The Comedown

  He limped out of the locker room, gasping at the pain, dragging his backpack. He’d forgotten how eerie the hallways were during class periods—even more unpleasant to be in than they were when crowded with people. He heaved himself through the fire exit next to the locker rooms, a loud buzzing sounding behind him.

  He was running across the lawn with the mad stagger of an escaped convict. Miraculously, no one came after him. He’d either get a month of Saturday detentions or be suspended. His vision narrowed from the pain. The more adrenaline he could conjure, the faster his broken body could move. He was getting close to losing all the blood his front tooth-space had to lose. He broke into the most excruciating jog of his life. The few cars rumbling around Braxton at one twenty slowed, but none of them stopped for him. They must have been scared. He was, too. His brain was flashing bright white with the kind of realization that was so persistent and painful precisely because it was so true: he had been born the deformed way. All this time Gipson had just been showing EJP what EJP already knew, that he was a fraud and pervert, that he was an embarrassment and danger to the human community.

  He was passing Cisco Drugs. He thought of Alexander in his lab, adding chemicals to other chemicals. He thought of his mother at Grandma Alice’s bedside, reading aloud to the constant beep of Grandma Alice’s vitals. He felt momentarily bad that they didn’t know him as well as Joey Gipson did, but then who would want to? Look what the burden of knowledge had done to Gipson. He would never wish that on his parents. He started crying again, which snotted up his nose. He bit down on his shirt and wailed. Keep running, asshole.

  Another thing: he wasn’t even good like Link. He was supposed to defend the weak from Ganondorf and protect the Triforce. Who were the weak? Julie Cosworth and Abe Verdega? He’d done nothing for them. He knew that if given the chance, he’d put on Dennis Delpiere’s monkey suit and dance for Gipson and Stockton. He’d do it in a second. He’d flip trays and beat up gay kids and call people fat and poor and insane to their faces. At least he’d be safe. If it meant he could be safe, he’d act however they wanted him to act. However anyone wanted him to act. If he could’ve kept himself safe, he would’ve used the bought time to fix himself. But now it was too late. He was totally beyond repair. He was a real fucking glitch. They’d all been right about him. Some people were Chris Finn and Eliza Strobeck, and some people were glitches.

  He had a mile and a half to go, then just the length of his subdivision, then there was his house. It didn’t feel like he’d been run-stumbling for long, but he had and his guts burned. He keyed in the garage code and dropped his backpack in front of Alexander’s tool shelf. There were certain items that looked grabbable and certain items that looked programmed into the background. Grabbable: the door to Alexander’s study. He coughed his shirt out of his mouth and opened it. When he couldn’t unlock the gun cabinet across from the desk, he opened the right-hand desk drawer and took out the hunting knife Alexander had gotten as a graduation gift. The handle was embossed “Fight for your Ole Miss ’72!” EJP stared for a second at the knife before taking it upstairs to the kitchen sink, where, with unbelievable pain and surgical precision, he opened the artery at his right wrist, and then, blind from the shock of the initial pain—which was worse than anything Joey Gipson had made him feel, a prelude to what he was now feeling—he turned on the faucet and prepared to take on his dominant hand. Which was when his mind did this weird thing where the pain was so incalculably bad for him to feel, so disorientingly and terrifyingly unlike anything he’d felt before, that he became immune to it.

  He thought about a game his mother used to play with him when he was very little, when she had curlier hair and bigger eyes and when Alexander would still sometimes cook his pot roast and the summers were longer and the house was brighter inside. She’d hide one of EJP’s stuffed animals behind her back and then produce a different one, making him believe that his elephant had turned into his toucan and his toucan had turned into his puppy and so on. And then eventually he’d pounce on her and find all the animals behind her back and she’d say, “You found me out! You found me out!” And she’d tickle him and he’d laugh and try to run away.

  But he’d never really wanted to get away. He’d definitely never actually wanted to get away. Oh shit oh shit oh shit. On the floor, his back against the dishwasher and his wrists bleeding in rhythm with his heartbeat, EJP realized weakly and then strongly that it was better to be a monster and see the toucan become the puppy than it was to never have been a monster at all. The kitchen sink was spewing water and he howled, his voice thick with regret: “Ma!” Then a second time: “Ma, please!”

