Out of the tree of life, I just picked me a plum.
You came along and everything started to hum.
Still it's a real good bet, the best is yet to come.
I.
It started to rain. At first it was just a couple sagging blobs, but after a few seconds, Tom’s room was drowned in the cracking sound of the more violent raindrops against the window. He groggily but curiously peered outside from his bed, on which he’d been asleep before the raindrops roused him. He sighed, and, being fully aware that his bleary eyes would fail him for his next task, felt around his trifle-littered nightstand for his alarm clock as though reading Braille.
"6:60," he slurred aloud; lending his brain a good couple of seconds to realize something was amiss. He pushed himself into a sitting position on his bed and carefully studied the clock. "4:30," he corrected. His tousled hair further blinded him, having shifted during his sleep, and even though fate had it that he pushed the dissenting locks out of the way, it was patient for him to do so.
Tom gazed out of the window for a minute in an attempt to return to reality. To do this, he recounted the events of the day. "I got up, I think," he began to whisper to himself, "Went to school, came home, went the hell to sleep." After finishing the rather bare list, he let escape a deep sigh, one that heralded more than his imminent chore of getting out of bed for a drink of water, a chore he decided to put off for a few minutes.
He scanned his room. The walls, the door, the ceiling, the floor were all pasted with a grayish tint due partly to the weather and partly to his light having been turned off. On his walls, besides that gray paste, were many years’ worth of tacked up posters and drawings of his own. On a critical study of his wall he would occasionally wince at the interests he sincerely held only a year or two before that the posters would not let him forget. However, there was something about the whole setup that forbade him from removing the thorns.
Not one of Tom’s sketches made him feel anything but comfort or nostalgia. There were so many of them that actual wall was an ever-thinning rarity in that part of his room. The contrast between them all was also apparent. Everything from a partially torn and crumpled palimpsest the meaningless doodles upon which he could claim only partial authorship to a tall panorama of a stark but vivid mushroom cloud consuming a no less stark landscape that took days to complete were among the delineations that festooned his room like a wall he could kick in.
Tom heard his parents talking downstairs. There was a certain trepidation when they had a conversation. It too often erupted in an argument, sometimes even a fight, and he could never, no matter how he tried, predict how it would turn out. If it went fine, the tension would just grow in him and he would almost hope for a purging of their combative emotions whether they even existed or not. If it turned into an argument, there would be some uncomfortable times ahead when he would be forced to speak with them both at the same time and assert his neutrality almost by conflict. Neither could he ever predict how he would feel if they fought, but raw experience guaranteed that it was never a good feeling.
Tom’s parents refused to divorce; still, when they wanted to, holding desperately and frantically onto what brought them together in the first place. Their dreams of love and romance wouldn’t die the way their dignity had. Tom thought that a fear of life without even what was decided carelessly to be love was what kept them together. In any case, the two of them were married for the wrong reason, and the three of them knew it.
"Only Thursday," Tom, weary of the previous train of thought, complained quietly to himself before standing up out of bed. He wondered at how much he hated the week, throughout it wishing dearly for the weekend. But on further consideration, the weekend wasn’t a great deal better, and only acted as a terminus for the week: something he could look forward to, as long as he made sure not to think too hard about what exactly he looked forward to.
Every day was the same. Weekend, weekday, there was no difference. At the beginning of every day, Tom, without fail, had a hope that he just couldn’t shake no matter how much he wanted to, a hope that something would be different that day, anything. His friends would invite him places, places he thought might be interesting. If he didn’t go, he felt that that time, that one time, would have been the time he was waiting for, the time that would be different, worthwhile, and fun, and that he just missed his chance forever. If he did go, on the other hand, finding, to no surprise, that it was the same as ever, he felt that he just wasted several hours of his life pretending to be having fun when he could at least be sincere and bored at his house. This dilemma was well past a rut.
Before Tom left his room, a muffled echo of yelling arose from beneath the floorboards. If the rain hadn’t woken him up, he supposed, the yelling would have. He decided that it was better to remain in his room for a while.
Tom’s parents stood, prepared for anything, in the dining room. A bare wooden table lay in the center of the room, and around it were four equally bare chairs, one much dustier than the other three. On top of the table, besides a thin plastic vase holding a fake rose that would certainly have died long ago were it ever alive, stood opened a half-empty bottle of wine.
"You have a problem, Stanley!" Tom’s mother stammered angrily through her teeth. "You know that as much as I do!" Her jaw was set, her body leaned over the table, and her hands, birdlike, gripped a chair beneath her, where also hung a strand of pearls from her neck.
It was all Tom’s father could do not to shatter the dripping wineglass firmly squeezed within his adamantine fist. "I’m not even drunk, Dolores!" He truthfully reasoned. "And what the hell do you think you’re accomplishing by keeping alcohol around the house, anyway?"
Dolores looked like she’d just heard Stanley chastise her for drawing on the walls. "I am an adult, Stanley, and this is my house! I’ll do whatever I want in my house!" Once that had been growled, she forcefully and purposefully exhaled.
"You said yourself, Dolores, that I have a problem! It must not be such a huge problem if you decide to keep booze around, huh? You weren’t even hiding it, either!" Stanley motioned towards the wine bottle and held up the glass.
"Give me my glass!" Dolores commanded, "It’s my wine. I can handle it, like an adult, you cannot!"
"You know what, Dolores? I hate to say it, but you cannot handle it. You might not get angry or sad," he said this as though quoting her, "but you sure as hell don’t act like a human being. If I were you, dear," he particularly hissed the word ‘dear,’ "I would stop acting like a damn saint about this, especially since I’ve stopped drinking, while you, it appears, have not."
"You’ve stopped drinking? Why the hell do you have my glass in your hand? Because you wanted to save me from the evil drink?" Dolores almost danced with mockery. "No, because you’re weak! You just couldn’t take it that I can drink and you can’t –"
"You can’t drink, Dolores, you can’t! You have a problem, but you refuse to admit it!"
"You’re fooling yourself, Stanley! It’s just so damn obvious that you’re projecting your weakness onto me because you can’t take being alone with it!" Dolores delved with her defensiveness.
"How much have you drunk, Dolores? Half the damn bottle!"
"Yeah, your slate is perfectly clean! Has that glass fused to your hand yet?"
"See for yourself!" Stanley smashed the glass upon the table, and the little bit of wine left in it looked like blood from a glass shard’s wound.
"This is a joke. Are you five years old?" Dolores spat. Stanley was silent, but grabbed the wine bottle and made a movement as though he were going to drink. "You had better not take another sip of that, Stanley." She threatened.
"Real intimidating. Good thing I’m not scared of you, huh?" Stanley sneered.
"That’s very mature. I’m walking out right now if you take even a sip, by God, Stanley. I’m absolutely serious." Stanley took a pull from the wine bottle, just to spite her. She muttered something and left with nothing more but a grunt.
"What about Thomas?" Stanley yelled from across a few rooms, not as a plea, but as a reminder of guilt.
"Screw Thomas," Dolores resiliently yelled back.
Tom heard, for the most part, the entire conversation, and could hear perfectly his mother starting her car and driving away. He feared what was in store for him now. He wanted to go back to sleep. There really was, he knew, no chance of that. He sighed once more and lay on the floor, close to the point weeping, but incapable of reaching it.
Tom wished that his parents would stop torturing themselves and each other, but most of all he wished they would stop torturing him. Selfish, perhaps, but what would that change? Events like these occurred every month or so. One of his parents walks out on the other one, they both get upset until they’re reunited, they reunite, they’re happy for perhaps a day, and so the cycle continues. That, he comforted himself, that was something he could predict. As erratic as his parents acted, there were some things that he could pinpoint like a psychiatrist in their behaviors. Pinpointing, he reasoned, was one thing, but curing was quite another.
He lay there motionless with his thoughts for three hours before falling asleep.
II.
Tom awoke, on the gray hard floor of his room to his alarm clock screaming as though someone were just killed. The sound hurt his ears used to silence and he clambered over to it as quickly as his previously static body allowed to shut it off. Once silence returned, Tom laboriously rose to his feet. He still wore the clothes he had been wearing the day before, he discovered upon gazing downward. He took a chunk of the front of his shirt and deeply inhaled for a moment, testing his aroma, and then let go and shrugged. The smell didn’t matter; he wasn’t going to bother that day.
Listlessly lurching downstairs, Tom found none of the usual signs of the time of day: his parents with complete awareness and the cheer of having ‘slept on it,’ whatever ‘it’ was, offering a hearty "Good morning!" no breakfast for anyone in the house, not even any lights turned on. Tom returned upstairs to see what the trouble was.
On his parents’ bed lay a pathetically groaning Stanley, two fallen-over bottles, both almost certainly empty, and several spots of wine-blackened stomach contents. Tom stood there for a moment in disgust and pity, and approached his father to wake him up. Before he reached him, though, Stanley stirred sluggishly. Tom changed his mind and left for school.
Same car. It wasn’t that Tom wanted a different car, he would just get used to that one, too. It wasn’t that the car actually needed anything changed about it. Tom just didn’t want to drive to school anymore. But that wouldn’t solve anything. Maybe he just didn’t want to go to school anymore. Nevertheless, before he knew it, he was right there. He went directly where he wanted not to be without even thinking about it.
Tom emerged from his car for a moment and stared at the school, a bunch of huge empty brick cubes. What had they in store for him? Work, losers, boredom, his friends.
Tom was getting sick of his friends. Maybe, he generalized, he was just getting sick of human interaction. It hadn’t ever really worked for him, but loneliness kept him trying. No one wants to be alone, he hastily reasoned to himself without thinking any further. There wasn’t really any reason he was going to stop trying, either. And besides, cutting off contact with all of his friends would just make him a lot of personally insulted enemies. But the way those people acted made him sick. Sick to his stomach, sick to his brain, sick to his heart. They make everything such a big damn deal, he thought, except for what is. Other people are overdramatic; they’re the deep ones. That’s how teenagers think, though. Any attempt to talk about it with them would just end in misunderstanding or ridicule that he’s making a big deal out of it. There’s a nice big juicy hypocrisy those perfect dimwits won’t admit to, he thought.
Tom reentered his car and left the parking lot.
The school was far behind Tom and his car, though its image still tainted a corner of his mirrors. He had no idea where he was going, or why he did what he did. He checked the car clock. His first period was a few minutes commenced, and his friends might have, at that time, noticed that he wasn’t there.
Tom watched both the landscape wave past him and his gas meter drop, and after what he guessed was about a half-hour of aimless wandering, he decided that there may be one person who would listen to what he’d convinced himself then to be the meaningless ramblings of some sad teenager.
Rachel lived about fifteen minutes from Tom’s school, but from where he had wandered to, he couldn’t tell how far she might be. She was a few years older than him, and out of school. Despite her being out of school, it wasn’t due to graduation. Her parents were more often than not absent from the house, either on the photography trips from which their income flowed, one of their unnecessary and perhaps prodigal vacations, or, as far as anyone besides they themselves could tell, missing in action.
Rachel had dropped out of school at about the same time in her career as Tom was experiencing then. The band in which she sung, whose name had changed faster than Tom could, or would find it beneficial to, keep up with, decided unanimously that it was going in a direction favorable enough to quit their day jobs. Rachel’s, of course, was school. While the band did make some money, and had existed for longer than most of its kind do, as far as an undiscriminating eye could tell, she was a derelict.
As much as Rachel was what most members of this society would describe as a screw-up, Tom reflected, she wasn’t by any means unintelligent, and for all the nineteen years of her life, he opined, she was far wiser than most of her elders, or at least the ones of which he was aware.
Tom figured that Rachel lived in the opposite direction from his escape route from his school, and so understood that he’d have to get close to it once more. A few minutes from the school, he parked at a gas station, looking for a phone to call Rachel. The place was soaked in countless mysterious puddles that Tom was sure did not contain only the water from the rain of the day before. He left his car and spotted a few phone booths on the side of the building. He approached and chose to use the one with the fewest obscenities scratched onto it. Wary of any nearby truant officers, he leaned against the booth cautiously after dropping some change in the slot and called his friend.
The phone rung perhaps six times, and then from the other end, a clattering sound and a host of less describable noises indicated Rachel’s attempt to pick up the phone. While Tom waited for her to finally speak, he poked a black spot on the filthy sidewalk with his shoe, in a bored attempt to determine its identity.
"Did this just ring?" Rachel, who was not trying to hide the fact that she’d just, for the most part, woken up, asked.
"Yeah, hi, it’s Tom," he responded after making a sign with his face that he’d known the conversation would start something like that.
Rachel’s sleep still clouded her mind, and so she skipped any greeting and instead returned, "Do you know what time it is?"
Tom paused to check his watch. "It’s almost nine."
"Well, I guess maybe I should get up," she sighed, and Tom could hear the rustling of cloth. "So, why exactly did you call me in the middle of the night?" She asked, the conversation finally beginning. Before Tom could respond, she added, "And why aren’t you at school?"
"My parents are at it again, and I didn’t want to talk to my friends about it," Tom explained, "But I can’t not talk about it."
"Well, as someone who you don’t consider a friend," Rachel began, not awaiting Tom’s inevitable explanation of his obvious meaning, "I’d be glad to hear it."
"Well, I’m coming over now," Tom notified her. "I’ll be there in about fifteen minutes."
"I’ll unlock the door," Rachel said. "See you."
Tom approached Rachel’s house; one floor, cracked driveway, crab-grassy lawn. Out of the corner of his eye, he spotted her next-door neighbor scowling from the window at him. He looked away and rolled his eyes, but immediately wished he’d done so in reverse.
The door was unlocked, and Tom called out for Rachel. There was no answer, so he decided boldly to enter further into the house. He walked cautiously through the not particularly, for that household, disheveled living room, and called again, hearing this time some stirring from her room. Her door was wide open, and Rachel was sprawled asleep and half off of her bed, wearing a long t-shirt of a fifteen-year-old band tour that had likely been her nightclothes and some jeans that were probably put on in her failed attempt to get up when he’d called her.
"Rachel!" Tom said again, sharply.
"Hm? Oh, Sorry!" She said, opening her upside-down eyes and heaving herself up on the bed.
"So, did you get up, go all the way to unlock your door, and then go back to sleep that fast?" Tom asked, astonished.
"Actually, I think the door was unlocked all night. I can’t remember leaving my room," Rachel responded. Tom sighed. "Hey, sorry about your parents." She remembered and sympathized.
"We can talk about that later," Tom returned, unwilling to discuss it with her while she was in such a state. "Do you want to go get some coffee or something? I’m surprised there aren’t any vultures in here."
"Coffee sounds necessary," Rachel said, sighing involuntarily as she ascended from her bed. "Let me just put on some shoes. Otherwise, I can go out in public like this. At least, I will."
The coffee place was nothing in particular, some national chain unworthy of note, but the two were tired, and a more individual brand of caffeine wouldn’t make much of a difference.
There were two employees there, one was mopping the floor after the messes of the earlier-morning group of customers, and one stood by the cash register. Before Tom and Rachel, the only two patrons there, entered completely, they caught the tail end of a very quickly halted but profanity-filled conversation. A radio was on somewhere, since the room was crooned by generic songs about generic things.
Rachel said to the cashier, "Can I just have a regular black coffee that’s not named anything weird, with nothing fancy on it, please?" as though she would have given her a cup of mercury otherwise.
"I guess I’ll have the same thing," Tom added from behind.
They took their coffee to an isolated table and were silent for a few seconds.
"I don’t know if I can take my parents anymore," Tom began, "They just don’t stop fighting. The only time they aren’t fighting is when one of them isn’t there. My mom left yesterday because of some fight about my dad’s alcoholism, and then last night, my dad pulled a Poe and is probably still passed out, if he’s not dead."
"I’m sorry, Tom," Rachel responded, "I wish I could do something besides listen."
"I appreciate it. Our friends my age wouldn’t. Whenever I– whenever anyone wants to talk about bad things that happened to them, the rest of them just chalk it up to some bored, attention-starved teenager who wants something dramatic in their life to make it seem worthwhile."
"Well, Tom, that might be true. Maybe they do it, though, because they know themselves to be those attention-starved teenagers whose only hope at feeling important is to belittle the problems of their friends so that theirs seem huge in comparison."
"It’s horrible, the way things are. It shouldn’t be like that."
Rachel said nothing for a moment, but broke the silence by replying, "But your problems are valid. Immature fighting parents are something people go to therapy and court for. What are our friends’ ‘problems’? They asked someone to the prom who didn’t want to go? They got plastered and their parents added an hour to their curfew?"
"Your accuracy is uncanny," Tom opined. "They make such a huge deal out of every event that they determine to be an injustice just because they’re not getting what they want. They don’t have any focus; they don’t know what’s important. They’re all just slaves to themselves and simplicity."
"What, exactly, is important, then?" Rachel asked. "I mean, certainly not what you’re telling me what they get hung up about, but what should they be doing?"
"They should at least care about something! Maybe it’s not that they don’t know what’s important, it’s just that they don’t care! No one does! People find plasma screen TV’s and wrinkle remover increasingly imperative and then forget about how empty their lives are until they’re just embittered shells of what once were human beings."
"Tom, they’re teenagers. None of us know what’s important. Do you?"
"At least I try to figure it out! But no one rewards that. People are rewarded for beauty and greed."
"That only happens to a point. They punish themselves just by the nature of their actions and desires," Rachel returned, "They don’t know what’s good for them, and so never find it. They might get money and friends, but they can’t enjoy them. How can they? They can’t even enjoy themselves."
"That’s a generalization," Tom refuted, "People can ignore themselves and be completely happy. Hell, those people hate what’s inside anyway; ignoring what you hate is logically nothing but relief."
"That might be so, but relief from yourself can’t possibly last. Here’s my theory: your friends are normal teenagers, and don’t take this as a baseless flattery, but you’ve grown up too fast to enjoy the pleasures of superficiality."
"Maybe you’re right." Tom said flatly, obviously not having absorbed any respite. Rachel wasn’t one for white lies, though.
Their coffees had been barely touched, and in simultaneous realization, they both took a sip.
There was a silence for a few seconds before Tom broke it, saying, "I just wish my friends weren’t vegetables. And that my parents weren’t drunks. Why are we, after being born without our consent, expected to be grateful for all the suffering and work necessary for life?"
"What are you comparing the suffering and work to?" Rachel asked, beginning an attempt to reason with him. "The utter void you were ripped from seventeen years ago? Compared to nothing, of course you experience a colossal amount of pain. Your pain is infinite compared to nothing. But, if you think optimistically for even a second, you’ll see that everything is infinite compared to nothing. Comparing unhappy things to nothing is a biased way of thought, since you’re not comparing, say, the happy things to nothing. Just as the unhappy things are infinite compared to nothing, so too are the happy things. Everything is."
"But I’m not comparing it to nothing. I’m saying that if I’m forced to be born, what’s the justice in being forced to do anything else? I didn’t ask to be born. That’s not my fault. It’s like drafting a coward and not understanding why he doesn’t want to fight."
Rachel listened, giving her coffee a few more sips. "What are you comparing your suffering and work to, then?"
"I guess I’m just comparing it to how I want life to be. That’s no good, though, since I have nothing actual to compare what I want life to be to. It’s a baseless grounds I guess I fall through a lot."
Tom’s coffee was still both hot and full, so again he began another conversation. "My parents fight like children," he said, taking a sip to clue Rachel that his short mention was all he wanted to say before she responded. It looked like the comment was too general for her, however, so her silence roused him to elaborate. "They can barely take care of themselves, and they expect me to be dependent on them. My mom left my dad, no one knows where she went, and now he’s drinking again. I’m sick of the damn cycle they go through. I wish they’d grow up."
Little could be replied on Rachel’s part, but she scraped up something not quite as useful as she’d hoped. "You could live with me for a while, if you wanted," she offered halfheartedly.
"Thanks," Tom said, knowing as well as she that it was an idle offer. "But that wouldn’t solve anything. They’re out of control now."
There was another silence. "You know what’s a comforting thought?" he began again. Rachel affirmed that she did not. "All of the suffering we were talking about isn’t really necessary at all. At any time, really, you can do anything you want. Sure, there’ll be consequences, but in a completely spontaneous and physical sense, you can do anything. I could hop up on this table and yell my lungs out onto it. I could commit a murder. We can all do so much, but we’re all frightened of what might happen. If you wanted to, you could just walk away. Right now, even, one of us could get up and just leave. I wouldn’t have to tell anybody, or say anything, or even have a plan, I could just get up and leave my life. It’s in my physical capabilities completely.
So much that seems vital in life just doesn’t have to matter: friends, romance, a job, really, anything you want. It’s your life. Does all of that matter? We all end up in the same place anyway. Is the time and pain that goes into procuring all those things worth it? You have to suffer either way, why not suffer doing what you choose? People think that they have no control over their lives. Given, that much control over your life would probably ruin it, but what’s one ruined life to the entire world?"
"You wouldn’t last a week," Rachel reasoned, "One ruined life isn’t much to the world, but it is to the life. Tom, you’re a teenager. Face it. You just don’t know what’s out there. People can and do enjoy their lives by getting a job, by getting married, by having kids, by dying. Do something where relative safety is guaranteed but happiness isn’t, not something where they’re both up in the air."
"It’s not even about happiness. It’s about freedom. We all think that we have to get a nice-paying job, and a house, and a life partner. People are terrified of the alternative. We don’t know what to do with ourselves, so we hide behind something we think works. But as my parents can tell you without even trying, life isn’t perfect, no matter what you do. Why do something you think works and then fail at it? ‘Doing whatever you want’ to most people is going on vacation, or getting their nails done. Is that really what satisfies people? To me, ‘doing whatever you want’ is having ultimate control over every aspect of your life, doing whatever you want to change it, for better or for worse. If you want to destroy your life because you’re sick of it, go right the hell ahead. It’s your life. And leaving your home, your school, your every previous ritual behind despite the fact that suffering is almost guaranteed to result is the apex, I think, of that complete control."
