I ring the doorbell. Eric’s mom answers.
“Oh. Hello. I thought you were already here.”
“Hi! No. Is Eric here?”
“I think he’s off somewhere,” his mom says, “behind the house.”
“I’ll go around,” I tell Eric’s mom, who I’m pretty sure thinks I got her son addicted to drugs that make him fall down and fuck up his arm, and who, taking that into consideration, is surprisingly pleasant.
Eric’s house is on the edge of his subdivision, The Mesa At San Vista Hills. “Behind the house” is miles of desert, butting up against the Indian reservation if you go far enough. I circle the block and go down the dusty cul- de-sac that opens up onto not much.
On the other side of Eric’s house’s fence is a set of footprints, like the kid hopped the fence. More footprints in the dirt head off into the scrub brush and cacti. I don’t usually tramp around in the desert or go outside much at all unless it’s to walk or ride the bus between indoor air-conditioned places, but this is the new me, the man me, who has sex and tracks his friends into the wilderness with the sun setting.
When I find Eric he doesn’t look like Eric. His shirt is off and his back is to me, he’s facing the world like an Indian brave on a vision quest in a movie, and I sort of expect to see war paint on his face when he turns around. There isn’t any, but his eyes are big and bloodshot.
“When I’m like this I see things and I don’t know if they’re real or not. So if you’re real I’m sorry, but you really have to go. Please go.”
“Can I help? What can I do?”
“I’m telling you,” Eric says, his voice about two levels less nerdy than normal, “you can go.”
“Are you sure? I can… We can…”
“No.” Eric shakes his head. “But thank you. And Darren. This is assuming you’re Darren. Don’t tell anybody. I know this makes it harder. But you can’t tell anybody.”
I nod. Eric turns around like he hears something, but there’s not really anything to hear besides traffic on the interstate maybe five miles away. But the silence and how totally he believes something’s there has the effect of making the silence kind of terrifying in itself, so manly sex-having me turns and bolts and the kid who no girl has ever laid a hand on stands in the desert and fights imaginary God-knows-what. It’s getting cold fast.
I run back to the house full speed, second time today I’m drenched in sweat even though it’s winter, running even though there’s no real danger it seems like, to anyone but Eric and even that’s all in his head, and it’s not like I’m running back to call somebody or tell somebody, I told him I wouldn’t tell, I keep my word to him except when I don’t. I feel like a fucking asshole for telling my fucking asshole brother and thinking just because it’s something too crazy to believe that he couldn’t find somebody stupid enough to believe it, but I will make it up to him by not running into the house and telling his mom that he’s waist-deep in dangerous hallucination and maybe we should call someone but instead running back through the dusty cul-de-sac and straight to the bus stop and straight home, see you tomorrow. And his mom will just assume we’re back there causing trouble in the scrub brush, even after it gets dark, because I am a bad influence. I told, I told, I fucking told.
During monsoon season these big thunderheads come in off the desert, like fleets of spaceships with hostile intentions. A lot of how I relate to the sky has to do with spaceships. When I was really little and scared of thunder, my mom told me to imagine they were Star Destroyers reentering the atmosphere from hyperspace. A lot of things ended up not being very great about her as a mom, but one of the good things was, she paid enough attention to
So it’s about four times as weird for me when I’m walking to school the day after Eric in the desert and there’s a huge red storm hanging over everything. It hasn’t been monsoon season for three or four months. There’s a dim brown layer of smog over us always, but this isn’t that. The smog is shapeless and you only really see it from far away. This is shaped like six thunderheads giving painful birth to each other. It’s like the kind of storm that blows in off the deserts of Mars, probably. Except this storm never actually storms. It hangs there all weird and un-commented-upon by just about everyone in school, never releasing whatever’s inside of it (rain, snow, skulls). By the time Eric and I are at lunch, it’s dissipated entirely and the sky is maybe too blue.
“Did you see that this morning?” I say.
“See what?” Eric says.
“The clouds,” I say. “It was like something out of
“Oh, yeah,” he says. “I guess it was. Weird.”
But we don’t talk much more about it, because if we speak frankly about weird stuff, we have to talk about yesterday, and if we talk about that we have to talk about why I feel so guilty, and I’m not at all ready to do that. Maybe it’ll blow away like that Martian storm, without ever spilling its probably terrible contents.
8
A typical day last year, before Eric: I walk home right after school. August through October and March through May my T-shirt is a sweat rag by the time I get there. When I get up to my room I take my shirt off and look into the mirror for a while, not in a vain way, just to see what the fuck is going on with my torso, scrawny and fat at the same time, has to be the worst torso for miles. Then I might turn on MTV, again not because I like what’s going on there but simply to gape in wonder at what the fuck is wrong with everybody, and occasionally there’ll be some stupidly hot girl on, writhing around on the top of a car. I go downstairs and eat everything in the kitchen and get an enormous glass of soda with no ice because it’s cold enough from the fridge. I whale on kids and grown men on Xbox Live for a while, all of their voices modified by the presets to sound like robots or monsters. Once the headset starts to make my ears sore I go back upstairs to my room and turn on my clock radio, NPR, and listen lying underneath the fan if it’s something interesting, and if it’s really boring news, particularly from the Middle East, I might zone out and fantasize in a half-assed way about one or two girls from school. For some reason my fantasies work best if they’re half-plausible and for some reason two girls from my algebra class falling into after- school lesbianism is more realistic than them throwing me any, so while a reporter drones on about the Gaza Strip I might think about a couple members of the girls’ volleyball team making each other in the back of a Camry. After that and cleaning up after that I’ll probably fall asleep until
After Eric and before Christine, a typical afternoon is going over to Eric’s house to talk about ideas and swear, and after Christine a typical afternoon is going over to Christine’s house to fool around, and my phone that used to be a silent brick I kept in my pocket to remind me how lonely I was is now ringing every ten seconds with calls from Christine if I’m with Eric, in which case I usually go wherever Christine is, and with calls from Eric if I’m with Christine, which I usually ignore.
One time Christine calls and asks if she can come over, but it doesn’t sound like a fun sort of coming over. She had a theater meeting after school so I just went home. I thought about going over to Eric’s but I knew she was going to get out of her meeting at some point and call me, and I feel less bad just avoiding him altogether than going over to his house for an hour then leaving when Christine calls, so I take a way out of school that I know to be different than the one he takes and I catch the bus.
I’m watching a show about bear attacks when Christine calls. “Can I come over,” she says, like words that are preceded by the words “I’m sorry, but…” and after I hang up this dread comes over me like well, here it comes. Sex after school with a girl that can stand you seemed impossible, and it was. The package was mistakenly addressed to you and the real owner is coming to get it. I settle in for a lot more bear attacks. Christine knocks on the front door.
When I open it, she comes in and basically collapses into my arms. She’s been crying and will be again.
“The show is canceled!” she says. Her hair smells good.
“Yeah?”
“The administration, those fucking idiots, they say Mr. Hendershaw can’t put up any new work. It’s too ‘risky.’
