Born in the 1980s

by Alex Wire

  I laugh at her even as my heart jumps into my throat and we narrowly avoid oncoming traffic. ‘All right, Miss Lips, come all you want, but just keep your eyes on the road while you do it.’

  ‘Really?’ she asks me, doing the eyebrow thing again.

  ‘Yes. Really.’

  ‘Okay!’ she says, and throws herself into moaning again. This time, though, the car stays in its lane.

  We are passing mountains. Two Lips has never seen mountains before in her life. That’s what you’re supposed to do when they tell you you’ve only got a couple weeks left to live – if you’re young and you know in advance, that is – which is not common but it’s the situation she’s in.

  You’re supposed to live every day as if it’s your last, but of course that’s bullshit, because then nobody would take out their trash or have a driver’s licence or do any of the thankless jobs that they have. So when you haven’t lived every day as if it were your last, then you do what Two Lips is doing, which is living the last three weeks of her life as if she could pack in every moment that she always wanted to have. This involves a virtual pharmacy in the trunk, thumping music to shake the seats, and mountains.

  What I don’t know is when she plans on stopping. Unlike Two Lips, I did some research on the line that we are travelling – a straight line down in the Sierra Nevada – and it’s pretty much mountains all the way down. If she wants to see the tallest one on the continent, then we’re going the wrong way. We are burning gas and money, and there are all of these mountains all around her. I mean, I know, it’s not supposed to be about the destination, it’s supposed to be about the journey, and really I shouldn’t worry so much because Two Lips has got five credit cards that she fully intends on charging to their maximum limit. You don’t worry about good credit when you’re dying, which is another way that the whole idea of living every moment to its fullest is totally bullshit. Regular people, people who are not Two Lips, do not spend ten thousand dollars in three weeks without thinking twice about it, unless their last name happens to be Hilton. Of course, though, she deserves it; she deserves to have the entire national budget in her pocket. But even that wouldn’t make up for the sixty years of her life that have just slipped through her fingers like some sick magic trick. How much would you sell a year of your life for? Like the MasterCard commercials say: some things are just priceless.

  Two Lips starts coughing really hard and we get off the road just in time for her to hang out of the car window and puke her guts out on the shoulder of the road. I try to be sympathetic, but it’s got to be a lot nicer to spend your last days in enough of a state of sobriety that you’re not puking up Kettle One and diner omelettes every few hours, right? When she’s finished I try to scold her, but she cuts me off before I can even get a word in. ‘Yes, Pix,’ she says, wiping her mouth with a napkin from the glove box, ‘I will now lay off the vodka. And you can drive.’

  I roll my eyes. ‘How very generous of you, Lips, thanks a bunch. Just drive up a couple of feet so I don’t have to walk in your puke, okay?’

  ‘Right-o.’ She drives further up the shoulder, and we both get out of the car to switch places. I look at her as we pass each other in the front of the car. She looks so much smaller when she’s not driving, smaller than I’ve ever seen her before. I think of what she used to look like, when we were teenagers. She used to be a big girl. Not fat, but with lots of steep curves that made everyone stop and stare at her. Two Lips had literally caused traffic accidents just by walking down the street; and this at a time when the supposedly beautiful girls were those who called a celery stalk dinner. The fashion magazines could say what they wanted, but tits had never gone out of style and Two Lips never let anyone forget it.

  I get into the driver’s seat, trying to ignore the puke that was sprayed down the outside of the car door. Two Lips takes the passenger seat and immediately falls asleep. She’s been sleeping a lot lately. I start to drive, not knowing where to go except straight ahead. I figure we will stop when she says so, and she isn’t going to say so for a while, at least. I turn off the radio and watch the mountains roll endlessly by.

  Three hours later Lips wakes up, scaring the shit out of me when she speaks. ‘Pix.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘What would you do? I mean, pretend you’re me. Only a little bit of time. What would you do?’

  ‘If I were you?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘No one is anything like you, Two Lips.’

