The Vast Fields of Ordinary

by Nick Burd

  I sat there for a while thinking about what he’d said. I thought of how many nights I’d stayed up late wondering what the world had in store for me, if I’d ever find someone that I could fall in love with. I wondered if all gay boys had nights like these, if there was a time when even someone like Alex stared up at his ceiling and wondered the same thing.

  “So where are you taking me?” I finally asked.

  “Someplace you’ve never been.” He looked at me and smiled. “Since you seem to think you’ve been everywhere. But don’t worry. You’ll be gone soon enough. Me, on the other hand. I don’t know when I’m going to get out of here.”

  “What’s keeping you around?”

  “I tell myself it’s my grandmother, but I know that’s just an excuse.”

  “So what’s the real reason?” I asked.

  He tilted his head, pursed his lower lip, and made a little face. “I’m not exactly sure.”

  “You could make it somewhere else,” I said. “It can’t be that hard to leave. People do it all the time. Your sister did it. Plus, you seem like one of those people who could do anything if you put your mind to it.”

  “Yeah. I guess you’re right.” He smiled a little. “Sometimes I fantasize about New York. Chicago even. The idea of New York terrifies me, but I feel like maybe that means I should try it out. Go to where the fear is, right? Learn something new.”

  He drove me out past the towns that scattered the countryside beyond the Cedarville city limits, towns that consisted of little more than a post office, a gas station, and a bar. They all seemed abandoned, like the people living there had picked up and left. We were a mile outside the toy-like town of Whitfield (pop. 509) when Alex turned off the highway and onto a tiny road of packed gravel and weeds. In the headlights of the car I saw a rusted fence and beyond that were headstones. He’d taken me to a small rural graveyard.

  “Are we supposed to be out here?”

  “Probably not.”

  He navigated the road toward the back of the cemetery, where a fence divided it from a sprawling soybean crop, and shut off the car. There was just the buggy soundtrack of the countryside split with the distant rush of a semi on some unseen highway. Every sound he made—clearing his throat, removing the keys from the ignition, opening the glove compartment for a fresh pack of cigarettes—seemed huge. We got out of the car.

  “Check out the stars,” he said. They were abundant and bright.

  “I forget how many there are sometimes,” I said.

  “Yeah. They’re something. That’s one of the reasons I come out here. It’s like being at Dingo’s house except the vibe out here is a little less intense, if you can imagine that.” He was walking in front of me, determined on leading the way toward something.

  I leaned in and checked the dates on some of the gravestones. They went so far back. 1932. 1920. 1899. I became humbly aware of my position in the void of time.

  “Here it is,” he said.

  He was standing by a cross-shaped headstone. He leaned in and flicked his lighter to illuminate the date.

  “John Arthur Ellis,” he said. “Born 1880, died 1923. It’s my grandmother’s father, my great-grandfather.”

  He let the lighter go out and stood back up. He took a deep breath and slowly let it out. Something about it felt like he was reminding himself that he was alive. Without thinking, I did the same. He looked over at me and smiled.

  “I come out here sometimes and talk to him,” he said. “I obviously never met him, but my grandmother always tells me that I remind her of him. He was an inventor. He was always dreaming things up and trying to get rich off them.”

  “Did any of them work?” I asked.

  “Nah. Supposedly he was a bit of a laughingstock around the town. But that never stopped him. He was looking for a way out. My grandmother told me he wanted to get rich and move to California. Live by the ocean. He died poor. Poor but happy. With my parents gone, sometimes I forget that I came from anywhere. That’s why I come out here. To remind myself.”

  I was touched that he’d brought me here. I didn’t know what to say. Up until then there was a part of me that wondered if maybe there was nothing more to him than an aura of danger and a disposable charm that he used to keep himself from getting into too much trouble. I was beginning to realize that like everyone else, he was searching for something, and like everyone else, he had no idea where he could find it.

