The Gospel of Winter

by Brendan Kiely

At the end of the day, Josie and I snuck a few notes back and forth during end-of-the-day announcements. I told her I noticed she was wearing the same skirt, blouse, and sweater she wore to the Christmas party, and she explained that she and Sophie were going to a Broadway show that evening with their mothers, for their annual January Girls’ Night Out. It was her young lady outfit. I told her she made all clothes look like the dream the designer first imagined—it didn’t matter what she wore, she made it look its best. She was still blushing when we walked down the front steps of CDA together and she and Sophie got into the car waiting for them along the curb. I had meant what I said, but it felt better to know how to say it too.

  Everybody was going out that night. Mother was attending a party over in Rye, and as one of their Christmas gifts to each other, Mark’s parents had bought themselves tickets to the opera. They were staying in a hotel in the city for the night and not coming home until the next day, so although Mark was grounded and not supposed to leave the house, he insisted we hang out anyway. He said he needed it, and when I gave him one of Mother’s lines, “We can’t let the world have fun without us,” he laughed and agreed. I was grateful not to spend the night alone. I felt like I was gaining momentum, and I didn’t want anything to slow me down.

  Although I could have started our party midafternoon, Mark had to go home first and then wait for his mother to leave. He couldn’t use a car, either, because he was afraid his father would check the mileage when he got back. We decided to meet halfway between our houses at the playground of Coolidge Elementary, and because I had nothing else to do, I went ahead of him and tucked myself into one of the concrete climbing blocks. It was already dark by the time I got there, and I looked up through the square hole in the roof of the block to the sky. The streetlamps in the nearby parking lot cast a faint gray-orange haze over the playground, but I could still see a few dim stars burning in the picture frame above me. Their light was weak, and I almost thought I could see them flicker, as if they shifted ever so slightly through faded shades of blue or violet. As I continued to stare, a few more stars blinked to life between the other stars. It was depressing to think about the distance between them and me, because I knew it was likely that at least one of the stars I saw that night was already dead and that all that was left of it was its light in my eye. I lit one of Mother’s cigarettes and, between drags, held it toward the sky, trying to fix my own orange dot into the vast emptiness above me.

  I was taking my last drag when Mark poked his head through the hole. I couldn’t see his face at first, but I knew it was him. “Hey,” he said. “What are you doing? Trying to send smoke signals or something?”

  “Ha, yeah,” I said. “Is anybody watching for them?”

  “Nope,” he said. “Only me.”

  He crawled through the hole and dropped down beside me. He laughed loudly, and the echo in the concrete cube doubled the volume. I told him to keep it down, in case anybody did walk by, and I passed him a plastic soda bottle I’d filled with Old Donovan’s rum. He took it and shook his head. “What the hell. I’m stoned already, man.” He took a gulp and wiped his mouth. “Holy shit,” he said. I took a swig from my own bottle. It tasted like I’d sucked on the wrong end of a lit cigarette.

  “This is supposed to be the good stuff,” I said. “I guess it’s an acquired taste.”

  “Like everything in this dumbass world,” Mark said. He looked away and laughed to himself. We were both quiet for a minute. “Why not?” he eventually said, as if we’d been carrying on the conversation.

  His eyes were bloodshot, but he packed his bowl anyway. We smoked it together, and I lit another cigarette to camouflage the smell. We were cramped too close together, and I stood up through the hole to finish my cigarette. “Hey. You’re blocking my view, man,” he said, tugging on my pant leg.

  “You’re on edge, tonight,” I said. “Let’s relax.” I sank back into the block and let one leg dangle out the open back side of the cube.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Sorry. I’ve just been thinking a lot lately.” What I’d come to recognize in hanging out with Mark was that when a person was stoned, he didn’t finish his thoughts. He verbalized about half of them, maybe, and it was up to me to fill in the missing links in his logic. “It doesn’t matter what perspective I look at things from, though. I still end up at the same damn place.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  Mark looked back at me and just shook his head.

