“What, like if you get lost?” I asked.
“Yeah, if they’re out, would you follow them home?”
He laughed a little, and I sat thinking of all those dead gas balls going supernovae. “I don’t think so,” I told him, and he took a sip of his drink, a red plastic cup with a mix of every bottle the kitchen had to offer.
“You’re a pessimist,” he said. “I like that.”
Alan was easy to take out to the woods. He followed me out of the house, both of us staggering a little, never asking where we were going. I knew what he wanted, and what he thought was going to happen. It might have happened, and I just pushed it down to forget it. I let a lot of people do a lot of things to me in college. After that, there were two of us sitting in separate rooms on opposite ends of campus, staring at the same trees. We skipped class, we didn’t eat.
We went back to the woods for the fear, the feeling of being hunted, shaking and cold and afraid to open our eyes, with our mouths so close together I could feel his breath on my lips. I'd never felt so close to anyone in my life. Just do it, already, Alan, I thought. "Just get it over with," I said. And then he started to cry, because the woods had us surrounded.
I started to like the guy. I didn’t usually like guys, but I liked Alan. We went on sad little dates, sitting on boxes in back alleys with the smoke from the factories rolling above us like water, and we talked about what we might do after college.
“I might get a house,” Alan said, and I shrugged.
“I might too.”
“Well we could get a house together. You know what I mean,” he said more quietly, shivering from the cold. He looked over at me with his dark eyes shining.
I smiled at him. “Yeah maybe,” I said, which was how I said no in college, and he still smiled when I said it.
“I guess that’s kinda stupid,” he told me, and I shrugged again. “I love you, Nathan,” he added.
“Don’t say that,” I mumbled, and he never did again.
For a while, things looked like they might be okay. I was able to forget the feeling of being stalked that had been in the back of my mind ever since my first time in the woods with Reed. Alan and I still went, but only once in a while, and we did it together. It was no different than when we showered at the same time in each other’s bathrooms or ate together in one dining hall or the other or got each other off in the restrooms between classes. We went into the woods, into that pulsating void that surrounded us and connected with every cell of our bodies, sucking the electricity from our neural pathways. I did it with Alan because we protected each other.
One day, though, I did it alone. I found myself at some party, standing in the corner of the room like a dead stalk, looking for an exit, and I found one. The trees had grown closer to the house while I was inside, and they stood dark and silent at the property line. With my hearth racing, I put down my drink and made footprints in the snow toward the woods, and I was gone for a while.
I woke up on the shoulder of the highway out of town, screaming. Someone passing saw me and called the police and soon I was back in the hospital. They called my mom and she came down to see me. She was small and angry in the doorway when she got there.
“Look what you’re doing to yourself,” she said.
“I don’t need a lecture,” I said to her.
“It’s well past time to lecture,” she said, tossing her purse onto the floor and sitting in one of the chairs beside the bed that I was unable to move from. “You suppose maybe I should set up a bed in here too?”
“I just passed out. I was drunk.”
“I know what you were doing,” Mom said coldly. She leaned toward me and added, “You gonna live your life like this? I didn’t raise you to be stupid.”
“I’m not stupid, Mom. I got lost.”
She scoffed and started digging around in her purse. “We’re all lost, Nathan,” she said into her purse, shoving keys and cough drops and paper clips aside. “None of us know what the hell this life is about, but you’re ruining it for yourself. I tried so hard to keep you boys safe, but those trees—” her voice cracked a little. “I tried to keep you boys in the house and safe, and now all I do is worry.”
“I know, Mom.”
“Your brother is gone,” she said with finality.
“He’s still alive somewhere,” I told her.
“He might as well be dead, where he is,” she muttered, yanking out a little bottle of Xanax. “Here,” she said, tossing it onto my bedside table. “You’re gonna need these.”
She slept in that chair until they released me, and then she drove me back to my dorm. “No more,” she said, pointing at me from the car. “I will beat your ass.” Then she smiled and waved as she drove away. Her taillights vanished around a corner, and I stood there all stupid and floaty from my new meds, with the hospital band still around my wrist. I hardly recognized my own name printed on it.
I went back to the woods slowly. The first time was just a glance at the trees on my walk back home from Astronomy, with my brain full of new and painful knowledge. I was proud of myself for not going in, but I guess it didn’t matter. Alan and I snuck out the next night and ran through the trees together, holding hands, snagging our sweaters and our intestines on the branches, pulling ourselves apart into intricate spider webs of thread and blood. We ran from things we couldn’t see and waited for the world to end. Of course it never did, and we were still whole, but the trees do funny things to your brain. There was one time that I lost him and I heard him screaming and I just kept running, ripping open down to the last fiber until I was just a ghost in the darkness, looking for the moon or the stars or anything to guide me home.
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CHAPTER SEVEN
I did manage to stay out of the hospital. I also managed to stay out of class, the dining halls, and anywhere outside of the pathways between our rooms and the woods.