  She smiles. ‘Okay, you’re you.’

  I’ve thought about it. Of course I’ve thought about it. How could I not? Still, though, I’ve never come up with anything that’s remotely satisfying, some plan that would make it okay, after three weeks, to just keel over and leave everything behind. ‘I don’t know, Lips,’ I say, ‘but I’d want to spend it with you.’ That sounds worse than the songs on the radio, but it’s the only thing that I know for sure.

  She smiles at me. ‘Thanks.’

  We’re quiet, then, watching the mountains and the sun that’s going down, making it all look like we’re driving into a postcard. Two Lips and I don’t have to talk about how beautiful it is – we both just know it. We’re from the same flat place filled with the brown apartment buildings that blend in very well with the grey sky, and the cold that never seems to go away for long enough. When Lips and I were growing up, in one of those brown apartment buildings, we used to get these giant coffee table books from the library about Art Deco buildings on Miami Beach and tell each other about how we were going to get two of those houses, right next to each other, and spend all day tanning on the beach. This trip is the first time that either of us has seen anything even remotely like this. I mean, Midwestern farms have their charms when the light is slanted just right, but it’s nothing like this.

  It makes me sick, now, watching it roll by, knowing that there’s no way to make it stop, and no way to speed it up either, to somehow get her all over the world so she could see every mountain and every beach. How many mountains could she see in sixty years? Almost all of them, or at least enough that she would have her fill, that at some point she would say, ‘All right, Pix, I’ve had enough of the goddamn mountains now.’ But instead I’ve got to watch her staring out the window as if she’s eating every last one and she can’t get enough and I can’t give her any more.

  I pull the car off the road to get some gas. Lips goes in, to get some coffee, she says. There’s an old guy in the next pump over filling up his truck that stares at her as she walks into the store. Even weighing about as much as a nine-year-old boy, Lips has got the walk that makes people stare at her. I wonder, not for the first time, if I am in love with her. I’m not gay, but I’ve never met a man in my life that makes me ache the way I do for her. I mean, that old guy thinks he’s in love with her, but he hasn’t spent the past twenty-three years of his life with her, like I have. You would have to be an idiot not to love her.

  I go in to pay. Lips said that she would pay for everything, but I don’t want her to. I don’t know where we’re going but I want her to have a five-star hotel and room service when we get there. When I get into the store, Lips is already charging everything. We go back to the car and Lips says she wants to drive again, so I get into the passenger seat.

  I must have fallen asleep then, because when I wake up it is under another set of fluorescent lights in another gas station, and everything around us is black. Lips has already filled up the tank and is pulling out of the station, back onto the nearly deserted road.

  ‘Hey,’ I say, shifting in my seat. My back aches from sleeping cramped up in the seat.

  ‘Are you ready?’

  ‘For what?’ I see only blackness, no sign of any civilization except a few distant, twinkling lights.

  ‘Just wait,’ she says, and I do. She turns the car off the highway and we get onto a smaller road. The windows are down a notch so that when she pulls off the highway, I know what it is without asking, because I can smell the salt of it
. And there it is, staring back at us from beyond the lamplights of a deserted parking lot.

  ‘The ocean,’ she says, simply.

  ‘God, Lips. It’s pretty huge.’ I can’t say anything else. I keep waiting for a finite end; I want this to be that moment where we are so overwhelmed by the beauty of this thing, the ocean, that we can both be satisfied and think to ourselves, ‘All right, that’s it, now we can leave forever.’ But this ocean isn’t it, not right now. It’s pretty, of course, with the moon reflecting down in a big white line across the waves. But this isn’t it; and I am beginning to think that that moment just never exists, that there will always be the possibility of more. We get out of the car and walk across the abandoned parking lot to the beach, and sit down in the sand. It’s warm here, at least, and we take off our shoes and put our toes in the sand. Lips stares out at it, hugging her knees.