"You said suffering was unfair, Tom," Rachel reminded him. "You said that you aren’t in control of whether you’re born or not, and that further suffering was unjust. Personally, I think that’s a load of bullshit, but nonetheless, you said it."
"It’s different if I cause the suffering. I am in control, in a case like that. I’m the one who caused it, I’m the one who decided that the suffering I cause myself is more just than the suffering others cause me.
"My parents make me suffer. They make each other suffer. They make themselves suffer. I’ve been over this. I don’t care what they do to themselves, that suffering is just. But they make everyone else feel what they feel. This is what is unjust. I feel the only fair thing to do is to stop them from making me suffer. Controlling my life, even if by replacing how unhappy they make me with how unhappy I make myself, is favorable to being stomped on without even a say."
"You don’t have to ruin your life to be in control of it." Rachel pushed herself into the conversation Tom was having almost with himself. "What about your art?"
"What about it?"
"You have complete control over that. You can go places with that. If you succeed with your art, isn’t that control? You’ve allowed a major catharsis to bring you income. A scenario like that means not only that you have control, at least emotionally, which is what I assume you mean, over your own life, but that you’ve done it without failing at it. Leaving your life now would be premature, you’re not even finished high school. Give a guarantee of safety at least a chance before wandering off in search of what you probably just need to wait for to find. Maybe making money off of your emotions is a shallow endeavor, but will you ever know for sure what will happen if you go now? You’re a particularly bored suburbanite teenager, hell, so am I, and believe me, I hate to sound like a guidance counselor, but be patient; give life a chance."
"Well, it was just a comforting thought."
They left the café and threw out their coffees mostly full.
The two of them climbed speechlessly into his car, and without asking, Tom began to drive Rachel home. A few minutes into the car ride, there was speech once more.
"If you’re seriously thinking about it," Rachel said, revealing what she’d been thinking about during the break in conversation, "Don’t run away."
"I said it was just a comforting thought, Rachel. It’s really not a big deal. You wanted to go home, right?" He reassured and asked her respectively.
"I have to go home, I have practice in a few hours and I’m still tired. I just brought it up again because I was thinking about this stupid time I had a couple years ago."
There was no sense in not hearing it, Tom decided, and so he said, "What time was that?"
"Well, when I was fourteen, I think, my boyfriend got in trouble with the police. I think he got busted hard for drugs, but in the frenzy of the circumstances, I never really figured out what exactly he did. I knew he didn’t use anything; well, nothing hard, but he sold meth to a lot of creeps at school. He didn’t go there, but I’m not sure if it was because he was just truant all the time or he was too old.
"But anyway, he got in trouble one night in November, just a few hours after he dropped me off at his house, and I was asleep. He scared the hell out of me, Tom. He knocked hard on my window, and I thought he was a wandering lunatic for a lot longer than I should have. I opened the window when I recognized him, and he crawled in quietly, and told me that we had to get out of town that very minute.
"I had a feeling there’d be trouble if I didn’t go with him, but I persuaded him to give me ten minutes to pack, and for the duration, he hid low and told me to keep my room light off. All the money I had at the time was about forty dollars, and he had even less than that.
"We got in his car, which looked like it was parked by a dog, not utilizing the driveway as much as the lawn, and he started to drive towards Philadelphia. I asked him what was happening and why they had to get out of town on the way, but he was either too scared or too high to answer conclusively. I decided to wait, and when we got into Philadelphia, he wanted to ditch the car. I would have been okay with the decision if we weren’t in such a horrible little corner of the city. He parked on the side of the road and left the keys in the door so somebody would steal it, which someone did almost before we even left completely. We had to walk, but to where he kept very secret from me.
"We found our way into a parking garage, at which point, he met some of what I guessed to be his colleagues in meth distribution. There were two of them, and I never learned either of their names, or much of anything else, because he didn’t even tell them what the story was, or why he was there. However, they had a plan and everything: where to stay, what to do, how long to be there, so I guessed he got to them and explained first.
"Anyway, his friends, who might have killed me or worse if I wasn’t with who I was with, assumed I was staying with him, and these were people I didn’t want to piss off by asking not to, so I agreed to the terms. There wasn’t much of a way out, but it was at least possible, I found, to escape from him and his untidy friends. They all lived in a repugnant little apartment close by, and I decided to make a quiet escape once they all fell asleep. At this point it might have been three or four in the morning, I was in the ghetto, and I had money on me. That was a worse combination than the Hindenburg and New Jersey, Tom, but I had no choice.
"I discovered soon after that that there was another complication in my plan: my boyfriend might not have used meth, but his buddies sure did. They were awake all night. Good thing is, their insane elations made them pretty easy to deal with and sort of low on judgment. Maybe an hour after my boyfriend fell asleep, I built up enough courage and knowledge of the others’ basic current demeanors to walk out of our bedroom, or what we decided to call a bedroom, but would more accurately be described as a cube with a ragged mattress in the center and the tangible literary and artistic effects of every namable drug all over the walls.
"They asked where I was going, and for this I was prepared somewhat. A cigarette, I told them. Of course, it figures that at least one of them smoked, too. A girl maybe a little older than I am with a brightly and oddly colored and shaped head of hair and an arm full of tattoos and what looked a lot like track marks said she’d come with me in a particularly frantic but jovial voice. Of course, I couldn’t refuse, not just then, and we walked down a few steps to the street below.
"I offered her a cigarette casually but in my head frantically searched for any diversion that would allow me flight. All I could think of was to look over the girl’s shoulder, widen my eyes, point, and yell ‘holy shit,’ or something, but that would buy me what – four seconds? And then where would I be even if that careless scheme succeeded but a bad neighborhood in the middle of the night. That was no good.
"While we were outside, we made small talk, and my salvation was an offhand remark that my companion explained, that if a police car drove by, we’d have to get off of the street. As happy in the apartment her drug had made her, on the street, upon which was accumulating thin layers of snow, she was all paranoia. Obviously, I used this to my advantage the first chance I got, and during a lull in the conversation I histrionically perked up my ears and told her that I heard police sirens. She bought it, the dupe, and disappeared back into the apartment without another word, not even for me to follow.
"So I began to run the way my boyfriend and I’d come. Turned out, not too surprisingly in an area like that, that a police car did appear, a few blocks from the apartment. The police officer pulled over – I looked suspicious and I knew it – and I told him that somebody tried to kidnap me but I escaped. I gave him a fake identification of the kidnapper, a fake name and a fake address, which was a few blocks from my real house, and he dropped me off there after a pretty tense drive, at least for me. I was thinking he’d try to talk to my parents, who, like me, didn’t live at the house I told him.
"So that’s what happened when I ran away, and I even actually prepared for it and had a car and everything, not like how you explained."
"You have got to be kidding me," Tom stammered once Rachel had finally finished. "You can’t possibly just rattle a true story off like that. No one can. You can’t be serious," he verbalized his confusion in a fitting manner.
"Believe it or not, Tom, your choice. I don’t care, I’m just warning you what can happen. Hell, I was lucky. Just think about my story, okay?" She pleaded.
No sooner had Rachel said this than they arrived at her house and she climbed out of the car. "Thanks for the coffee," she told him "Thanks for the story," Tom replied, "But seriously, you don’t have to worry about me."
And so it was just Tom once more. He wasn’t sure he made his story and reasons perfectly clear to Rachel, when he thought about it. Control, what he’d said to her, was one thing, but change, what he didn’t, was another. The two were correlated, of course: he not only involuntarily gave up the control of his life to the rest of the world, but he could predict what the rest of the world would do with it. That was more aggravating than if they were independent of each other and Tom had just gone completely onto a digression with Rachel. He’d been unable to make clear the fact to her when he had the chance, and couldn’t help but let bother him that there still stuck to his mind something that hadn’t yet been spilled, but nevertheless, the rut in which he was fixed would cave in on itself – maybe him too – if he ventured such a drastic change.
Tom’s friends would probably try to get a hold of him after school. When he dropped off Rachel, it was a little past eleven, and so he had a few hours until they would begin to harry him. Maybe, he thought, he shouldn’t think like that. They want to entertain him, after all; it’s his own fault if he doesn’t enjoy it. And what’s the alternative? Staying home alone with his drunken dad? What was he thinking? Just pondering his other options for spending his Friday night besides in the normal human fashion got him excited for the tradition he’d previously dreaded.
But what to do until his friends left school? Tom only had a few dollars in his wallet, and his car’s gas tank was half empty, and so there was little to do but go back home. He drove once more past his school, through which he could see a horde of students scurry, their activities marking some sort of shift change.
Tom’s vehicle wandered past the lumpy Pennsylvanian countryside on the way to his house, and Tom wondered, again, whether the night would be different. If he stayed home, he knew it would be different. He knew his dad would be there in a state that would suggest a serious mental disorder, and that they’d be the only ones in the house. There was no factual evidence that his mother hadn’t returned, but as with the so cyclical actions in which his parents engaged, the evidence was there all the same. Maybe it wouldn’t be that different after all. With his friends, on the other hand, it would be the same, and his friends would perhaps either be or strive to be in a state similar to his father’s. He wouldn’t be able to talk to them, since they’d perhaps be discussing the minutiae of themselves or others, or of perhaps nothing at all.
Tom approached his neighborhood, but continued driving past it. There would be nothing to gain from a night with his dad. Admittedly, he reasoned, there was almost assuredly nothing to gain from a night with his friends either, but at there was always a chance with that.
Tom ended up getting fast food for lunch, eating it silently on the premises, an event so mundane he nearly forgot about it before he was finished. He loitered in his car for a time, hands on the steering wheel and the radio turned on low, both before and after his meal, to eat up time. It took long enough – school was over – and he turned on his cell phone, awaiting a call. Very quickly after that, his telephone rung. It wasn’t who he expected: it was his house, but Tom answered anyway, with nothing more ordinary than "Hello?"
"Tom? Get home, now!" It was, logically, his father, who seemed not to have been drinking for the past several hours, though in a case such as cutting school, unhindered cognition on the part of those to whom it mattered wasn’t a favorable situation for those to whom it didn’t.
"What for?" Tom asked in an attempt to be sure the two were on the same page, or rather, in an attempt to see if they weren’t.
"Decided not to go to school today? Don’t you know that the school checks that?"
"I figured you weren’t in any condition to remember what the names of all the colors were, much less answer the phone and understand what’s coming out of it."
"Don’t you talk to me like that. Just get home. You’re grounded."
Well, he sure wasn’t drunk anymore, Tom figured optimistically. He was pissed off thought, and Tom’s almost yearlong record without being grounded was broken.
The last time Tom was grounded, about ten months before, was when he’d gotten careless about his drug use that had since tapered off. It had, just like this time, been the second half of a Friday, only much later.
A friend of his, Kyle, had purchased a respectable quantity of pot and invited Tom to share it with him. Kyle had a car, but Tom was driving while his companion preoccupied himself with preparing it for consumption and simultaneously called a web of their other friends, and then acquaintances, and then strangers, at least to Tom, to see if they could engage in it at their house. Tom’s parents were, happily for them, recently reunited after a fight, but this meant that he couldn’t use the house, in any case. Kyle’s family stood watch over their house at all times. There was, Tom recalls being told, never a time when Kyle’s house was empty since its creation. Of course, that could have been an exaggeration, but for all intents and purposes, Kyle’s house was off limits as well.
It turned out that no one would let them use their house, but another of Tom’s friends, Catherine, had sneaked into their plans by promising to show them a place at a park that they could utilize.
The search for a location was entirely more effort than, Tom decided in retrospect, it was worth. It took almost two hours and a great deal of gasoline to even make the plan for where to go.
They picked up Catherine, and – Tom felt like he could shudder – traveled only about two miles from a police station to their destination. The park was expansive, but no matter where therein you went, constant police sirens would serenade the air more than even the birds would.
And so the three of them walked around the park for almost a half-hour before getting anything over with, hearts violently pummeling ribcages, prayers hastily mumbled every time a police car sounded. Catherine led them into a bushy area through which little could be seen. The time of year numbed their fingers, afterwards cracking them after repeated use of Catherine’s poorly assembled lighter. The more they used, the slower and slower they went, the plant taking obvious effect on their actions, and before they were finished, without even realizing it, they’d been sitting in the mud for over an hour, and it had gotten almost completely dark. Besides that, the three of them had forgotten to keep their voices down.
Despite the endless sirens, or what should have been an automatic and extended-release dosage of fear, they’d been louder than they should have. Consequences were swift: a middle-aged hiker had smelled not only some suspicious doings, and had called the very close-by authorities. Luckily, in the labyrinthine and self-similar park it was difficult to describe and discover any one place, especially when depicted over the phone by someone in the middle of it. As indiscrete as were the group at hiding their activities, so indiscrete was the hiker in ratting them out. Tom, Kyle, and Catherine very speedily retreated into Kyle’s car, and they decided it would be safest to part ways, so the three of them were driven home.
In their frightened and haste, Tom had forgotten to conceal the smell in which his body had been wreathed for almost two hours. His parents, who hadn’t expected him home so early, approached him, smelling what could perhaps not have been disguised at that point anyway.
Tom couldn’t remember exactly what had happened, but he knew he made his mother cry and his father yell. He was grounded, for how long escaped him, and his parents became much more nosy, not, of course, without justification. The thought of causing so much trouble, when it was fresh, caused him much anguish, but it had staled, and, despite remembrance of so much in so little time, Tom felt close to nothing.
Once again, he approached his house, this time returning there instead of leaving, even though he did have half a mind to keep his dad waiting. There was nothing more he could do, though. His father stood directly by the driveway; there was, though he wasn’t looking, no way through to the house that the man would miss.
Tom had barely gotten into the driveway before his father advanced on the vehicle. "What were you doing all day?" Tom’s father snapped. "Are you on drugs again?" He wanted to think of his father as acting like a lunatic very badly, searching in his mind desperately for any justification to do so.
Sure, Stanley was overreacting. To his son having disappeared for several hours? Not at all. Well, he didn’t have to accuse him of something he wasn’t doing anymore. Then again, Tom didn’t tell anyone that he wasn’t using drugs anymore because when he got in trouble the last time, he’d continued, thereby damning him to admit that he’d done so if ever at a later date he’d want to tell them he’d quit truthfully. Well, that’s true, but what kind of nut stands outside to wait for someone to come home, and then immediately begins rattling off accusations? Why, the father of someone who’d just vanished illegally. Well, maybe he did vanish, but wasn’t it to escape a father who he couldn’t take anymore? No, school would have taken care of that. It was to escape from friends he didn’t feel like talking to.
Despite his thorough search, Tom found nothing except the blame falling squarely upon himself. His father was guilty of something, but it had nothing to do with this.
"I got some coffee, then some lunch, then you called. I didn’t do anything," Tom simplistically replied. He knew even better than his dad did that the blame was his own, but he nevertheless unconsciously gave off an air of annoyed indifference at a false accusation.
Tom walked past his father into the house. "Don’t you walk away from me. Why did you just disappear? Do you know how worried I was?" Stanley spat.
"I didn’t think you’d mind. Frankly, I was surprised you could even answer the phone, in your state." Tom returned, perhaps justifying only why he thought he could get away with it.
"Don’t you make this personal, Thomas," Stanley argued. "Just go to your room. You had your moment of freedom."
That one hurt: his ‘moment of freedom’. This is how freedom, even a moment of it, was received: by much more than a moment of a lack thereof. Perhaps he deserved it. He wasn’t being punished, as Stanley had made it seem, for being free, he was being punished for worrying his father. But why was his father worried? Tom didn’t ask to be born, but Stanley had had him on his own free will. If he didn’t want to be worried, he shouldn’t have had kids.
Stanley quietly ushered Tom in once they both realized that no tension would be relieved by a furtherance of their conversation. Tom passed his father and hastily cloistered himself in his room in comprehension that he’d have to get used to being in there for a while.
Tom once more illuminated his room, but he decided against light for the moment and the room was gray again. He lay on his bed and scanned, as he had a day before, the drawings on the wall. "A major catharsis?" Tom found himself asking out loud in memory of his and Rachel’s previous conversation. It wasn’t anything of the kind. The drawings weren’t even all his. He had no catharsis. They were distractions.
The mushroom cloud was the centerpiece, and he’d completed it in about a week during the past summer. He’d been losing sleep, over what, he could not recall, which, he supposed, was his aim. He’d purchased a canvas, brushes, and paint from all different stores despite the fact that all three items were at all three businesses. The whole grocery list cost over one hundred dollars, and Tom, having only about twenty at the time, desperately thieved from his parents as though he needed canvas and paint to feed his starving children.
The painting did nothing for his insomnia any more than a shot of adrenaline would have. There was a frenzy in his work; he spent all day and hours into night making every detail perfect, though, even then, he had no set decision as to what perfect was, thereby causing every stroke to be a sweat-calling deliberation.
Neither had he any idea what he was painting until well into it, and the rather barren, generic ground upon which he’d detonated the atom bomb was emblematic of this indecision. The subject of the painting, he’d felt, could wait, it was the action itself he was after.
Once the painting had been completed, after six days of nothing but it, his parents, standing by while his days were absorbed in the solitary activity, asked if they could see it. He had no choice, and they all knew it, though he didn’t want them to have anything to do with it. They told him how great it was, but that it was a little violent. What the hell did he care? He didn’t make it for them. They were the ones that wanted to see it in the first place; he was against that in the beginning. It’s ridiculous, Tom thought, how art is just assumed to be for mass public gawking and further unrequested criticism.
They’d been in his room, where he’d felt a sanctuary from not only his thoughts during the mind-consuming effort it took the make what in retrospect was a rather mediocre piece of work but from them as well. He didn’t want them to look at it because of how little it had to do with them. It was his, the days, the nights, every stroke, they were all his, and his parents were taking them all away from him in their simplistic, perhaps feigned, interest in the picture that it almost seemed they wanted to magnet onto the refrigerator.
Tom took the painting off of the wall and put his foot through it.
Without really remembering having ever gone to sleep, Tom awoke from a dream, at whose apex was its end, a while later. It was dark. A scan of his clock revealed his having slept for almost six hours; it was nearly ten o’clock, when he usually went to bed. Tom groaned. A nap like that wouldn’t take well to any more sleep for a very long time. On several occasions where preceded huge slumbers, Tom stayed up for hours, perhaps not returning to unconsciousness soon enough and being forced to reel through a day on no substantial sleep at all. These days were often during the week, and at school, Tom would notice an almost magnetic attraction of his head to his desk. This, however, was a Friday night. Who knew what he was missing.
Tom decided early to give up on sleeping that night, since fighting for stillness seemed like a futile oxymoron to him, and doing such hadn’t ever before gotten him to where he wanted to be anyway. He looked upon his wrecked painting and muttered, "Idiot," to himself. The realistic takeover of sleep had made him forget what it had also calmed him enough to look at objectively once he’d gotten up. A few seconds’ fit of disgust had destroyed a week’s fit of diversion. It was already destroyed.
There was a commotion from downstairs. Tom perked his ears to the sound of Stanley lurching up towards his room. He sighed angrily, having predicted already his father’s state. It wasn’t the first time Stanley had been drunk around him but still deadly conscious, no, but it had been a while since he’d let himself drink at all. He had a good run, Tom thought, but it’s a shame that it wasn’t a very long run.
"Tom?" His father listlessly called from outside his door before knocking palpitantly upon it. "Can I come in?" Tom could almost smell Stanley’s pungent doings even before he entered.
"What do you want, dad?" Tom filtered through his teeth. He rose from his bed, preparing for whatever the imbecile had up his sleeve.
"I just want to talk to you for a minute," Stanley answered in the same manner as he had asked. Without waiting for an answer, he opened the door. "I didn’t mean to be such an asshole before, Thomas, I’m sorry!" He apologetically offered.
"Get out of my room, dad," Tom commanded, though if Stanley were more aware of his surroundings, he may have been able to pick up a tinge of pleading. "You’re drunk. I don’t want to hear an excuse, but let’s both make it clear that a drunken father should keep away from his kid."
"Oh, Tom, I’m sorry," he advanced further into his son’s room. Tom rolled his eyes furiously. "I don’t mean to be such a bad guy, It’s just that right now your mother and I are going through a rough patch –"
"You’ve been going through a rough patch for as long as I’ve lived," Tom interrupted. "And, dad, if you wanted to talk to me about it, maybe it would have been a good idea to do it when you can think. Get out of my room, now."
Not only didn’t Stanley leave, but he came closer, sitting on the bed while Tom kept his distance. "Please forgive me, Tom, I love you," his father’s slurring increased at so rapid a pace that the first word in the sentence was noticeably shorter than the last. "I just want to make you happy," he began to cry.
"Oh, God…" Tom recoiled. "Dad, really, if you want to make me happy, and you’re not just blurting out a drunken boast, you’ll get the hell out of my room and sleep that crap off, okay? Please," If Tom wasn’t pleading before, he sure was now.
"Don’t make me go, I think we’re really getting somewhere, son!" Tom’s father mumbled. "We don’t have quality time like this enough!" He seemed genuinely excited about it.
"If barging drunkenly into my room at night and refusing to leave is your idea of quality time, I should shudder to think what you think a painful time is. You see, I thought an event like this would plague me for the rest of my days, but you know what, dad?" Tom paused for a moment, waiting obviously, even for his father, for a response.
"What’s that, son?" Stanley predictably responded.
