The Vast Fields of Ordinary

by Nick Burd

  Time got rubbery. One minute it was eleven o’clock, the next it was almost two in the morning. The Vas Deferens playlist ended and Lucy put on some German synth pop. Two spike-haired boys moved the kitchen table into the garage and began break-dancing in the space where it used to be, leaving black scuff marks on the linoleum. I was too drunk to care. I told myself that I’d make Jay and Alex help me scrub that up the next morning. A crowd of people gathered around the break-dancing boys. People were clapping their hands and cheering. The house was singing in German. Somewhere I heard glass break. Someone yelled, “Party foul!” and everyone laughed like they’d never heard anyone say that before.

  “Party foul!” I yelled, eight seconds too late.

  A girl to my left looked over at me and let out a laugh.

  “You okay, man? Havin’ a good time?”

  I looked over at her, gave my sagging eyelids a minute to open. Was she the girl from Bert’s party who’d told Alex and me that we were the cutest couple she’d ever seen?

  “Sucks that Dingo and the band got too messed up to play,” she said.

  “Um, yeah,” I said, not knowing exactly what she was talking about. Had there been some announcement I’d missed? “Do you like Johnny Morgan?”

  “The actor?” she said.

  “Yes. The actor. The very famous movie actor. I’m in love with him. I believe that someday I will marry him. I believe it enough to make it happen. It will happen.”

  The girl burst out laughing and threw her arm around my neck. “Dade, dude, you are toasted.”

  “How do you know my name?”

  My words felt like heavy things that just kept falling out of my mouth.

  “I’m Sandra. We met earlier. Remember? We talked about the Vas Deferens show I saw in Colorado with my cousin Roxy, who knew the drummer because—”

  I walked away as she spoke. Stumbled is more like it. I needed to leave, needed to lie down. Where was Alex? Jay? Lucy? I should stay awake. This was my house. I had to keep things in order. Why had I gotten so drunk to begin with? If my parents could see me from Europe, they would ground me for the rest of my life. On my way up to my room. I passed a guy with blue hair wearing a T-shirt with Jenny Moore’s face on it. Across the image was the word found in big red letters.

  I went into my darkened room and fell face-first onto my bed. Purple Christmas lights blinked all around me. What was a purple Christmas for? Who has a purple Christmas? I told myself that I was just going to close my eyes for a minute. I was just going to take a little nap. I would stick my big toe into the pool of sleep and that would be enough. Then I’d get up and go downstairs and make coffee, wake the hell up, become a new man.

  I have a fuzzy memory of Lucy kneeling by my bed and asking if I was okay. I made a noise in my throat. She asked me if I was okay again. I think I said Alex’s name. Actually, I think I said Alexander Hamilton.

  I woke up in my underwear with my sheets pulled over my head. From the other side came an icy light, the earliest moments of dawn. I felt like I’d woken up in the middle of an operation and was being forced to confront my useless, semi-repaired body. Alex was right there beside me, lying on his stomach in his neon green briefs. His mouth hung open in some sort of dreamy awe like on the other side of his eyelids he was watching a film that explained all the secrets of the universe.

  “Are you awake?”

  The voice came from the corner of my bedroom. Pablo was sitting on the box that contained my new dorm refrigerator. Scattered around him were the smaller things from that day. The alarm clock and the hair dryer. Packages of underwear and socks. He looked like he’d been drinking all night too, but not here. There were dark circles under Pablo’s eyes and a cut on his lower lip.

  “You haven’t answered any of my text messages,” he said.

  I sat up slowly. The vile taste in my mouth seemed to correspond not only with the large amount of alcohol I’d consumed the previous evening, but also with Pablo’s presence, with the fact that the light coming through the window was exactly how it was the other morning when I’d gone downstairs and saw that they’d found Jenny Moore. A hundred Johnny Morgans watched from the wall, cutouts from different magazines. Different haircuts, different expressions, different periods.

  “How did you get in here?” I asked.