  And like an apparition there she was, just as if he’d summoned her, opening the door from the garage and stepping into the kitchen, a copy of the newspaper in one hand. She looked up and saw him and gasped, and he said “Ma” again, but this time only with his breath, and for a fraction of a second there was just the sound of running water while they stared at each other.

  May 2009

  Wisconsin and Ohio

  Jocelyn had made a phone call to the dean at the college about her husband, who was apparently locked in a psych ward in Chicago, foaming at the mouth. The college confiscated all the paraphernalia from Tarz’s and Lee’s rooms and suspended them both (this counted for both strikes one and two of Southgate’s Three Strikes Drug Policy). They left campus together in Tarz’s car—he knew he’d driven to school for some reason, and it turned out that reason had been to drive away. They didn’t wait to hear back from their parents or eat any more of those pasty liberal arts cafeteria meals or sit around being given lectures by all their friends about how they were dumbasses who should’ve been more careful. And now here they were in a car together, driving from Wisconsin to Princeton, New Jersey, where Lee thought he was going to win back this girl from high school who had dumped him while—this was Tarz’s understanding—he was in the hospital in a full-body cast after a car accident. It wasn’t exactly Tarz’s place to comment, but if it had been, the comment he would’ve made was, “Why the fuck would you mess with someone like that?”

  The thing was, just sitting next to Lee in the shitty Honda felt good. Of course Lee could drive manual transmission. There seemed to be nothing he couldn’t do. So Tarz let him drive and pretended to look for something in the little glove box between their seats so he could brush against Lee’s hand as Lee toggled the transmission. Lee liked to drive with the windows down regardless of the weather, and the wind made playful cowlicks of his hair. Sometimes they stopped at oases and Lee got a cheeseburger from McDonald’s and a side of fries and Tarz got a McFlurry that tasted like chlorine but which he nursed so Lee wouldn’t think he was some kind of health-food hippie extremist. Then he’d open his laptop and work on a game he’d started designing.

  The game was a love note to Nintendo’s golden age, a basic platform setup wherein Birdo of Super Mario Bros. 2 starts level one as male, becoming increasingly feminine until she ends level eight, the final level, as female. He’d written the script and done the graphics himself, in the style of a late-eighties sixteen-bit scroller. The game wasn’t supposed to be that challenging—it was easily winnable if you were playing with a keyboard on a PC—but he knew the gender-change element would appeal to hipsters who wanted to subvert their warm-and-fuzzy memories of nineties Nintendo. The best part about the game was the cameos: in the second level, Luigi accompanies you through a cave in a dress and heels; in the sixth level, muscle-bound Falco limps on-screen in a sequined shift and begs to be carried on your back. The game was supposed to look like someone hacked the original Donkey Kong, releasing all the Easter eggs of code the creators had planted there for the benefit of extremely patient nerds. Tarz wanted to give the players of this game the hope that this alternate universe lurked beneath the pixelated surface of every game they’d ever played. If they just knew the right buttons to push, they could see Princess Peach shaved bald and dressed like a biker, or play Doom from the per
spective of a ruthless five-year-old girl, or watch Mario finally consummate his relationship with Yoshi. He’d titled the game Birdette’s Universe. Lee was always trying to look over Tarz’s shoulder, but Tarz would shut his laptop and insist it wasn’t ready yet.

  “Is a game like a painting?” Lee asked. “Is it like a book? Are you a tortured artist who can’t show your audience your beautiful little jewel until you’ve finished carving it?”

  “It’s something like that,” Tarz said. He liked how much Lee talked. He always had. “Nobody would even like playing this game until I’m done making it.”

  “I’d like playing it.”

