Every time I was supposed to take two, I took one. Every time I was supposed to take one, I took half, and it was hell. The itches, the shakes, the hallucinations, all that shit—I puked almost as much coming off the drugs as I did during chemo. But I did it, and in the end, I had one bottle left. One hundred tablets. A hundred more than I was supposed to have.
Detox shoulda left me with nothing. But like I said, I was a bad patient. I complained about cold hands, needles, drugs, the nurse’s garlic breath, the orderly that banged my gurney against the corner, chemo, not getting chemo, my hair falling out, my hair coming back in wiry, the d.t.’s, the shakes, the rebound headaches. Nobody was writing the inspirational story about my shit, because I wasn’t doing it right, was I?
Yeah, well, you know what? I was fighting. Just not the way they wanted me to.
Now I’m running. And I’m not doing that right either, because I still don’t know where I’m going.
(MEET IN THE MIDDLE)
The way I figure it, if something’s bad, go ahead and make it worse. Got in trouble for stealing somebody’s lunch out of the coat room? Go ahead and kick the principal, too. Blew off the first day of the rest of your life? Steal your mom’s car, while you’re at it.
And even if you’re starting to fall asleep a little, keep going. Keep driving.
The road blurs, and I veer. Rumble strips on the shoulder buzz. The sound wraps around my throat, squeezing me until I can’t breathe. The water I’m under is mine. Humid, salt, all up in my head. Filling up my lungs. Everything stretches out of reach, out of control.
With shaking hands, I jerk the wheel. Off the highway, onto the shoulder. For one brilliant, time-stopped second, it looks like I’m going to skid into the ditch. I stomp the brakes and yelp when the back end fishtails. But then it stops; everything stops.
I throw it into Park and collapse. Raw, ugly sobs tear at my throat. They come out like animal sounds, rough and wild. The air conditioner keens, too. There’s something stuck down in the system, whistling away.
Tepid air dribbles out, hardly cold. My breath fills up the car, ragged but slowing. I drag a hand across my eyes, then blink and my sight clears. Emotion drains away, and all that’s left is the uneven buzz in the engine, and an uneven ache beneath my skin.
Cars fly by. I feel them; their wake pulls like gravity. It’s almost night, and the sky’s blossoming with stars.
There are roads going everywhere and nowhere. I used to think that was amazing. How all that pavement was a choose your own adventure. Set off on the right path, and you’d end up in Las Vegas. Or New York. Or anywhere—everywhere was possible on the right road.
One of them—this one I’m currently on—leads, eventually, to the Salton Sea. A body of water trapped in the middle of a desert, full of salt and pesticides and algae—dead fish wash up on the shore. It wasn’t always that way. There’s a resort out there from the fifties, all crusted and rusted and decaying, too. They pumped that thing full of chemicals and killed it.
They pumped chemicals into me and saved my life.
Now that I think about it, we’re sitting at the crossroads of the alive/dead highway, huh? We belong together, me and the Salton Sea. At least for a minute. Long enough to shake hands.
A semi blasts by. My heart pounds, the Monte Carlo shakes, and I realize how fucking stupid it would be to die in a car crash on the side of the road after surviving brain cancer. Everything pops into focus; I have to get my shit together.
Digging around, I produce a handful of McDonald’s napkins. I scrub my face with them, and inhale the scent of historical french fries. A different ache rolls through my belly, and fine. I’ll go eat something. Even though it will suck.
I have to roll the window down to see if it’s clear—the side mirror is long gone. I wonder where it is. Junkyard? Dump? Maybe some kid picked it up and took it home. It could be reflecting anything right now. The shape of a girl learning to play the guitar. Some stoner discovering his fingers at the edge of the universe. Maybe the sea; maybe the sky.
Like a dog, I lean all the way out the window and breathe. I smell oil and gas and grass and in the distance, rain. Nobody coming; it’s clear for me to go. I slide back behind the wheel and pull onto the pavement again.
This car will speed, but only if I trade it for a terrifying shake over sixty-five. I buzz and bump with it, and it’s like a hive of bees swarming over my skin. They fill my ears and blot out my senses. All I have is my sight, and that’s blurry from the vibration.