  “There’s a guy and a girl out by your pool. Everyone else is gone. The front door was open. Wide open.”

  “What time is it?”

  “Five something. Real rager, Hamilton.” He sniffed loudly, kicked his toe at the carpet. “You’re a real dick, you know that?”

  “What?”

  “The way you left me there in the milk cooler.” He gave out an awkward laugh, curt and sorta terrifying. “We fuck around for how long and then you just leave me all balled out?”

  “I’m sorry,” I said tentatively.

  “Yeah, I bet you are. I bet you’re real sorry.” He was bouncing his left leg rapidly, a terrible habit he shared with my father. He nodded at Alex. “Who’s that dickhead? Is that him?”

  “That’s Alex.”

  “Yeah, I know Alex.”

  “Then why did you ask?” I said.

  “I wanted to hear you say it,” he said. He sat there searching for something else to say, but he just ended up repeating himself. “You’re a real dick, you know that?”

  “You told me you didn’t want to ever see me again. You spit on me.”

  He scratched at the inside of his wrist, some halfhearted distraction from the matter at hand.

  “That was different,” he said. He furrowed his brow at something, maybe at his imaginary itch or maybe he’d realized that what he’d just said didn’t make any sense at all. He let out a sad little half laugh. “But I’m here now. I’m right here.”

  “I need water,” I said, slipping out of bed. “And Alex is asleep. Let’s take this downstairs.”

  Walking and being upright shifted the ache in my head from the back to the front. Pablo followed me downstairs, several paces behind and moving as slowly as I. The house was a mess. There were plastic cups scattered about and dirty footprints on the ivory carpet in the living room. My mother’s giant potted plant had been tipped over, and the surrealist print in the foyer now had a forty-degree tilt to it. The kitchen counter was covered with empty two-liters of soda and seltzer water and bottles of cranberry juice and orange juice that contained less than an inch of fluid. The kitchen table had returned but it was upside down with its legs in the air like a dead horse.

  I got a glass of water and we went out back. The backyard was in a similar state of disarray. Cups, napkins, assorted scraps of garbage everywhere, on the lawn, polluting the pool. Whatever couple Pablo’d been talking about was gone, but there was an army green bra near the pool just lying there like some listless amphibian trying its damnedest to make it into the water and failing. We each took a seat on a chaise longue.

  Pablo nodded slowly, acting like he understood me. We were both staring out at the yard, at the pool. That moment marked the first time our interaction wasn’t overshadowed by some huge emotion. I wasn’t scared of him or desperately infatuated or even angry. I felt a sort of empathy toward him, and with that empathy came a new willingness to let Pablo be whatever he happened to be.

  “You seem different,” he said.

  “How?”

  “More like the you I think you really are. Does that make sense?”

  “I guess,” I said, a bit flattered. “You’re probably right.”

  “It’s been weird not seeing you this summer.” I could sense him feeling for the next phrase, trying to find a way to say it so it didn’t sound like what it was. “I missed you. They found that girl, you know? At work. Of course you know. It’s been everywhere. Just found her. She just reappeared. I thought of you when I saw that. I almost called you.”

  “I thought I saw her one night,” I said. “Right over there. On the other side of the pool. I thought all those people that claimed they saw h
er around town were just making it up, but now I wonder. I wonder if maybe she didn’t really come back, that maybe the Jenny Moore they found at Food World is, like, the product of some mass hallucination, like maybe we all can’t deal with the fact that the real Jenny Moore is gone, so now we’ve gone and invented her. Or I guess reinvented her. Brought her back.”

  “Things come back if you want them to.”

  He lit a cigarette and fell back against the chaise longue, silent for a moment.

  “Your mind is a mysterious thing, Dade Hamilton,” Pablo said. “A very mysterious thing.”

  He had this look on his face like he was seeing right through me and the smile of someone who’d just glimpsed some fateful light.

  “Thanks,” I said. “I’m learning that.”