  As far as Tarz knew, Lee had only slept with girls. He hadn’t asked him about it, but he’d seen him with them. He had a type, too: girls who were smaller than his own small frame, who wore their hair in bangs and looked like they were always about to cry, who’d gone through life without being told that anything was wrong with them. They dangled their little pink purses off their wrists, unbuckled their heels whenever they came to visit Lee, tried to get advice about Lee from Tarz. Tarz pretended he didn’t know anything, but he knew so much. He knew, for instance, how Lee had a secret fondness for old-people music, especially acoustic rock. He knew which memes Lee found the funniest (faildogs), which he found needlessly gross (most things originating from 4chan), and which corners of the Internet he spent the most time on (TVTropes.com). He knew both he and Lee had fake front teeth, though he had one to Lee’s two. He knew that Lee was ticklish on the bottoms of his feet—he’d found this out by accident one night when they were both sitting on Lee’s bed, Lee barefoot and Googling something they were both too stoned to remember. Tarz leaned to look over his screen, the zipper of his hoodie lightly brushing the bottom of Lee’s foot, and Lee had squealed and whined something like “Buy a girl a drink first!” which made Tarz laugh.

  But Tarz wasn’t about to tell any of this to the girls who came looking for Lee. Neither was he going to tell anything to this Maria Timpano person if they ever found her. Tarz himself hadn’t been with anybody ever. Lee had never asked him about it—they maintained an eerie, fragile silence around it. One night when Lee was getting ready to see Devi at some party, rolling back his cuffs, he had asked Tarz if he was going to be lonely and Tarz had responded by busting out his scale and grinder and saying he actually had a few customers stopping by. Which wasn’t a lie—he turned $160 that evening—but it wasn’t the truth, either. He’d liked the muted pop of Lee folding and unfolding his collar, the rustle of crisp linen against his skin. “I’d go if the right person asked me,” he said, and Lee got a sad look on his face and said, “There’s no person right enough, Tarz.” He didn’t know if Lee meant it as a compliment, but he took it that way.

  Now it was just the two of them: Tarz’s parents had given up trying his cell phone, and Lee’s mom had only called once to ask him to come home eventually. “We’re on a friendly vacation from reality,” Lee said. “We might as well use it to get shit done.” Truthfully, Tarz had been meaning to get his degree done. But then he was a white boy who wanted to go into game dev—his kind didn’t exactly get turned away for lacking a college degree. Although Birdette’s Universe wasn’t the kind of game any studio would be knocking down doors to publish, either. If he had a college degree, he could just settle into some corporate software engineer job pulling down six figures a year. Lee was the one he was worried about. Who hired English majors, and what did they hire them to do? Teach other English majors usually, but you needed a degree for that. Maybe Lee could live with Tarz; Tarz could provide for him while he got back on his feet.

  “What’s all the shit we’ve been meaning to get done?” Tarz asked.

  “Well, you can finish your game. And I can win back Maria. And maybe we can go to Mexico or something after that and live like Tony Montana?”

  They still had weed, at least Tarz always did. It was necessary for him to get through the day. They had tried to give him mood stabilizers and antipsychotics in the hospital, and then benzos and an SSRI when he was finally discharged, but he had started cheeking the pills doctors gave him and flushing the rest as soon as he became lucid enough to understand where he was and what was happening. When he was discharged, he just hit his piece as regularly as possible.

  “I never liked Tony Montana,” Tarz said. “He was all show and no substance.”

  Lee laughed, slamming the steering wheel. “All show and no substance! Okay, then who do you like?”

  “Like which drug lord do I like?”

  “Yeah. What else would I be asking?”

  “Well, I mean, El Chapo at least has a system of patronage that helps his friends and family.”

  “El Chapo’s a scourge! And Tony Montana would do the same!”

  “Yeah, but he’s like, this weird lone wolf. If I had all that money and power I wouldn’t be like ‘Ooh I gotta fuck a bunch of women, I gotta bury my face in a mountain of cocaine.’ I’d be thinking of who needed my money more.”

  Lee nodded. “That’s considerate.”

  “I guess the drug lord I’d really like doesn’t exist. Maybe someone somewhere in Latin America selling drugs to bankroll a socialist commune where, um, the needs of the disabled and women and children are prioritized.”

  “Be the drug lord you wish to see in the world,” Lee said, making a grand gesture that seemed to include every car on the road. “There’s nothing stopping you.”