  “Come on, it can’t be that bad. You survived after I left your house on New Year’s. I did too. We’re here now.”

  “Yeah,” Mark said.

  “Sorry they found us like that. I barely remember falling asleep.”

  “No, man. It’s all fucked. It’s not your fault.” We were quiet again, and I listened to a car pass by along the street beside the school. I knew whoever drove it couldn’t see through the line of trees to the playground, but it made me a little nervous anyway. Mark didn’t seem to notice. He was in his own head now. “I’m supposed to be someone, remember?” he said when he came out of it.

  “Yeah.”

  “Somebody perfect.”

  “Oh, I know. Aren’t we all?”

  “Well, my folks think you’re pretty far from perfect.”

  “They’re not the first.”

  “But a bad influence. Like, I’m not supposed to hang out with you because you’re going to fuck up my future.”

  “That is fucked.”

  “Nothing makes sense to me anymore,” he said. “Plus, they don’t even know the half of it.” He drifted back into silence for a moment. We drank more from the bottles, and then he continued. “People say they believe in certain things, but then they do all kinds of other things—things that contradict what they say.” He pulled out his one-hitter, filled it, sparked it, and kept the lit bat in his hand. “If they catch me doing anything like I did on New Year’s—like driving around drunk—they are seriously going to kill me. Fuck it—if I get caught doing anything, really, they are going to kill me.” He sucked in a hit. He offered it to me, and I turned it down. He sucked in another and continued. “We were talking about that shoe bomber in class today,” he said. “And I was thinking. Know why the jihadists are going to win in the end? They believe in something. Seriously. They seriously believe in something. We don’t, and we’re fucked because of that.”

  “I don’t believe that.” I tucked my knees up to my chest.

  “Yeah, right,” Mark said, mocking me. He drank more from his bottle. “My dad wrote a check to the capital campaign at Most Precious Blood. A ten-thousand-dollar check. He said he had to match your dad, even if he thinks you’re a crazy person. You know my dad thinks your dad shits gold bricks. Anyway, he sent them all that money, and I don’t even remember the last time he stepped into a church. What does that mean?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “Come on, man, just forget it.”

  He shook his head. He took another hit, and I waved away his offer for another. He finished it and put it away. He rubbed his eyes and pulled out a bottle of Visine. It had some effect, but not enough.

  “I mean, I haven’t been to church in a long time, and I’m not going back. My dad doesn’t go either, but he wants to believe we’re a part of the community. Like it’s a necessary badge or something. Part of this club: check! Part of that club: check! Part of a religious organization: check!” Mark stood up through the hole in the cube and looked around into the darkness of the playground and the baseball diamond beyond. “I feel like I’ve spent my whole life trying to please other people, trying to become who they want me to be, but it’s not like I have any other ideas. It’s not like they’re stopping me from being the someone I want to be. There is no someone I want to be—isn’t that weird?”

  “No,” I said.

  “I’ve always assumed other people have better ideas, that they do know what is best for me. It never occurred to me that they’re all just like me—they’re all pretending too. We’re
all completely on our own.” He bent down to me suddenly and grabbed my shoulders. He looked at my black eye, and for a moment I thought he was going to bend forward and kiss it. My stomach dropped, and I stood with a familiar motionlessness. “Dude,” he said. “Loneliness sucks.” He shook his head and stood up again. He wiped his nose.

  Being cramped in the cube now made me uneasy. I kicked my legs out the back side and jumped down into the sand. “Come on,” I said to Mark. “Let’s not hang out here. We’re too loud. Someone’s going to hear us eventually. We’ll get caught.”

  “Fuck,” Mark said. “I don’t know. Maybe it’s time I got caught—that I really got caught. Maybe that’s what I need.”

  “Don’t be crazy!” I said.

  “Fine,” he said. He was looking at the school. He cupped his hand over his eye like a visor to block out the glare from one of the parking lot lights. “I know a place we can go where no one will hear us.”