But it’s hard to feel anything else with all this shaking. And I swear, I could sleep like this. I really could.
(2652.2)
The green and white sign overhead reads AMARANTH.
Amaranth, why is that familiar? It’s one of the exits coming up, and it’s stuck in my head. I want to sing it. But I don’t even know how to pronounce it. Not out loud.
I know a lot of words like that. I got them out of books. I know what they mean, but I have no idea how to say them. Bonafide, now, I’m pretty sure that’s bone-a-fied. Somebody at the clinic pronounced it bone-a-fee-dee, but I don’t think that’s right.
Chiffonade is definitely shiff-uh-nod, I figured that one out thanks to the Food Network closed-captioning in the hospital. Roll that basil up and slice it into itty bitty ribbons: chiffonade, bitches.
But Amaranth . . . what is that?
According to the signs, there’s gas-food-lodging here, but I’m half-a-tank, not staying. I pull into the gas station right off the highway. It’s a good waypoint, someplace I can sit and think. I know Amaranth means something. I just can’t drag it out of my head yet.
I park in the far end of the lot and the sudden quiet does a number on me. Too quiet. Too almost dark. Suddenly, my brain decides it needs something. Needs some noise, or some food, or hey, how about a pill or two or six? I scrabble for the bottle down in my bag.
It takes nothing to open it up, and I stare into it. The pills are packed in good, all the way to the top. They smell like nothing; found out the hard way about a thousand times that they taste like shit on top of bitter metal. I learned to take some water in my mouth, throw the pills in, and swallow fast fast fast.
Except, I don’t need them. I don’t need them anymore. There’s nothing in my head but brains. Nothing in my lungs but air. All I am is tired, and fucked up, and the pills are familiar. I fish one out and rub it between my fingers; it leaves a white trace of powder on my skin. Then, I throw it out the window and slump behind the wheel.
My bones are jelly; my skin is goo. I could seep into the seats and be another stain for my mother to bitch about.
(MY MOTHER)
He’s been a pain in my ass since the day he was born, I imagine my mom saying as she reports the stolen vehicle. I’ve heard her say it before. Usually to Lynne, a yes-man if ever there was one.
Mmm-hmm, Lynne hums soothingly, as though my pain-in-the-assery is a foregone conclusion.
Right now, I’m costing my mother money. How is she gonna get to work? But Lynne will pick her up. Lynne is my mother’s very own hallelujah chorus.
—If I got cancer, I’d just have to die of it.
—Mmm-hmm.
—It’s not like Medicaid covers everything.
—Lord, I know, Becky.
—If it did, would I have to work this hard?
—No, baby. Of course not.
—That’s all I do. I work and I work and it all goes right back out the door. Don’t I deserve something?
—Hell yes. Treat yourself. What’s ten dollars?
Thanks, Lynne. Thanks for being there when my mother was inconvenienced because I was dying. Thanks for helping spend what little money we do have.
But then, Lynne’s entitled to a say, I guess.
A couple summers ago, Lynne had the bright idea of pasting my picture on a bunch of empty tin cans. Talked people at the gas station and the market and all the stores up and down the state road to put them by the registers. LITTLE DYL
AN NEEDS CHEMOTHERAPY PLEASE HELP GOD BLESS.
A couple summers ago, I was fourteen and awkward and bald and covered in sores. Had my first knotty scar looping over my ear; my skin was grey tissue paper. Nobody gives money (or rings) to Gollum, so they used a picture from my seventh birthday instead.
Back then, I was brown eyed and bright faced and making all kinds of smiles over the new-used bike I got after I blew out my candles. That ride was choice. It had streamers on the handlebars, and slightly faded stars on the seat, and it was mine all mine.
Little Dylan did need chemotherapy. That part wasn’t a lie. Little Dylan got it, too, paid for by the state. Change and crumpled ones in stewed tomato cans, that was fun money. My mother and Lynne got cigarettes. Fingernail polish with glitter suspended in it. A trip to a casino or six, lots of off-track betting slips because a horse named Everly’s Golden Sunshine couldn’t lose. (Spoiler alert—yes, it could.)
