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BEYOND THE YELLOW BRICK ROAD

CHAPTER 34-LATITUDE

SARAH ROCKFORD’S POV

girl sucking thumb icon
this is the story of a girl
who cried a river and drowned the whole world


Harper’s daughter, Amelia, was less than receptive to the idea that Brian would be leaving the house and going somewhere without her. His impending departure threatened to unleash a tsunami that seemed to have everyone up in arms as they got ready to go out for the evening. At one point, you found yourself alone in the foyer with the little girl while she was in between breakdowns.

“May I sit beside you?” you asked pointing to the stairs.

“No.” She was guarding them; Brian would have to come down at one point or another.

“I saw the tea party you were having upstairs. Who were you having a party for? It looked very fancy.”

She looked up at you and sniffed, “Amnimals.”

“Oh, you have a lot of animals; must be a lot of work to have such a big party.”

“Yeah, ’cause sometimes they’re hungry.”

“I’ll bet they are.”

And then all of a sudden the studio door opened and everyone poured out of it. You called to Nate who was sitting in the living room talking to Daniel, “Nate, they’re leaving.”

Amelia’s face started to crack again, but Harper came down the stairs, took her hand, moved her out of the way and then told her that it was her job to hold the door for everyone. Brian made sure he was at the back of the line. “Good night, Amelia,” he said. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Bye…Brime….Kin…ney,” she said, the last of her tears reluctant to leave, and then she clung to the doorknob as he walked down the front steps, watching as the cab he’d gotten into with Justin finally pulled away. Having successfully completed her mission, she spun around and slammed the door shut, and then followed you into the kitchen because Harper had promised her a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

“One of these days,” Harper told her, “You’re going to slam that door too hard, and it’s going to fall right off its hinges.”

But Amelia didn’t care; she’d miraculously recovered from Brian’s betrayal and was now interested in you, patting your leg to get your attention and asking, “Do you know that I’m so beautiful?”

“I did notice that,” you told her. “How’d you get so pretty?”

Amelia scrunched up her forehead and looked at Harper as if her mother needed to whisper the answer to her, and when Harper didn’t she looked back at you and just guessed, shrugging her small shoulders, “I was just borned that way a long time ago.”

“Oh, that’s very interesting. You’ll have to tell me that story sometime.”

“Yeah,” Amelia said, “But you hafta brush your teeth a lot first.”

“Deal.”

*********************
DANIEL CARTWRIGHT’S POV

blue magnifying glass
and I don't know if I've ever been really loved by a hand that's touched me

When you returned to the city after your mother’s funeral three years ago, Justin was painting like a man on a mission. You weren’t exactly sure why he’d left in such a hurry that November night, but you had problems of your own: playing catch up with your patients and processing your own grief over the unexpected loss of your mother. So, although you thought it a bit strange that he began painting with an intensity you hadn’t seen before and locking his studio when he was ready to take a break for a few hours, you didn’t allow yourself to over think it. You’d secretly feared that he wouldn’t come back, that you’d get a phone call one evening asking you to pack everything up. But he did and you didn’t, so why look a gift horse in the mouth?

But then one day, you came home from work around four thirty, your usual time, and passed Justin as he was leaving your place. His mood had changed, the intensity seemed to have floated away, he was smiling as he walked down the street. You waved to him, he waved back, and when you entered your home, there was sunlight pouring down the stairs for the first time in months. The studio door was wide open.

You ignored it at first, making yourself an early dinner, watching some television, trying to finish a book you needed to return to the library, but after you’d read the same page four times, you gave in and went upstairs, standing in the doorway of the studio. There were several uncovered canvases, all but one of them facing the doorway, so you walked around slowly, looking at all of those first, every one of them a variation on the same scene…

A cemetery, a grave, a headstone, Justin, and the man who’d swept him away in a limousine that night…

And all of them different…

In some, the headstone was given top billing. In others Justin loomed large. And in the one facing away, the one he’d completely finished, the man who’d come to get him that night towered over everything…

You wondered what this was about but never put the question to Justin—perhaps because you felt guilty for peering at his secrets, perhaps because it made him all the more attractive to you—the enigma content with his complexities; someone who had zero interest in the one thing you were good at. But when you put the question to Jonathon, he cut through your psycho-babble with a butter knife, “You don’t want to know, Dan, because if you figure him out, you’ll know why he doesn’t love you.”