"You’re just not worth getting upset about." Tom didn’t think about how his father would react, but even had he, he certainly wouldn’t have predicted what it was.
"Oh, Tom," Stanley said jovially, "You forgive me?"
"I don’t think you understand," Tom said in a tone suggesting that he’d been forced through strange circumstances to have to explain himself to a cat. "Despite your best efforts, you can’t screw with my head. You’ve past that stage. You’ve made me pretty angry, and I’m hoping you pass the hell out soon, but I’m not upset. I won’t waste my time, especially since you won’t even remember this when your brain in throbbing out of all the holes in your head tomorrow."
"I won’t forget this, Thomas! Thank you, I love you…" Stanley passed out only a few seconds after Tom had made his wishes clear. Perfect, Tom thought, his last words to him were "I love you." How sweet, he thought. The drunken bastard hadn’t said that he loved anyone for as long as he had walked the earth, but he says it now. That was worse than "I hate you." At least that would have had the potential for truth. The words he did speak were excruciatingly obviously the ravings of a drunk.
Tom poked his snoring father a few times with his foot, and, once he’d determined that the bloated lush was thoroughly unconscious, he rolled him off of the bed. He effortfully pulled out of his room Stanley by the legs, at which Stanley groaned somewhat, but did not awaken. He brought him into his own room, where lay about five bottles of different beverages, some half-full, some empty, but none untested. By the smell of his room, Tom figured that Stanley hadn’t showered or cleaned up any biological messes he’d made. Tom, too disgusted with the place, left Stanley on the floor in the middle of his room; just another mystery from the night of a blackout.
Tom returned to his room, but had the afterthought to wash his hands after handling his father. Extra sanitation couldn’t hurt with so unsanitary a man.
He told Stanley how he wasn’t upset, but not to make him feel better. God, no, if his father thought that, which Tom was sure he had, he’d failed his task. You just can’t win with drunks. He said it to make himself feel better, and if it bothered his dad, that was only a bonus. He didn’t really think so. You can’t forget something like that, he supposed. It did upset him. He was alone in his house with that man, and he’d only have to continue being around him for however long his mother remembered how what Tom was feeling felt.
Tom pondered as to whether he’d turned Stanley on his side in case of a very probable and perhaps imminent gastric deluge. He didn’t check, however.
Tom made up his mind about one thing. He didn’t have the strength to stay with his father any longer. And who could he talk about it this late? If he was having trouble getting to sleep before, it was impossible, now.
His home life finally lost all appeal. He couldn’t even control his own solitude, not when his dad decides to crash in and have to be dragged out by his feet. But where could he stay? Rachel’s house? No, Rachel didn’t want him there, he knew that. His other friends weren’t worth considering. Tom couldn’t even imagine what they would talk to him about, but he knew it wouldn’t be about his father. Hell, they wouldn’t take him, either. And even if they did, his father would certainly have a lapse in responsibility and find him and take him home anyway.
What about a social worker? They would take Tom out of the disgusting clutches of his parents. But what after that? Another family? Some sort of sanctuary? Tom didn’t want to know. He wanted to be free of people. No one of them would help him. Maybe they just couldn’t. Maybe he didn’t want help. He just wanted to be independent. Those that knew him kept him where he was with their desire for him to stay, or more accurately, their learned unhappiness if he were to leave. But it wasn’t his fault. He didn’t ask them to want him to stay. And what if he did? He would give people who don’t care about him the opportunity to continue not to do so. There was no justice in that.
What would happen, even if they did suddenly begin to care about him, afterwards? A fortune wasted on a college education that led him on to the dream of his becoming an artist professionally, followed by an attempt to reach that dream, then the dream being dashed due to his unbridled mediocrity, then settling for a trade that had perhaps or perhaps not something to do with the art with which he so wished he could envelop himself. The trade would follow him the rest of his life, if he was lucky, and maybe he’d get married in the meantime, maybe have kids, and add more and more complications to his life until he dies of a stress-induced heart attack, if not from the Russian roulette of a cancer he had little control over anyway, another faceless slave to the terror that the unknown, that real freedom, would happily devour him if he gave it the chance.
Would he be happy if he followed that route? Maybe he would. People have had fulfilling lives with no particular uniqueness to them. Then again, what are cheap psychiatrists and relaxation tapes for? Maybe life wouldn’t be so sunny.
But what was there if he veered off the route? What would he find but starvation, homelessness, isolation, and homicide? That’s the life of a wild animal. But was that even a guarantee? Wasn’t that the terror of the slave to the safe? Perhaps true freedom is impossible. Perhaps in either staying or going there are factors that will lead us to misery. Perhaps none of us can be free from misery. But, Tom though, reminding himself of his current state, perhaps not. He hadn’t much to lose by going, and he sure would be free from something if he did.
III.
As far as anyone could tell the next day, Tom had disappeared with only the clothes on his back. He hadn’t thought his escape through at all thoroughly, having not packed for even a moment. He had, once he’d made his decision, walked, without money, clothes, identification, or even a plan as to where he would travel, out of his home. The only complete forethoughts to his vanishing were to put on his shoes, and, just before he left, beginning to write a note of explanation. However, he didn’t even finish the first sentence before crumpling it up and throwing it away.
Tom had gotten out of his bed and walked down the stairs, a blank but determined stare pasted onto his face. He’d opened the door and left the house. He’d walked across the front lawn and, without any sort of knowledge of its terminus, began down the road to the left. This was his first choice, an arbitrary, pointless choice, but one that made all the difference in the world. The definitive option had been as carelessly decided as which channel to watch on TV.
As Tom ventured further from his home, he saw around him all of the features he had always seen, his school, familiar neighborhoods, restaurants. These though, were seen in so new a light; he never had to associate with any of them again. The rut in which they’d been unforgivably correlated no longer had the sting when he looked upon them. They were not a part of his life anymore.
Very little, Tom realized, was a part of his life anymore. He had his clothes and empty pockets. His at that point about fifteen minute walk away from what he had carefully guessed to be the direction to his house had given him time to assess the situation. He would surely get into a mess if he continued on. But Tom saw no reason why it was morally or socially wrong to do so. His parents probably wouldn’t even notice that he’d left for a few days anyway, his mother especially, since, unless she returned soon which Tom doubted she would, there was almost no hope, her being up to date being at the mercy of a drunk with the maturity of a twelve year old, and, in turn, his being up to date being at the mercy of his own oblivious nature. Tom almost screamed in relief when he recognized that he did not have to worry anymore about his parents. They were, as he’d previously noticed, not a part of his life any longer, as so little was.
Tom became every so often frightened of what he may have been about to get himself into, and even once the fear moved him so far that he turned his body completely around to return to his house, but before even taking a step, he turned around once more. There was no returning to what he’d left. He almost froze when he just thought about it, and when he turned around, all that had made him leave shot at him like an angry maniac. Perhaps there was a very simple physical chance of a return to his life, but that amounted to nothing when the rest of him genuinely longed for emancipation.
It was past eleven when Tom got to a intersection usually riparian with its flow of cars, the hour now having dried it up. On several occasions, he’d braved the confluence during the afternoon, when the most traffic spilled from all corners, to walk from his school to his home or vice versa, for whatever reason. It would take twice as long to get from one side to its diagonal in that one intersection than the rest of the entire walk. This time, however, Tom walked directly in the center of the square with no threat of death whatsoever.
There were so many options Tom could take, he observed. If he kept walking straight, he would find himself in a rural and sparse part of the state, what Tom decided was the western nothing of Pennsylvania by which he would get to nowhere but Ohio. Left or right, he recalled, would take him to more and more suburbia, nothing different except a school district for miles and miles and miles. That, of course, was out of the question.
There projected a little exit, however, directly off of the rightmost route. That one, as inconspicuous as it seemed to make itself, led to Philadelphia. It was surprising how the many passages to nowhere overshadowed the one passage to the biggest city Tom had ever known, the great labyrinth through which one could wind for hours without once finding a decrease in urbanity. That was to be Tom’s goal.
The very notion Rachel had warned against both generally and specifically was that very one that he decided upon. She didn’t even understand his problem. Perhaps he didn’t either, but this freedom, the overwhelming ability to truly go – or at least begin to go – anywhere he wanted to, was the first step, he thought, in the right direction.
Tom moved to the exit and walked upon the highway. Though he saw that it too was sparsely traveled, that fact was here an anomaly. There was a high concrete divider in the center of the highway that he walked against for a few yards. However, Tom realized that if someone were to see him, they might bring him back to where he came from. Tom moved across the highway and jumped over the other divider to a sidewalk-width rocky area under a forested one that acted for all intents and purposes as a shoulder.
The rain that had soaked the earth hadn’t yet dried up, and Tom trudged through mud and puddles that the darkness above which concealed almost completely. He checked behind himself, and on the road, there was a burst of traffic, the only one during his entire walk: a car, a sixteen-wheeler, a car, a car. Before, there was almost utter silence, but during, there were myriad sudden lights and sounds, but Tom could find them nothing but soothing after the endless parade of footsteps, the only noise he’d heard for well over an hour. The stimuli, as they had so appeared, petered out as they passed Tom, and again silence returned to the area.
There, past the highway, past the few trees beyond the highway, past an inhabited valley beyond the trees, and upon a hill beyond the inhabited valley there blinked the disembodied red lights of a set of night-concealed radio towers. The lights seemed like an unhealthy wall of stars in front of the natural white ones, and Tom did not look away from the anomalies for some time. What broke his stare broke also the silence; his watch heralded the hour, one o’clock, with a piercing alarm. He almost immediately pressed the correct button and walked on, looking forward into the gloom.
There was, perhaps, not for miles, a person outside. Of course, they passed every so often in cars, but someone upon whom rain could drop was likely a rarity in a place like that. Tom wondered how utter his solitude at that moment really was, relishing the fact that in the city he would never be alone. Maybe, he thought, that wouldn’t be so fortunate. He’d always had trouble with other people. Besides the fact that he wasn’t greatly fond of his friends, and nor of his parents, though for good reason, he’d never had a romantic relationship, nor much of a desire for one. Until he was perhaps ten or eleven, Tom hadn’t even had many normal friends at all. Before then, he’d never had more than one friend a year, an ephemeral, temporary one, since he’d started school. The two of them wouldn’t ever associate outside of school, almost as a rule. His parents worried every so often about his underdeveloped relationship with his peers and would occasionally initiate long uncomfortable talks about the situation with him. He’d assure them that he was fine, but even after years of being fine, they’d never relent. It became clear, at least to Tom, that his finding friends was more for them than for him.
When he started middle school, Tom finally decided that if he were subjected to any more of the speeches he’d begin to lose neurons, and so made attempts to correlate with others. Superficial similarities were, as always, the main, if not the only, causes for the friendships. Tom would agree on the music to be put on or affirm his approval of a book with his friends, but beyond events like those, they were strangers to each other. Speaking with them was initially almost insurmountably difficult, both parties awkwardly testing through trial and error every possible venue of similarity until one of them was found, and then pouncing upon it to finally end the discomfort. Even upon retrospect, Tom couldn’t figure out why his friends thought he, always the harbinger of conversations stabbed full of awkward silences, was a worthwhile person to spend time with in the beginning. In any case, what they all could have predicted happened. A great rift in personality finally made their association an act of habit, not enjoyment. Tom, in the present, saw himself making the first move to a healthier relationship with them.
Tom had been walking for hours and hours on a highway whose miles lay close to identical. Only by the landmarks independent of the road, the radio towers being the only ones among which Tom had used, did he keep from complete directional bewilderment. The mud that hadn’t even begun to dry since the rain a day before hindered Tom, but before he became too annoyed, he figured the time it wasted was negligible; ten minutes or so extra doesn’t do much when its sprinkled throughout a perhaps four hour walk. Tom treaded on.
The still-wet mud lost all hope when it began to rain again. Tom felt the first drop on the back of his labored and slouching neck. A few yards, ahead, to his fortune, there was an overpass that he walked no faster towards than he had been, but once the gouts began to bombard him, he picked up some speed. Placed upon the side of the bridge was a green-and-white-sign that said only "Philadelphia – 5 ½ Miles."
The side next to the road was a slanted plane of concrete. Flattened dying crab grass popped out of cracks that moved from the road to the wall, to which Tom made his way to hide from the rain. Profanity written on the wall that looked to be made from a fat permanent marker was the only sign of human habitation before, and though Tom felt like reading some of the more intelligible remarks, the darkness prevented him fervidly. Despite the slant of what he sat upon, the coarse concrete kept him from sliding perhaps better than flat ground would have. Despite his inability to slide downwards, that didn’t stop an almost completely ground-covering carpet of cigarette butts, soda bottles, and other human waste from doing so. The road above was not as much of a rain-deterrent as he expected; some of it made its way down past the set of I-beams that held up the bridge, and dripped onto the concrete.
The I-beams themselves looked almost wide enough to lay upon, and, Tom thought, anyone who might see him where he was would certainly not see him if he crawled onto one of them. An attempt was made to do so, but what Tom could only hope was a bird fluttered furiously out of the darkness, and he decided to stay put. Before he could make any other plans, the exhaustion of the day and much of the night finally conquered his drive to get to his objective as quickly as he could. Before drifting off completely, a thought occurred to him as a result of the unpleasantness of his so potent fatigue: why hadn’t he used his car?
IV.
Tom awoke in almost the same place as before, a speck lower; gravity had been chipping away at his position during the night. A compelling confusion overtook him when he realized that it once more was night. He figured that his long walk and terrible day made an alliance to have him sleep through the entire span of sunlight, but the November evenings got dark deceptively quickly. He checked his watch to dispel his questions, but, to his surprise, it was nearly twelve once more. He tried to remember when he’d fallen asleep, but any time than made any temporal sense would force him to have slept for well over twelve hours. Tom thanked his lucky stars that no one saw or cared to inquire about him during the day, despite the heavy diurnal traffic, and he gathered himself to continue walking.
It had stopped raining, Tom noticed, and in the vein of natural observations, he wondered how long it had been since he’d seen the sun. His shoes once again sank into the quagmire that made up the boundaries of the highway, and had a feeling that they’d hinder him much more than they had, especially when he felt the mud invading his shoes.
Tom thought of his plan for the immediate future. Being in absolute control of his life was, even though a great burden relieved, a daunting prospect. He asked himself what he would do. Tom refused to take the easy way out through panhandling and homelessness, though the latter, as much as he hated to admit it, was sort of an inevitability, barring any strange circumstances involving free lodging. He settled that he would not let complete independence make his life miserable, though, he felt, even if he failed, he would still leave with something. Anything, he decided, was better than home.
That reminded him, if his parents had figured out that he was missing before Judgment, they would likely hound him relentlessly. Adding to the threat was the spontaneous nature of Tom’s flight. His plans were played by ear, and he walked with no money or any more plan to cover even the next hour or so, when he’d arbitrarily predicted to arrive in the city. The expanses of Philadelphia, however, would assist him more greatly than any other setback would hinder him in hiding from those who knew him and wanted him back.
The forest through which the highway had sliced opened so suddenly to the city that Tom was almost surprised to see it. He was forced, lest he fall to his death, to jump over the concrete barrier to walk down the path. There too increased the traffic immediately, and a smattering of vehicles passed Tom even before he’d reached the end of the exit.
The outskirts of the city were naturally flat compared to the impending skyscrapers in the distance, and Tom walked through what seemed only to be a grassless version of the suburbs from which he’d just escaped. It wasn’t totally grassless, however; weeds screaming for nourishment seemed to crack open the sidewalk in their search, finding there only the endless puddles of unredeemably spoiled water and the useless detritus of human habitation: a rusty nondescript metal object here, possible drug paraphernalia there. The culture of the city that Tom had imagined, he felt, had not quite begun.
The almost perfect dark that had consumed the countryside between Tom’s origin and destination had so gradually been taken over by the residual light of the city that he hadn’t even noticed that the sky had become one of the evening, and not one of past midnight. There was what looked like a post-apocalyptic car repair shop outside of which a muscular fellow whose employment at the shop was dubious eyed Tom between drags on a particularly smoky cigarette. A street light illuminated him as though he were the star of a play. Tom tried not to return the stare as much and walked on.
This seemed to be what Tom had striven for, despite what he’d imagined. He was wandering in a wet city at night with nowhere to go and a strange man staring at him. He hadn’t really thought about what he would do once his goal of escaping his other life had been accomplished. There had to be plenty to do in a major American city on a Friday night, Tom figured. But you needed money for most of those things. The ostensibly abandoned concrete neighborhood upon which Tom had stumbled put him off, considering his position, and so he made his way, as best he could, to where more people would gather. South Street came to Tom’s mind first, and the fact that he had no idea where that was came second.
A few blocks from the car repair shop, the buildings began to loom and constrict. There passed by Tom every few minutes perhaps one or two night owls, most of whom didn’t seem in a friendly enough mood for Tom to think asking for directions wouldn’t be a grave mistake. As he walked aimlessly on, the interval between walkers shortened to almost an arrest, when there appeared the only life in the city that Tom had seen and would voluntarily describe. As much as increased the number of walkers on the street, however, so increased the number of sitters and sleepers. Traffic had previously been sparse, but now honking, air-thickening automobiles halted and raced down the street, mirroring the actions of the people on the sidewalks. It certainly wasn’t South Street, but it did the trick.
Tom was thankful to be lost in the anonymity of the crowds, but didn’t show it lest that very anonymity be broken. Before he could complete another block, a neck-crooning and confused-looking crowd waited to enter a club. Tom looked at the sign on the side of the building, which said, on the date, "11-12: Lenin and the Bolsheviks, 1-2: House of Mice. Admission: 5 dollars" Tom had no idea what the first band was, but he thought he recognized House of Mice as one of the names Rachel’s band had called themselves, and so decided to confirm his suspicions. He didn’t consider the fact that he had no money for admission.
Tom had a hard time imagining that his coffee shop conversation with Rachel hadn’t happened just that day, but it was a little easier to swallow once Tom remembered that he’d been utterly unconscious for a good chunk of it. Thinking back to the conversation, Tom had no recollection of Rachel telling Tom that she and her band had a job that night at all. Rachel didn’t tell him much of anything, anyway, he thought. When he thought hard about his situation with her, he didn’t feel that they were very good friends at all. Rachel’s band included mostly people he didn’t know, mainly those he hadn’t even met. They were rather chummy with Tom’s friends, he reflected, but not really with him. The thought hadn’t bothered him until then, not when he still wished for contact with his friends, not when he made the decision that the people by whom he was surrounded made him sick, no, when he finally escaped from that life, when he finally began anew, this was when that shard of his old life wounded him. That thought bothered him more than its cause did.
He got into the crowd, which was possibly once a line. There was, at the doors, some commotion, which many of the people waiting attempted to discern by standing on their toes and craning their heads. If they were successful, they would find that the admission collectors were both drunk, and both arguing with each other instead of taking admission. Not even those in the front were able to determine what exactly the two of them were arguing about, and it was possible that the arguers were just as clueless. They became increasingly languid and far less passionate than they had been when Tom arrived at the scene, and, once they’d finally passed out perhaps five minutes later, a threatening and tall tattooed androgen screamed in an enraged male voice, "They’re fucking passed out!" To which a similar looking female added, "Screw this! I’m going in" And then did so. The rest of the crowd followed suit, including Tom, who, among perhaps many others, wondered who was in charge of the two drunken admission collectors but hadn’t shown up to fire them on the spot.
By the unoccupied looks of the inside of the club, either Lenin and the Bolsheviks were very unpopular or the two drunks had been at it for a very long time. The club was, for being inside, rather cold, as breath could be seen as well as it could be outdoors. It wasn’t too kempt or overly complex either. There was one cubic and warehouse-like room, a bar in the corner, a few bathrooms to the side, and a black wooden stage at the end, which two red "Exit" signs and their supplementary doors flanked. On the walls there was what seemed to Tom to be meaningless graffiti that lay heaviest at normal human height but tapered off as the blue-painted cinderblock wall continued upward. He couldn’t tell whether the vandalism was an intentional stylistic enterprise or an indication of the building’s previous use, or lack thereof.
Tom checked his watch; there were still about fifteen minutes until Rachel and her band came on. He wondered why he was there. Shouldn’t he be finding shelter or food or money? Of course, Tom thought, but at almost one o’clock, his decisions were limited. Perhaps the concert would give his mind a break to think about the practicalities of his just then nearly completely idealistic voyage.
The flickering strip lights above the crowd were suspended only by a few wires, but it looked as though they outnumbered the lights, as disembodied, possibly still-live wires hung down like roots from an electric tree. The great majority of the population of the club was smoking, and the combined vapors of two hundred cigarettes collected cloud-like near the ceiling and perceptibly blurred the light in the entire room.
Rachel and her band began to silently set up, and Tom moved closer into the throng. He hoped, naturally, that Rachel didn’t see him, but made no caution, considering the crowd. He had a feeling that even if she noticed him, she’d pretend not to, but it was really just a feeling. The spontaneous movements of the center of the group on a few occasions caused Tom to be pushed violently out of the way and treated as though he’d been purposely blocking a path of which he’d not even known the existence.
In the center of the pandemonium, Tom felt a hand lay on his shoulder, and assumed another violent thrust was to result, but instead, an inconspicuous but not altogether stern-looking girl perhaps a little older than he was come from behind him. "You need any meth?" She asked him calmly, even almost with a tone of boredom.