For a while there, we always had Coca-Cola and Wonder Bread. I won’t lie to you. I bought twenty-two books, barely used. A soft comforter for my bed. A subscription to World of Warcraft. Even though my laptop’s so slow that I have to play it with all the special effects turned off, I love WoW.
Yes, there’s something I love.
No, it’s not real, but so what?
Clapping my hands to the wheel, I suddenly realize why I’m in Amaranth. World of Warcraft.
Arden.
Arden’s here.
I have to find her.
(SEVEN DAYS FROM THE SALTON SEA)
We’re gonna go on a quest, me and her. A real-life quest, and there’s gonna be dragons and roads untaken and who knows all what, but it’s gonna be real. I deserve it; I let the Wish people pass me over, and I shouldn’t have. I was all screwed up in my head; what the hell was wrong with them, listening to me when I said no?
Out of the imaginary world and into the real one. One long first walk—well, not walk, or I wouldn’t make it to the corner. It’s been a long time since this bag of bones did crazy shit like exercise or running or walking; I’m out of breath just thinking about it. But a trip. There’s no wishing for wishes now. No more money, no more little Dylan. No more anything, and I’ve got to escape. I want Arden to come with me; it’s dangerous to go alone.
Our quest . . . what’s it gonna be?
Not Disneyland. Or the Statue of Liberty. Or the Grand Canyon or a white-sand beach. Those are for the little kids. My thoughts tick and ache. Cogs grind in my brain, off center. Those are ordinary places. They live on maps; where’s the magic? Where are the monsters?
Why not Atlantis? There was a flood that washed the rings of the city away, but it seemed to me like, if archaeologists can find shit like dinosaur feathers and Neanderthal footprints, why can’t I find a whole city? Probably because we can’t drive to the Straits of Gibraltar?
Pick something. Damn it, Dylan, think. Something with magic and lies. Something like the game. Something impossible and possible.
Then, I know. I know what it is, what it always was.
Back in the day, there was this guy, Iturbe or something, he sailed to the New World from Spain, then up and down the California coast. He stole a metric shit-ton of pearls from the Kumeyaay Indians there, and thought he was gonna get away with it too.
Except back then, those Spanish bitches thought that California was an island. What Iturbe sailed up was the Colorado River, all flooded because of hard rain.
But not that deep—he got almost to the Salton Sea when he ran aground. Had to leave that ship full of stolen pearls and limp on home by way of Mexico. He sent people back to find his pearl ship, but they never did. Earthquakes and sand and time swallowed it up. Iturbe died poor as shit, which is about as fair as it gets, if you ask me.
Anyway, people have been looking for his ship ever since, a ghost galleon in the Mojave Desert.
Yes. That’s exactly right. My head swims; for a second I lose the thread. Strings of pearls roll away as I try to focus. It was always this place. It was always that crossroads; it makes sense now. Maybe I didn’t realize I had started a quest when I got turned out of the school, but I had. Picked it right up and providence put me on the right path.
I didn’t have to believe in destiny to let it guide me.
(JUMP ON YOUR TOON; LET’S GO)
Okay, I got World of Warcraft because when I was on chemo, then radiation, then most of the way to dying, with sores and nutrition shakes (which are not shakes; shakes are cold and creamy and they don’t taste like vitamin dust), I wasn’t supposed to go outside.
I couldn’t leave and I needed to, so bad. So I bitched and cried and yelled and made my mother almost as miserable as me. That’s why she let me spend almost a hundred dollars out of the donation cans to get a video game. Anything to shut me up so she could get back to how all this affected her.
Warcraft was exactly what I wanted. I read faster than the bookmobile could bring me new books, but the game had stories that went on for what seemed like ever.
We only had to pay for the subscription. Our neighbor’s Wi-Fi was practically begging me to use it. No password, and the hub or the station or whatever it’s called was named ShareMe. So I did. And I logged into a whole other world.
