“Why did you come here, Emma?”
She turned to me once more, but didn’t answer. She tilted her wine glass toward mine and tapped the edges together. The soft chime floated through the room.
“I’m lonely, too,” I said. I didn’t care how the words sounded. I wanted her to know how I felt, and I think this was the most I could confess, though it was only a fraction of what I wanted to say.
There was a sudden current in the room, and I could feel my hand starting to moisten around the glass it held. Emma put her fingertips on my forearm and started brushing back and forth along my skin. A casual touch, yet electrifying. The heat from her seemed to spread through my entire body. I wasn’t sure if her signs of affection were meant the way I wanted them to be, but I was edging at the point of caring. I just wanted her to keep touching me.
I reached out and put my hand on top of hers, stopping it. I didn’t mean it as a sign for her to stop what she was doing; I just needed to touch her hand.
She looked at me, and all I could see was vulnerability.
I was looking in a mirror.
In that second I knew what she wanted. It was what I wanted. But I didn’t know what things she was wrestling with inside, and I was afraid to ask. Too nervous to even move, as if it would disrupt the moment. There was only one thing I could think of to say.
“Coyote’s a good guy.”
She stared at me for what seemed minutes, though only seconds passed. Finally, she squeezed my hand and leaned into me.
“No, he’s not.”
Those three words released us. She closed her eyes as I leaned in to kiss her, and as our lips touched, I thought there was nothing in my twenty years that had ever tasted so good.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
AUGUST 1990
It’s been so long.
Harden looked up from his typewriter and moved his head slowly back and forth, feeling the muscles seize in his neck. Everything was sore, yet real pain remained suppressed only because fatigue overwhelmed it. Every movement was a chore, and he could only type for a few minutes at a time before he needed to lie on the floor again. Yet true rest never seemed to come; only a momentary shift of his discomfort to other parts of his body gave him the illusion of peace.
He went to the floor now and stretched along the cold, hard dirt. On his back with his eyes closed, Harden put his hand up his filthy shirt and gently stroked his fingertips along his stomach. It had stopped growling weeks ago. He felt along his ribs, over bony ridges he hadn’t been able to see since he was a skinny kid. It wasn’t that they weren’t feeding him, but the food simply wasn’t enough.
He was slowly dying.
Harden moved his hand to his face, feeling the weeks-old growth of his beard. He had once asked Baby Face for a razor, but the request was only met with a laugh. Now he was thankful for the hair, for it gave him a sense of warmth. He knew it was only a matter of time before some kind of illness took over his atrophied body. When that happened, his captors would have to make a decision. Cure him or . . . not.
Which is why he had to type. Telling a story might not save him, but it was his only hope.
With effort, Harden pushed himself up against the desire to melt into nothingness and resumed his position in front of the typewriter. He tongued an old piece of gummed bread around inside his mouth and thought about what he was going to write next.
He noticed the dry, flaking skin on the backs of his hands as he began to type. He brushed off a piece of it, which floated onto the table, becoming, as did all things, just another piece of dust.
The night Emma came over was only the beginning of our relationship . . .
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
JANUARY 1990
The night Emma came over was only the beginning of our relationship. We had kissed that night, nothing more. But that hadn’t been the end of it. In the week since then, we had seen each other every day, even if just for a few minutes. The first day after, we approached each other with thick uncertainty, neither of us knowing how close to get. The day after, we kissed during a short walk by a frozen pond, the warmth of our lips in stark contrast to the bitterly cold tips of our noses.
“What are we doing?” she had asked.
I thought about that for a moment. “We’re deciding what we want.”
“So, it’s just that easy?”
“Nothing easy about it at all.”
She had looked at me, her glowing face bordered by a pink wool hat and the zipped-up top of her parka. “This isn’t what I do. Jumping from guy to guy. It isn’t me.”
“That’s good. And I’m not prone to stealing the girlfriends of others.”
“You think you’re stealing me?”
I shook my head. “No one possesses you, Emma.”
“Damn straight.”
“But that doesn’t make what we’re doing any less wrong.”
That made her smile tighten and then eventually fade. “So what do you want?”
I only had the truth to offer her. “I want you to break up with Coyote.”
She walked a few steps away from me, and her outline was crisp against the snow. She picked up a rock and threw it at the pond, where it bounced along the ice. “Let’s take some more time to figure out what I want.”
“So you might want him instead of me.”
“No, Harden. I don’t want Coyote anymore. I don’t think I have for some time.”
“But . . .”
She turned, her words steaming from her mouth. “But it seems more complicated than just leaving him. I know that sounds stupid, but that’s how I feel. Let’s just . . . take this slowly, okay?”
I took off one glove, walked up to her, and touched her cold, red cheek with the warm palm of my hand. “Whatever you want, Emma. I’m not going anywhere. Maybe . . .”
“Maybe what?”
“Maybe I could not go anywhere with you for a little bit more.”
She reached up and gave me another kiss, and for the moment, I was quite content being a dope.