“Sometimes I think you’re unnecessarily cruel,” you told him.

“Sometimes I think you like it,” he replied.

……

So when the six of you left your place that Wednesday evening at Sarah’s request, you ended up at a trendy New York restaurant, all of you underdressed and more than welcome. It was something that Brian was apparently accustomed to, and you couldn’t think of a time when you’d been more doted upon in your entire life. The meal was wonderful, the conversation delightful and oddly superficial, and as the plates were cleared away and bottles of wine were replaced with coffee and after dinner drinks, the six of you began to reorganize. Sam and Justin remained in an intense conversation at the far end of your table, the topic having shifted to Alan and his artwork and somehow morphed into a private discussion. The rest of you—Brian, Nate, Zeek, and yourself—wound up in the bar area at a table not quite wide enough for Brian’s leg room requirements. The only thing the four of you had in common, as far as you could tell, was that each of you left the house each day to earn a living. Sam and Justin were of a different sort.

It was at that table that Zeek and Brian brought Nate up to speed on the events of the day—the excursion beneath the city, the stress of the entire week (and it was only Wednesday), etc. Eventually, the conversation wound around to the few hours before he and Sarah had arrived at your home, and then the explanation of what Brian and Zeek had seen in the tunnels was interspersed with what you’d seen in the footage Sam shot while they were down there. Nate listened with a look of disbelief on his face.

“This is actually true?” he asked.

“Believe it or not,” Brian said. “And I wouldn’t have had I not seen it with my own eyes.”

“Aside from the fact that it’s unsettling to actually see people living like that, especially those children,” you said, “It’s really strange to be looking at reproductions of Monet, Matisse, Van Gogh, and then Justin’s work right alongside them. I thought that was kind of surreal.”

“No shit,” Zeek said. “And they do that shit with spray paint.”

“You’ll have to tell Sarah,” he said. “She’d be fascinated by something like that.”

“And also by the fact that we were seven levels beneath the street, and we never saw a single gnome,” Brian added.

Nate laughed, “You go right ahead and tell her that, too, Brian. Just remember that I’m not responsible for the ass kicking you’ll get.”

“Duly noted.”

……

Brian was sitting directly across from you and his legs bumped into yours more than once, causing him to apologize every time he tried to shift in his seat. Eventually, he got frustrated, and he and Zeek went outside to smoke. You had no trouble making conversation with Nate; he was one of the most affable people you’d ever met.

“Nate, you’re wife, she’s—" And then the word you were looking for eluded you. Nate didn’t try to fill in the blank for you; he just waited. “She has quite a presence. I guess that’s what I was trying to say.”

He smiled, “And you’ve only known her for half a day.” You weren’t exactly sure what he meant by that, and the expression on your face must have communicated as much, so he re-calibrated his response, “Sarah’s one of those people that when you meet her, you feel as if she’s known you your entire life, and then the more time you spend with her, the more you’re convinced that you’re right.”

You thought about what he said, “I think you’re right.”

The front door opened and Brian and Zeek walked back inside and sat back down. You leaned back in your seat a little, trying to outrun the smell of cigarette smoke as it washed over you, having totally forgotten to ask about the gnomes.

*********************
HARPER COLLINS’S POV

girl looking thru eye
because maybe
you’re gonna be the one that saves me


Once Amelia had scarfed her peanut butter and jelly sandwich, the three of you went back upstairs to your studio to talk so that Amelia could play without destroying Daniel’s home. Sarah asked about you, about your family, and then, because you offered, agreed to watch the footage Sam had taken in the tunnels that morning. You sat at your desk and watched it together on Sam’s laptop, and even just seeing it for the second time was making you feel better. Alan didn’t live a miserable life; he just lived a life you didn’t completely understand. As you got to the end of the footage, Sarah put her hand on yours, “Can you pause it or go back?”

“Yeah.” So you went back a few frames.

“Can you go forward like that? Frame by frame?”

“Yeah, sure.” So you did, and then Sarah stopped you and pointed at white eyes staring back at her, “Is that Justin?”

“Yeah,” you smiled. “Alan and Stitch painted that. It’s a tribute to one of Justin’s paintings.” You zoomed out a little for her, “And it’s harder to see, but that’s Brian.”