  He swung out of the cube and marched through the playground into the stand of trees beside the school. The building was shaped like a smooth and blunted scallop shell, with the back being the narrower end and the front of the school fanning out as it faced the street. The front of the school also had more floors than the back, so the roof gradually sloped downward toward the back of the building. A metal fire-escape staircase zigzagged up the side of the building near the back, beyond the playground and the lights from the parking lot. Mark led me to the foot of the stairs and quickly up them to the emergency door at the back of the school.

  “Hey, man,” I said. “If we try to go in, it will set off an alarm.”

  “We’re not going in,” he said. “We’re going up.” The window beside the emergency door was covered in metal grating. Mark looked to the roof. “Think you can do this?”

  “Come on,” I said. “You can’t be serious.”

  Mark smiled. It was the first time he had seemed fully relaxed all day. “Yes,” he said. “I know I can do it. But I’ve seen you swim. Think you can haul yourself up there?” He didn’t wait for my reply. He grabbed hold of the grate and started climbing. He scrambled up to the edge of the roof, and when he got there, he hesitated, but only briefly. He held on to the lip of the roof, pulled himself up, and rolled forward, out of sight. I followed, but more nervously. The climb was even harder than I realized it would be, and when I thought about how high I was off the ground, I didn’t look down. As I pulled myself up, my arms shook, and the grate rattled. I could hear the breeze moving the tree branches ten or fifteen feet behind me. I clung on as tightly as I could and continued slowly. When I finally got to the top and looked over the stone lip, Mark was sitting nearby. “Need a hand?” he asked. He planted his feet behind the lip, grabbed me underneath one of my shoulders, and dragged me over onto the rooftop.

  What I hadn’t been able to notice from the ground was that the roof was terraced. It ran as a flat expanse from where we were to a low wall, on top of which was another flat expanse leading to another low wall. From that wall, the roof sloped sharply upward to a peak at the front of the building. We sat against the first low wall, drinking from our bottles as I caught my breath. Mark didn’t usually drink at all, but he slugged down the rum faster than me. He smiled, but there seemed to be some kind of anger still lingering beneath his smile. He finished his rum and threw the bottle across the roof.

  “Careful. This is from the office of J. P. Donovan himself. Last time I chugged his stuff, I hosed down Sophie,” I said. I laughed, but he didn’t.

  “Ha,” he said flatly. “Remember that? That was a good time, until my mother came in with her frigging CIA crackdown.”

  “Look,” I said. I grabbed his shoulder. “We’re here now. Let’s forget them. We’re free. This is how we’re supposed to feel. Free!” I gestured out toward the roof in front of us. The lights for the parking lot were below and did not provide much light. In fact, from the roof, we could see more stars, and the dark sky opened up above us. We spun around, lay down with our heads at the base of the wall, and felt our perspective change.

  “Whoa,” Mark said. “Trippy.”

  He began to laugh, and I did too, glad that he was happy. We shared the rum in my bottle and smoked a little more from the one-hitter. After a while, we were stupid with laughter. I kept pointing up at the stars, and when I did, Mark would point too and then poke me with his other hand. I couldn’t stop laughing.

  Mark stood up. “Let’s get really free.” He started taking off his clothes. I stopped laughing when he was down to his boxer shorts and socks and was staring at me with a straight face. “You too, idiot.”

  I hesitated but then followed, glad Mark hadn’t taken his underwear off. When I was down to my own underwear and socks, I felt the cold biting up at my feet, and I swigged more of the rum to try to warm up. Mark grabbed the bottle from me and finished it off. He wound up and threw it over the edge of the roof. I heard the plastic cap hit the metal of the fire escape. “Woo-hoo!” he yelled. “Fuck them all!” We jumped around like lunatics and shook our fists in the air, dancing around our pile of clothes.

  “I think we can go higher,” he said. “Watch this.” He got a running start, sped toward the wall, and with a leap, scaled it to the next level. “Come on,” he said, leaning over it.