  “Thanks for bringing me here,” I said. “It really means a lot to me.”

  “Does it?” he asked. He seemed genuinely surprised by this. “I’m glad. I wasn’t sure if you’d get it. I thought maybe you’d think it was creepy.”

  “No,” I said quickly. “Not at all. I like that there’s these different parts to you.”

  “Good,” he said, smiling. “It’s hard to show people everything, you know? You never know what they’ll do with it once they have it.”

  We sat on an old stump in the center of the graveyard, just big enough for two people. I wondered if he’d ever been out there with some other guy he liked. I thought about him out there with someone else, someone cooler and better looking who always said the right thing.

  “They found that girl’s shoe on a bike trail,” he said. “I saw it on the news.”

  “Jenny Moore’s?”

  “Yeah. Her.”

  “Just one shoe?”

  “Apparently. Bad sign. I feel like two shoes would’ve been okay, but just one seems bad.”

  “It’s weird to think that she’s out there.”

  “People’ve been saying they’ve seen her,” said Alex. “I was at some party a few nights ago and this girl was going on and on about how she saw a girl that looked just like the girl in the yellow flyers sitting in the balcony of the Riviera.”

  The Riviera was an old movie theater downtown that played classic movies and art films. I had no idea how it did business, since its only patrons seemed to be the bespectacled members of the Cedarville High Cinema Club. Every year or so they threatened to turn it into a porno theater in an effort to make some money, but people would protest and money would appear and the matter would be put off for another year. I thought back to what Fessica had said about hearing someone say they’d seen Jenny on the golf course.

  “Maybe it was a ghost,” Alex said. “But I don’t believe in ghosts, so screw that. This chick’s also been known to eat a magic mushroom omelet before school, so who knows what kind of wavelength she was surfing at the time.”

  “I see those flyers all over town,” I said. “Everything’s haunted.”

  “I was always scared that I was going to be kidnapped when I was a kid. My sister was a hypochondriac, always thought she had bone cancer or a brain tumor. My big fear was kidnappers. I’d lie in my bed staring at the window and thinking that a man was going to crawl in and get me.”

  The scenario he’d just described flashed in my mind and I shivered. “I had that too. A little bit. Like, I got separated from my mom at the grocery store once and I was sure that I was never going to see her again. I don’t know what I thought would happen. I remember crying, though, and everyone stopping to look at me. Everyone asking where my mother was.”

  “Had she left without you?”

  “No. She was like one aisle over or something. But still.”

  “It’s so weird to be young,” Alex said. “I realize that now. I look back on when I was like eight or nine, and my brain worked differently. It was like I was hallucinating. The way my mind worked had so little to do with reality that it was sort of frightening. It’s amazing I survived.”

  We paused to look away from each other and take in our surroundings. Any fear I’d had upon entering the cemetery had disappeared. I felt strangely at peace. I wondered if it was connected to Alex’s great-grandfather, if maybe his kind spirit wandered the graveyard and kept everything in check.

  “I’ve never met anyone like you before,” I said.

  He laughed. “Is that a good thi
ng? Wait. Don’t answer that.”

  “No. It’s good. It’s really good.”

  He put his hand under my shirt and rubbed my lower back. My skin tingled where his fingers were. I fell into him. I rubbed my face into the nape of his neck and moved my lips against his skin. It wasn’t so much kissing as it was mumbling into his body. He took my face in his hands and really kissed me. The feeling of his mouth was so familiar and amazing that I wondered if every kiss in my life would lead back to him, to his cigarette and laundry detergent smell, to the stubble on his face. There was so much meaning in his hands, in the way they cupped my cheeks and kept me still.

  We had sex that night in the grass. He kissed my ears and ran his hand over the stubble on my head. I kept waiting for the moment where he turned on me, the moment where he pulled a Pablo and everything was eclipsed by some dark malignant mass, but that moment never came.