“Your brother’s really good. That’s kind of scary.”

“Those other paintings we saw, he did those, too; either by himself or he and Stitch did them together.”

“Those reproductions?”

“Yeah.”

“Harper, that unbelievable.”

“I know. It kind of freaks me out; all this time he was a better artist than me.”

“His art meant something different to him, didn’t it?” she asked.

“Yeah,” you agreed. “I guess it did.”

As the evening ended, Sarah thanked you for allowing her to view the footage because, “It gave me a real sense of who he was. Makes me feel much more grounded and honored, frankly, to sing for him.”

“Thank you.”

“And I’d like to take you out tomorrow, you and Amelia. Maybe have lunch and get a dress to wear. Sound good?”

“You don’t have to do that.”

“I know that, but I want to. It would mean a lot to me, Harper.”

“Well, okay, I guess,” you told her, “I was sort of wondering where you got your shoes.”

Sarah looked down at her feet, “Oh god, these? Milan, I think.” And then she looked embarrassed, “You have to understand; my husband…well, you know how most men can’t look a woman in the eye because they’re staring at her breasts?”

“Uh, yeah.”

“Well, Nate can’t because he’s staring at her shoes.”

You looked down at the old pair of sneakers you had on, “He probably didn’t even see me then.”

Sarah laughed and said, “Well, we’ll buy you some shoes tomorrow, and then you can put them on, and we’ll see if he acts like it’s the first time he’s ever met you.”

“Okay.”

You walked Sarah down the stairs, exchanging phone numbers, thanking her for everything. She wouldn’t hear of it, “Don’t mention it again. I’ll call you in the morning. We’ll have a good time. You’ll see. It was wonderful to meet you,” and then she hugged you, “I mean, I never imagined that a friend of Justin’s could be so utterly charming.”

And when you laughed in that way that means that’s funny, but I really shouldn’t be laughing at that Sarah added, “Don’t get me wrong; I absolutely adore Justin. I just never tell him that I do.”

“I think that’s what Brian did, too,” you said. “So he must like it…’cause he married him.”

“Ooh, you’re witty and insightful. I like you.”

“I’ll see you tomorrow, Sarah. It was great to meet you.”

“The pleasure was all mine.”

……

Back in your studio, you looked around for Amelia. She was there, you knew, because you’d heard her making dinner for all of her dolls and stuffed animals...

”You hafta eat your macaronis!

and putting them to bed…

”Just one more story…once upomatime…”

And then she’d gotten quiet. You’d assumed she’d fallen asleep as well. It was late, and it’d been a long day. But when you found her…

“Amelia, what are you doing?”

You bent down and helped her sit up, every pink, sticky inch of her.

“The peoples,” she said, “They’re boken.”

Her eyes were barely open and the bag was empty; she eaten every single casualty of the Pink People Cookie Massacre without making a sound.

“Let’s go home, okay?” you said, picking her up. You carried her into the bathroom and let her tired body lean against you as you wiped the pink icing off of her face and hands and decided you’d deal with her hair in the morning. You walked through Daniel’s place turning off the lights, grabbed your purse, and stepped outside into the April night, locking the door behind you. Sam would’ve wanted you to take a cab, but you didn’t want to.

……

You carried Amelia down the street to the subway station. It was a short walk and the night was almost warm. Amelia buried her face in your shoulder at the bright lights when you stepped onto the train and sat down. Less than a minute after the train began to move, she closed her eyes again and fell asleep. The only other person in the car with you was an old woman, far away from you at the other end. You looked at her once, and she smiled and then went back to digging through the plastic grocery bag she had next to her. You held Amelia as tightly as you could without waking her up, closed your eyes, and thought about Alan…

about who he was…

about why you missed him…

about how your life was going to start being about you.

And you were probably crying when it was time to get off the train, but you didn’t really care. You carried Amelia up the steps and back up onto the dark street, down the block, into your building, and put her in her bed, her little shoes now on the floor. And then you went into your bedroom, took off your clothes, put on a nightgown, and got into bed. When you called Sam from the phone on your night table, the number popping up on his cell must’ve surprised him, “Harper?”

“Just wanted you to know that we’re home.”