  I know that it’s selfish of me, but I want her to say that it’s okay. But the unwritten rule is that you’re never supposed to ask. We just plunge straight into the future, because that’s all that any of us knows how to do, and it’s what we’re supposed to do. I want her to tell me that it’s okay even though I know it’s not, because I’m terrified. I’ve never known anyone who was dying before, except my grandfather, and that was a long time in coming. My grandfather died at the time in his life when people are supposed to, and all of the light had gone out of his eyes. But Lips is still burning strong. She is going to go, I know, without ever having any of the light fade – it’s just going to be smashed out of her, one second burning strong and the next just gone.

  ‘Let’s build a fire,’ Lips says, and I try not to get freaked out that she’s just answered my silent metaphor.

  ‘All right,’ I say. ‘We’ll need flashlights to get the wood.’

  We go back to the car for the flashlights. We have to dig around a bit through the stuff in the trunk to get at them. Lips grabs the little bag that she’s been using as a travelling pharmacy, too, and pulls out a few of the prescription painkillers that the doctors gave her.

  ‘Want one?’ she asks me.

  You’re not supposed to take these kinds of pills unless you’re old or terminally ill or just a young kid trying to get some kicks, and I really want us to be in that last category. ‘Sure,’ I say, and swallow the pill with water from the gallon jug that I insisted that we keep in the trunk for emergencies. Two Lips takes two.

  We head out to the beach again and start collecting driftwood and twigs. It takes us about forty-five minutes before we’ve got enough gathered in a huge pile, and then we go about stacking it up. ‘God, I think the last time we did this we must have been twelve, right?’ Lips asks me. ‘Girl Scout camp.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I say, ‘let’s see if I can remember how, because I know you weren’t paying attention.’

  ‘Hey!’ she feigns indignation.

  ‘Oh, come on, you spent the whole time composing love letters to Jimmy Frandon.’

  ‘Well, Miss Pix, I am about to show you that I am a woman of many talents. I am capable of both wooing a man and learning how to stack up a pile of logs. Watch.’

  I do. Lips expertly puts in all of the twigs and piles up the larger pieces, teepee-style, and then lights it up with old twisted newspapers from the car. In a few minutes, the fire is huge and glowing. ‘Told you!’ she says, triumphant.

  The drugs have kicked in, hard. I wonder if Lips is feeling the same sort of euphoria that I am. ‘They gave you some good drugs, at least,’ I say.

  ‘Yeah, they are pretty good, huh?’ she says, smiling and poking at the fire with a long stick. ‘Two is just right.’

  We stare at the fire she has built. It feels good to be sitting here with her, next to the ocean that neither of us has ever seen before, next to a fire. The fire is strong and mesmerising. Maybe it’s the drugs, but staring at it and listening to the ocean crash up on the beach is making me feel calmer than I’ve felt in a really long time.

  ‘God, it’s better than television, you know?’ says Two Lips.

  ‘I know. It’s like the first television,’ I say. ‘I mean, just think about how long people have been watching fire, just like we are.’ I pause and then start laughing.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Oh, nothing, just that that sounded so deep.’

  Lips giggles and puts her arm around my shoulder. I realise that there is not a thing about this moment that I want to change. It’s warm, the ocean is spread out before us, and Two Lips is smiling. I can’t tell her that, though, because saying it would make it go away. So I change the subject. ‘Whatever happened to Jimmy Frandon, anyway?’

  ‘Oh, he was a perfect gentleman,’ Lips smiles, pouring sand on her feet. ‘He never made his move. That’s why I went for Kyle Mulligan.’

  ‘Oh god, that’s right!’ I groan, ‘He was so disgusting!’

  Lips laughs and pretends to make out with the air, rolling her tongue around violently. ‘It was just like that!’

  ‘Should have waited for Jimmy,’ I sigh.

  ‘Yeah,’ she says, ‘if there is a Heaven then I will be presented with a harem of Jimmy Frandons the second I walk through the gate.’ I know she’s kidding but jokes about the afterlife are not really something that I can handle right now, and it pierces through the drug euphoria and makes my heart race.