  “So I’m not going to Western Iowa,” he said.

  “What?” I asked, surprised. “Really? Why?”

  “I’m just not going there.”

  “So where are you going?”

  “Somewhere else,” he said. “Not there, though.”

  “What about Judy? What does she think of this?”

  “I haven’t told her yet,” he said. “But she’ll figure it out.”

  And then I noticed he was crying. He was still wearing that glazed smile, but there were tears in his eyes. Pablo Soto, crying in my backyard amongst the debris of a party I’d had the night before, while my boyfriend slept upstairs. Miracles everywhere. He wiped at his eyes and tried to hold it back, but he couldn’t. He sat up and buried his face in his hands and he wept. I thought of something my mother sometimes said. I couldn’t have been more surprised if you set me on fire. And I was on fire. The summer was on fire, a giant surprise.

  “Are you okay?” I asked.

  He suddenly stood up and started for the patio door.

  “Walk me out,” he said.

  He was wiping his eyes with one hand and blindly waving me inside with the other. I was caught off guard. I had no choice but to follow him inside and through the war zone of the house. I wish I could’ve smiled about it. There was a Dade somewhere who wanted to smile at the state of his parents’ house, at the way the summer had changed. Or maybe that Dade had changed over the summer. But it can be hard to smile at endings. The end of the party. The end of the summer. The end of the Pablo I’d hated for so long. I followed this stranger through the kitchen and the living room, into the foyer and out the front door.

  He’d made himself stop crying. We stood for a bit like the awkward couple we always were. I was in my boxer shorts. He was looking at his shoes. The cool of the early-morning air was laced with subtle streaks of heat. Suddenly he grabbed my arms and pulled me toward him, and for a moment the familiar fear of Pablo Soto welled up inside me.

  Instead he kissed me. His mouth tasted like beer and beef jerky and salted peanuts, all sorts of convenience store junk he’d probably picked up sometime during his night of driving around thinking about whatever, maybe thinking of this moment, imagining it happening and repeating to himself over and over again that he was gonna do it. He was gonna kiss Dade Hamilton, really for the first time.

  He pushed me away frantically, keeping his hands on my shoulders. His tearstained face now registered more fear than sadness. He lumbered off the porch toward his little gray pickup truck, an object that appeared in some of the family photos his mother had around his house. In one of them Pablo’s father and another man are leaning against the truck shirtless, both men holding a beer, Pablo in his father’s arms, a little baby reaching for some eternally unknown thing just out of the frame of the photo.

  He started his car and took off down the street, the mufflerless engine sending a beaded roar through the suburban morning. I stood there watching, feeling like I’d been dropped into another life. I watched him turn the corner, listened to the engine fade as he navigated his way through the maze of our subdivision. And when that was gone, so was he. No one ever saw Pablo Soto again.

  The ringing of my phone pulled me out of my second sleep, the one I’d fallen back into after Pablo sped off down my street. My head still hurt. The clock on the wall said 11:41 a.m. In those piled moments upon waking I recalled Pablo’s earlier visit as if it were a dream, an unfocused film projected onto an overcast sky. I glanced over at the refrigerator he’d been sitting on as if I would find some trace of him there, as if the slow aimless spirals of the dust motes were somehow confirmation that yes, he was there but now he was gone. This is what he left in his wake. Aimless pieces of the things we begin and end as. Beside me was Alex, a sprawled mass of beautiful boy in the bed beside me.

  I checked my caller ID. It was Fessica. I didn’t say anything when I picked up.

  “Dade?” She sounded frantic, like she was looking over her shoulder as she ran from something. “Dade, can you hear me? It’s me. Are you there?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “What is it?”

  “Pablo’s dead. Can you hear me? Pablo’s dead.”

  It was as if the floor had disappeared. I became wrapped with the sensation of plummeting, riding my bed like a broken magic carpet into oblivion. There was a single stinging point of pain in my chest and then it spidered out, filled my entire body with an acidic ache. A pain that makes you sink.