*********************
DANIEL CARTWRIGHT’S POV

red wine
it was once upon a place

While you and your houseguests had been watching Sam’s footage earlier that afternoon, you saw a version of that mysterious painting yet again and thought that maybe since years had passed that you could get an answer to the question that had been waiting in your mind, patiently unanswered all that time. So, when the footage was about to end and the mural came into focus, you turned to ask Justin what this piece of work was about, but he was gone—his spot on the sofa abandoned. When you glanced around at everyone else, Zeek finally told you, “He went to check on Brian.”

“Oh,” you said. “I was just going to ask—"

“Yeah,” Zeek said. “Good luck with all that.”

You looked at Sam and then at Harper, and they both shrugged. It was a mystery. Maybe Alan took the answer to his grave.

……

So, when Brian and Zeek had returned to the table, fragrant with second-hand smoke, you thought you’d try a different route, “Brian, may I ask you something?”

“I promise I won’t kick you again.”

You laughed, “That wasn’t it.”

“Shoot.”

You glanced at Zeek, and then back at Brian, “When I was watching the footage Sam took, at the very end, there was a mural or something on the wall that looked like Justin?”

“Yeah.”

“The other figure in the mural, was that you? It was really dark.”

“Yeah.”

“What is the significance of that painting—"

Brian got up and pulled another cigarette out of his pocket, “You should probably ask Justin.”

“I tried.”

By then, he’d put the cigarette between his lips, and he took it back out as if annoyed by the inconvenience, “What’d he say?”

“He got up and went to check on you.”

And then you saw something transpire that, for lack of a better term, seemed almost magnetic…

Brian no longer made eye contact with you, glancing across the restaurant at Justin instead, and Justin, as if he knew something was amiss, got up within less than a minute and met Brian at the table. Brian completely disengaged as Justin orchestrated the cordial farewells, the ‘see you tomorrows,’ the ‘thank you for everythings,’ the hugs, all of it.

Twins do this, you thought, have this sort of unspoken empathy for one another. The evening was clearly over.

Nate got in a cab. Sam got in another. And you and Zeek stood quietly outside the restaurant as Brian and Justin walked away. There wasn’t an inch of space between them.

“Did I say something wrong?” you asked Zeek.

“Fuck if I know.” And then the two of you started to walk in the opposite direction of Brian and Justin. It would’ve made much more sense to take a cab, but somehow you both knew that you just needed to walk. “What time is it?” Zeek asked you after you’d walked a few blocks.

“Almost ten.”

“Okay if I crash at your place?”

“Of course.”

……

Your foot was on the first step leading to your front door when you thought of something else, “What about the name on the tombstone? Do we know who that it is?”

Zeek laughed, “Fuck no, he won’t even tell me that.”

*********************
CODY BELL’S POV

black cat
I’m a loser, baby,
so why don’t you kill me?


This was most certainly Hell.

To wake up to some homophobic prick staring down at you. You closed your eyes again and waited for the rest of his friends to join him, for the gay-bashing of the afterlife to begin.

But when it didn’t, you opened your eyes again, and he was still there.

So you told him, “If you’re going to beat me to a pulp, stop being a pussy and just fucking do it.”

“I’ve got nothing but time,” he told you. “There’s no rush.”

So you were right; this was Hell.

*********************
BRIAN’S POV

heart padlock
and I'd give up forever to touch you,
‘cause I know that you feel me somehow


When you bury something alive, it will eventually claw its way back out, one way or the other. If you’re lucky, you’ll be standing in the exact spot where it plans on resurfacing so you can greet it with equal amounts of rage and gravity to force it back down, but luck is bullshit.

As you and Justin walked back to the hotel, he held your hand for a while and then his hand moved up, rubbing the inside of your forearm, eventually curling around your arm.

The first order of business when you and Justin entered the lobby of your hotel that night was to take back everything that you’d stored away. It was you who asked the young lady behind the desk for the contents of the safe, and Justin who quietly inventoried everything, who made sure that nothing was missing. When he looked up at you and smiled, you thanked the woman and the two of you crossed the spacious lobby and stepped into an open elevator. When the doors shut, Justin asked you to hold your briefcase up, and you did. He unzipped one of the pockets and took out your wedding rings, handing you yours. When the doors opened, all outward signs of matrimony had been restored.

Once inside your suite, you sat your briefcase on the table while Justin closed the door. You heard the lock thunk into place.