  Afterward we lay there side by side in just our T-shirts. Up in the sky the flashing red dot of a helicopter moved amongst the stars. The blades of grass scratched the back of my legs and bugs bounced off my naked thighs, but I didn’t care. We’d been quiet for a long time when I said, “I’m scared that when you get to know me, you won’t like what you see.”

  “Where did that come from?

  “You know Pablo Soto?”

  “The Sexican?” he asked.

  “Yeah.” I sighed. I could feel the entire story of Pablo gathering inside my throat and making it hard to speak. I decided to take it one word at a time. “We used to have a . . . thing. It was never all that great. And then things got worse.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “What happened?”

  “He’s just a jerk,” I said. “That’s really the only way to describe it.”

  “Well, you don’t have to sleep with him to figure that one out,” Alex said with a sarcastic laugh.

  “I guess you’re right.”

  “But we all go blind,” Alex said. “And scared. Everyone gets scared.”

  “Are you scared?” I asked.

  “Right now?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe.”

  “What are you scared of?”

  He thought for a moment and then said, “I’m scared that I’ll keep on not letting myself feel anything and I’ll turn into my dad. Or Dingo. Or so many other people I know. I don’t want my heart to become a dead nerve, you know? But at the same time, you’ve gotta numb that stuff sometimes, man. Sometimes not caring is the only way out.”

  I remembered what Fessica had said the other day about not letting myself become one of those people who stopped caring in order to protect themselves. I thought of my mother and her pills, my father and his distance.

  “I think my parents are going to get a divorce the minute I leave for college,” I said.

  “Well, that’s not always a bad thing.”

  “I know. It’s probably for the best. But right now things suck. My father is having an affair and my mom just sits around painting and popping pills and pretending nothing’s wrong, and then she freaks out from pretending nothing’s wrong and takes more pills to pretend that nothing’s wrong. It’s a mess. I’m going to leave for school and my entire life is going to explode behind me. It’s going to be like one of those scenes in an action movie where Johnny Morgan is walking toward the camera and a car blows up behind him.”

  Alex laughed. “I know exactly what you mean. Luckily you’re walking away from it, though. At least you’re not the dude stuck in the car who gets blown to bits.”

  He leaned over and kissed me. I got hard almost immediately, but he didn’t. At first I was worried that I wasn’t doing something right, and then a few seconds passed and I realized he simply wanted to kiss me. It was the first time someone had given me everything I wanted and asked for so little in return.

  There was no life as we drove through town. Everything was dark except for a twenty-four-hour convenience store, and in the blur of passing I tried to spot even one person behind its glass walls, but there was no one, not even at the counter.

  I made him turn his stereo off when we pulled into our subdivision. He parked in front of my house and shut off his lights.

  “Your neighborhood has such a weird glow,” he said. “The streetlights seem different than normal streetlights. Like space-ship lights.”

  “They import special lightbulbs from somewhere, France or something. The Neighborhood Standards Committee thought the old bulbs were sending out gamma rays that were damaging the lawns in the night.”

  “Uh, okay.”

  “I know, right? There was a petition and a protest and everything. It was insane.”

  He let out a snorting laugh and shook his head. He looked out at the neighborhood, at its perfect surfaces. The blades of grass, the clean black road, the sloping rooftops. Everything was something you could slide down.

  “Up the street they have what they call a model home,” I said. “It’s a house that they show people who are thinking about buying here. For a little while they were having open houses every weekend, and they liked to have someone from the neighborhood there to talk about how wonderful the houses are. My mom had to do it a few times. They have like a cardboard television instead of a real one. And a cardboard family scattered around the house. The cutout of the dad is in the den. The one of the mom is in the kitchen. There’s a little girl in one of the bedrooms.”

  “And the son?” he asked. “Is he in the basement listening to death metal and dying his clothes black?”

  We both burst out laughing. He took my hand. Our laughter died off and we sat there for a little bit staring out the windshield at the neighborhood, both in some sort of trance.