I went to go see Reed’s room in his old residential hall, hoping he’d be there. I knocked on the door and after a minute, a short kid with blue eyes and a mess of red hair answered. “What,” he said.
I stared past him at the room, and it was unrecognizable, covered in vintage furniture and James Dean memorabilia.
“I have the wrong room, I think,” I told him, and he smiled.
“No worries,” he said, and then he closed the door, leaving me alone in the hallway.
Alan came up to my room one night. I guess I hadn’t been out in a couple days, and when he saw me, he said, “I’m not going back in.”
“Fine,” I told him. “Good for you.”
We stared at each other for about five minutes, neither of us saying anything, and his eyes were a little deeper than I remembered them being, black and wet and empty, and he had snot dripping from his nose.
“Wipe your nose,” I told him, and he used his sleeve, smearing it across his cheek.
“What are we turning into?” he asked.
“I’m not turning into anything,” I said, glancing over at my own sunken, sad reflection in the mirror. I looked him in the eye and added, “I feel fine.”
“I bet you do,” he said loudly, and he laughed a little,
I grabbed the box of tissues of my night stand and came over to him, yanking a few of them out of the box. “Hold still,” I said.
He cringed when I touched him, shrinking away from my hand on his shoulder, and when I wiped his cheek clean, he yelped. “No, I can’t,” he said, and he pulled away.
“You had snot all over you, dumbass!”
He stood there with his arms crossed, shaking in his green hoodie, and I thought about how sick it is that illness makes some people look better. “Listen, I’ve been up all night thinking about this,” he said, and then he stopped.
I stood there, still holding the soiled tissue, and eventually he said, “Never mind.”
“I love you, Alan,” I said to him, and he laughed, shaking his head and looking out the window at the woods.
; “Don’t say that,” he said finally.
“I love you, and if you don’t want to go anymore, I won’t make you.”
“You don’t love me any more than you love a toilet or a bed or a fucking car, Nathan.”
I shoved the tissue in my jacket pocket, not thinking. Alan looked at me, right in my eyes. “You did this to me,” he whispered. “Every day I sit and I look at those woods and I think of you and all the things I’ve seen, because this is how much you love me.”
And then he left the room, not closing the door, and started the long walk back to his residence hall. I decided I wasn’t going back, either. I closed the blinds, I watched TV, I picked up a textbook to study but it opened like a tomb and I tossed it back onto the desk.
That night, I was finally able to sleep a little. I woke up early in the morning, with the world still dark, and I burst into tears, thinking of Alan with his sunken eyes and the first time I took him out to the woods, ruining him. Not thinking, I picked up the phone on my nightstand and I dialed his number and listened as it rang once, twice, then went to voicemail, and I hung up and lay there defeated. I picked up and dialed my house, and after three rings, Mom picked up.
“Hey, it’s me,” I said.
“Nathan, it’s pretty early. Are you okay?”
“No.”
There was silence on the other end, and then I heard her cough a few times. “Okay, tell me what’s going on,” she said, and I pictured her sitting in the recliner at home with the TV muted.
I thought of Alan, how he used to be, a normal kid with normal hobbies and a future, before the world ended. “I’m coming home for Christmas and I’m bringing someone.”
“Oh?” Mom said, and I could hear the smile in her voice; it was nauseating.
“Yeah, yeah. His name is Alan and he’s a good kid. You’ll like him.”
“Well he sounds great. I’m glad you found a friend.”
I squeezed my eyes shut, tears streaming from my cheeks, and I struggled to control my voice when I said, “Yeah, me too.”
Alan left college and went home to Nebraska, a land full of country roads and big, ugly skies. His mother called me a few days later to tell me he had hung himself in their attic and that I was a name in his suicide note. Months passed. Every day, I lost my soul. I went home a shell for the holidays.
I took the bus back to my hometown, and Mom shrank back a little when she saw me. “Oh, Honey,” she said quietly.
“Hello to you too.”
She watched the other passengers get out off the train. “Where’s your friend?”
“He couldn’t come,” I told her, and she got it. Her eyes got all sad, and I had to look away to stop my heart from ripping itself from my chest and bleeding out.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” she said, and we left the station. The ride home was quiet and painful. Home itself was a mausoleum of childhood memories, preserved forever in dust and formaldehyde. My room was exactly the way I left it, the room of a teenage boy. The person in the mirror had never lived there.
Reed came back over Christmas vacation. It was a pretty uneventful episode. He came right in through the back door while Mom ate and I stared at my cereal. He sat down at the table like the last year had never happened.
Mom glared at him for a while, and then she got up and went over to the fridge and pulled the cheesecake out. She started to cut it into slices.
"Where have you been?" I asked Reed.
"You know damn well where I've been," he said, and that was the end of the conversation.
