. There’s supposed to be a lake around here, right?”

  Davis had a lot to learn about the isthmus city.

 
“You can show me that.”

  We agreed where and when to meet. Then Davis walked home.

  Sometimes I imagine an alternate life for Davis. A life where we didn’t meet that stiflingly hot August day. A life where Davis just showed up as the new kid in school, an unknown quantity with bright eyes and an infectious smile. I wonder if we still would have ended up as friends. Did I doom him to a stagnant social life because he showed up to school with me, the class joke?

  In that alternate life I picture, Davis made friends with everyone who ever ignored me. He instantly received everything he wanted: recognition, belonging. He never got beat up. He never went to extremes to fit in.

  But that’s my imagination. In reality, I have no reason to believe Davis would have been popular even if we hadn’t met. But I also never thought I could be loved by someone like Erik. That alone tells me anything is possible. And if there was a chance Davis could have been someone else without me. …

  I don’t have many regrets. But I told myself years ago that if Davis, even unknowingly, sacrificed another life to be my friend, I owed it to him to be the best friend I could. To always stand by him. To make sure he never once regretted helping some dumb, lost kid find his way back home.

  Back then, getting home was the answer. Today, nothing’s that simple.

  gone

  The next morning, Davis is gone.

  I’m the first to notice. When I wake up, his sleeping bag is empty. I’m not surprised. But I don’t raise the alarm. I sit cross-legged in the middle of the floor for a long time, just staring at the vacant bag. Something in me wants to be angry. But I’m too numb to respond.

  Shan and Brett stumble out to the kitchen, followed shortly thereafter by Erik, wincing and clutching his side. It only takes a moment for them to register exactly what has happened.

  This is the point where anyone else would give up. We’d done our best. We got him back. Time for things to be over. But that’s not what happens. These people who have every reason to be angry with me for countless lies and evasions, these people who should turn their backs on me—these people mobilize.