After that, our conversations grew deeper, along with our passion. We never met at my place or hers, for fear of Coyote showing up unexpectedly. Our radius was limited—neither of us had a car—so we usually met somewhere on campus. On the fifth day we took an innocent walk through the East Quad. Despite the cold, we kept the most casual of paces, as if we were soaking in the sun of a mild summer day. I had been tempted to hold her hand but resisted the urge, unsure if our paths would cross with someone we knew. I wondered if we were walking closer to each other than we would have been a week earlier, or if anything about how we interacted with each other gave off some kind of sign as to what was happening between us. As I considered this, a burst of snowfall surprised us. The flakes were large and heavy, sucking from the area all sound. The silence overwhelmed me, and I felt for a moment a figurine inside a snow globe. I didn’t want the moment to end with the inevitability of the flakes in a globe settling to the bottom.
“Follow me,” Emma said, not knowing such words were unnecessary. She veered toward the music building and walked down a small flight of steps to a side entrance. Rather than going inside the building, she stopped and pulled me into her. A small metal roof protected us from the snow.
She kissed me first. I returned in kind, allowing myself to melt into her. God, she tasted good. I could stay there forever.
She grabbed onto my parka with gloved fists and pulled me close again. “Don’t be infatuated with me, Harden. That doesn’t do me any good. I don’t want to do this if infatuation is the only reason you’re with me.”
I wondered where this came from, but I was also very focused on the fact she said with me. “I was infatuated with you the moment we met,” I said. “That infatuation passed a long time ago. I’m way beyond it.”
“I’m not asking you to love me. I just need you to be real, okay?”
“Do I seem anything else to you?”
She shook her head. “No, you don’t.”
<
br /> I took her hands from my chest and held them in my own. I wished we didn’t have gloves on. “What I feel is beyond infatuation. Coyote is my friend, and I wouldn’t be doing this unless I really thought we had something . . . I don’t know. Something special.” I squinted my eyes in mock pain. “God, that sounded lame.”
“Yeah, pretty sappy.” She reached up and kissed the tip of my nose. “But it was nice.”
“Thank you.”
“But you’re risking more than your friendship with him.”
“What do you mean?”
She squeezed my fingers. “We’re both risking more than our relationship with him. He . . . I don’t know what he would do if he found out. We both know he’s capable of pretty bad things.”
She was referring to the redheaded boy in the woods. “He was just a kid then. It was self-defense.”
“I think it’s still in him.”
“You think he could become violent?”
She stared at me for a moment before pulling me in. She kissed me, and either her lips or the cold made me dizzy. Maybe both. After she pulled back, she turned to walk back up the snowy steps.
“I just think we need to be prepared for what could happen if Coyote gets angry.” She got up half the steps before she appended her thought.
“Really angry.”
CHAPTER THIRTY
Back in the apartment, I slipped a Depeche Mode CD into my player and turned it up. I sat in my room and listened for a while, soaking in the dark melodies. Then, seeking company, I moved to the living room couch and picked up Jacob’s Sports Illustrated, which showcased Jerry Rice on the cover.
Coyote sat at the kitchen table and poured over a stack of religious studies textbooks. As I stared at him, the music from my room bled into the rest of the apartment.
I think that God’s got a sick sense of humor . . .
Jacob and Derek returned to campus within a day of each other. Derek came in the apartment with a bag and a smile. We gave each other a brief man-hug, but he only offered Coyote a vacant smile and a muttered hey. Coyote ignored him altogether, and I wondered what would happen to the relationship of these two as Coyote’s experiment took shape. Would Derek have a role in it?
Jacob bounded in a day later like a Golden Retriever coming home from being boarded for a week. He was beautiful and stupid, and my urge to pet him was quelled only by my urge to slap him with a rolled newspaper. He gravitated to Coyote immediately upon returning, and Coyote greeted him with a wide smile and a hungry stare. He had plans for Jacob.
It was the night before classes resumed, and after an hour of doing little in the apartment except daydreaming about Emma and listening to Dave Gahan sing about pain, I suggested we all go to Benny’s. I hadn’t been there in nearly a month, though Benny’s changed at the same rate as the Arctic ice shelf. They both were slowly but continually eroding into nothingness, and few seemed to care.
It was good to go back.
Jacob brought the pitchers to the table and asked Coyote a simple question that rattled me.
“Hey, how’s Emma doing? When did she get back?”
Her face flooded into my mind. I hadn’t thought of her in at least twenty minutes.
“She’s been here almost a week. I’ve seen her a bit. Not a lot, though.”
I busied myself pouring beer.
“You guys going to break up?” Derek asked.
“Why would you assume that?”
Derek shrugged. “Just asking. If I had a girlfriend, I’d be all over her as soon as I got back.”
“Well, Derek, I suppose that’s another difference between us.”
Derek forced a laugh and shook his head slightly. “Yup, one of many differences, I suppose.”
“Maybe you’re interested in her. Is that why you want to know? You want to fuck her, Derek?”
Derek’s smile evaporated. “Jesus, take it easy, Coyote. I was just asking.”
Then Coyote looked at me over the top of his beer glass and continued his gaze until he set his glass down. There were only two words that were in my head, and they looped over and over in rhythm with my pounding heart.