  Two Lips knows it and covers it by joking more. ‘I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said that,’ she says. ‘I mean, the whole point of a harem is variety, right? Fuck, it’s Heaven. They’d have to throw in a few Matthew McConaugheys and maybe Antonio Banderas, too. And Steve Urkel.’

  ‘What?!’ I laugh. ‘Steve Urkel?’ Urkel was the nerd in highwater pants from Family Matters that we used to watch together as kids.

  ‘You’ve always got to have something for comparison, to remind you of what you’ve got,’ she says. ‘You wouldn’t want to take all of those Jimmy Frandons for granted.’

  ‘You are a strange, strange woman, Two Lips.’

  Lips smiles at me, the huge crooked Two Lips smile that’s caught god knows how many men in its trap. That smile is how Lips got her name, because when she does it the rest of her just disappears and that’s all that there is. Just two lips. I feel euphoric again, and hug her. The fire is strong and glowing in front of us.

  ‘I feel kind of tired,’ she says, then, ‘too much driving.’

  ‘Yeah, me too,’ I say, lying. ‘Let’s go to sleep.’ She lies down in the sand, and I lie down next to her, my eyes open, staring at the stars.

  ‘Hey, Pix?’ she says in a whisper.

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘If you come with me, I’ll let you have Urkel.’

  I force myself to laugh. In a few minutes, Lips is snoring softly next to me. I get up as quietly as I can and walk back to the car with one of the flashlights, the pavement rough under my bare feet. I open the trunk silently and get out her medicine bag and the gallon jug of water and bring them with me back to the fire. I pour out her bottle of prescription pills in my hand, and stare at them. I look over at Two Lips. She’s still sleeping, quietly, the fire lighting up her face. I swallow the pills, one by one, until there are only two left. Two will be enough for her, for tomorrow, and she can get more if she needs them. I lie down next to her and stare at her sleeping. I want to tell her that she’s beautiful, that she’s the best person that I’ve ever known, that she is the person with the brightest light, that I love her, that she deserves five thousand harems of Jimmy Frandons. But none of it seems big enough. I lie down and put my arm around her waist and my head on her shoulder. The fire is cracking loudly and the light is everywhere.

  ‘Lips?’ I say. She stirs and says something like ‘ummmmm.’

  ‘I’ll take Urkel.’

  ‘Okay.’ She smiles and turns over. I smile too, and close my eyes, letting the light go out.

  Author Notes

  Catherine Browne

  Born: 1981, Blackpool

  Lives: Leeds

  Currently listen
ing to: The Ting Tings, Black Kids, Orchestra Baobab.

  Currently preoccupied by: I’m both anxious and excited about the changes I’m making to my life.

  First memory: is aged three, at my little brother’s christening; my dad is taking a picture of us and my Great Uncle Jack is pretending to pour a cup of tea on his head to make us laugh.

  Currently annoyed by: shop assistants who stand around chatting to each other whilst you’re waiting to pay.

  Favourite books: Nabokov’s Lolita, Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby

  Favourite places: Paris, Berlin, Whitby

  When you’re not editing, what else do you do: bake cakes, drink tea, climb hills.

  Katharine Coldiron

  Born: 1981, Charleston, South Carolina, USA

  Lives: Maryland, USA

  Currently listening to: Jonathan Coulton’s folk-rock cover of ‘Baby Got Back’ (look it up!)

  Currently preoccupied by: yoga

  Where else can we see your stuff:

  kcoldiron.blogspot.com, very occasional updates. Google me.

  First memory: being scared to death on Santa Claus’s lap at the age of four.

  Currently annoyed by: the Supreme Court

  Favourite place at the moment: my sofa

  When you’re not writing, what else do you do: I like to knit, think, read.

  Christine Cooper

  Born: 1983, Doncaster

  Lives: Leeds/Sheffield

  Currently listening to: kitsch electro pop music, especially Chinese kitsch electro pop music. Oh, and English country dance tunes.