Most of the time, people think video games are just for shooting stuff. But there’s a story in Azeroth—that’s the name of the land you play in, in Warcraft.
And not just by yourself, there’s people. Tons of people. They’re all logging in, all around the world, all at the same time. While I’m walking around as my Shaman (I can heal, I can fight, I can bring back the dead. It doesn’t mean anything; don’t read anything into it.), millions of other people are walking around, too. You pick a race, like Orc or Goblin, and you pick a job, like Warrior or Mage, and then you get thrown into a whole new world.
The world looks real. Yeah, there’s magic and stuff, but a mountain is a mountain. Trees are trees. If you’re around at sunset, you can watch the sun go down. Throw a fishing line in some water and it makes ripples. Boats come and go. You can take a walk through the forest. You can ride beasts and hot air balloons and trains.
If you decide to take a swim, you can go to the shore. There’s nobody telling you that you can’t go in. Dive under and the water gets so deep, it goes down and down, into murky, ghostly places. If you don’t come up for air, you drown. It’s scary to get too far below the waves, when it starts to get dark and your life is running out.
There’s quests to do, and places to visit. There are cities and fairs and festivals. Me and Arden finally did the Midsummer Fire Festival quests last year. She got a glowing crown and a gold dress. All she had to do was click on it, and it threw fire in the air and made her dance. She sparked and blazed, crazy beautiful.
Arden wasn’t the only one goofing off. I have a bunch of shape-shifting toys. She danced, and I turned myself into a blue, hissing snake-dude. Then I froze myself in amber. Then I turned myself into a Dwarf made of iron. Right on the steps of the auction house, we danced and changed and changed and danced.
When Arden’s in her regular shape, she waves her arms in the air, a slow, snakey goth dance. I do the Electric Slide—it’s programmed in, those are the only steps we can do. You have to be one of the pretty races to get something sexy. But she plays a Forsaken, a rotting zombie chick, and I play a Tauren—a black-and-white cow-chick. We don’t do sexy.
I’ve been playing with her almost every day for three years. We’ve walked, her Forsaken, my Tauren, from Winterspring to Uldum, and that means nothing to you. But trust me, it’s a long way. It’s like walking from New York City to Miami. We swam up the coast once, from Tanaris to Azshara—San Diego to Seattle, sort of. For no reason. We could have caught a flight or ridden our mounts. But we went because we could. To see what would happen if we did.
Dungeon crawling and finding ancient artifacts, and sometimes just sitting on top of the world and talking. Typing, anyway.
I’ve never heard her voice. She wanted to
chat real-time; and she kept pushing for me to turn on the voice chat in the game, or get Ventrilo—it does the same thing. It runs on the computer, letting everybody on the game talk for real. One touch of a button and it would be like a phone call, right in each other’s ears. Arden’s voice in my brain and mine in hers. But the donation money had run out. No way was my mother gonna shell out for a headset.
Anyway, why bring real life into it? Inside the game, I could do stuff I couldn’t in this stupid, wasted body. I wasn’t some sad, dying gay kid who got short of breath walking to the bathroom. She wasn’t a trans girl trying to get her dad to just be chill. In Azeroth, we could be whoever we wanted.
Inside the game, I was alive and confident, strong and funny, and Arden was sweet and excitable and up for anything. I could make a fifteen-minute flight from one end of Kalimdor to the other for fun. When our toons were little, Arden knew all the paths and shortcuts so we could even make the trip by land, if we wanted to. (Now she can turn into a Sandstone Drake, and I just ride on her back to wherever we want to go.)
The point always was, it was us. Together. Free. I flirted with her; she flirted with me. And why not? Why shouldn’t we? Whatever we did, it didn’t change us or the game.
It didn’t even matter if we died there. Our bodies were always right where our souls left them.
All we had to do was run back and start again.
(REAL ID)
I wind myself up to walk inside the gas station. All I have to say is that I have a flat and my phone is dead and look at him hard. I’m ashy and gaunt; my hair is wiry, wavy, sticking all out because I can’t keep my hands out of it. I’m probably fucking terrifying at this point—maybe that’ll work in my favor.
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