  “He can’t be. He was just here a minute ago.”

  “He’s dead, Dade. Judy’s freaking out. Everyone’s freaking out. He got in a car accident this morning. People are freaking out, Dade. People are freaking out.”

  I could make sense of it. I could prove Fessica wrong. She didn’t know anything. She’d never known anything.

  “Dade, are you there?”

  My hand went to my mouth. I was watching this all from my seat on top of my dorm refrigerator, watching myself react like some character in a movie.

  “That’s not true,” I said. “That’s not true. They’re lying to you. They’re playing some stupid fucking trick. Tell your sister she’s a lying piece—”

  “Dade, listen to me.”

  “I can’t listen to you,” I said. The panic in my own voice scared me. “It’s a lie.”

  “What’s going on?” It was Alex. He’d woken up. His hand was on my back.

  “Dade, talk to me,” he said. “You’re scaring me. What’s wrong?”

  “Dade, it’s true.”

  I made a sound that wasn’t words, a nothing sound that meant everything. She said my name again and through the nothing sound I said his name.

  After

  That was it. That was the end of my summer. It was my last real summer in a lot of ways, just like my father said. I could never set foot into June, July, and August without thinking of those months before I left for college, the summer I floated away.

  Fessica was right. Pablo Soto died at 9:49 a.m. at Cedarville Memorial Hospital after losing control of his truck on Maple Creek Road and driving headfirst into a tree. He wasn’t wearing a seat belt, and his truck was from the days before airbags. The police said his vehicle reeked of booze and there were no skid marks. They figured he was a drunken teenager too out of his mind to even think about breaking.

  When I look back on that morning I remember a strange nutty taste on my tongue and a cramp in my stomach and the exact temperature of the morning air on my skin as Pablo leaned in and kissed me on my porch. In retrospect, I think I knew as he sped down my street that he was going to kill himself. It was as if I’d experienced this all before, maybe in some other life that I was now reliving with the hopes that I could get it right this time. That would explain the overwhelming sense of failure that I carry with me when I think of all the other ways it could’ve ended.

  Alex tried to comfort me after I got off the phone with Fessica, but I couldn’t bear to be touched by him. Not because of anything he’d done, but because somewhere buried in his touch was the idea of Pablo, the idea that any boy I loved would eventually disappear. He went downstairs and woke Lucy, who was asleep on our sofa, and it was when I explained it all to her that it crystallized in m
y mind and became real. Lucy sent Alex home and told him she’d call him later with an update.

  Mrs. Savage called my parents in Europe and explained what had happened. They booked flights to leave that night. I stayed in bed with Lucy until they got back. That day and a half passed like a runaway nightmare, one that kept lurching over the borders of sleep and into my waking moments. Dana Savage would pop in now and then. She’d stand there watching us grieve with the heavy solemnity of someone who’d been there before and was all too aware that the sadness had to run its course like a fever.

  I kept having this terrible dream that seemed like the cousin of the dream I’d had where the thing was coming up to my room. In this new dream I was in a pitch-black room that may or may not have been my bedroom. I could sort of see someone shifting around in the darkness, someone I was pretty sure was Pablo. He was crying and asking for my help, but when I reached out, I couldn’t find his hand, and suddenly his voice and cries would be farther away and I’d have to keep on looking for him.

  I’d wake up and my heart would be racing. I could tell from the light outside that time had passed and for some reason I found this completely terrifying. Lucy would jerk awake and plant little kisses on my cheek and whisper that everything was going to be all right.

  When my parents returned my mother held me as I cried hysterically into her chest. My father watched awkwardly from the doorway of my bedroom. Somehow it was enough to feel him there, hovering on the outskirts. In fact it was exactly what I needed. I was thankful that he understood that, that he was aware of the nature of our relationship.

  I only saw Alex once more after that. We met for coffee at a diner and I told him that I loved him, but that I had to go to Fairmont and start over again.