Before he could think of anything graceful to say, Tom hastily muttered, "Actually, well, I’m not really in the market for that sort of–"
"Thank God," The girl replied. "I’ve sold enough for one lifetime." She looked at home among a healthy fraction of the patrons. Her hair fell almost to her shoulders and contained an almost awe-inspiringly bright shade of green and equal but contrasting black, and what Tom supposed was the transporter for her drug was a black leather jacket that seemed too large for her; just her fingers obtruded from the sleeves, and it fell down far enough down her legs that only black stockings could be seen below. Her relative exoticism could only have been further distinguished by Tom’s so mundane and disheveled appearance, which included unintentionally uncut hair and clothes in which he not only traveled many filthy miles but was beginning to wear for the fourth day in a row and, it looked like, might wear for longer.
"Is there a big market for meth around here?" He asked, not particularly interested in anything else going on.
"Sure is, my friend. That’s how I make my living," she said in a manner not suggesting that she was at all proud or ashamed of it. She’d lit a cigarette when she said this and let it hang on her lips while she looked busy and craned her neck, asking, "When the hell is the band coming on?"
"It says one o’clock outside, but it’s way past that," Tom replied. He wasn’t quite sure if her question was rhetorical or not, but didn’t really care, either.
"At least its free, huh?" she returned.
"Until the manager kicks us all out," Tom reminded her.
"I’d like to see them try!" She jovially challenged. "Say," she began again, "There’s a lot of room to, you know, live, in the back. The view isn’t great, but at least you can keep from breathing just smoke and sweat vapor. Well, I’m going, anyway."
Tom shrugged and followed her. She spoke the truth, he found, once they got to the back. There were one or two people at the bar, but the rest were all concentrated as close to the stage as much as their pesky solidity would allow.
"I was getting thrown around too much, anyway," Tom justified. "My name’s Tom," he said, and put out his hand. She looked his outstretched appendage over for a perceptible moment before shaking his hand.
"I’m Judy," she said, and almost immediately after asked, "Have you ever heard this band before?"
"Actually," Tom replied, "I have. I know the singer, but I didn’t really come to see them. To tell you the truth, I don’t like them very much as a band or very much as people, at least the ones I know. I just sort of wandered in, not unlike most of the other people who came."
"No argument here," Judy opined. "I didn’t come for the music, either. I just have to push my product, you understand."
"You seem to be doing a fine job," he returned, "Giving up before I could even finish telling you that I wasn’t interested."
"It didn’t sound like you would finish, in my defense. Besides, I’m just a creature of habit, Tom. I go to these places to sell things I have no interest in selling because I really have nothing else to do. Hell, I want to be in Montreal." She said enigmatically. She continued, "Well, anyway, who are you here with?"
"Well, I didn’t really plan on coming." Tom began, "I sort of walked out of my house and came here. In retrospect, I have no recollection as to why I came this way, to Philadelphia, but I’m here all the same."
"So the first thing you do after running away from home is go to see a band whose lead singer you know personally. I can’t decide whether that’s more ironic or stupid," Judy chaffed.
"Well, I guess they’re independent of each other, so it could be both." Tom suggested in the same manner.
Rachel’s band introduced themselves and began to play, but the acoustics of the room weren’t in great shape, and were Tom and Judy paying attention, from their location, they would likely not have been able to understand a word of it, anyway.
"So, a runaway, huh?" Judy reminded him. "What made you decide to do that, If I may be so bold as to ask?"
"Nothing out of the ordinary. Parents whose behavior warrants an arrested at any moment," Tom began to list, "Fungi for friends, the injustice that I have to put up with it all simply because they want me to," Tom paused, "I guess that’s my whole story."
"You probably get this a lot, Tom," Judy warned, "But you seem to be pretty impulsive. It doesn’t bother me what you do with your life, I don’t know you, but I feel like starting a whole new one at however old you are couldn’t really be anything but an overreaction."
"An overreaction to what? My parents drank and fought and left each other and returned over and over again for as long as my memory has worked, probably even longer. I’m surprised at myself for lasting as long as I did. My friends were mostly forced on me because my parents wanted to think I was normal, likely as an easy way to affirm their own health, but ended up only leaving me to people with whom I had nothing substantial in common. And so here I am."
"I stand corrected," Judy remarked sardonically.
"Well, maybe I am an oversensitive kid. I don’t particularly care. We’ll all be dead in a century," Tom reasoned, more with himself that with Judy.
"That’s the spirit," She replied.
"Well, I guess I’ve been rambling on for a while, maybe you should have a turn at it. What is your story, anyway?"
Judy looked up at the strip lights as though trying to remember all of the details before going ahead and relating the account.
"Well, I guess I can’t beat yours, but my dad left my mom when she was pregnant with yours truly, so she took care of me by herself until I was about ten, when she started seeing this cokehead that turned her on to that crap, and she left me with a much-appreciated and long-lived lesson in independence. That guy she was seeing tried to rape me when the two of them were both coked up at their house, but before he could, I picked up a stool and beat him within an inch of his life. My mom wanted to call the police and an ambulance, but she was so far gone at that point that she’d forgotten which things were illegal and needed to be hidden from the authorities. With enemies like that, it was a simple task to get away and flee to the city, though I didn’t get anywhere concrete for way too long. I was looking for a place to live during the winter, which I probably wouldn’t have lived through if I were homeless, and during my desperate search for a home, I met this jackass who lets me use his apartment if I sell methamphetamine for him, and so here I am, having just insulted my life in this story’s very brevity."
"Yeah, no kidding. Sorry I brought it up, Judy." Tom apologized cautiously, in case she would direct her still visible anger towards him.
"Actually, it felt kind of good. I usually don’t talk about that with anybody, but, then again, no one really asks. If I were rich enough, I’d probably be too proud to go see a shrink, but since I’m not, I guess I’ll stick with being too poor."
House of Mice hadn’t gotten any more audible, and the only way for Tom and Judy to make them so was to enter the flailing, almost singular mass of furious dancers that probably could barely hear the music itself. A thin young man with an impressive multihued Mohawk walked hastily past Tom and Judy, who were standing near the entrance. He held part of his face, and through the cracks of his fingers there leaked drops of blood. The music was certainly not worth that.
"So, you know that girl?" Judy confirmed, motioning to a passionately crooning Rachel almost dancing with the microphone stand, with a crowd finding it nothing less than pleasant. "Because, this band sucks. You get what you pay for, though, huh?"
"You’re telling me. I don’t have anywhere else to go, though." Tom told her. "Except to go find money and a place to live. I’m not even really sure why I’m here, because I shouldn’t be."
"If you want, you can live with me and my…" Judy paused, "Colleagues, I guess. I’m not too crazy about any of them, but the only alternative is homelessness, at best. I have about eighty dollars that’s ‘just for me’, and that’s ‘dirty’ money, as they say, so I’m sort of stuck with them."
The manner in which Judy had invited Tom to live with her and her associates was very clearly more genuine than Rachel’s invitation days before. "I can guess the catch," he replied, awaiting what he accurately predicted.
"Yeah, you’ll have to sell meth, but if you have any qualms against that, or against living among those who do so, you’re pretty much sunk."
"Excuse my Victorian sensibilities, but I don’t do hard drugs," Tom said, "And if I may bring it up again, wasn’t your mom consumed by them? Are you not bitter towards their effects?"
"Hey, I don’t use them, I just sell them. I used to use them to some extent, but I didn’t want to feel any slimier than I have to, so I quit. I don’t have much of a choice as to what I do for a living, and as much as I hate addicts, and as much as I find revolting the fact that I’m creating more and pandering to those that already exist, I do what I can to keep my bones from meeting. If you think you can do better with your decision to run away, you do it, but don’t moralize, it’s no use."
The tongue-lashing took Tom aback, keeping him from a reply for a few moments. When the phase wore off, he apologetically replied, "I didn’t mean any offense. I just wanted to understand your rationale for selling it, I wasn’t trying to point out a hypocrisy, or–"
"It’s fine," Judy said, once she’d realized Tom was likely not going to stop until she cut him off, "I’m just defensive, I guess. I don’t like doing what I do that much, but my need sort of justifies it. It evens out."
"Why can’t you get a legal job that doesn’t just feed what you hate?" Tom asked in a curious manner.
"No one will take me." Judy explained. "Believe me, I’ve tried to get a real job, but everywhere I go, there’s either something that I can’t get across, whether its having references, or having to live somewhere, not having tattoos all over. Jesus, I haven’t been this depressed for a long time."
"Sorry," Tom apologized once more. "My friends say they get depressed around me. I guess I bring gloom in my wake."
"Oh, it’s okay," Judy reassured him. "At least now I know why you and your fungous friends don’t have the best relationship. I don’t mind downers, though. To put my philosophy bluntly, life is miserable, and I’d rather be around genuine but sad people than happy people just practicing their histrionic abilities. That’s what makes me happy, if you can look past the ostensible hypocrisy. Maybe that’s just me."
"Actually, if it means anything, you worded my outlook pretty accurately, Judy," Tom agreed.
"My head hurts," Judy complained. "And my ears. This band not only sucks, but the acoustics are beginning to make me think I’m going deaf. What do you say we get the hell out of here?"
"That’s perfectly fine with me. I feel like the life I’m attempting to escape is following me in the form of the band. I don’t want to see them anymore, they’re making me think I’ve failed. Let’s go." Tom rapaciously agreed.
They had only to turn around and depress the bars on the thick, paint-chipped, metal doors to escape, which they did. Outside, the liveliness of the street hadn’t died down a bit, and Tom had a feeling that it wouldn’t for some time, if it would ever.
Across the street, between the cars passing by, there was packed into an alleyway a flaming metal drum surrounded by two or three night-obscured itinerants. The walls of the buildings on both sides were plastered with almost as much graffiti as those inside the club. Tom hadn’t noticed before, but only every other streetlight was turned off, almost without anomaly. Tom couldn’t decided whether he thought it was intentional or not, but the not-whole condition of some of the lights at least suggested that it wasn’t completely deliberate.
"Where’s your apartment?" Tom asked, observing Judy standing still and making no attempt to travel towards wherever it was.
"In there," Judy pointed across the street to a door above which were printed numbers that Tom was unable to distinguish from his position. The two of them stood there, watching each vehicle as they passed them, each one blowing their clothes and hair for a moment and then moving on. The traffic wouldn’t stop in either direction.
"I guess we’re trapped on this side, for now," Judy unnecessarily notified Tom. She sat down on the insignificantly damp curb, her legs extending onto the lake-like shoulder, a pair of plain, though wet, boots extending further, and Tom followed.
"I could leap into traffic if I wanted to," Judy examined, seeming to still be somewhat unhappy after their conversation in the club. "As much as life can suck, you really can do whatever you want with it and it wouldn’t make a hell of a difference. Any sorrow in my life would be extinguished with a negligible loss to the world if I jumped in front of a car."
"You have the freedom to do so," Tom added, implying, but not saying, "Duh."
"I’ve been thinking about that," She began, explaining, "About the extent of my freedom, I mean, not about suicide. I could easily jump into traffic just as easily as I could jump in the opposite direction." Judy stood up as she said this and leapt across the sidewalk, a few feet in front of a couple who looked fed up with nonsense. "Watch it, psycho," one of them snapped. Judy rolled her eyes and returned to her seat. "That was easy; I can do anything."
Tom was astonished at the chance that they’d both thought about such things independently and met each other, but figured that the conversation might die if he agreed with her so soon, and so unconsciously began to feign misunderstanding, saying, "That’s sort of a stretch, don’t you think?"
"Well, not anything, of course" Judy explained. "So much that we just don’t do is in the physical realm, things that, in the grand scheme of things, will make absolutely no difference. Hell, in a million years, even the effects of a nuclear holocaust will be stamped out, what’s the difference of one killing spree, or a hundred killing sprees, or one cigarette, or a thousand cigarettes," she pointed as she said this at a large anti-smoking advertisement on the side of a bus stop a few yards from where they sat. "As selfish as it sounds, I think, just do what you want. Enjoy your life as much as you possibly can. Perhaps it’s not sociologically or even morally correct, but that’s my view and I’m sticking by it no matter how much I’m hated for it. Everyone else can waste their lives living for others. If I have to, I’m doing it for me."
"That’s perhaps the main reason I ran away," Tom gave in and agreed, "Maybe I’d be ruining my life by doing what I’ve done, but it seems almost like an epidemic that we’re all too afraid to embrace the freedom that the laws of physics have bestowed on us for fear that life will be worse when they’re already bad. Why do something that’s only causing you pain? Why is life worth living if you have to wait on the desires of people you don’t like, or don’t want to?"
"Because," Judy began to play devil’s advocate, "They care about you. They assume that you’re grateful to be alive, and, as such, that you shouldn’t mind giving up for them what’s been forced upon you. Lots of logic there, huh?" Tom rolled his eyes in solidarity, and Judy continued, "When I am forced through some unhappy circumstance to divulge my philosophy to someone involuntarily, I’m often asked afterwards why I don’t simply kill myself if I’m not grateful to be alive. What they don’t seem to understand is that I don’t have anything better to do, and that I have a whole lot of eternity to be dead. I’m trying to make the best out of a bad situation, and if I fail, I’ve ended up wasting nothing, especially not time with which to be dead. What the hell is wrong with that? I haven’t given up. I guess that’s where the thought processes of people like me and the bullet-headed fork. And besides, what sense is there in killing yourself when you can’t be grateful to be dead?
"The people who think that your only choices are to appreciate life or commit suicide are the ones that are terrified that life isn’t a formulaic schedule, usually ‘grow up, get a job, make a family, go to hell,’ but merely a flicker of awareness during which anything can happen with little consequence once the flicker has gone. People are too afraid of their own freedom to want to understand that. What should it matter if you appreciate life or not? There’s no alternative to appreciate."
"An atheist, huh?" Tom simplistically joked, and added, "I wish I could have said it that well. I’m glad somebody can. I was afraid I was alone in that thought, and frankly I’m astonished that I’m not and I met someone else who’s not."
"I wish I could say it better. There’s something I can’t explain that I feel and it can get really frustrating. I’m glad you got something of interest out of what I began much too early to think was an uncontrollable ramble, but I can’t ever get what I’m thinking perfectly worded."
"I know what you mean," Tom said in a tone of despair. He paused, and continued, "If it’s any consolation, though, that’s a thought that’s irrelevant to have to word correctly. Just doing it is all that’s ever necessary. I couldn’t explain it, not even to myself, so I took action, the only accurate way to experience it. I got up and left. I doubt I thought about it for five minutes before I was out the door. What good is wasting your life? Like you said, it’s just a flicker. When it’s all over, whether it is your life or the universe’s, it comes down to nothing. There is no reason to stay in an unpleasant situation, since you’ll be doing it for nothing, in the end. All there is to do is to enjoy the nothing while you can."
"It’s a very good thing that we met, Tom"
"I agree, Judy."
There was a break in traffic synchronic with the pause in Tom’ and Judy’s conversation, and without notifying him except with a wave of her hand, she rose and began to nimbly dash across the road, bounding over a puddle before he even noticed that it, the road, was temporarily clear. He presently followed suit, failing to pass the puddle completely and splashing what once was water onto his shoes and the bottoms of his pants. Tom felt his wet shoe step into something that he was happy to leave a mystery, and met Judy on the other side.
The door through which Judy led Tom was an unremarkable but nevertheless sinister-looking one, a once-white color except where the paint had chipped off to expose the wood beneath. There was stamped on it a greasy window that looked as though the very glass was dripping, it not being completely flat and in some jagged places, not completely there. Around it circled unusually dark bricks, some of which had been painted on almost better than the door had been. Judy, having assuredly seen it all before, paid no attention and wordlessly ushered Tom inside.
Thinking about the situation, Tom felt more terror than foolishness that he was entering the apartment of a drug dealer he’d met not an hour previously. She could very well be angling to rob him, maybe kill him, he considered. He’d already mindlessly told her too much. Then again, she’d divulged a bulky load as well. She seemed to be in charge of her own mind, he felt, and so despite the very realistic possibility of misery and death that he could willingly have been throwing himself to, he walked on.
Inside, there went a hallway into darkness that, if taken out of context, would more likely be construed as an alley, and a particularly filthy one, at that. Next to it, a flight of stairs as basic and gray as that in a parking garage threatened to push the unwary off of itself with its thin rain-soaked railing and steps, individual footprints on which were still clearly printed. A naked light bulb revealed the state of the place: Plaster flaked off the walls like skin and dropped onto the floor in increasing size in the direction of the walls. Amateur graffiti, like much of the upright-standing articles in that portion of the city, swathed the parts of the walls that hadn’t fallen away. Black lines of spray paint depicting not particularly shocking, or sometimes even legible, text could be seen as far back into the hallway as the light bulb allowed.
There was an all-saturating chemical odor by which Tom was almost floored as he passed the threshold into the building. Even Judy, he noticed, was not totally used to the smell, her head moving involuntarily backwards when she crossed inside.
"What is that smell?" Tom asked, too overwhelmed not to inquire. Judy was somewhere up the steps when Tom did so, and she turned around to look at him, motioning him to speed up.
"This place smells like it all the time. It’s pretty inescapable, but you get mostly used to it. The landlord makes all the methamphetamine that we sell right here," Judy explained. "And the odor of all the chemicals he uses sort of gets everywhere. To me, recognizing his sickening carelessness, it’s incredible that he hasn’t been caught yet, but the mystifying fact remains."
From the invisible back of the hallway became distinguished to Tom a human figure. Judy saw it too, and sighed. Unaware of the figure’s identity, Tom unconsciously hurried towards Judy, who was much more at ease, in case it was a threat.
"Judy?" The voice called in a deep, scratchy growl. "Is that you?" The figure let itself become exposed by the light. It was a rather large and unhealthy-looking middle-aged man, leering at the two of them through thick, black-rimmed, eye-blearing glasses. When he entered the foyer, the chemical odor that had been almost too much to begin with increased profoundly. He was almost entirely bald except for a few turncoat strands of blonde and gray around the sides of his head, and just about everywhere visible, and very likely not visible, on his body as well. When he spoke, his mouth looked as though it would imminently crumble from the stress of mere speech, the abrasive, labored manner being responsible for the seeming. He had the last inch or so of a lit cigar clenched tightly between a set of flinty teeth through which his voice was strained, and wispy smoke curled around his head and above it. Despite the cool autumn weather, the man looked as though he’d been in a sauna, sweat still dripping off of him and onto his yellowed tank top and gray sweat pants.
"Yeah, Boris, it’s me," Judy confirmed in a tone as though preparing for something unpleasant. "This is Tom, he said he wants to live here." She motioned to Tom, to whom Ed then directed his attention. "Tom, this is Boris, the landlord."
Despite Boris’s unfriendly air, he put out his hand and genially said, "Nice to meet you, Tom," with a little bit of a Russian accent. As much as he wanted to avoid touching people like Boris, Tom was certainly not going to be rude to him, he figured perhaps accurately that it would be a serious mistake. Tom shook the sour-smelling, hair-darkened, sweat-dampened hand of a now-smiling Boris, and while he did, Boris asked ominously, "You know what you’ll be doing here, don’t you Tom?" Boris was obviously talking more to Judy than Tom, as was evident by his glancing at her while he spoke.
Before Tom could respond affirmatively, Judy, knowing as well as Boris whom the conversation was between, said, "Yeah, yeah, I told him. That’s how we met, I tried to sell him some. He doesn’t indulge, though."
"He’d better not," Boris warned, now more businesslike. "I don’t want any more junkies stealing my merchandise."
"Patrick stopped four months ago, and he paid it all back, everything he stole from you, retail price, even."
"Patrick was lucky. You have any money, kid?" Boris asked Tom, who hadn’t spoken a word to Boris through the entire conversation.
Even if Tom had had any money, telling that to a couple of drug dealers in an apartment foyer like that one would be as big a mistake as any he’d avoided thus far. Tom truthfully but nervously responded, "Well, no. Um, why?"
"Because Patrick did have money. He was lucky to have money. If he couldn’t pay me back for all of that meth, I would have gutted him right there on the steps." While he spoke he unsheathed a switchblade and pointed in between Judy and Tom, depicting where he would have gutted Patrick. "What about you, Judy? I haven’t seen your ass for a week, what have you been doing all this time?"
Judy peered down and checked her leather Jacket’s innumerable pockets, saying "I got four hundred dollars for you, Ed, somewhere around here." She reached into a pocket inside her jacket and fished out an untidy wad of bills, putting it into Boris’s eager fingers, almost dropping it in so as not to touch them.
As excited as Boris seemed to possess the money, he still acted as though he’d been cheated. "Four hundred dollars? That barely covers the cost of materials to make more! You’ve been gone for a week and all you make is four hundred dollars?"
Judy looked furious. "That’s over a thousand dollars this month, and it’s only the eighteenth, Boris! We agreed that rent is five hundred a month, and that means I have four months backed up to stay here! If anything, you should owe me, since I haven’t gotten my cut for two months!" She spat all at once.
"Oh, fine!" Boris howled. "Just take it now!" He threw the money onto the debris-crowded floor, crumpled ones, fives, tens, and twenties fluttering to the ground. He stomped back into the darkness while Judy gathered the money.
Judy led Tom up the stairs towards the apartment, and walking through the hall, Tom opened his mouth once more, saying, "Two hundred dollars a month?" "How do you live on that?"
"As much of a fucker as Boris is, he’s not a bad provider, which is incredibly surprising. I think he gets a hell of a lot more money from the meth than he lets on, because he fills our kitchens with food, and never swindled any of us once. All I have to really pay for is clothing. Yelling seems just to be his twisted way of encouraging us to sell more."
"That doesn’t sound too bad," Tom opined.
"Oh, yes, Tom," Judy began in what anyone hearing her could predict to be a sardonic tone, "Selling methamphetamine to idiots and losers all day is certainly worth shelter here," she glanced around the fluorescently lit hallway through which they were traveling, the graffiti not having halted at any point, the repetition giving it the look then almost of a wallpaper design. "Well," she began to backtrack, "I don’t really know if it’s all that bad. We were only just talking about true freedom, and here I am saying I’m doing something I hate. Maybe I am among the terrified who won’t go past what they know in fear of more unpleasantness than is felt already."