Neither of you bothered to turn on a light.

His movements were quick and smooth, and if you didn’t know from years of practice that he was seducing you, you might’ve thought that he was getting ready to rob the place. He was so quiet, as if he’d even learned to forgo breathing in moments like this for the sake of the heist. But few thieves take off their clothes before cleaning you out as Justin was doing…taking his off first so that when he pushed your knit shirt up over your head, you’d have immediate contact with his skin and when he slid his hand down your stomach and beneath the waistband of your jeans, you were eager to help him then, getting out of them like they were infected with a deadly disease. And all this happened while you were standing up and then he pulled you and your knees bent a little and so, as before in a New York hotel room, he was on his back and you were on top of him—only this time, you were the one being rescued.

The denial wasn’t running so deep anymore.

Hell, it was barely treading water.

Maybe that was why Justin was trying so hard, why he was so impatient, why you couldn’t get inside him fast enough, and once you did, why he wanted you to go, go, go, and you just didn’t want to. You just really didn’t want to move. And because you have a rather distinct physical advantage over him, there was little he could do besides kiss you or moan in your ear or fidget underneath you…

“Brian.”

So you kissed the place behind his ear and on his neck that always makes him settle down, and his eyes closed, and you let your fingers move across his face and then your arms wrapped around him again, cradling his head as yours sunk into the sheets next to his…

“Brian?”

And when you didn’t answer him and probably because you didn’t answer him, he said, “I think you should go back to Pittsburgh tomorrow.” His voice was soft and sweet and his hands were all over you trying to cushion the blow.

……

……

“No.”

……

“Why not?”

“Because I don’t want to.”

……

“You don’t need to worry about me. I’ll be fine,” he said.

And you pushed up on your elbows then and looked at him, amazed at how much you could see in the darkness, and told him, “And so will I.” He wouldn’t even look at you, preferring the ceiling instead. So you lay back down and told his shoulder, “Thanks for the vote of confidence.”

……

……

……

……

The moments that followed didn’t exactly feel awkward, just not very comfortable, your body responding to the apology in his touch, unable to deny him the pleasure he seemed to need. You gave it to him and looked the other way when he traded it for emotional solace.

But it wasn’t a fuck; it wasn’t foreplay or after play. It was just was some sort of emotional static resonating through your physical connection. He sighed and just held you as you lay there for several minutes and then eventually rose up underneath you, making a request after a perfunctory kiss, “Can you let me up please?”

“Yeah.”

So you did, rolling onto your back, watching him get out of bed, walk to the bathroom, turn on the light and shut the door. Something about the matter of fact way he did it just made you feel even worse.

*********************

blue syringe
personal jesus

You have options in these types of situations; things you can do to allay the unsettled feeling inside you, so you began to tick them off in your head, giving each one fair consideration…

…raid the mini-bar, finish off the evening in fifteen minutes with Jim®, Johnny®, and Gin. After all, when life gives you lemons, spike the lemonade. But you’d have to get out of bed.

…dial Kevin Le Concierge and offer him cold, hard cash to hand deliver your favorite letters of the alphabet, but he’d probably demand a little ‘face time’ and when you (aka: Justin) told him to ‘fuck off,’ he’d turn you in or some shit. And then Justin would freeze your bank accounts and make you stay in the slammer overnight just for calling Kevin Le Concierge in the first place.

…go over to Michael’s house and demand that he go with you to Babylon right then and there--oh fuck--wait, your techno-car is the bomb, but it’s not some fucking time machine.

…distract yourself by masturbating, but you were already doing that, and, well, you know, how Jell-O has that consistency…?

And then it dawned on you, what you had to do. When these things happen, when all of life’s Novocain has worn off, there’s only one thing to do.

Take all of that negativity simmering inside you and direct it at the one person who really deserves it.

*********************

anderson cooper
we’ll crucify the insincere tonight

“Asshat.”

The world’s just one big, huge circle that leads right back to Anderson Cooper, that’s what all that ‘three sixty’ business is all about. Doesn’t think the world revolves around him; oh, no. He thinks it revolves because of him. And the way he smirks at you every night at eleven o’clock is completely unnecessary. It’s like he’s saying: ’Yeah, Kinney, I see you. You may make the commercials, but I’m the reason they turn on the set. It’s all about me. First, me; then, the commercials. I’m number one. You’re number two. Me, me, me. Ha, ha, ha--’

“Jesus, Brian. Not tonight, okay?”