  I followed him up, and then again, as we did the same at the next wall. We scaled the sharply sloping roof by crawling up it on our bellies. When we got to the edge, we looked over it to the street below. Another car passed, but it didn’t slow down. “Fuck them all!” Mark shouted again. The world seemed to flip out from underneath me. My sense of balance was out of control, and although I wasn’t moving, I had the sensation that I was slipping forward, up and over the edge of the roof. I shuffled back down the slope and rolled onto my back. I felt a little better, but again, with the dome of the sky all around me, I felt like I was tipping forward, pitching toward the stars. “Holy shit,” I said.

  “I know,” Mark said. “I feel like I’m flying.”

  I arched my head and looked back at him. He was still up at the edge, but now he was on his knees, with his arms stretched out on either side of him. I shivered. “Come on,” I said. “Let’s get our clothes back on. I can’t do this anymore.”

  “No,” he said. When I looked back at him again, he was perched even closer to the edge of the roof. “No.”

  “Mark.”

  “No. Fuck them. They can kiss this Senator Kowolski’s ass.” He pulled down his boxers and mooned me. He tried to turn himself around on his knees so he could moon the street below, and his feet rose up over the lip of the roof and wiggled in the air above the front of the school. He laughed and tucked his head forward into his chest, but I couldn’t tell if he was crying too.

  “Hey, man,” I said.

  “How do you do it? How do you stay sane?” he asked softly. He remained perched at the peak of the roof.

  “You’re the one who always looks together.” His hands stayed firmly planted in front of him and although he pitched forward, down the slope of the roof toward me, his feet still dipped out over the edge behind him as if his socks were drifting off into the neighborhood. “Hey,” I said. “Come down from there, man.”

  “Fuck that. I look together? I’m a mess, man. You know that. You know that better than anyone.”

  “Dude! You’re wasted. Seriously.”

  He picked up his head and looked at me. “Are you saying you care about me?” His voice tilted upward at the end, and I couldn’t tell if he was mimicking or mocking Josie from New Year’s or if there was something genuine in his question.

  “Come on, man.”

  Mark stretched one leg out farther behind him until his knee was out over the lip. Nearly naked and thrust over the point of the roof, he looked like a berserker figurehead of some Viking ship careening into the darkness ahead of him. And with a sad madness in his eyes, he asked, “Would you help me, really, if I needed it?”

  “Jesus, man.” I flipped over and began c
rawling toward him. “Have you lost it?”

  “You know it.” He lifted his hands from the roof and began to lean back. His leg sank farther into the air. He grinned, then his body waivered, he pitched to the side, and he cried out.

  “Mark!”

  He slipped and lost his balance and his whole leg sank over the edge. He buckled and hit the ledge of the roof, but I was able to grab his wrist as he tipped backward. He didn’t fall once I had him in my hand. His body trembled as we threw our arms over each other’s shoulders, and we slid forward down the roof. Mark didn’t resist. I stopped us at the edge of the wall and leaned back against the slope of the roof.

  “What the hell is wrong with you?” I asked.

  Mark was silent, and after a moment his eyes were red and wet. He had corrected himself, and now he sat beside me with his head down between his knees. He leaned against me, and the breeze across my skin chilled me. “Come on,” I said. “We need our clothes.” We climbed down the first wall, and as we walked across the second terrace of the roof, we could see back over the entire playground and the parking lot below us. To the left, along the road that led to the school, I saw a pair of headlights flash and come around the corner. I hustled Mark toward the edge, but before we could get there the car pulled into the parking lot. I dropped to my stomach and yanked Mark down with me. “Stay flat,” I said.

  I snaked us forward to the next wall and looked over its lip to the level below and to the ground. The car came to a stop near the playground and flipped on its high beams. It was the police. A cop stepped out from the driver’s side and waved a flashlight toward the jungle gym, then the swing sets and the concrete climbing blocks. He left the flashlight pointed at the blocks for a while. Our clothes were one level down, but I was too afraid if we climbed over the wall, we would become visible. Flattened, and behind the lip, we remained in the shadows. I was freezing but too scared to move. Mark stayed beside me but didn’t look over the edge with me. He lay on his back and, with tears on his cheeks, stared up at the sky.