"I don’t think you, or any of us, can help feeling like we’re forced to do unpleasant things every once in a while." Tom theorized. "But if you, Judy, really hated it, you would leave. That’s how you work. That’s why you ran away in the first place: to look for a better life with the threat of a worse life. Maybe this is a worse life, but it’s yours, and that’s why you’re still here. Well, that’s what I figured, anyway."
"That may very well be, Tom," Judy agreed, "But when I remember what life was like before, living with a couple imbecilic coke-fiends and having to rout one of them with a stool to keep him from raping me, I figure this life is all I really want. I don’t know why I said I didn’t like it. High expectations are for people who want to be disappointed. They’re for people who don’t want to make the best out of a situation, no, they want the situation to make the best out of itself, and even though they know it won’t, they’d rather be miserable than take charge of their own lives. Those are the people who are afraid of freedom, not me. I can prove it only by being where I am and remembering why I came."
"Don’t take this the wrong way," Tom responded, "But of all the people I’ve ever known, I wouldn’t expect you to be optimistic. As abnormal as the optimism is, its there all the same and that boggles my mind. I suppose I’ll have to agree with you, though. I used to know people with high expectations, or at least who said they had them. It seemed to me like they just wanted to complain, and since their lives were just peachy, as far as I could tell, they made things up to be sad about." He paused, and added, finishing the thought, "I hate my friends."
"Forget about them," Judy reminded him, "You escaped them for a reason. Don’t let them bother you anymore."
Before Tom could return details as to that suggestion’s difficulty, Judy stopped at a door not unlike the one outside, the only recognizably difference being the window, or lack thereof, on this one.
"Here’s my room." She notified Tom. There was a rustling sound behind the door and Judy rolled her eyes. "It sounds like some of my roommates are in here, but don’t worry about them, they’re idiots."
Judy felt her jacket for her keys for a moment, and, unlocked the door. The apartment looked like ancient ruins. Two windows held together possibly only by duct tape threatened to succumb to gravity and injure or kill a passer-by. The floor of wood was so warped Tom could feel it through his shoes. A corner of the apartment seemed to have been defined as the kitchen, but it looked like starvation was a preferable fate to consumption of food therein.
A leather couch that looked to have been stabbed, its insides pushing out in several areas, lay in the center of the living room, and upon it a sleeping man who looked to Tom a little older than Judy snored unrhythmically. Long hair rolled around near his head, some on the couch, some hanging off if it and some on the clothes he looked to have been wearing during the day. A washer and a dryer that looked surprisingly functional were pushed in the corner, behind the couch. There were two doors on either side of the apartment that assumably led to similar rooms. There was almost more trash on the floor than outside despite the presence of a trash can in plain sight.
"What happened in here?" Tom asked in an unguestlike manner as he did his best to walk on the warped floor.
"I think it’s better to ask what didn’t happen in here," Judy replied. "No one seems to take care of this place. It’s not like we have a maid."
The man on the couch stirred and arose, almost falling off. "Judy? What the hell are you doing here?" he mumbled miserably, rubbing his eyes. "What time is it?"
"Nice to see you too, Patrick," Judy responded. "It’s about two."
Patrick perked up once he saw that Judy wasn’t alone. "And who’s this? A young suitor, perhaps come to see the manor house?" he sneered, even though his voice still sounded miserable.
"Go to hell," Judy seemed to recite, and explained "I met him about an hour ago, his name’s Tom. Tell him," she commanded.
"She’s not lying, my name’s Tom. I ran away and I need someplace to live, so I guess I’m going to have to get into your business." Tom explained.
"Our business? I haven’t heard that one before," Patrick snapped and lay down again. "You sure know how to pick ‘em Judy. This kid just goes with some meth dealer he found on the street back to her apartment because he thinks he’s going to finally get some? Aren’t drug dealers supposed to be dangerous? He must be desperate. How romantic."
"He wants a place to live, Patrick." Judy said, exhausted and annoyed with him after not five minutes of conversation. "It figures that an oversexed little ogre like you immediately jumps to a conclusion like yours, though. I know you can’t understand the concept of having friends that you don’t feel up. I’m not mad, you just can’t help it."
Tom was flattered that Judy considered him a friend so quickly after their initial meeting, but then figured that she was just trying to beef up her insult to Patrick and may not have meant it completely.
It appeared to Tom that it was a mistake to make such an insult to whom he could see even then was so unstable a character as Patrick, but Judy was unphased by Patrick’s response. He got off of the couch, and growled "Who do you think you are?" Poking her in the chest with his index finger. "Do you think anyone would notice or care if I shot you right now?" He fished out a pistol from a jacket in which he’d been sleeping bizarrely and pointed it at relatively the same area as he’d pointed his finger. Tom became rather nervous, but Judy seemed amused, if anything at all.
"I bet they’d be pretty interested if you managed it with an unloaded gun," Judy mocked, directing his attention to the weapon’s magazine that looked to have fallen out of Patrick’s jacket when he was asleep. As threatening as he had attempted to be, Patrick lost whatever he had had by hopping back on the couch to retrieve the magazine.
"Patrick, go back to sleep." Judy suggested. "You’re getting cranky." Realizing his failure to get his way, whatever it may have been, Patrick, with an air of faked indifference, put the weapon away and went back to sleep.
"Sorry about him," Judy apologized to the still startled Tom when Patrick obviously could not have been asleep yet, "He’s an idiot." Patrick didn’t try to avenge his name, however.
Judy pointed at one of the doors, and explained, "That’s Emily’s room. She’s almost as new as you; she came in a couple weeks ago. She’s probably asleep, but you can sleep in my room. There are a couple mattresses that I don’t use, so you can have one. I don’t know where they’ve been or how old they are, but you’ll have to settle."
They entered the door Judy hadn’t pointed to, and upon the walls there were doodles and writing covering the walls almost from top to bottom in every medium, from marker to pencil to pen to knife. The floor was noticeably less warped, and the two of them looked less like drunks when they walked. In the corner of the room there lay a worn denim backpack. "What’s all this stuff on the walls?" Tom asked.
"Jesus, I don’t know, it was here when I came. Some of it looks pretty old, though. I think it’s just forty years of compiled drug-induced creative endeavors from whoever lived or snuck in here since then. It’s a real mystery as to why they chose only this room as opposed to, I don’t know, anywhere else in this apartment. It can get pretty distracting when you’re trying to sleep. Speaking of which, could you lock the door?"
"To your room?" Tom asked. Judy affirmed, and Tom did so, asking, "What’s it need to be locked for?"
"Would you trust someone like Patrick to keep to himself?" She replied. It was natural enough that Tom wouldn’t, and so he returned, pulling a mattress from a corner of the room off of another upon which it was stacked. Tom moved the mattress over a few thick black letters on the floor that spelled out "Who is John Galt?" and sat down upon it. Judy had removed her filthy boots and had sat on her mattress as well.
Tom lay down in silence, his eyes examining a rather detailed picture of a dead goat that had somehow been drawn on the ceiling. He lay down only for a few moments before returning upright, saying, "I woke up under an overpass a few hours ago after about half a day of sleeping. I’m really not tired at all."
"Neither am I," Judy agreed, fishing through the backpack and returning with a mostly-full green glass bottle. "I don’t usually sleep well, so I usually take a few swigs before I go to bed. I can’t really say it works on anything but the level of a placebo, but I think I’ve permanently melted some of the meth into my brain since I’ve had trouble sleeping for so long."
"Sounds serious," Tom replied, eyeing the bottle, curious as to its specific contents, while Judy hastily threw it upside down and took a pull. It smelled like gin, and Tom tried to stifle a recoil.
Judy seemed to have noticed Tom’s attempt, and cruelly asked, grinning as she did so, "You want any?"
"Thank you so much," Tom returned in the same manner, keeping his disgust at the smell as much concealed as possible "But I’m all set. I figure if I have any I’ll be wasting it out the window and perhaps on an incredibly unlucky stranger."
Judy shrugged. "More for me. Anyway, you said your parents were alcoholics. That’s no good. You’d steal all my stores."
"Then again," Tom added, "Maybe I was adopted and they were going to tell me the day after I left."
"In any case," Judy said, taking a second swig, "You’re probably better off without it."
After a few minutes, Judy had drunk much more than Tom had thought she could without losing some sort of control of herself.
"What is that, half the bottle?" Tom eyeballed. "Why are you not completely floored, if I may ask?"
"I didn’t even want this much," Judy said, looking disappointed at her excess. She tossed the mostly-empty bottle on top of the backpack and said, "My mind is perfectly clear, but even if I had the energy, I probably couldn’t walk three feet without falling on my face."
"How the hell does something like that happen?" Tom asked quizzically.
"Jesus, I don’t know. I’m usually able to keep it to a few swigs, any more that that and I’m left unmovable until I finally fall asleep, but now and again I can’t. I used to get drunk, I used to be able to drink and scramble my brain, but now it doesn’t even touch my mind and I think that just a few more pulls will get me to my intent. But it just makes me move like an idiot while I feel like shit that I can no longer lose any sense of sobriety. Hell, maybe I just didn’t wait long enough. Maybe I’ll be singing and laughing if I give it a few minutes more. Right now I’m bordering on miserable."
Tom raised his eyebrows at the rather over-affected story, saying, "You don’t really sound normal, if that’s any consolation. And anyway, if it makes you sad like this, why do you do it?"
"I already told you, Tom," Judy said, lying down lethargically, "I have hope, not just that I’ll be grateful to be alive, but for everything else, too. ‘Maybe this time it’ll be fun’, I think, but I’m wrong every time, and the mistake only increases in magnitude every time I do it. There’s something that makes suicide look like a good idea. If drinking is a microcosm for the rest of the world, and life only gets worse the more of it you have, sure, I’ll put my belt and ceiling to better use than I have been, but there’s the kicker: you’ll never know. God, I’m going to sleep."
Judy fell backwards onto her mattress and shut her eyes, preparing for bed in no more way than Tom had seen before him. He wasn’t much in the mood to talk anymore, not that he could anyway, except, he thought, to himself. He lay down on his mattress, awake for much longer than he usually would be, falling asleep only hours later.
V.
To Tom’s surprise, he woke up unharmed; Judy lay in an identical position as when she’d fallen asleep, the door was, when Tom arose to check, still unlocked and didn’t look to have been tampered with. Despite his justifiable concern, he was in relatively safe company. The sun from which he’d escaped for so long had finally caught up with him, and it took his eyes so long to get used to the piercing light that he began to wonder whether there was something wrong with them. Still unaware of how the drug dealers’ lives worked thus far, he stayed in bed and pretended to sleep, prepared to do so until Judy woke up to tell him if there was some necessary ritual to be done before getting up.
Tom had only to wait a few minutes before Judy stirred. She reeled upon her mattress, but it was unclear whether she had actually awakened or not. "Are you awake, Judy?" he tried to find out. She affirmed ambiguously and rose, still in the clothes she’d worn the day before, barring her boots.
"Do you want to change or something?" Judy asked, combing through her jacket pockets for something. "Your clothes seem to be a little worn, if I may say so."
Tom glanced down at his clothes. Mud caked a good part of the bottom of his pants, and just about all of his shoes. He didn’t smell his best, either. "I guess I should," he decided.
Judy had begun to engage groggily in a cigarette while Tom assessed his attire. "I don’t have much to choose from," she said, getting off of her mattress and looking through her denim backpack. "It’s all in here." She pulled out a reasonably unisex, though incredibly wrinkled, black T-shirt and a pair of jeans that could have been, by the looks of them, digested by a tiger. She threw them both into Tom’s lap. "You don’t look used to this hospitality, Tom." She joked.
"Hey, you let me wear some of your clothes. I’m indebted," Tom replied as he undressed. "Fits perfectly, to boot."
"Just put your old crap in the washer, outside," Judy notified him as she unlocked and opened the door. Tom got off of his mattress and followed Judy out. Patrick and who Tom figured was Emily sat on the couch in front of a coffee table on which was spread a considerable quantity of a clear crystalline substance, what Tom assumed, by Patrick and Emily’s careful handling of them, was methamphetamine. Among the chunks of the chemical there was a scale that Patrick was using to weigh them, after which he put them into accordingly sized bags.
"What do we need all of this for?" Judy asked, surprised at the quantity of the substance extending across the table.
"God, I don’t know, Boris just gave us a kilogram and told us to sell it on this very holy Sunday. I guess he figures we can now that we have an extra set of hands around," Patrick explained. "Oh, by the way, Emily, this is Tom," he motioned to him and looked at her. "Judy scraped him off of the street yesterday and now he’s going to live with us. Go figure."
"Very good, Patrick," Judy responded, sitting opposite the couch on the ground. "You remembered."
"All right, cut it out, you guys," Emily warned tiredly, carefully adding a few lumps to the scale. "It’s too early for this."
"We’re going to be apart all day anyway," Patrick said. "Can’t we hold out for any longer than a few minutes?"
"You tell me," Judy seethed.
"Just control yourselves, Jesus!" Emily snapped. None of them spoke until all of the methamphetamine had been bagged.
"Tom should only get a couple bags today," Emily suggested. "Unless you’ve done this before?"
"I can’t say I have, actually. How much do you charge for one of these?" He asked, picking one of the bags up and eyeing it abstractedly.
The others seemed not to have remembered that the answer wasn’t inborn knowledge, and it took a few moments for Judy to reply, "For something that size, it’s traditional to charge maybe fifteen bucks. That’s what I do, anyway."
Before Judy had completely finished her sentence, there came a knock at the door. The occupants’ relatively slack temperaments changed, and Judy arose, manipulating a switchblade at her side, and asked, "Who is it?" while carefully inching towards the not particularly suspicious sound.
"It’s Boris!" a voice identified. "Open up, I just got a deal that’ll make your day a whole lot easier." The identification didn’t much change their demeanor, and Judy cautiously opened the door a crack, all that the chain lock would allow.
Boris peeked his sweaty face in as much as he could. "See? It’s me." He said to Judy "I wasn’t lying. Now, what do you say to letting me in?"
Judy did so, and Boris, a half-used cigar in between his fingers, and the predictable cloud of malodorous chemicals all came inside. There were some burn marks on his hand that Tom didn’t think he’d seen the last time he saw Boris, but he couldn’t confirm anything then.
"Anyway, some Guinea mob jerks called me up a couple minutes ago and said they wanted to buy a kilogram of methamphetamine," Boris explained, putting the cigar to his lips and pawing a lighter left on the kitchen table to relight it. "We agreed on $15,000 for it, so you better look at what they give you. I checked it out and I know one of them, so it’s safe and everything. Just tell them I sent you if they start getting pushy. I’d bring some thing to defend yourselves with if I were you in case it starts to go down, too. You can’t tell what gangsters have planned."
They looked like they understood. Boris handed Judy a piece of paper, explaining. "That’s the address they want you at. I wouldn’t go in a car if I were you." He blew the remaining cigar smoke from his quivering lips and made his exit. Patrick checked his gun as Boris left; making sure it was loaded before making a much more critical mistake than he had the night before. Judy inattentively flicked her switchblade with one hand while leaning on the floor with the other. Tom and Emily glanced at each other and shrugged.
The address was to a draughty and ambiguously abandoned warehouse on which traveling was likely trespassing. Trash and less identifiable accrual peppered the nearly black concrete floor where broken glass from the ancient crumbling windows did not. The four of them sat there, in a corner of the room, watching their breath leave their bodies and mingle before disappearing.
"I guess it goes without saying that it’s cold as hell in here." Patrick complained. "I wish these guys would get here already. God, we’re all about to get shot, I just know it. Fucking mafia."
"What experience have you had with the mafia, exactly, Patrick?" Emily asked patronizingly.
"I’ve had enough, Emily," He replied evasively. "Anyway, these guys are really eating up my time. How long have we been here?"
"About fifteen minutes, Patrick," Tom said as respectfully as he could, though he could only hide his weariness for Patrick’s complaining to an extent.
"What do a few greasy businessmen want with a kilogram of meth, anyway?" Patrick pondered. "They wouldn’t seem like the partying type."
"Not like you, huh, Patrick?" Emily mocked.
"Hey, what’s the use of living if you can’t have fun?" Patrick said. "Drugs are an easy way to fix whatever’s in your life that sucks, and, not to complain any more than I have, but mine needs a lot of fixing."
"We all have something to complain about, Patrick," Judy reminded him. "We don’t all screw with our heads to manage it."
"Who are you to talk, you drunk?" Patrick returned. "You mess with your head just as much as I do."
"But what about Tom or Emily? They’re clean, as far as they’ve divulged to me, and they’re dealing with whatever they don’t like in their lives just fine."
"Hey, don’t drag me into this," Emily entreated. "I know when a fight’s brewing."
"All I’m saying, Judy, is that life sucks, and you know it. We all do. If we didn’t know that, we wouldn’t be sitting here in a cold, dirty warehouse waiting for some mobsters to come and rob us. But drugs change that. Don’t remind me about how it’s not real, and that it’s all temporary, because what no one gets is that it’s not important that it’s temporary when you’re there. Life seems perfect when it’s happening."
"As much as I hate to," Judy began, "I’ll have to agree with you. You do what makes you happy. If other people have a problem with it, that’s for them to ruminate over, not you. You can do what you want, Patrick; the more destructive, the better."
"That goes for a lot of things," Patrick continued on another vein.
"Your whole life is just a buffet of pleasure, isn’t it, Patrick?" Emily scoffed. "It’s all sex and drugs with you."
"Well, sex is a good example, despite whatever problem you have with it. Doing what you want, at least for me, is a sort of dead end. It isolates just by the nature of the action. I doubt I’ve ever had anyone who makes me feel alive through themselves, but any cheap few minutes of carnal pleasure can give anyone with working genitalia a sense of belonging. I just want to be happy. Isn’t that all that’s really important? People say ‘live in the moment,’ and then tell you not to do drugs or have meaningless sex. But how can you live in the moment and be happy without doing that?"
When Tom heard Patrick, he heard a child. He was surprised that Patrick would ever confess to feeling anything like that. Patrick seemed like he wanted to be seen as some jaded tough guy. Tom guessed not, after that. Patrick seemed to be embarrassed by what he’d revealed about himself, and kept perhaps unconsciously as quiet as Tom was being.
"I never really understood the appeal of sex," Emily addressed Patrick. "I can’t think how it could make someone feel close to someone else in any way that, say, talking wouldn’t. People tell me a lot that it’s an animalistic release from our human prison, or in words similar to those, but they always seem to gloss over why mere sex is preferable to putting on loincloths and chasing down deer. It’s a waste of time and energy that could be spent on things that aren’t so pointless. Patrick, have you ever actually felt better or closer to someone when you were all done with them?" Patrick made an uncomfortable face suggesting that he didn’t. "And there it is," Emily motioned at Patrick. "But perhaps Patrick just hasn’t found the ‘right person’ yet. Why go to all the trouble of finding this ‘right person’? Shouldn’t the right person have more to do with emotional or mental compatibility? Why should sex even matter once that’s guaranteed?"
"Jesus, that’s the most I’ve heard you say all week," Judy said, obviously surprised at Emily’s sudden lecture.
"Sorry. You can’t keep it all in forever," Emily said in a meek manner amusingly contrary to her previous outburst. Emily left their attention and unobtrusively lit a cigarette and let someone else talk.
"I don’t see it your way, however," Judy broke Emily’s silence, saying, "Finding the ‘right person’ does, like you said, have to do with emotional and mental compatibility, but I think God threw in the physical compatibility into the fray as a bonus. I can’t speak for everyone, but I think an animalistic enjoyment of someone is sort of necessary, to keep mankind from completely losing touch with the biological reality of existence that we really can’t escape, no matter how huge our cities are built or how unnatural our lives become."
It didn’t sound like Judy was finished her thought when there inconspicuously appeared three black-suited businessmen, looking much more imposing than the squatting drug dealers. One had a plain black leather briefcase and they almost certainly all had weapons.
With no pleasantries of which the stereotypically charismatic gangster was often fond, the one in the center asked coldly, "Are you with Boris?"
Judy rose to her feet to show at least a semblance of professionalism, put out her hand to greet whichever one wanted to shake it, and replied, with a little more feeling than her customer had, "We’re with Boris. What do you have for us?"
"Let’s make this quick," the one in the center suggested without shaking Judy’s hand. "Fifteen grand, just for you." The man with the briefcase wordlessly handed it to Judy. Patrick remembered his part and rose from his position to offered man in the center the kilogram of methamphetamine, some of which remained in the smaller bags and some of which had been taken out, collecting at the lowest point in the bag. The receiver took one look at it and rolled his eyes.
"I hope we meet under less formal circumstances," Judy tested the men’s senses of humor once they’d begun to make their exit from the warehouse without saying one word to the four of them. "Bunch of stiffs," She muttered once she was sure they were out of earshot.
"We’d better get this all back before someone kills us for it," Emily suggested.
Once he’d opened the door, Patrick let escape a howl of success and carelessly tossed the briefcase onto the couch. "We didn’t count this yet, did we?" he asked nobody in particular, sitting down on the couch and unhooking the latches on the briefcase. Despite the suspicious nature of the question, Patrick’s demeanor was no less dampened.
"We could have been given an empty briefcase," Judy hypothesized in a much less delighted tone than Patrick.
"If it is, at least we can pawn it for a couple hundred bucks," Tom added.
The briefcase wasn’t empty, as they’d half expected; there were rows of neatly banded hundred- and fifty-dollar bills, which Patrick pawed through and began to count.