When did he come out of the bathroom?

Fuck, where’s the remote? It was right next to you.

Find it. Find it. Find it. Jesus Fucking Christ, how did it get all the way across the room?

“What’d you do? Turn it on and throw it, Brian?”

“No.”

“I think you broke it.”

“Shit.”

“Call the front desk and tell them to bring us another one.”

“Bring it here. I can fix it,” you told him.

“I know you can. I just want you to experience the humiliation of having to ask for a new one so you’ll quit throwing them.”

“Okay, you win. I’m thoroughly ashamed of myself. Now, just give me the fucking thing.”

“Fine.”

And then Justin climbed over you (because walking around to the other side of the bed was apparently too much to ask) which meant that his ass was right in your face because you were sitting up and sometimes that’s the hottest thing ever and sometimes it’s just having an ass in your face. And then he got under the covers, turning his back to you, burying himself under the sheets with a warning, “Look, watch it if you want, but don’t just sit there and talk back to him. If that’s what you’re going to do, go in the other room. I’m not listening to that shit tonight.”

You muted the television and then made a sound that can only be described as a cat experiencing excruciating menstrual cramps.

He glanced back over his shoulder, glaring at you in such a way that left you quite certain he’d just put a hex on your penis:

J-E-L-L-O.

*********************

doll puppet
tattoos of memories and dead skin on trial

So within a few minutes, Justin was asleep, and you felt fairly certain of this because of two reasons. One being that you’d been whispering back at Cooper for the last five minutes or so, and Justin hadn’t so much as huffed at you…

You’ve had so much Botox, you can suck cock without altering your facial expression.”

Two being that while you were doing this, you had one hand under the covers resting ever-so-lightly on his ass, and your other hand on your dick, and both hands were doing quite well. In fact, Justin had actually moved toward you since you touched him, so things were definitely looking…

Well, better not to jinx it.

But when Anderson came back from commercial, he should’ve been ready to end his show because it almost midnight, but he didn’t. His expression had changed. He wasn’t smirking or summing up the night’s stories; he was switching gears. You sat up a little straighter, abandoned your dick, and turned the volume up just a little bit.

CNN is getting breaking news right now from one of our affiliates, KWCH, in Wichita, Kansas. Todd, we’ll turn it over to you.” (Kansas Todd has it so bad for Cooper it’s pathetic.)

“Thanks, Anderson. We’re reporting tonight at the site of a deadly meth lab explosion here in Wichita. As you can see here behind me, the home housing the lab was completely obliterated, and KWCH is now reporting that five people injured in the explosion have died at the hospital.”

“Todd, I understand that the Wichita sheriff’s department had this house under surveillance?”

“That’s right, Anderson.”


And that was when the picture they kept flashing on the screen finally registered in your brain. It was Cody, and he looked like shit casserole, like a piece of crap living in Kansas without a brain or a heart. (Then again, it was a mug shot.) But this strange turn of events had suddenly given you courage,

“Justin, wake up.”

“Nuh.”

“Seriously, wake up.”

You paused Anderson’s face and squeezed his ass, “Justin, come on.”

“What the fuck?” He’s always so pleasant when he’s half asleep.

“Look,” you said, pointing to the television.

He didn’t, “Brian, listen to me. Are you listening?”

“No.”

He didn’t care. “I don’t care if he’s wearing a Men’s Wearhouse tie with his Prada jacket over his Fruit of the Loom tighty whities. Okay?”

You changed your tactic, adapted to the situation, “Well, fine then; suit yourself. I just thought you’d want to know that one of Sarah’s winter chalet paintings just went for twenty five thousand at auction.”

He sat up then with a flourish, the sheets smacking you in the face, “The fuck it did.”

“Just kidding. Watch.”

And you pushed play.

*********************
CODY BELL’S POV

grim reaper
consider this the slip
that brought me to my knees


You were a dead man long before you were a dead man, chased back home to Kansas by a string of warrants for violating restraining orders, assault, drugs, and ultimately bank robbery—the crime you’d resorted to when you needed cash to finance all the others. Had you not facilitated your own earthly exit when you did, you would’ve been in federal custody within a week. Someone within your group of righteous renegades had already sold you down the river for immunity. Your body will be buried in a public cemetery in Wichita next to the old county courthouse and it won’t be there for long. Developers are ripping it up in fifteen months to put in a strip mall. After that, you’ll probably end up in some landfill somewhere.