He knows.
I forced other images into my mind, erasing Emma for fear I was projecting her face through my eyes. I thought of colors, deep ocean blue, lava red, canary yellow. Then yellow made me think of blond, and blond brought me quickly around to Emma’s hair, and suddenly I was smelling it, breathing in the fresh scent of her shampoo. Goddamnit.
“What is it?” Coyote asked me.
“What is what?”
“You’re staring at me.”
“No, I’m not.” I could feel myself starting to panic. “I’m just zoning out. I guess I’m tired.”
Derek, sitting next to me in the booth, gave me a nudge. “Harden, school hasn’t even started yet. What do you have to be tired about?”
I shrugged.
Jacob gulped his beer. “Why did you guys come back so early?”
Coyote shot me a look and a paper-thin smile.
I reached into my coat pocket and quietly turned on my Walkman recorder. It had started to become a habit.
“Harden and I have an idea,” Coyote said. “We came back early to flesh everything out.”
That was undue credit. Coyote had hardly spoken to me about the Revelation in the past week. That was okay by me. I had been too busy stealing small moments with Emma and dreaming about robbing a bank full of them.
“Flesh what out?” Derek asked.
“An experiment.”
“What kind of experiment?”
Coyote pushed his beer glass forward an inch on the table. “The kind that could make us all famous.”
We fell into silence as Coyote told Derek and Jacob about the Revelation. The idea was more real since our initial conversations. I was stunned at not only the attention to detail Coyote had afforded the whole scheme, but about the sudden sense of plausibility I had about it all.
Coyote stopped talking after twenty minutes. Derek was the first to speak when Coyote finally raised his beer glass to his lips.
“Are you fucking serious?”
Coyote turned to him. “Have you ever known me not to be?”
Jacob looked star-struck. “I think it sounds awesome.”
“Thank you, Jacob. In fact, I have a special favor to ask you.”
Before Jacob could inquire further, Derek interjected. “Are you doing this for any kind of course credit?”
“No.”
“It’s a huge investment of time. What about school?”
“I only need fourteen credits to graduate.”
“People are going to think you’re crazy.”
“Some will, undoubtedly. Others, hopefully, will not. If I fail, then I fail. But I don’t think I will.”
“But your fake religion makes no sense.”
“I don’t know,” I said, my first words of the conversation. All heads turned to me as I thought aloud about the basic tenets of Coyote’s new religion. It was the first time Coyote had shared them with me.
“It’s pretty basic,” I said, thinking about Coyote’s outline for a meaningless faith. “It speaks to the human need for belonging in the most abstract of terms. It involves faith, but it doesn’t articulate exactly what the subject of the faith should be. It allows for forgiveness, yet requires obedience. It doesn’t judge. It focuses on living in the moment.” I felt like I was swimming in Coyote’s mind as I considered all the loopholes he had filled. “It’s the ideal belief system for the wayward college student. The agnostic masses who want to believe in something, but don’t know what that thing is.”
In that moment, I realized I had completely endorsed everything. I was with Coyote, whatever that meant. Despite the man he was, and despite the fact that I was falling in love with his girlfriend, I was too compelled by Coyote’s search for greatness to let it pass by me. Inside all of us is a need to be great, and maybe this was actually my chance. I mean, what if the Church
of the Revelation actually worked, and I got to be a major part of it from the beginning?
“The Revelation?” Derek asked. “What does that even mean?”
“It means nothing,” Coyote answered. “It’s vague and has a Christian overtone to it, which is the predominant religion here. And it carries a slight ring of hope. It’s the perfect name. It’s all about marketing.”
Derek shook his head. “Sounds like a self-help book.”
Coyote nodded, and I saw his right fist clench and release. “With one difference.”
“Which is?”
“The words of a book mean nothing when they’re just ink on paper. It’s the author you have to believe in, not the message. If the author of a message is believable, the message becomes irrelevant.”
Derek squinted as the lights in the old bar struggled for life. “And you think you’re believable?”
What happened next still seems only a blur to me, and the tape recording of it does it no justice.
First, Coyote fell silent.
I thought he simply chose to ignore Derek’s question, but he didn’t. He was preparing himself for the answer. He must have been planning this all along, but the moment was so spontaneous I felt something miraculous was truly happening.
Coyote shut his eyes, his lids squeezed tight in seemingly intense concentration. His hands balled into fists on top of the table. His mouth twitched just enough to make me realize he was murmuring something to himself.
“What the hell are you doing?” Derek asked. When he received no response, we all looked at each other.
“Coyote, you okay?” I reached out and touched his shoulder, but he didn’t move. For a second I thought he was having some kind of spell, but his body was so still I couldn’t imagine he wasn’t in complete control of it.
Suddenly, Coyote’s eyes shot open, but all they showed were the whites.
Then he let out a howl.
That’s the only way I could think to describe it. He lifted his face toward the ceiling and howled to the heavens. It was primal, emanating from the depths of his gut and releasing with a shock wave through Benny’s like a tsunami shattering a small coastal village.
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