"I’m assuming that we’re splitting the money four ways," Emily said confidently, "And since Boris didn’t tell us to give any of it to him, I figure we can do whatever we want with it." She jovially picked up a stack of the hundreds and said, "Looks like Boris won’t be hounding us for rent any time soon."
"Would you give me the money, Emily? I’m trying to count it," Patrick pleaded irritably as he plucked the bills out of her hand.
"That’s almost four thousand dollars in cash for each of us," Judy calculated. "I guess we’ll be locking our doors and keeping our weapons ready, huh?"
"I guess we can’t all just agree not to steal each other’s money?" Emily predicted. "We’re not mature enough yet?"
"I’ll keep out if everyone else does," Patrick pledged, removing the last of the money from the briefcase and beginning to count four piles. Judy watched intently as he did so. "That’s fifteen thousand; those gangsters weren’t screwing us over," he observed.
"I guess the next question is what we’re all going to do with our money," Judy figured. "How about you, Tom?"
"Oh, God, I don’t know," Tom pondered, not having prepared anything graceful to say. "I feel like saying I’d get painting supplies, but that’s just out of habit. I used to just buy paint or canvasses when I got enough money before I ran away, but it seems sort of pointless now."
"You’re probably right about that," Patrick added. "Our lives aren’t as artistically blessed as most."
"I never really knew why I painted anyway," Tom continued, considering Patrick’s response "It was just a waste of time; I never purged any emotions or whatever’s supposed to happen when you engage in your passion. I guess it just wasn’t my passion, but I’ve tried so many creative outlets and none of them seem to do anything but distract me from whatever’s bothering me at the moment. A friend of mine once assumed that it is a purging of emotion for me, and there wasn’t really any way for her to know that it wasn’t at all, but it really sucks that something’s just assumed of me that I’ve found almost impossible. I would feel something I figure is good enough to call art, and then gather all the supplies I needed, whatever they were; a pencil and paper, a canvas and paint, a knife and a soft wall, it’s not important. Then I’d draw it, and in the middle of it, I’d lose what had originally ignited the idea; the feeling just wouldn’t be there anymore. The result would turn out as impersonal and emotionally hollow as if I’d paid someone to do it for me. It happened over and over again, but I wouldn’t stop and look for some other outlet, and I can’t, to this moment, understand why."
The others listened passively, Patrick flipping through wads of bills, glancing upwards at Tom at arbitrary intervals in his counting, Judy seeming to want to listen but continuing instead to eye Patrick suspiciously, Emily looking downwards at the corner of the table and unthinkingly flicking a cigarette lighter on and off. Once Tom had seemed to finish, she set the lighter down and raised her head.
"I think we’re on the same boat." She tried to relieve him. "I used to write, when I could. That was my ‘thing.’ An idea, more of a feeling, would start as an unforgivably abstract flash in my head that I just couldn’t specify, but it would be too exact for me to be able to explain it in any way besides the versatility of words. I have tried to make the idea physical through poetry and a whole mess of visual arts, but the practicalities of color or rhyme or whatever the outlet in question heralded took insultingly away from the much more significant underlying concept, so I’d express it through simple prose, or at least try.
"I’d get inspiration from the standard insipid adolescent ruminations; whether there’s anything to the rest of our lives and whether it’s worthwhile, admittedly trite crap like that, and for no more than a few seconds I’d be so happy with a specific explanation of one of those ideas that I couldn’t wait to put it in words, and ‘couldn’t wait’, I’m sad to say, is excruciatingly literal. What I wouldn’t ever accept is that the concepts, however moving for the few seconds they existed, were too abstract to exist for any more than those few seconds, and even then, only in my head. Now, how could something that intangible and ephemeral ever be anything but restricted to the point of meaninglessness by the comparative brick wall of language? Despite this restriction, I couldn’t ever do even a semblance of justice to my vision with any other outlet I could get my hands on, since there was so much more to think about, like I said, that I’d forget the initial feeling faster than I would independent of any superfluities.
"I always ended up writing just for the ‘practice,’ or because I really was capturing what I’d initially planned, or any other obviously false justification of which I could think, and what I’d written turned out flat, vague, and insincere in the desperate search for the primary spark. So one day I accepted mediocrity and just stopped writing."
"Another frustrated writer," Patrick sighed simplistically after having put most of the money into four neat piles. "That’s never been done before."
"Oh, I figured you wouldn’t want to hear it, Patrick," Emily rolled her eyes. "Just give me my money."
Patrick glowered at Emily and tossed her a stack of hundreds that she began to count at once. It seemed to Tom a wise decision to do the same.
"No one can express themselves when they’re twenty, Emily," Judy sympathetically reassured her. "If you peak that early, you’re doomed for failure. Don’t give up on it because you can’t figure out what you want to say now."
"It’s too late, anyway," Emily explained despondently, "Tom’s right, this life doesn’t take well to creative undertakings, and I haven’t written a word that was just for me for years; it had been a long time even when I lived with my parents. The facts that I don’t have much of a chance to write in between all the drug deals and end-meeting, and that I haven’t written for such a long time, aren’t even the main reason I see no point in starting again, either. I just never get that spark of inspiration anymore."
Tom glanced at his watch for the first time that day, and discovered that it had been that day for much longer than he’d thought, being well past noon. There was only one stack of money left, he noticed; everyone else had taken theirs, so he grabbed for his share and counted it under the coffee table, realizing only halfway through that he was unable to figure out what one fourth of fifteen thousand was in his head. He counted a little less than four thousand dollars, containing his amazement at the quantity of money that his attendants seemed to have learned to take for granted. Once he counted it all, he stuffed the bills into the pockets of his ragged jeans; trying to keep it all in one pocket was impossible.
"If you still want to know what everyone’s doing with their money, Judy," Patrick hazarded, standing up from the couch "I’m getting a drink."
"You could get quite a cocktail for four thousand bucks," Judy supposed as Patrick walked out the door.
"A drink at 12:30?" Tom asked, once Patrick had left. "My parents weren’t even that bad."
"Patrick’s a drunk," Emily reflected, "He’s told me that he can’t talk to ‘chicks’ unless he’s ‘a little tipsy.’ I figure that alcohol turns on that charming wit we don’t have the privilege of seeing here."
"That’s his plan," Judy added, "To show off. I don’t know how long he’ll be gone, but from the looks of the hour, he’ll be incredibly smashed when he does."
"I can’t escape this drunkenness," Tom observed. "It surrounded me when I lived with my parents, it surrounds me now. I wanted to get as far away from that crap as I could, and I’m failing miserably."
"You think you can’t escape it?" Emily challenged. "My parents died in a car accident that their own drinking caused. It’s not that huge a deal to me; I was six when they bit it. Both of my mom’s parents are dead, and my dad’s wanted nothing to do with me, and I have a lot of head-scratching to do before I can think of why. I was put up for adoption when I was eight years old. When I was thirteen, I was adopted by "I know a depressing conversation when I hear it," Judy recognized, getting up and walking towards her room. "I think I might need a drink, too."
Tom was among desperate people escaping terrible circumstances, but he didn’t feel at all at home. Even Judy, who appeared to be such a kindred spirit initially, seemed to have begun to become alien to him.
"I guess we’re the only two artists under this roof," Tom supposed.
"If one can even deign to call us that," Emily replied, "No offense to your work, Tom. I just figured you suffered from mediocrity as much as I do. Maybe it’s just wishful thinking, though."
"Oh, God, no, there’s nothing interesting about my art," Tom explained, "They’re all just attempts at some impression of a catharsis, like you said."
"It’s one thing to be mediocre to others." Emily affixed to Tom’s thought, "Others are meaningless when it comes to genuine art. It’s a real problem when your art is mediocre to yourself, especially when you can’t find anything of yours to compare its mediocrity to."
Judy reentered the living room with a glass of some clear alcohol. Emily’s story and Judy’s return suddenly reminded Tom of what Rachel had told him about her brief escape to Philadelphia. It had taken him much longer than he would have liked to think to wonder if these were the same people.
"Hey, Judy," he said with designs on confirming his suspicion. "When Patrick came to Philadelphia, did he come with a girl?"
"Actually, he did," Judy remembered, "He used to live in the suburbs somewhere, and that’s where he sold, too, but there was a really nasty bust a few years ago and his name was on a lot of lips, so he came here, and he brought his girlfriend, too. I don’t know what happened to her, though, if that’s what you’re going to ask. I guess just being in his presence finally got to her, because she disappeared pretty quickly."
"That was my friend, Rachel," Tom recognized. "She was the singer in that club."
"Small world," Judy remarked impassively.
Emily had a surprised look on her face, explaining it by asking, "Patrick actually had a girlfriend?"
"That was almost five years ago," Judy reasoned. "He’s not really the type to have normal human relationships that last for more than a few blurry hours."
"That’s what I figured," Emily said, visibly appeased by Judy’s explanation. "Even so, how a fruitcake like Patrick can find someone who’s willing, even happy, to put up with him for however long she did is a real enterprise in human persistence."
"Tom tells me that she’s not exactly the wisest friend," Judy relayed.
"I didn’t say that," Tom corrected. "She’s pretty intelligent, but compared to the people I knew, that’s saying so little it’s almost an insult. She just isn’t much help when something in your head is eating away at you. I had a conversation with her before I ran away, and we talked about the ups and downs of doing so. It was all hypothetical just a few hours before I got up and left, but she was just so literal about it. I didn’t run away for spite, but that sure didn’t do anything to make me want to stay."
"Maybe Rachel and Patrick were meant to be together," Judy supposed. "I guess problematic people just find each other. At least that keeps them out of circulation."
"What do you care about keeping people out of circulation, Judy?" Emily asked. "You always say you’re totally uninterested in romance."
"I guess I was being altruistic," Judy returned. "To be honest with you, I figure dating and romance and sex and those whole areas of interest just aren’t worth all the work. You only ever hear of a nice Valentine’s Day and then a horribly painful divorce when it comes to romance. The benefit and detriments don’t seem to be proportional, but even if they were, you’d just be doing a lot of work for no gain at all."
"Makes sense to me," Emily related. "I feel the sting of hypocrisy, having had sex in the past. It was only once and it never amounted to anything, of course. God, I’m a fucker. A while ago, before I came here, a friend of mine had a horrible bout of depression, and one day, he decided to give in completely to his id in a desperate attempt to feel any better. He told me he was going to kill himself, and I had no reason not to believe him. Maybe I’m going to hell for this, but I don’t think it’s anyone’s place to dissuade someone from suicide. All I think it’s right to do is help them come to the decision to or not to in a reasonable manner. I tried that, and he wanted out. I guess he wanted to thank me for what I’d helped him realize, so he asked me if I wanted to have sex with him, that bastard. I must have been in some state then, because for an imbecilic reason I’ll never remember, I agreed. I’m a bastard too.
"The next day was his last; he dove off of his roof. He had a girlfriend with whom I was very old friends, but I guess he figured that, since he wouldn’t be in a position to tell her what we’d done, I would be too cowardly to. He was right. She has no idea, and if I can help it, she never will. That’s how I lost my innocence, and I think I did so pretty thoroughly." Emily stopped, but before anyone could remark on her story, she asked hastily, "What about you, Tom? You’re being a little quiet."
"It’s not all that interesting," Tom warned, "I can’t say truthfully that I have ever had sex. The people with whom I used to associate were difficult enough to have platonic relationships with; I could hardly attempt a romantic one with any of them, let alone an unchaste one. I guess I dodged a bullet."
"You haven’t taken advantage of any sluts, I see," Judy discerned. "You must have soul in there. I guess I’m a little bit of a hypocrite, too, to be honest. I’m a virgin and I’m all set to die that way, but I did have a girlish crush on this guy at my school when I still went. In my defense, this was a few years ago; I must have been about your age, Tom. Anyway, this guy sat a few seats in front of me in my chemistry class, and I figured we were in the same grade. He was one of a sizeable population of art losers at my school, all of whom mingled somewhat with my friends. I wasn’t the most outgoing person among them, so I could hardly ever force myself to talk to him, even when given a chance by every possible avenue.
"There was one time, just once, that we conversed, and that was a very good day for me. He initiated the conversation for some incredible reason, and we engaged in idle chit chat for a little while. I can remember hardly any of the contents of the conversation, but since I also don’t remember being utterly ashamed of myself, so I must have made sense, if not very interesting sense. My desperate heart figured he was interested in me, but my ruining mind made sure I never said another word to him again. At the end of the year, it turned out that he was a senior, and he left for college. The only good thing I can salvage out of the whole experience is that even if he hadn’t left for college, I probably wouldn’t have tried to talk to him anyway." Judy looked lost eye contact with Tom and Emily the more she spoke. "Well, bottoms up." She gulped down the shot that she’d been ignoring throughout the whole conversation.
Someone knocked at the door, yelling, "Open up, it’s Patrick!" Judy impassively approached the door with her empty glass and looked through the peephole.
"Damn, it is Patrick," Judy lamented, unhooking the chain lock and swinging the door open. Patrick stepped inside.
"Bars all ban you?" Emily hazarded.
"None were open," Patrick returned tiredly. "It is pretty early. I just wish I could figure out a way to spend my money."
"Why don’t you get a nice apartment?" Judy suggested.
"Let me guess, on the other side of town?" Patrick predicted. Judy said nothing.
Before anyone could say another word, gunshots rung from outside. Tom was stunned for a moment, but calmed himself once the rest of the group kept still. There was another knock at the door, more frantic than Patrick’s. There was no identification from the knocker, and Patrick fondled his weapon as he moved toward the door. "Who is it?" He asked out of habit.
"Open the door," came an forceful and unfamiliar male voice from the other side. Patrick looked through the peephole, but as soon as he did, it flew open at the kick of the man on the other side and threw Patrick onto the floor below.
Another more blurry figure rushed through the hallway past the door as the man entered. He was dressed in an expensive-looking black suit that looked to be of the style the mobsters were wearing. They had all figured it out by that time; the men hadn’t found the methamphetamine acceptable.
Patrick brandished his weapon at the man, who mirrored him with a shiny black revolver. Tom, Judy, and Emily, hoping more than anything else to make their escape but unable to do so because of the only exit’s happenings, had almost instinctively rushed into Emily’s room. Despite the situation, Tom had time to look around Emily’s room. It didn’t look a great deal different from Judy’s except that it had a bed for the mattress, it didn’t have a window, and there were far fewer writings and drawings on every available flat space. Emily fumbled through a green backpack on which was hung a pink-dyed rabbit’s foot. Her hand came out of it grasping intently another handgun.
Tom fully expected to have been dead by that time, or at least for either Patrick or the gangster to have opened fire. He heard them converse from outside as both Emily and Judy watched the door fixedly.
"We’d like a full refund of the money we gave you bunch of liars," the stranger commanded.
"Do you have the meth?" Patrick replied. In Emily and Judy, despite the haze of their terror-faces, there could be seen a glimpse of exasperation with Patrick’s answer.
Another gunshot made the three hiders jump, and footsteps became a touch louder. Tom thought her heard the stranger mutter, "I’ll find it myself."
Moments later, the doorknob turned. The stranger knew right where to go because of his having seen the three of them rush into Emily’s room initially. Emily stood on the bed, crouching to fit the ceiling, and pointed the weapon as evenly as she could considering the circumstance. Judy had lit a cigarette.
The door opened wide and the stranger rushed in. Emily released a vein-bursting shriek that wasn’t even completely drowned out by the barrage of bullets that escaped her weapon. Tom and Judy realized before Emily that she’d either wounded or killed the stranger and, as such, bounded out of the room, not stopping for a moment to check bloody Patrick’s unclear state, and then out of the apartment altogether.
Judy led the other two further down the hallway, at the other side of which they could hear, and then see, another gangster. Tom wondered where the police could possibly be. At the end of the hallway, at the back of the building, there was a broken window that opened onto the landing of an unsafe-looking fire exit. Judy didn’t seem to have any qualms about it and nearly leapt out of the window, an action that Tom, directly behind her, mimicked exactly. Emily came a moment later, and they all rushed down the shaky black stairs, across the garbage-collecting alley into a wet parking garage. Judy had her eye on a worn station wagon that she moved directly towards once they entered. None of them had even thought about slowing down, encouraged by the voices of pursuers.
Judy nearly ripped open the driver’s side door and Tom hopped in the passenger’s seat simultaneously. Emily was about three yards behind the car, a gangster a few yards behind her, when Judy tore out of the parking garage, surprising to Tom considering the car’s condition, and onto a road that it, the garage, opened out upon. Tom looked through the rear-view mirror and Emily running, looking not to have slowed down still, after the two of them. Judy didn’t stop. She drove onto a busy but quickly moving road, and Emily left the mirror’s view.
"Jesus, that happened so damn fast," Judy said, shakily attempting with great difficulty to light another cigarette, succeeding to do so before putting her hands back on the wheel.
"Too fast for Emily, I suppose?" Tom reminded her.
"I would have left you too if you hadn’t gotten into the car in time," Judy explained. "We were on our own just then, but I guess it’s good that more than one person made it out. We have twice the money we would have had."
"Where are we going?" Tom asked.
"Right now, I just want to make sure those gangsters don’t find us again. I’m guessing they came here in a car. I want to get out of the city, but I haven’t thought further ahead than that. We have thousands upon thousands of dollars on us, so if those guys don’t get a hold of us and take them out of our cold stiff hands, we’ll be all set, for a little while, at least."
The only obviously working machine was a digital compass under the rear-view mirror, and on the road it had nothing on it but an "N."
The buildings became shorter and shorter the further the car noisily sputtered along. After about fifteen minutes of driving, they were on a highway much like the one on which Tom had traveled to the city. The cigarette Judy had lit hadn’t been touched except by her shaking fingers, and the snowy ashes had been sprinkled on her clothes, the seat, on Tom, and a number of other places. It was obvious that she’d forgotten that it was there when the burning filter reached her flesh.
"Ow!" she exclaimed, dropping the butt onto the dashboard. The flame had gone out by itself so Judy just left it where it decided to go.
Signs of human habitation slowly disappeared as the car continued north. By that time, the city had inarguably closed behind them, and the country opened its extensive maw in greeting. Beige sound barriers above rocky outcroppings looked only to keep the sound of traffic from the trees. The car passed a tree on which was hung a sign with only the word "Jesus" written upon it, and a life-sized stone cross with graffiti that Tom hadn’t enough time to read besides a large and central "IHS".
"What a weekend," Tom reflected exhaustedly, resting his head on the not particularly comfortable closed window.
"You’re telling me," Judy responded, not taking her eyes off of the road. "You sure came at the wrong time."
"What’s wrong with the time I chose?"
"You mean, besides the fact that your first sale was to mobsters whom only hours later tried to take back the money they’d given us? You should have come a year earlier. You could at least have had a static life for a while. It took me almost six months before I actually stayed anywhere for a mentionable span of time. Believe me, it’s exhausting. Maybe you didn’t think about it when you left – I didn’t either – but you don’t want to have to move around for that long. I don’t know what it is that makes it so miserable, I guess humans just need rituals. I didn’t think I had any use for rituals until then, when I realized that I had had too many to notice before I ran away.
"Of course, they weren’t very exotic; coming home every so often, despite home’s sorrow, sleeping in my bed, talking to whoever I talked to throughout the course of the day, nothing any more than that. When I ran away, though, all of those recurring activities were dissolved. I was lucky if two days were similar, and hoping for any more than that wasn’t ever anything but a masochistic endeavor.
"When I left my mom and her boyfriend, I tried to get to Montreal, as far as I thought I needed to go to make a clean break. I hitchhiked a huge portion of the way, or took the bus when I found enough money on the ground or from blessed strangers for the fare, occurrences that were, needless to say, negligibly rare. I slept in a different place every day and got caught for vagrancy every so often, but by that time I was just eighteen and I didn’t have any legal obligation to my mother, thank God, so I would just have to spend the night in jail instead of the street. I lost a lot of weight due to my appallingly minute diet; I had brought only one hundred dollars for food, and a lot of it was wasted on bus fare.
"I got to Massachusetts, surprisingly far considering my erratic mode of travel, where I was picked up by a few hippy types in a white van. They didn’t seem like altogether wholesome characters, especially when they revealed an incredible quantity of LSD, which, they told me, was a rare and lucrative commodity on the east coast. I guess it wasn’t lucrative enough for them not to indulge in it perpetually, but even despite that, they assured me that there was enough, I failed to believe, to feed a coast’s worth of acidheads. They said that they were going north to every major eastern city and selling the drug in sheets. I was commissioned to help, and figured that if I did I would get relatively free ride north.
"Turns out that the idiots were going south, and after only a frightening week of driving with a group of the hallucinatory jackals, I was back in Philadelphia. I decided then to make my escape, a task as simple as escape from my mother was, and, giving up on my plan to run off to Montreal, roamed the streets of the city at which I’d been involuntarily thrown for almost two hunger- and discomfort-packed weeks. I guess I looked like either a practicing or potential addict, because Patrick, rest his soul, found me wandering aimlessly, wondering if I’d made a terrible mistake as to the initiation of my once new but then stale life, and asked if I wanted any methamphetamine. I agreed, despite the fact that doing so would at that point, cut my entire monetary worth in half.
"In an uncommon display of philanthropy, Patrick invited me to stay in his apartment, explaining the set up there completely. Not one to pass up a place to live after months of wondering where each night would be spent, I agreed to stay there. People came and went, including Patrick, but until now, I stayed there the whole damn time. I’m back where I started, only now I have a car, thousands of dollars, and a barrier against the sorrows of solitude."
"It’s been quite a weekend," Tom repeated.
Tom and Judy’s conversations in the car were only occasional; a stretch of an hour or so might carve any speech had in the car. Judy appeared, though perhaps seventy miles from the site of her pursuit, to still feel chased.