It was your inability to grasp the concept of moderation that killed you. You couldn’t believe in something without becoming the leader of the resistance, couldn’t hate something without boycotting the product, picketing outside the company, and personally harassing it’s employees, couldn’t see an injustice without launching a crusade to avenge it.

But none of these things were really you; they were the Venetian screens of your life, propped up to dazzle and shield everyone from the real you—the nothingness inside you, the person you forgot to become. So you’ll be remembered as the person you pretended to be on a headstone you’ll never have:

Cody Bell
Rebel With a Lost Cause.


*********************
ZEEK ZIRROLLI’S POV

suck slowly I'm thick
yeah, I got a first class ticket
but I'm as blue as a boy can be


Back at Daniel’s, you couldn’t sleep. You tried, in the guest bedroom. First, in the dark, but your mind wouldn’t settle down. So you turned on the light and tried to read one of Daniel’s magazines…no dice. Finally, you called Gabe. He entertained you with stories of the past few days: Emmett (in a butch moment) determined to do your job, trying to stock the walk in freezer back to front and only getting about halfway through until his back was killing him and he had to quit, Rube calling Gabe (instead of Brian) that morning with his Wednesday numbers and Gabe realizing that Rube is truly an automaton when it comes to things like that, your little brother chairing the morning meeting in Kinney’s absence where they essentially had nothing to talk about because, “You know, how it is.”

“Yeah,” you said, “We only have those meetings so Kinney can bitch at us in a professional atmosphere.”

“Right,” Gabe laughed, “And so that Cynthia can write it all down.”

“And archive it in our PERSONNEL FILES. LIKE STAT.”

“So he can review it for posterity when—"

“When Justin’s not around and he needs to jerk off.”

“Stop it,” Gabe added, “You’re making me choke on my beer.” It felt good to laugh. You needed to laugh. “How’s mom?”

“Same.”

“Pop?”

“Same.”

“Are those cops that did this—"

“The same ones that enjoy comped meals at our place? Of course,” you confirmed.

“What did Pop say?”

“He said he told one of their buddies that if he ever saw them even standing in front of his restaurant, the entire force would come down with a mysterious case of food poisoning.”

“This is bad news,” Gabe said.

“Oh, the shit’s going to hit the fan. I think everyone’s just laying low until the funeral’s over.”

“When is it?”

“Friday morning.”

And then Gabe added, “Oh, and I meant to tell you, at the end of the meeting today, Cynthia asked when you’d be back.”

You sat up, “She did?”

“Yep. So, Rube decides that we should have an official vote for the record, so he says, ‘Raise your hand if you miss Zeek.’”

“Boy, this was a stupid meeting.”

“Right, so Rube raises his hand, and I do, and then Debbie does and then Cynthia does, so then Emmett goes, ‘Why not?’ and raises his.”

“And that leaves Pointdexter.”

“Right, so we’re all sitting there with our hands up like dorks staring at Ted, and he’s like, ‘Fine, whatever, I miss him,’ and he raises his, too.”

“Get the fuck out? It was anonymous?”

……

……

Gabe was laughing and coughing so hard you thought about hanging up and calling 911. His last words to you were, “Oh my god, I gotta go, I’m gonna puke. Seriously, just…come…home.”

Afterwards, as you lay there in your underwear on Dan’s guest bed surrounded by Harper’s sweaters and hair things and winding Amelia’s Jack-in-the-Box over and over and thought about Alan, you began to feel the anger you’d been trying so hard to ignore. Because it wasn’t until that moment, until Gabe said that he missed you, that everybody missed you, that you thought about Alan’s death as if somebody had killed your little brother.

And it wasn’t until you heard a knock on the bedroom door, “Zeek?” that you looked down and realized that you’d popped your last weasel.

“Shit. Yeah?”

“You okay?”

“Yeah. You can come in.”

