A laugh sputtered out of me—a laugh!—acknowledging the ridiculousness of what I’d said (or maybe acknowledging that it might sound ridiculous to someone who wasn’t attuned to my deep inner torment), and I said, slightly shamed: “I don’t know.” I kicked the ground in a way I wanted to read “unconsciously frustrated” and almost tripped. I saw myself as if from a distance, acting this way: my self-involved tragedy seemed comic. The brick buildings of the college were coming into view—we’d changed from the gravel alongside the road to the sidewalk on the campus proper. I asked, “Does it ever burn you out, to be a part of the punk scene in a place like fucking Richmond, Indiana?” I was still implying a lot, but at least this time my sentence was answerable, had clear ramifications to respond to.
“Constantly,” you said. “But I grew up here”—I’d insulted her town—“so I’m experienced with the burnout. You get used to the energy expense, you know what wears you down and what you can stand—it’s a pattern. You know when you just need to give up and go someplace else for a while. Indy’s not so far away. You?”
“I’m from Dayton.” This meant nothing except a different state, but apparently the answer stood on its own.
I experienced a moment of panic after I answered, a couple of seconds delayed, a body-wide chill of realization that, though to my knowledge we’d never met before—and how had I never noticed you? how had I failed to map such a crucial person?—our set of friends and acquaintances, our familiars must overlap in some substantial way: what were the chances that you didn’t know August, didn’t know Candace, weren’t aware of some rumor of what I’d done? In the thick of the blooming night I saw all of this unraveling before it even started, the destructive path of revelation twined with the perfect vision I suddenly had of our future together, the kind of fantasy a crush spins hopelessly into infinity. I would spend the rest of my life under this fear of discovery. I tried to bury the feeling by talking over it—to disguise my past steps with forward momentum—and gestured around us, the smallest canvas. “Where do you live?”
“Brinkman.”
“I’ll walk you there.”
“How chivalrous.”
In a few minutes we came to the most visibly decrepit of the dorms, a three-winged concrete block on the far eastern edge of the tiny campus, no more than five hundred feet from my dorm. Nine months later, we would move into an apartment less than two miles from here, and then we would stop paying. “Did you know,” you said, at the door, “that this dorm was designed by a prison architect?”
“I didn’t.”
“Yep. Stand next to the staircase on any given floor and you can see straight to the end of every hallway in any direction. Every inmate accounted for.”
You stepped away and swiped your ID in the reader to unlock the door—the lack of analog technology for this was briefly startling, like a moment out of time, a reminder we weren’t living in the ’80s—then turned back. “See you in the pit.” You did a two-finger salute, and you were gone.
And that’s it; born in fire.
*
We follow the railing a short ways to the ground, one after the other. We exit the stairway into a small commuter parking lot, maybe three-quarters full. Like the station, it’s completely silent. The cars sit motionless, as if they’ve never moved, aren’t capable of movement, their owners decided unanimously to remain in the city for the night. I hear you swallow next to me. It’s truly ominous.
We walk past an unattended tollbooth, around the lowered gate to the heel of a two-lane road, new and black, paved two inches higher than the parking lot. The road is bordered by looming, impenetrable trees, and curves gently in both directions, like we’re standing at the very crest, the access point to an artery that, way down, leads back to the city, and up, to somewhere else. There’s no sound of traffic in either direction, none at all. The wind channels through the tops of the trees, shifting the spired skyline. The feeling of being trapped inside, of moving through the city during those final moments—it’s obliterated as soon as we step into the road. The sky is a rich navy blue, and there are stars, actual stars. We’re standing in the middle of the road, looking up at these stars. I wonder what time it is, if we should be expecting cars, other life, the sun.
“Do you have a preference?”
“North. My preference is north.”
We turn to our right, in the direction we assume leads north, because it’s approximately parallel with the tracks; I don’t know the stars well enough to tell. The road is too wide for our footsteps to echo, but we can hear them on the asphalt, above all else.
We’re wearing the same clothes we wore to the show in the city, innumerable hours ago, dressed in layers of paint mist and ash from the streets, the accumulation of travel. There’s dried blood on the front of my t-shirt, splattered along with the cosmetics. The skin of my face is hard in places, lightly crusted where the polish has dried and swollen around my cheekbone. I work my tongue under my upper lip when I need a reminder, pushing out the wound, repeatedly breaking it open. There’s still some gunk in my right eye, and every so often I’m suddenly blinking back tears. You look less damaged—you wore your boots to the show; I wish I’d done that. That’s the first thought of consequences I have as we walk, not of hunger or our lack of a destination: my shoes are shit, they’re going to be the first to go.
I piece the preceding night together in my head—impossibly, we are still in the midst of it. It must be close to dawn.
The road is tracked by power lines, hoisted above the trees. When the road curves, we follow it, because the alternative is to have no path at all.
As the thickness of the night slowly rolls back, far to our left, an elevated highway fades into view out of the solid mass of trees, revealing mountains farther back. We stop for a minute. There’s no distant glow of headlights, no sound carried through the wind. It wraps through the landscape like a concrete skeleton. I’m struck again by how everything a certain distance beyond us doesn’t seem real, a painted sheet surrounding the set on which we walk, changeable only by distance and angle, variously lit.
Eventually, our road splits, offers an exit on the right down a single lane lined in thinning trees. We change courses here—we have options, and the highway is too eerie, too quiet. Around the curve, we find an abandoned gas station sunken into a gravelly offshoot of the road. The fluorescent lights inside burn into the declining night, and we hear it humming from a distance, its perimeter glowing like a ghostly shell. I step uncertainly toward it, off the road—there are two pickup trucks visible in the parking lot, and through the windows, I see the shelves are stocked—but you grab my arm and pull me back. “Don’t.”
“I’m sure there are supplies in there.”
“I am not that desperate.”
I don’t press it. There’s something unnerving about the building’s illumination; the buzz of electronics that maintain it seems like a mechanical deception of life, of a structure grown self-sufficient. We walk resolutely past it, the hum following us for a while before it dissipates into the air, becoming ambient. I strain my ears to continue noticing it—the subtle, droning undercurrent—but very soon it assimilates into my surroundings, and I can’t pick it out.
The road slopes down, and the woods start to separate, unveiling more landscape to either side of us. We keep up our pace for a while without acknowledging it, until the guardrail to our left disappears and a hundred yards later is replaced with a low white fence, bright and idyllic. Grass accompanies the road now, and looks to have been mowed in the last week. The sky goes pink with morning coming on. The tenor changes.
You don’t speak until we’re out of shouting distance of the gas station and the silence has returned, completely returned. “John, I—”
“What?”
“I—I don’t think there’s anyone