"Where are we going, exactly?" Tom asked Judy finally, figuring by her determined look that she had some sort of a plan for them both.
"Montreal," She answered preparedly. " I didn’t tell you that story for nothing; I’m going to finish what I started."
"Don’t you have any feeling for Patrick or Emily?" Tom asked. "Do you not think they deserved what they got?"
"I’m trying not to think about that," Judy answered. "I don’t want to think about that. I wasn’t all that fond of either of them, Patrick more, I suppose, but that’s over now. I won’t be bothered by something I can’t do anything about. It was them or me. I’m not going to die for someone else. I’m all I have."
"We couldn’t have waited for Emily?" Tom almost pleaded.
"If we did, we all would have been killed," Judy reasoned. By the tone of her voice, Tom found her cold logic begin to weaken. "I suggest you forget about it, too. Emily and – I’ll admit it – Patrick didn’t deserve what they got, but we wouldn’t have either. If it were them in this car and us in Hell, it wouldn’t be any different. Just make the best of what you can, Tom, don’t worry about what you can’t change."
"I just can’t get Emily’s desperate face out of my mind." Tom explained. "I saw it through the rear-view mirror; she didn’t even seem to notice that we were leaving without her; for a moment she almost looked like she thought she was safe. I can’t help feeling horrible. I don’t know if I’ll ever forget."
"We need to get some gas," Judy replied.
The highway became smaller, Tom observed, thinking perhaps that Judy had gone into an exit. Four lanes fused gradually into two, and buildings began to appear. Trees and the beginnings of mountains still surrounded them; only what they surrounded had changed. Judy stopped at what looked like a family-owned gas station, no name or logo being offered. The gravel crunched under the revolution of the wheels, stopping when the car did. As far as Tom could tell, the place was deserted except for nothing more than the outline of an attendant either sleeping or lazy. Tom figured he’d been asleep in the car for an hour or so, looking at his surroundings to determine how far they’d traveled and by extension perhaps how long he’d been asleep. Since he was neither particularly interested in the length of his slumber nor able to discern their location, he stopped trying and got out of the car with Judy.
"You have a watch, right?" Judy asked as he did so. She asked him as he was in the midst of stretching his arms, so he returned them to their normal position and checked his watch.
"It’s almost six," he replied. "I assume you wanted the time, and not to rob me of my valuable watch, right?"
"You guessed right," Judy assured him, "but now that you mention it, I could turn that watch into a handy nickel." She began to fill the car up. "Jesus, if you’re not lying to me about the time, I’ve been driving for five hours. I’m a little proud of myself and my terror. I’m guessing we’re somewhere near Scranton."
"We’re almost out of Pennsylvania altogether," Tom perceived. "Just one more state until we get to Montreal. We should be there in no time."
"Do you mind driving for a while, Tom?" Judy hoped.
"I don’t have my driver’s license with me, and we have thousands of dollars in cash in the car. If we get pulled over, we’re screwed," Tom answered.
"Good point. You really didn’t think ahead with this running away thing, huh?"
"Not as much as I wish I had. My decision was just too spontaneous. I didn’t have any sort of a plan; I still don’t, really. My purpose was to escape a life for which I had no affinity, not to start a better one. I knew what I was getting into, and I knew it was a shot in the dark, but I wanted whatever happened to me to be my own doing. I didn’t care if it was unpleasant as long as I could just live for myself. I guess that’s why I didn’t think planning was necessary. Well, I didn’t think anything. I just did."
"There’s nothing else to do," Judy said, "If that’s your goal. I supposed I planned – not enough I see now – before I left because I wanted my life afterwards to be happy. I don’t think any amount of planning can afford that, but I figured then that it would at least help. I suppose that’s where our purposes fork, though. The path to them is oddly similar, at least."
The gas tank was full, and Judy slipped a bill into the money slot and returned to the car. Tom followed, falling listlessly to the passenger’s seat. Judy began to pull out of the gas station and drive down the road from which it was an offshoot, but before getting very far, stopped the car once more. "I’m going to go see if they have anything to drink in the store," Judy informed Tom.
"Something like alcohol?" He answered. "Because they don’t sell in any gas station you drive by."
"I’ll bet they do at this one. How many cops do you think come and check this place out?" Judy asked rhetorically, adding, "And how much revenue do you think this business like this would make by selling contraband around here? People do stuff like this all the time, Tom, trust me."
"Did you remember that you’re the only one who can drive this legally, and if we get pulled over due to any drunken decisions on your part, they’ll find the huge quantity of dirty money that we, by the way, should keep a little more hidden than in our pockets."
"I told you, alcohol doesn’t affect my head," Judy returned.
"You admitted yourself that you lose motor control," Tom argued. "Even if you know what you want to do, you’re not going to do it."
"We have to stop driving and go to sleep some time, Tom. And when we do, I’ll drink. If you think I can sleep without that crap, you’re dead wrong."
"Do you really think they’re going to let us pass through a national border with booze, Judy?" Tom continued.
"Do you really think they’re going to let us pass through a national border with this much money in cash, Tom?" Judy mimicked. "Besides, I can and almost certainly will drink it before we get to Canada. That’s hundreds of miles away, maybe two or three days if we get a move on now. Don’t worry, Tom, nothing’s going to happen," She reassured him.
Tom shrugged, figuring they were already in a pretty vulnerable spot and a little more incrimination wouldn’t go very far, and that there wasn’t any guarantee that Judy would find any alcohol there anyway.
Tom’s second assumption turned out completely false; it seemed that Judy could sniff out contraband better than a drug dog. She came back with nothing more than two bottles of schnapps, taking a pull from one while holding the other. She got into the car once more, telling Tom, "Peach schnapps: that’s all they had. Go figure," she shrugged and wordlessly offered Tom some. Tom declined in the same manner.
"I wish I remembered where the highway was when I left it. Ah, well, we have a full tank to look for it," Judy said mostly to herself as she drove down the road, looking for a signal that the highway was close.
A scraggly young man dressed in all white; a white T-shirt and what looked like bleached jeans had appeared on the side of the road as Judy found the highway once more. Their cautious search for that road had slowed their momentum to enough of an extent that it was clear that the man was hitchhiking, despite the sky’s at that time having turned to genuine night.
"I’m going to pick this guy up," Judy said, slowing down enough for there to be no return if she changed her mind.
"You’re kidding," Tom said, "He looks like a lunatic. He’d have to be to want to get into this clanking contraption."
"You have to die sometime," Judy responded. "Anyway, he might be interesting. We’re not in any hurry to get to Montreal." As if that was enough to assure anyone, Judy said nothing more about it.
The man was poorly shaven and let his curly hair drop past his shoulders. "He’s sitting up front," Tom conditioned as he climbed in the backseat.
Judy pulled over and leaned out the window, "Need a ride somewhere?" She asked perhaps a little too genially.
"Oh, thank God!" The man said exclaimed. "I thought I’d have to walk for miles and miles. Thank you," he continued more coolly.
"Get in," Judy offered simultaneous as the man’s doing so. He walked around to the passenger’s seat, throwing a white backpack on the floor of the car before he got in himself. Tom watched him get in. Despite his unclean appearance, there was no sign at all of a stain anywhere on his pure white clothing.
"I’m Adam," the man said. "Which way are you going?"
"We’re making our way to Montreal," Tom said.
"So it’s all north for a very long time," Judy added. "We’re Judy and Tom, by the way. I’ll let you figure out who’s who. So, how many hundreds of miles out of our way is your destination?"
"Oh, heavens," Adam began, "It’s just along this highway," he pointed, "Maybe ten or fifteen miles north of here. I live in a commune with a couple of other like-minded individuals."
"That sounds promising," Judy said, starting to drive down the highway once more. "You’re in a cult, aren’t you?"
"God, no," Adam contested, "Though the similarities would make proving so exceedingly difficult. We don’t angle for people to join us, nor do we abuse them if they do, we simply work as closely to Christ’s word as we are able because it’s good to do."
"And how do you do that, exactly?" Judy said, obviously still suspicious.
"The most obvious accumulation of our work can be seen every so often at the edges of the road; whether it’s a wooden sign we nail to a tree saying merely ‘Jesus,’ or a more noticeable but more expensive stone cross, we do our best to keep Christ on people’s minds."
"You really think highway drivers are going to drop everything and accept Jesus as their redeemer just because they might for a second see his name in the woods?" Judy scoffed.
"You’d be surprised, my assumption-fond friend," Adam explained. "And let’s not forget the fact that we don’t try to get people to join, as I said already. In my opinion, I’d rather somebody make the conscious and genuine decision not to follow Christ as a result of our work than to blindly and inaccurately accept it. His path is a good path, but it’s not the only one, and certainly not one to be misused."
"That’s an admirable outlook," Tom said.
"We try to be accepting of our fellow man," Adam said. "It’s what He would have wanted. We just want people to give God a thought. Nothing more. You might think it’s ineffective, but you’d only think that if you thought we were trying to rustle up converts, and I’ve made it clear that we weren’t."
"I have a question, Adam, and I mean no offense," Judy began cautiously, "But do you help humanity in any way besides passively reminding them of the hugest religion on the planet?"
"You think we don’t try?" Adam asked resentfully. "Our financial situation is all but inexistent. When we do get a couple bucks from selling whatever we can at a farmers’ market, it goes right to charity." He looked at Judy, who, though keeping her eyes on the road, seemed unmoved. "Were you expecting more cynicism, Judy?" He asked as politely as his question’s content would allow.
Judy sighed and felt her pocket for her pack of cigarettes, cracking open her window once she’d found them. "I don’t mean to be a bitch," she ambiguously apologized, "But I have trouble believing that people aren’t just for themselves, and want to make the earth a less miserable place and nothing else on the side. I figure that the earth has been miserable since the first protein made two of itself, and I sort of think looking out for others is an enterprise in futility, so I’m just finding it hard to so quickly swallow an attitude that I’ve never observed being carried out in my life."
"That’s a terrible way to live," Adam appraised. "Of course the earth can be less miserable. Let’s be realistic here, it probably won’t ever be perfect, since human misfortune has befallen us since before we were humans, but what Christ teaches is simple, and if people can understand His way, if only to better understand their own, the earth can’t help but become better."
"I don’t know," Tom entered, "People have tried to ‘spread the word’ for two millennia, and it always seems to get molested into the most convenient fashion that the person spreading it can get it. I think it’s simply against human nature to follow him accurately. We’re animals, and no matter how much we invent and clutter the space between us and that fact, it remains true all the same."
"You make a good, though somewhat fatalistic, point," Adam said. "Just because, or even if, it’s impossible for people as a whole to follow Christ, that doesn’t mean it’s not worth trying. What is there to lose by trying to make somebody happy? Failing? So someone who is unhappy remains unhappy. You gave it a try, and they got at least a chance for their misery to change. That sounds worth it to me."
"What you have to lose is the true meaning of Christ’s message," Tom said. "I don’t really believe He was celestial at all, but I don’t think anyone can honestly say that His ideas weren’t noble. I appreciate what He was trying to do, but I don’t think it’s worth dirtying His name any further."
"Then what do you want?" Adam asked. "Do you want those who follow the word of Christ as closely as possible to give up His word completely to those who use His name to further their own selfish agendas? You said that following Him accurately was futile, but you also think that following him inaccurately is immoral. Do you just want people to stop following Him altogether despite the fact that they’d be forsaking what you yourself described as ‘noble ideas’?"
"I guess I didn’t get as in-depth with it as I thought I did," Tom said.
"In Tom’s defense," Judy began, "He can feel both ways. There’s nothing logically wrong with forcing yourself to choose between futility and immorality, but I do question what Tom was trying to make clear."
Tom looked like he was being ganged up on. He exasperatedly sighed, saying, "I just wanted to say that I think it’s futile to get Christ’s word to be followed accurately in a widespread area because that’s not how people work. I then said that those people who say they follow Him but know that they do not are immoral people. Nothing more."
"Exactly where is this commune of yours, Adam?" Judy inquired not too soon after Tom had finished explaining himself.
"It’s the exit after this one," Adam clarified, pointing his finger upon the window at a passing offshoot.
"Just out of curiosity," Tom mentioned, "How many people are members of your commune, exactly?"
"Hum," Tom said quizzically, obviously not having thought of it before. "Well, there’s me, my sister," he started quietly listing other members of the enclave the names of whom Tom wasn’t paying attention. "About seven, altogether."
"One more thing," Judy added, sending the three of them through the exit to which Adam had alerted her. "What exactly were you doing by that gas station with neither car nor shoe?"
"I’ll assume my secret’s safe with you," Adam replied, motioning to the open bottle of peach stuffed between the console and the seat. He sent his hands into his white backpack under the dashboard, and he retrieved a plastic bag of what Tom eyeballed to be a half-ounce or so of pot.
"Charitable," Tom said.
"For your information, Tom, Jacob, the man at the gas station, trades marijuana with us for produce. Our money still goes to those who need it."
"Gasoline, booze, and pot" Judy marveled jestingly. "I can only imagine what he has stowed in the back."
That loosened a few chuckles from the rest, but Adam turned his head out the window, pointing at an upcoming road, the only one on the horizon between the trees and the cornfields, saying, "Turn in here. First house on the right."
Judy did so, but before she could enter down the driveway, there was a loud gut-sinking ‘snap’ in the front of the feeble little automobile and it finally succumbed to its ailments and entered into a stage of paralysis.
"How convenient," Judy said. "It must be thirty miles to the nearest bus stop. I should have guessed this thing would die before we could get anywhere worthwhile."
"I appreciate it," Adam said sarcastically. "We have some tools back at the house, and there’s a chance that we could fix whatever’s wrong with your car, but it’s sort of late. It might have to wait until the morning."
Judy sighed. "Well, we don’t have much of a rush to get to Montreal, nor much of a choice, at this point," she said with a fleck of sadness. "Thanks, though, Adam," she added after a pause.
The three of them exited the car after Judy had put it in neutral and they pushed the vehicle down the long driveway to a house almost at the edge of the highway, very close by the trees upon which the members of the commune hung their wooden signs.
While they pushed, foot-by-foot, Tom’s shoes angrily scratched against the viscous dust of the not-yet dry ground. He started to understand what Judy had meant when she’d told him about the lack of a ritual. Not even after three days filled to the brim with spontaneous but painfully consequential decision, he began to feel the sucking hunger for ritual. Would what he was doing then be how he’d spend the rest of his life? Every few hours were surprised for which he couldn’t possibly prepare. His life was only concretely planned for a few hours in the future, and anything beyond that was an intangible aspiration. Their getting to Montreal, a feat thousands achieve each day, was as vague a goal as finding a life partner is for most people. Tom yearned for a life. It hadn’t even been a hundredth of what Judy had gone through on her search and eventual discovery for a semblance of stasis in daily life, but his craving was close to intolerable.
He’d completely broken off from two perfectly viable lives during the weekend. The second of the two he hadn’t had much more than a few hours to get used to, and there was little about its cessation that he found unpleasant. If it hadn’t ceased he would have had no terrible memories of that time at all, since the only one was as they escaped the life in the parking garage; Emily’s seeming to blink out of existence. Even when his mind was on an absolutely differing subject, he still found inside his head the picture of Emily’s hopeful face as she watched the car he was pushing just then as though they’d back up and causally let her in.
Tom distracted himself from that thought. He hadn’t, he backpedaled, had enough time to get used to that attempt at a new life, but at the one previously he had much more than enough. Despite his grievous desire to break off all attachment to the life he’d been born into, he still had an urge to know what his family and friends were up to. He had his doubts that his disappearance was much of an event. He didn’t particularly want it to be so, either. Tom figured that he wanted his mind to make a clean break, no matter how it was failing, from those who peopled his previous life as much as he wanted their minds to make a clean break from him.
Tom was happy, he decided, that he wasn’t caught, though he did make some retrospectively stupid decisions; stupid, that is, only if getting caught wasn’t his goal. When he was making these decisions, he thought, he made with them a conscious effort not to be seen, to mingle irretrievably into the anonymity of throng and distance, which, he decided, was a terrific success. He wondered why he wasn’t content.
Before he could wonder too deeply, Adam gently nudged him on the shoulder to alert him to stop moving. Tom realized that Adam hadn’t even needed to warn Judy when to stop. She’d been paying the attention that Tom had not.
There were two other automobiles, and despite the gloom Tom could make out a white truck and a sedan similar in color to the car the three had come in behind.
"Don’t you have any towing equipment, here, Adam?" Judy suggested, motioning to the van.
"I’m afraid not," Adam replied. "Don’t worry about it, you said yourself, you’re not in any rush to get to Montreal."
"I did say that," Judy repeated.
Tom’s watch said it was 10:30, but he received the information with utter disbelief. The day had been impossibly demanding on his body and mind. Judy didn’t look altogether alert, either.
"I guess the others are asleep," Adam said. "We have an extra room for visitors or new members; you can stay there for the duration."
"Thank you," Tom said exasperatedly. Judy remained silent, but she looked appreciative all the same.
"I suppose you’ll need a shower and a change," Adam offered.
"I’m a little too tired," Judy said. Tom hadn’t seen Judy lose a sense of wakefulness since he’d met her. This wasn’t as strange as he’d first fancied when he thought about it for any longer, since he’d not known her for even a day.
The two of them were led into the extra room and Adam left them to it. It was all plain white, as very much of the house was, except for a window beyond which were the silent passing lights and life of the vehicles on the highway. There were three beds against three walls and a dresser that, succumbing to temptation, Tom discovered was filled with white clothing and linen.
"They sure have a working color scheme," Tom looking through the dresser, said to Judy, who had materialized a flask of the peach schnapps that she’d bought from the gas station.
"Must be some sort of cult thing," Judy, sitting on the bed by the window that she’d staked out, opined before swallowing a mouthful of the drink. "I don’t know if I buy that ‘commune’ bullshit."
"I’m a little spooked myself," Tom replied. "Adam seems pretty level headed, though. If all that they do is grow vegetables, tack up signs and crosses by the highway, and get stoned, it doesn’t seem too destructive a cult to me."
"That’s true," Judy said. "I would like to know where they got this house from, and meet the rest of the tenants herein. Plus, I don’t know why Adam went fifteen miles away to buy pot from a gas station with neither transportation nor shoes to speak of either way. It seems pretty suspicious."
"I’ll lock the door," Tom said, disengaging in the dresser and doing what he’d said. "Let’s just hope they can’t get in through the window."
"You know," Judy backpedaled, removing her jacket and dropping in onto the floor, "They could very easily just be a bunch of good Samaritans. It’s a natural suspicion, what we have – there are a lot of maniacs in the world – but it’s conceivable that there is still the odd outpost of humanity left here. I don’t know what will make me happy, but maybe these people are more aware of themselves than I am."
She’d finished the bottle by that time, and while she talked, Tom had gotten into his bed. The last part of her speech was the last thing her heard that day.
VI.
"Are you okay, Judy?" Tom asked, pushing his own bed sheets off of him with difficulty.
Judy stirred, crawling out of bed. "God, I forgot all about this place," she said, not responding to Tom’s question immediately. "I’ll be fine in a while; I just need some water or something." She stood up out of bed.
Judy painfully approached the dresser and sighed at her choices of clothes. "This place is just getting worse and worse," she said, picking out a white t-shirt and white cotton pants. "We’re going to look just like the rest of the cult."
"I wouldn’t say that so loud," Tom warned her as she hesitantly put on the uniform. "Plus, we only know that Adam wears all white."
"And that the whole damn house it white, and that all the clothes in here are white. I guess it’s a crazy theory, but I sort of have the feeling that the rest of the household is going to be in these colors. This place is freaking me out."
"I want to get out of here as much as you do, but you know better than I do at how unpleasant attempting to travel to Montreal on foot is, and if we want to leave right now, that’s what we’re stuck with."
"Yeah, I know," Judy said, almost camouflaged by her color and the walls’. "I just hate having to choose between two unpleasant options. Of course, everyone does, and it’s inevitable sometimes, but it disrupts my innermost virtues when my choices aren’t between pleasure and pain but pain and less pain. I think it’s my choice to suffer in this way, however, in knowing it’s inescapability, and thus it’s nothing I have a right to complain about."
"Jesus, that’s rough," Tom said, unable to ease the pain of what both of them knew was impossible to evade.
Tom had put on an outfit unavoidably similar to Judy’s when a knock at the door attempted to start their day.
"Hey, guys?" the voice was recognized as Adam’s. "Are you awake yet?"
"Yeah," Judy said, approaching and unlocking the door. "What time is it?"
Adam looked unable to answer the question, and Tom glanced at his watch, repeating what he saw, "It’s almost two."
"Christ," Judy said. "Did you try to wake us up?" She addressed Adam.
"With sharp failure," he returned. "I don’t know what you were doing yesterday, but I’m sure, if anything, you’re rested up now. You guys were out for well over half a day. Come downstairs, I think you car can be saved yet."
Six or seven people sat downstairs joyfully chatting, paying little attention to the two disheveled but nevertheless white-clad strangers in their midst.
"Judy, Tom," Adam began, picking a man who looked to be a few years older than Adam with a rather impressive beard out of the conversation he was having with some of the others. "This is Luke. Luke, these were the guys I was telling you about, with the busted car."
"Hello!" Luke said fervidly to the two tired travelers. "I took a look at your car and it’s a pretty simple problem; all you need is some oil and to let the car have a break for a while. I imagine you’ve been traveling for quite a ways."
"Oh, just a few hundred miles here and there," Judy answered sleepily.
"We have a little more of a drive left, too," Tom added.
"They’re going to Montreal, Luke. You think they can make it?" Adam asked in a genuine tone of concern.