  They took an off-ramp to a little town near Fort Wayne, Indiana, where Lee decided they’d find the nearest consignment store and make “disguises.” Lee liked playing dress-up, but not in public, and certainly not in consignment stores. Doing this meant he sincerely thought ditching their clothes and wearing other people’s would protect them from being arrested. Which was entirely unrealistic, a belief too childish for Lee. Which meant he was panicked. Now Tarz was nervous. Why would Lee be thinking like this? Did the law extend beyond the college campus? Southgate was world-adjacent, if not its own planet. He’d always thought he could do whatever he wanted in that little microcosm and the worst punishment he’d suffer would be suspension. Then Lee flashed a sun-spackled smile and Tarz forgot what he’d been thinking about.

  These were the things Lee had only admitted to Tarz in the privacy of their dorm room: how much he’d loved the smell of Diedre’s perfume, how he’d imagined himself as an exotic bird in Florida, how he’d liked going to temple just because he got to wear a pair of old tap shoes his dad had bought on the cheap to look like dress shoes. And Tarz in turn told him about his stuffed toucan, about drawing endless crayon portraits of Princess Peach, about drawing himself as Princess Peach. He even told Lee about the Thought. He never talked about the time with the Ole Miss knife after Joey Gipson beat him up: he hadn’t tried to wrap words around that for a long time, and he didn’t particularly want to. Lee listened to his secrets and absorbed them. Tarz did his best to do the same: Lee’s past was an effective window to his eccentric present, and there was no denying how much Tarz liked that present.

  The store was called Annie’s Closet and it was run by the pursed-lipped, plastic-glasses-wearing, old owl lady archetype who usually worked in high school cafeterias. When they walked in she offered to take their coats and bags and stow them behind the counter so they could shop with their hands free. Tarz wandered around the store and made his way back to the dressing room, where Lee had piled a stack of clothes outside the curtained stall. He walked out wearing what looked like army fatigues: a green jacket, camo pants, a black beanie. “I’m deploying to Baghdad tomorrow,” he said with a salute.

  “Too soon,” Tarz said. “You’re the guy riding the bomb in Dr. Strangelove.”

  Lee found a pair of aviators and tried them on, looking from the mirror to Tarz. “What do you think of Buck Stronghold as a name for me?”

  “Well, if we’re doing disguises it has to be realistic.”

  “Buck Strongman. A nice Jewish boy.” He messed his hair up in the mirror,
then fixed it again. “Now go find yours.”

  Tarz escaped from the military section, then from the men’s section altogether. He turned around to see if Lee was watching him. He went to a rack of women’s dresses and selected a green crushed velvet one, then a red polka-dot one with a ribbon tie under the bust. He tried them both on in a little dressing room at the other side of the store. They fit smoothly, the red one snagging on his hip bone just a little, nothing some Spanx couldn’t hide. He liked the crushed velvet one better because it brought out his eyes. He spun around in it and a small part of his brain said he should stop, registered the danger he was in. He countered that he wasn’t doing this because of the Thought. He was just wearing some clothes he wanted to wear.

  “Do you like it?” he asked. “The girl who’d wear this would be called Tweety.”

  Lee looked him up and down over his aviators, then slid them up his nose and smiled. “That would make you Tweety, wouldn’t it?”

  They paid and left, the owl woman less friendly now that Tarz was wearing a dress. But what the fuck was she going to do about it? They drove fast on the highway, blasting Demon Days all the way to Toledo, where Lee finally declared himself in need of a nap.

  “Buck Strongman’s had a long day on the road,” he said, hauling their bags into the elevator of a Comfort Inn while Tarz followed. “He needs to relax.”

  “Tweety needs to relax, too,” Tarz said, though he was speaking like she would. “She does declare, she’s not feeling right in the head.”

  “Oh, is she a southern belle?”

  “I’m a southern belle,” Tweety said.

  Buck Strongman came off with the military fatigues, but Tweety didn’t come off, not then. She shaved her legs in the bathroom, plucked a few blond hairs from her chin (she’d always been fair-haired and could never grow a beard), trimmed anything that gave off the remotest suggestion of a sideburn. Then she packed a bowl and hot-boxed the bathroom, packed another bowl, and brought it to Lee, who was lying on the bed watching Cartoon Network. Lee turned to look at her, then sat up.