Later that night, after I’d gone to my room, Mom and Reed stayed up talking and I sat with my back against the door, listening.
“You better be okay now,” Mom said. “I worry, you know.”
“Mom, I’m fine.”
I heard her sigh, like she would never believe him. “You know your brother’s been going out to the woods ever since you took him out there?”
“I know,” he said, his voice small and distant.
“He almost died out there,” she told him, and I heard her lighting up a cigarette.
For a few seconds, the world outside my bedroom door was silent, and then I heard Reed say, in a cracking and broken voice, “I know, I know. I’m sorry, Mom.” And then he started to cry.
There were the small sounds of Mom taking a drag off of her cigarette and then blowing the smoke out. “What am I gonna do with you two?” she said sadly.
I closed my eyes and imagined my snow angel covered over with new snow, erased from memory, made whole again. I pictured Reed smiling on the boardwalk years ago. In the shimmering, surreal distance of my memory, I could see him pulling me by the hand toward the next ride at the county fair, a long time ago. "Come on, Nathan. Don't be dumb."
"I don’t want to go on any more rides," I told him, and he laughed at me. Reed always knew how to get me to do things I didn't want to do, so I followed him onto the vomit comet, and afterward, I found a bathroom to throw up in. With my knees on the cold floor, I heard him laughing from the far end of the restroom.
“It wasn’t that bad,” he said, and I imagined us among the stars, riding the vomit comet out into space.
*
Reed always knew how to get me to do things I didn’t want to do, like when he let Jordan into my room in the middle of the night, high and wide-eyed. I knew Jordan had been watching me, and I knew he was in my room, even before he sat down on the edge of my bed. I knew this was going to happen, because Reed had told me on the way home. He said he’d get me a pizza with some of the money Jordan gave him, so I pretended to be asleep when I felt Jordan’s fingers in my hair. He laughed like a little kid, and it made me smile.
“Hey, you,” he whispered, and he laughed again. In some secret, magical place in my twelve-year-old mind, Jordan was my knight in shining armor. He was going to save me.
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CHAPTER EIGHT
Reality is bleak when you deal with the woods. You go in, and you come out, but part of you stays haunted. Part of you, some vital organ like your spleen or maybe a kidney, stays trapped in the tangled mess of secrets and pain hanging like a noose from the canopy. There’s a hole to fill, so you go to the woods to put it all back in, if only for the night. You can stop going in, but you’ll never be whole again. You’ll always be missing a kidney, and the trees will always be waiting to welcome you back and wrap you in darkness for the night, deep and empty and so ugly that you can’t even breath anymore. It’s like craving a car accident; it makes that much sense, but you do it anyway.
We went to the woods together that night, staring up at all the stars in the sky over the yard. Reed looked over at me, and I looked at him. "It's not so bad," he said.
"I know," I told him, and I looked back up at the sky, the rotating void above us, shining down cold and uncaring. And then we were gone, leaving only the white wasteland and the house, small against the horizon, staring with dark windows at the places where we'd been.
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About the Author
I was born in the wastelands of the American Midwest, and I still live there, much to everyone's regret. I started writing as a teenager as a side effect of what psychologists refer to as the "personal fable." I believed that I was unique, that my personal life story impacted the world, and that the world revolves around me. In my mid-twenties, I picked up writing again because I was sick of reading slosh and tired of having to go back fifty years to find books I actually want to read. I was especially over the only gay literature available in 2008 being soft core porn romance bullshit with jacked, oiled-up porn stars on the covers. I decided that if I wanted to read something that wasn't 500 pages of comma abuse and boners, I'd have to write it myself.
And so I did. It may not be the best, but it's what I want to read. Thank you for the support, and I hope my writing means something to you as well.
Visit my Goodreads page, where you can further abuse me by leaving me comments and questions an
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Dedication
This collection of poetry is dedicated to my partners in writing, a very select group of people who are also writers. They are all extremely talented and they write things that I look forward to reading (a rare thing these days because, in my opinion, there's a lot of literary slosh in the world right now) and they have all at one point or another helped me shape one of my typo-riddled landmines into a finished book. Without the guidance of these awesome folks, I wouldn't have the courage to publish anything I've written. I'd like to say that I do everything myself, but without the help of these people and being constantly inspired by their ability to keep writing and creating new works, I'd have given up long ago. I am inspired almost every day by you guys, even by things so mundane and inconsequential as status updates on social media, so thank you.
Gypsy Snow
Chelsey Barker
Carla Kleeberg
Joe Egly-Shaneyfelt
Elizabeth Verger
If I forgot anyone, I'm sorry. I blame my advanced age.
I want to extend a very special thank you to all of my readers for your support and encouragement during the 2013-2014 season. I'd like to extend it like the neck of a giraffe, but alas. I have no god-like abilities. You'll have to accept some kind of mechanized extension.
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All the Stars in the Sky Page 3