"If you let the car have a rest for a few days, I don’t see why you wouldn’t be able to drive to Alert."
"If you don’t take into account the thousands of miles of nightmarish freezing wasteland, of course," Judy reasoned jestingly.
"Very funny," Luke said. "Have you met the others?"
The other members of the commune all seemed very similar in dress and manner, and none of them made much conversation with Tom or Judy, furthering their uneasiness around them. The two ultimately found themselves talking with one another at a long table in the corner of the kitchen, looking to have been from a school cafeteria. The kitchen’s exit to the living room in which the rest of the household were chatting amiably was completely open; it was hard to tell if it was a different room or not.
A young girl with her chin on her elbows sat by herself at the other end of the table with a look of great tedium. What was most striking about her appearance was the want of white; she wore muted colors, but even they were eye-popping in the uneasily white surroundings. She hadn’t attempted to converse with the new members nor, even, with anyone else since Tom and Judy had first witnessed her. If she was doing anything, she was attempting desperately to sleep.
Another girl, much older and much more enthusiastic than the one at the table, bounded down the stairs with a large wooden board burned into which was the message: "John 20:30-31."
"That’s great!" Another said.
"Let’s go find a place to put this up!" Adam suggested. Tom wondered how they ever got anything done.
They all filed out of the house and walked towards the highway. Adam returned to the table at which Tom, Judy, and the sleeping girl sat.
"I don’t suppose you want to come, Sarah?" He addressed the girl.
"I’m too tired, Adam," She said, her voice muffled by her arms.
"What a surprised," Adam responded sarcastically. "And can I trust you two," he addressed Tom and Judy, "Not to rob us blind while we’re gone?"
"All of your possessions just beg for it, but we’ll control ourselves, right Tom?" Judy said, nudging him back into reality as he drifting into a daydream.
"I guess this would be a good time to put back all the stuff I took already," Tom chaffed. Adam smiled and bid them farewell.
"What are we going to do now that all of our stimulating company has left?" Judy said, deadpan.
Sarah chuckled from beneath her arms. "You like that one?" Tom asked sociably. "She has a million of them." Sarah pulled her head from the table and looked at the two of them neutrally.
"What exactly is your deal, if I may ask, Sarah?" Tom asked with interest.
"You don’t exactly have the signs of a member of this place," Judy added.
"I don’t really fancy myself one," Sarah said. "I don’t really want to be here. I never have."
"Then why’d you come?" Judy asked.
"Because Adam’s my brother. We lived right here since the beginning, and for just as long our parents were nuts about the whole Christian process. I never really believed any of it, so I ignored their attempts to lure me in, which is precisely what they tried tirelessly to do. A few of Adam’s friends and he decided to found a sect that would take all the filler out of Christianity except for what Jesus said, and nothing else. A noble idea, that’s certain, but I sort of figured that that’s how every sect begins before it becomes naturally perverted by the follies of humankind. Despite this, Adam had a vision for a better Christianity and it wouldn’t be shaken by the likes of me. I’m just his kid sister, after all.
"Our parents would have none of it, in their old fashion tradition, and so, in not so old a tradition, they walked out on us, both of them assuming that I was on Adam’s side. Adam was twenty-one by that time, and could take care of himself and me all right, but you’d think our parents would have at least some responsibility to us, to the house, to whatever obligations they no doubt faced. And so here we are, Adam as happy as can be and me, stuck with him because I don’t have nearly the guts or the means to leave."
Sarah looked like she hadn’t said that much in months. "No kidding," Judy said simplistically. "Seriously, that’s a shame. Doesn’t your brother know?"
"He seems to pretend not to," Sarah replied. "Don’t get me wrong, I’m happy for him that he’s found so genuine a faith, but I don’t fit here. I’m the only one who isn’t a religious zealot, and I can’t change what I believe."
"What do you believe?" Tom asked.
"I haven’t really figured it out. I haven’t had much time for much thought about it, that is, except for the thought that I don’t believe what my housemates do. The only reason they’re here is because of their faith, and it’s incredibly hard to ruminate about much besides that, especially something particularly contrary to it. If I can just rest my mind for a little while I can figure things out. Every around me already has, due to genuine faith and at least a decade of time on me, and they can’t seem to understand that I haven’t ‘figured out’ a hair of what they have."
"How long has it been like that?" Asked Judy with concern.
"Jesus, probably no more than a year. It gets exhausting quickly, especially when you have as much time on your hands as I do. I quit school because my brother wanted me to help him with his tenuous lifestyle. He both says and thinks that I’m being home schooled."
"Do you want to come with us?" Tom entered without consultation. Once he’d realized that it was Judy’s decision as well, he glanced toward her for a moment. She didn’t look phased by Tom’s offer.
"We’re going to Montreal," Judy said. "In a busted car, no less."
"Inside of which are thousands of dollars that we’re not doing a great job of watching," Tom added.
"I’ve hidden my share, Tom," Judy assured him. "I assume you know where your share is." Tom was worried for a moment, but remembered that he had left his share in the clothing he’d been wearing the day before, which was in a pile in their room.
"Anyway," Judy continued, "We’re leaving our old lives, ‘in the dust,’ as they say, and starting, or at least trying to start, over again. I’ve been trying to get to that damned city for years, but Christ seems to be stopping me," She smiled at Sarah as she said ‘Christ’.
"By the way," Tom said in a tone suggesting that what he was to imminently say was in no fashion ‘by the way’, "We’re Tom and Judy. I’m Just getting that out of the way."
"I figured it would leak sooner or later," Sarah replied. "I think I will take you up on your offer to get out of here, once your car is fixed, though."
"Believe me," Tom said, "We’re quiet. You won’t have any problem decided what you believe in once we get on the road."
"By the way," Sarah began, "What are you guys, exactly? I figured you were some sort of Christian, but you don’t act like it. You’re too real. All of the Christians I’ve met were abstract idealists and psychopaths. Perhaps it’s a biased view, but I can’t control who I have to deal with, especially when it’s my family."
"You don’t have to explain to us," Judy said. "But you may be disappointed to hear that a pair of atheists are among the abstract idealists of which you spoke."
"We’re too real?" Tom almost gasped.
"You seem sensible enough to me," Sarah replied. "What’s so surprising about that?"
"My life has been a series of stupid decisions," Tom said, "The most recent of which being that I ran away from home a few days ago without five minutes’ thought."
"Don’t forget the fact that you took shelter with some methamphetamine peddlers," Judy said.
"Hey, you did too," Tom replied.
"You two are idiots," Sarah said with bold candor. Changing the subject casually, she continued, "What are you going to do in Montreal, if I may ask?"
"I wanted to go to Montreal when I ran away in the first place. From what I’ve heard about it, it’s a bustling Mecca of culture and life."
"Kind of like here," Sarah deadpanned.
"Hah," Judy said in a like, perhaps more genuine manner. "My quest to get to that damn city has been trounced by circumstance too many times, but I’m not giving up. I haven’t had the most pleasant life I could, but at least I have a goal. I want to be happy; that’s all you can really hope for. At least, that’s all I can hope for. I figure my search will be over in that magnificent place."
"What exactly makes you think Montreal will be better than anywhere else?" Sarah asked. "How did you pick Montreal"
"When I ran away, I figured Montreal was far enough away to completely cut out my old life. It’s in another country, after all. I see it now as my ultimate goal. When I think of that city, I think of the first exhilaration of being perfectly free to search for happiness without the distractions of everyday life. So here I am, stranded in a netherworld between where I want to be and where I left. I feel that once I get to Montreal I’ll be happy. I don’t care what I’m doing; working as a waitress, finding some artistic calling, selling drugs again, I know it’ll be better there."
"It still all sounds arbitrary to me," Sarah considered.
"It’s impossible to explain," Judy said exasperatedly.
The others returned genially from their sign hanging, a ritual so disproportionately aggrandized that it seemed to take place of church. Tom, Judy, and Sarah still sat at the corner table when Adam approached them.
"You guys still here?" He asked them.
"Apparently," Sarah replied sarcastically.
Pretending not to notice his sister’s viciousness, he asked in a hospitable tone, "I don’t believe I offered you breakfast. We don’t have a lot, but I’d feel bad not offering my guests a meal."
"I’m not very hungry, thank you" Judy said. Tom looked at Adam in a successfully attempt to tell him the same, and Sarah neither looked at him nor spoke.
"Well aren’t you easy to care for," Adam observed. "Luke’s working on your car now, if you want to see how he’s doing."
Having absolutely nothing better to do, Tom, Judy, and Sarah approached the driveway and the feeble vehicle complete with surgeon.
"How’s it coming?" Judy asked Luke in a way suggesting that she was stifling an anxiety.
"You’ve been running on low oil for a while, I think," Luke replied. "It’s worse than I thought."
"Is it salvageable, at least?" Tom asked hopefully.
"I think so, but we’ll need more oil to find that out for sure. You’ll have to walk down to Jacob’s. That’s a gas station maybe fifteen miles south, but it’s the closest one we have."
"Walk?" Judy asked. "Don’t you have a car of your own we can borrow?"
"We have a car all right, but it’s in worse shape than that," Sarah interjected. "How long has it been, Luke?" She said contemptuously.
"Charming," Luke said in mirrored tone. "Anyway, unless you can hitchhike, which we do a lot when we need to get to Jacob’s, you’ll have to walk the fifteen miles. Believe me, it’s no picnic, especially in November, but I’m getting a vibe that you guys want to get out of here, and a fifteen mile walk, ironically, is the fastest route."
And so the three of them left the commune to get the oil immediately after speaking with Luke about it. Despite her odd behavior, no one questioned Sarah’s going with Tom and Judy, nor, perhaps, even noticed.
The pastoral setting, what Tom hoped would be an all-surrounding distraction from the various unpleasant attempts in the city, brought his mind back to his walk to, and drive from, Philadelphia. That place and its productions were then indivisible from Emily’s end. Her already tenuous being, that through a side mirror was truly annihilated, replaced with the grimy concrete wall of a garage, and that particular end was the best among the other imaginable paths.
It would be another story had Emily’s demise ended, as cruel as it would seem, slowly, or in a way that would allow her to reflect upon it such that she could comfort not only herself, which, he felt, must be easiest, but others (he didn’t want to admit that he meant himself) as well. He imagined that she would have been better off dying stoically than immediately, as she could die like the profound human being that she was instead of the terrified animal that she had. The worst part, Tom thought, was that she might not have died at all. If he’d seen her lying lifeless it would have stirred something in him; perhaps it was called closure. He wanted to be there at the end. But he was here. He’d known Emily for barely more than a few hours, but that reality was, to him, impossible to accept. She was his friend, perhaps more so than Judy.
Judy wasn’t interested in others. Judy was interested, when it came down to it, in only herself, and her own well being. It wasn’t a completely stupid idea, no, Tom thought, she will be the only person in her life with whom there’s no chance of parting, and to make others happy would be a waste of energy should they ever bring pain to her, which, she’d already divulged, it seemed they did frequently.
It came down to a matter of trust; Judy didn’t trust anyone with her happiness, since so many before had mishandled it when she gave them a chance. Her constant declarations that she was searching for happiness appeared to imply her despondence over the current state. He wondered how mingled her thought-consuming quest for a life of happiness and the difficult minutia of getting oil for a frail car in which they currently detoured. It must kill her, Tom presumed, when she had to encounter such deviations. Sometimes it killed him as well.
Judy was beginning to grate on his nerves. If she was incapable of liking others, Tom reasoned, she shouldn’t subject them to her. The pang of self-duplicity hit him as he thought this. He’d disliked his friends for what had felt then to be an eternity, but evened out to a few years in retrospect. He tried to like them as much as they tried to like him. The sincerity, not of their enjoyment of each other, but of their desire to, was there all the same. Perhaps Judy was in the same ship as he was; running away to find a place among humankind that would be accepting. He felt empathy that she hadn’t found it in his company.
The two had so much in common, but for reasons fundamentally dissimilar. Tom wanted choice in his own life, and Judy wanted happiness. He remembered the animalistic but sanity-preserving feeling of the utter freedom he’d been bathed in during his initial flight from home, remembering along with it his ability to move on whenever he wished. He’d had the ability in the coffee shop with Rachel when the idea first became a physical presence, he’d had the ability when he still knew what of Patrick and Emily, and he had the ability at that very moment. The point of Tom’s even being where he was, and where he had been for going on three days, was to exercise his independence to not only his life, but to the rest of the world. There he was, he thought as he stumbled tiredly over a partially unearthed boulder on the side of the road, traveling to the ends of the earth with whom he’d hoped was a kindred spirit, but, he found, grew ever more a stranger, and despite his increasing contempt for Judy, he couldn’t bear the thought of leaving her. Something had to be the same. The difficulty for him to leave the first time had been closing in on insurmountable, and the difficulty for him to leave the second time would have been had Judy not come along to give him at least a sense of sameness. Judy was right when he’d told her that upon running away he’d feel the need for ritual, but he would have bet his life that it wouldn’t have happened so quickly and severely. Tom had thrown to the wind his ultimate goal, the objective that was the utter foundation of his embarking on the trip at all in favor of a trap which Judy had known and discovered before he even realized the fact that he wanted to go. He was a fraud.
Judy didn’t care about independence. That’s why she had no problem with ritual and rut. As long as what she was doing made her happy, she was perfectly content to do it over and over again, that is, until it no longer made her happy. He wanted to make an impression on her, so she could understand that humanity was just as much a commodity of fulfillment as malevolence, but he guessed that her previous wounds had scabbed so flimsily that she defended them with vicious diligence.
Tom wondered why he felt that way about people when he had no reason to. He knew it was backward of him, but his mind turned to his previous life; specifically of his friends. He’d never given them much of a chance to talk the way humans do, not genuinely until the eve of his escape when he’d spoken with Rachel in the coffee shop that morning.
When somebody talked about their last intoxication or their new skirt or whatever other trivia came to their mind, Tom would respond in a like tone, spouting what seemed to him the boring details of boring lives. If only he’d spoken to them about what he was thinking about when he had the chance, perhaps he wouldn’t have felt trapped then, and by extension, perhaps he wouldn’t feel screwed now. He hadn’t thought this through.
"Tom?" Sarah said for the third time.
Tom quickly shook his head once he’d finally heard Sarah, involuntarily at first, and then as an exaggerated show. "Jesus! I’m sorry. I sort of zone out when I walk for too long," he said almost as though he’d just woken up.
"Sorry to disturb you," Judy said, "But Sarah and I are getting tired, and we wanted to know if you were, too."
Now that he though about it, Tom was feeling a collapse coming on. "How long have we been walking, do you think?"
"I don’t know," Judy said. "You’re the one with the watch."
"It doesn’t really matter," Sarah said, "It won’t do us much trouble to rest here for a few minutes; we’ll get there." As she promised this she sat on the ground on the side of the highway, assuming successfully that the others would follow.
Tom checked his watch anyway as he positioned himself on the grass and leaves. It was nearly four. "God," Tom said, "We must have been walking for an hour straight." He said this not only because of the time but because of the sensations in his legs.
"That sounds about right," Judy said. "I guess we’ve gone about five miles." "Jesus, now that I think of it," Sarah rethought, "I really don’t want to walk the rest of the way at all. I’m going to fall over if we have to do what we’ve already done five more times."
"Maybe we can hitchhike or something," Tom said. "It might work."
"Hey, we picked up a hitchhiker on this very road," Judy said, "So imagine the chances we have."
"Maybe we can get out of here for good, that is, unless you want to drive away from this pit in a crappy car instead of one that’s someone else’s problem," Sarah goaded
"As crappy as that car is," Judy said, "It has all of our money. That’s a hell of an idea, though."
"I really doubt that we could get someone to drive us to the commune and continue north to wherever they’re going," Tom reasoned falteringly.
"Why?" Judy argued, "It’s right on the way, if they’re going north, and I have an inkling that a couple hundred bucks would smooth out any hesitations they may have about doing so." She pulled a wad of money that Tom supposed was for impulse items out of her leather jacket that she’d put on over her white clothes only to block out the November air.
"Sounds good to me," Sarah said, "And despite the fact that you’ll be taking not only me but a couple sets of precious uniforms, we can sleep easy knowing that we returned what we took in the form of a dead jalopy."
"Good thinking," Judy replied, "But those people of yours might be lurking around, and they seem to be keen on hospitality. I don’t trust them not to abuse and pamper a stranger pulling up to that house."
"We’ll just have to run," Tom decided.
Judy stuck out her thumb, looking hopefully through the window of every passing vehicle. Tom counted, albeit causally, ten or twenty failures before a white truck stopped only feet from Judy’s thumb. The window rolled down. A scruffy, middle aged man with a cigarette which at that point was mostly the butt leaned out, had a drag using only his lips, and spoke.
"Where you kids headed?" He said scratchily. His voice reminded Tom of the possibly dead Boris’s.
"Montreal, eventually, but right now we just need to go as north as we can," Judy explained.
"We need to stop somewhere to get our stuff, though," Tom added, as thought warning the man.
"It’s on the way, if the way is north," Sarah finished.
"That’s no trouble at all. Not for me anyhow. I’m on my way to Vermont, if that’s any help to you."
"Jesus, that’s way better than I expected," Sarah said in a manner sounding involuntary.
"Well, then, hop on in," The man said as they approached the car. "Where do you need to stop?"
"I can point it out," Sarah said. "I used to live there."
"Small world," the man muttered, lighting another cigarette. "The name’s Peter, by the way."
"I’m Judy," Judy said, seeming to be influenced by Peter and lighting a cigarette in the same fashion. "My attendants here are Tom and Sarah," she said as she pointed behind her with her thumb.
The three travelers entered the truck, Judy in the front and Tom and Sarah on the floor behind her and Peter. The truck had a not unpleasant scent as distinct as any spice, but certainly unlike any as well.
"Thanks for letting me come with you," Sarah said, fiddling with a glass beer bottle belonging to but unseen by the driver.
"Don’t I get a thanks for taking you there?" Peter scolded playfully.
"You’ll get your thanks when you do take us there," Sarah replied similarly.
"What are you kids going to Montreal for all by yourselves?" Peter asked casually after a lull in conversation.
"What are you going to Vermont for?" Judy interjected evasively. Peter didn’t seem to notice her brusque answer with more than a face of brief confusion, because he responded the way he would have had Judy do so.
"Well, if you really want to know, my daughter lives up there, and I’m off of work for a few weeks, so I’m visiting her for a while. I’m sure your story is as interesting."
No one responded to his second attempt to understand their voyage.
Tom had drifted off; Peter’s mere presence had somehow kept all from talking for too long at a time, and great lengths of silence were had in the car. The night stained the sky once more, Tom lazily observed through the window. He’d not seen the sky actually turn, when he thought about it, and realized that he’d been asleep. As though attempting to keep his new consciousness from the rest of the car, he cautiously checked his watch, slowly swiveling his hand and moving his eyes while keeping his head stone-still, and surprised himself with the fact that he’d been asleep for over three hours without realizing a second of it.
Tom wondered where they were, and judging by the car’s speed and his own previous location, he guessed it to be on yet another highway somewhere in New York. He tried carelessly to read what the green signs above the road said, in a bored concern for his specific whereabouts. Not much to his chagrin, the night was too complete, his eyes were too bleary with sleep, and he didn’t care enough to see anything definitive.
Peter and Judy were both smoking again, and Tom was unable to know if they’d ever paused since he saw them last.
The curls of smoke being thrown around and out of the car by the black night air flowing in through the partially opened windows reminded Tom of a memory from when he was a kid that he’d perhaps let escape his mind only soon after it happened.
He remembered one summer, when he must have been six or seven. He was unable to sleep a few sporadic nights, though his parents, having no trouble doing so, he decided, wouldn’t condone a decision to turn any lights on, which he felt he might as well, having no desire to sleep. The only light to which he had access was outside of his one window, by the moon and the streetlights. He looked outwards, and there below, on the side of his own house was a neighbor of his, who was probably then the age Tom was now. His neighbor was lit only by the moon. In retrospect, from what Tom knew about his neighbor, whose name he felt would never return to his memory, the two of their situations were comfortingly similar.
Tom couldn’t remember ever seeing him smile, and he could hear his parents fighting from within his house almost as constantly has his own. Tom learned through observation how the boy would have the nights to himself, since the days were his parents’. Every night for however long Tom could remember to look his neighbor sat or stood in the same spot, either stationarily reading a book the identity of which Tom could have no hope of making out in the gloom, or palpitantly pacing a few yards back and forth with a cigarette in his hand, perhaps talking to himself, perhaps not, or a combination of it all.
Tom’s neighbor was long gone, gone to college or to wandering in the same way he himself was, and his parents had moved away only months afterwards. His neighbor was pushing thirty, but to Tom, the fact that he could have changed, that what little he knew about him could possibly have been corrupted after seeing his troubled simplicity when he allowed himself a little pleasure in the dead of night by doing only what is no doubt impossible to take for granted otherwise, was incomprehensible. A decade could change anyone; even a trusted friend, but using only the four or five glances that fate allowed Tom to see his neighbor in that fashion, there was no hope of deciding whatever happened to his neighbor.
Tom had drifted off, waking up to see some peach schnapps fall into Judy’s back-flung head. "How long was I out for?" Tom said, trying to sound more oriented than he was.
"Do you remember us stopping at the nuthouse for the booze and cash?" Judy tested him.
"I should, shouldn’t I?" Tom replied.
"You’re a real go-getter, huh?" Sarah inquired quietly.
"Oh, my head," Tom heard from the other bed at what felt like daybreak but was actually past noon. The listless voice was obviously Judy’s, but doubt was felt due to her voice being muffled by the bed sheets.