The last phone call came two hours after that, when you were asleep, the scenery in the window unspecified, probably still Pennsylvania, and was from another high school friend, with whom I’d communicated even less recently. He said my first name, then my first and last name, to confirm who he was talking to. He asked if I’d heard about Nik, who had died this morning. I told him that I’d just heard. He was less sure than my other friend, more audibly broken up. They still weren’t sure. People were gathering in Dayton for the funeral. I filed the losses.
The peripheral world gets smaller.
Let’s pretend we’re walking home.
South again, you mount one of the stone lions outside the library. “What do you think it takes to bring one of these beasts to life?” You wiggle your hips.
“Probably a little more than you can give it,” I say. “Probably nothing short of divine intervention or a lightning strike on an eclipse night.”
You resolve to try anyways. You begin to grind back and forth on its back, grabbing the mane for leverage. I look side to side, embarrassed, as if someone will catch us in the act, but the street is deserted, almost seems to mock my concern. “What are you doing?”
Keeping the rhythm costs whatever breath you’d otherwise use to answer. You set your jaw and close your eyes, like this routine takes every ounce of your concentration. The scene is baroquely pornographic, as if we’d walked onto a tidily composed set on which we were supposed to play out the fantasy of some unknown director, where I’m the audience, and standing there beneath the streetlights and security cameras and around it capitalism and maybe somewhere above that the moonlight, tasting residual blood, watching your thighs tense—imagining, as anyone would, the lion as some beastly stand-in—I think, yet again, of the broken vase, glazed with an invisible layer of our dried sweat and oils, degrading it by degrees. I’d brought up your brother again once, obliquely. After we’d had the vase for a few days, when it had settled into the arrangement of the room, I drew my finger across the pattern of lotuses connected to cherry blossoms etc, etc and said, “It reminds me of something I’ve seen before—does it for you? Remind you?” The question was phrased in a way that made it incomprehensible. The only aspects of your brother I remembered were the tattoo and the fact of his death; I couldn’t have picked him out of a lineup in long sleeves.
You answered, “I mean, it reminds me of Japan,” which, fair enough, was what I’d replied to essentially the same question when we first brought it back, and that was all we said. Already a tacit understanding had formed, an unspoken agreement on what we would and would not acknowledge, a kind of commitment to choosing silence over dialogue.
By now you’re straddling the lion’s neck, totally spent, your hands splayed over the molded mane. You look up, panting, and brush the hair off your forehead. It takes you a minute to catch your breath, and then, saying nothing, you slide off the statue—I have the briefest image of your fingers untangling from long hairs—leaving a glistening streak down its side. You walk lightly, in a wider stance for a minute, then seem to forget. I wait for a breeze to clear the evidence, to crystallize this into an anecdote you’d once have shared among our circle of friends while I sat beside you, envied and silent, the chosen accomplice. The eyes stare out like statues do.
*
Three blocks later, we cross a high-end chain drugstore, recently shut down, its windows freshly blacked-out. We break in at my suggestion, a demonstration of our volition. The alarms go off immediately; in this neighborhood we still only have a few minutes before the cops arrive. You grab the back of my shirt and we stumble forward in the dark, as in the cellar—the only light comes from the jagged hole in the lower half of the sliding door. “Oh, John, let’s live here,” you say.
The shelves are still variously stocked; they haven’t had a chance to come in and clear it all out yet, to distribute the remainders to other branches or ship it off to a landfill. “Okay…” your voice comes from behind me. “So, what exactly can we take?”
“Anything that fits in your mouth.”
You dash off in the direction of the beauty aisle, while I lurch uncertainly toward the nonperishable foods in the back, for no particular reason except that they’re the most recognizable in the dark. I paw the shelves blindly, not really trying to accumulate but enjoying the feeling of knocking items to the ground, as if I’m some larger and more basic creature. After a minute I shout through the alarms, toward the general sound of your presence, “What’re you finding?”
“Cosmetics!” you shout back. “I can finally do my eyes!”
I slam myself into the back wall, padded with bubbly packages of junk food. I let them rain down on me from the upper shelves. I clamber to my feet and circle the store toward your voice, upending sundries as I go. I hear you rustling behind a nearby shelf. You scream, “AERIAL ATTACK!” and something shatters at my feet.
“Jesus Christ!”
“Oh shit, it’s a second barrage!” Another item hits the floor, and a third cracks against my head. I go down onto my hands and knees.
“Fuck! Joey!” My palms pick up little shards of glass and paint-smelling liquid. Something cool oozes down my forehead, hardening in the air. I hear sirens. “We have to go,” I say, as the synthetic, faintly peroxidal liquid trickles into my eye. “We have to go.”
Another shout—“BOMBS AWAY!”—but this time it sounds like it’s from the street. Still, it must act as a trigger because you launch another bottle from the adjacent aisle. It ricochets off my back before breaking open on the floor.
My vicinity now smells very strongly of chemical flowers, something created in a laboratory without context.
Through the imperfect black paint on the windows, spears of bright light trickle through. The hole in the sliding door glows orange, then red, like an unearthly halo. The sirens are right out front. When you shout “CATAPULT!” I’m sensible enough to roll out of the way, and whatever you’ve thrown lands just to my left—it clatters like something cheap and plastic, easily broken apart, I guess probably a hair dryer.
A roar—from a car, I’m sure—tears through the wall, and I hear signs of an escalating conflict outside. My right eye is glued shut.
“Joey, we have to get out of here.” By now, I’m speaking mostly to the ground.
One aisle over, however, you are having way too much fun. “Quick! They’re mounting! I hear them at the gates!”
A handful of glass containers hits the tile by my head—the expensive nail polish, I think.
“What do you say, John? Are you hurting yet?”
Something explodes by my ear and I’m misted with glass particles and a scent so concentrated and powerful that I choke on it. My body reacts as if to vomit, but there’s nothing to bring up; my chest goes rigid against the gray tile and my throat clenches repeatedly, mouth open, struggling to find something to expel. I get up ropy spit and drool until the convulsions subside, breathing shallowly, like the air can’t find a deeper way into my lungs. I roll helplessly onto my back and look up at the ceiling. I chew a few times on nothing, slowly and carefully, like I’m working into a motion I haven’t performed in a long time. Through an indeterminate haze drifting in through flaws in the black windows, I can just make out the shapes of the fluorescent lights above, empty and dead. The darkness is tinged with red, presumably from a safety light—no matter where you are, somewhere, something still has power. The memory of the gun rises up within me, a memory I’ve fought to keep buried: it was on a frantic night like this that it appeared in my hand, that the weapon revealed itself. I hear your footsteps first, and then watch you loom into view above me.
Earlier on in our days of exploration, when we were dividing