  “I should go,” I said eventually. “But thanks for taking me out. I had a fun time.”

  “Fun date?” he asked. “Not too morbid for you?”

  “Not at all. It was great.” I thought for a moment. “I don’t think I’ve ever been on an official date before. This was a good one.”

  “Your first date ever?” he said.

  “Unless you count the time in third grade when I asked Gina Larsen to eat lunch with me on the jungle gym.”

  “How’d that go?”

  “Terrible. She was the most stuck-up nine-year-old on the face of the earth and I was . . . a homo.”

  He laughed and moved in to kiss me again. We kissed for a long time. I didn’t want to stop. I wanted to stay like that forever, to live in his car with him, kissing and touching while the real world trudged on outside the windows.

  “I should go,” I said when I finally pulled away.

  “You’re right,” he said quietly, slowly settling into his seat. “Go on. Go inside. Sweet dreams.”

  I could feel him watching me as I crossed the lawn. He didn’t pull away until I’d opened the front door and was stepping into my house. I was standing in front of the refrigerator trying to find something to eat when my phone vibrated. It was Pablo calling. I ignored it.

  I poured myself a glass of lemonade and leaned against the counter, waiting to see if he’d leave a voice mail. But he didn’t. Instead he sent a text.

  What r u trying 2 prove by not answering?

  I shut my phone and put it back in my pocket. There was no room in that night for Pablo and his bullshit. I pulled a bottle of vodka from the cupboard and took it out to the pool with my lemonade. A cool breeze swept through the yard. All around, the leaves of trees rustled in the wind. I looked up at the moon, the only witness to the entire night. I longed to be back in the cemetery with Alex, lying in the grass and staring up at the sky. I wondered where he was right then, if he was home yet or if maybe he was driving around town on that disappointing nocturnal search for somewhere else to go that nearly every Cedarville teenager embarked on at some point.

  Pablo texted again.

  I know you’re awake, douche

  It was immediately followed by another one.

  Judy says hi/die

&n
bsp; I tossed my phone a few feet away, not caring if it broke against the concrete surface surrounding the pool. I chugged the rest of my drink and filled my glass a third of the way with vodka. I downed this in three big gulps and filled a quarter of the glass up again. I lay back and stared up at the sky and tried to make peace with the burning sensation that the vodka had left in my throat. I didn’t know whether to be sad about Pablo texting me or happy about the night I’d had with Alex. I drank the rest of the vodka in the glass. I thought of science class and the way deadly storms were born when cold and hot air combined and how that same principle was behind the range of emotions I was feeling. I forced out a laugh just to see how it felt, and it came out forced and false and a little bit frightening. It didn’t sound like me at all.

  A few feet away my phone vibrated again. I didn’t get up to check it.

  An especially forceful gust of wind woke me up. It was still nighttime. I didn’t remember falling asleep. I didn’t know how long I’d been out or what time it was. I tried to stand up, but when I did I grew so light-headed that I fell back onto the chair. I realized I was drunk. I remembered drinking the vodka and drinking it fast, and I wondered if maybe I’d had more than I realized. I clumsily reached for the bottle beside the chair. There was less than half left. I tried to remember how full it had been when I took it out of the cupboard.

  It was then that I noticed a flash of movement in the corner of our yard, some little person scurrying away from the pool and toward the bushes.

  Is that a kid? I thought.

  It was. She was wearing a pink shirt and denim shorts. She looked over her shoulder at me as she got on her hands and knees and crawled into the bushes. For a split second I saw her face in the moonlight, young and scared and chillingly familiar.

  It was Jenny Moore.

  And she was gone.

  I jumped up to go after her, but the light-headedness came back and I realized that my leg had fallen asleep, turned into a pillar of pinpricks and dead muscles. I stumbled over to the spot where she’d vanished. I kneeled down and tried to peer into the bushes, but it was too dense and dark to see anything.