Dan opened the door and poked his head in, “I’m sorry. I couldn’t sleep, and then I kept hearing that song—"

“Think I’m gonna have to buy her a new one,” you said, turning the recent casualty of your rage in his direction so he could see the carnage. Jack was no longer in the box, but rather slumped over the front of it, the weight of his head doing him in.

“She’s got a least five of those things. She won’t miss it.”

“I’ll just put ten bucks in her college fund.”

Dan laughed, “C’mere. I want to show you something.”

*********************
SAM COLLINS’S POV

little girl in space
my girl

You didn’t plan on sleeping at home that night, assuming that Harper would want to stay at Daniel’s. His place had always been your second home. When you unlocked the door to your apartment, it felt good to be home even if Harper had forgotten to leave the light on over the stove. You shed your jacket in the hallway, hanging it up, and then walked quietly down the hall toward your bedroom, when you walked past the bathroom and heard a tiny whisper, ”Daddy?” You doubled back and stood in the doorway. Amelia was sitting on the toilet in the dark, her hands clutching the sides, her feet swinging back and forth.

“Hey.”

“I hafta poop.”

“Okay.” You turned the light on, and she winced, so you turned it back off, turning the one on in the hallway instead. And in that flash, you could see the cause of Amelia’s distress as you sat in front of her on the little step stool she’d used to get herself on the toilet. You held onto her so she could relax and not have to sit there a second longer clutching the porcelain, fearing that she’d fall in. “Mommy forgot to get your practice potty ready for bed, huh?” It was lying in the bathtub, upside down like it always is after Harper cleans it.

“Yeah. She’s a ‘fraid train.”

You laughed, “You tried to wake her up?”

Amelia nodded in the darkness and then pressed her face to yours to show you what she’d done to Harper, “I did like this: ‘you’re ‘upposed to help me poop, Mommy,’ but her ears were boken.”

“I’ll bet she forgot she put them on before she fell asleep,” you told her in your ‘shame on Mommy’ voice.

“Yeah.”

“So you got up here all by yourself? Such a big girl; I’m proud of you.”

“It’s time for the poop right now, Daddy.”

“Okay, sorry.”

That was your cue to shut up.

……

Once you tucked Amelia back into bed, made sure her practice potty was ready, her night light was burning and told her you loved her, she wanted to know what you had for dinner, so you told her, “Steak, shrimp, vegetables, and a too many beers. What did you have?”

“Gingerbed,” she said with a twinkling smile on her little face.

“Is that what’s in your hair?”

“Yeah,” she said, “And I had so many beers, too.”

“You did?”

“Yeah.”

“What color were yours?” you asked her.

She looked at you like you were stupidest daddy in the world, “Chocolate.”

*********************


I licked the silver spoon,
drank from the golden cup


Your life in New York City, how it’s ended up, is not what your parents envisioned for you when they were raising you in Connecticut high society. Your father devoted his life to being a top executive at a pharmaceutical company that made a killing on one of the plethora of Erectile Dysfunction drugs of twenty-first century, only to retire with a lifetime supply of it and no interest in fucking your mother. You couldn’t exactly blame him mojo-wise because your mother had more or less retired to the basement of your family’s mansion almost twenty years prior so she could count, sort, and re-organize her impressive collection of Bakelite jewelry and antiques. It started out as a hobby, something she could do with the other high society mothers at the country club whose husbands were always ‘playing the back nine’ which was code for ‘fucking their secretaries.’ But those husbands retired, gave up their secretaries, and enjoyed their wives again, while your parents never quite reconnected. Your father spent his time upstairs reading the Wall Street Journal and bitching about your mother, while your mother was downstairs moving everything red to the east corner of the room while cursing your father.

And while all this was going on, you were supposed to be in med school, and you knew this from a very young age, probably about the time your mother started referring to the crusty piece of your umbilical cord that she’d saved in your baby book as ‘Dr. Umbilical Cord.’ You were much more interested in the drama going on in your house than in healing anyone and discovered your true calling when an uncle gave you a video camera for Christmas one year. Once the presents were opened, your mom and dad vanished to their separate corners again, so you whipped out your new toy, went downstairs and taped your mother while she talked all about her Bakelite collection and why she was moving all of the circular pieces to the left side of the room and, “Anything with an edge to the right side. You know, near your father.”

And then you went upstairs and taped your father who was watching It’s a Wonderful Life and delivering a litany of reasons why—thanks to your mother--it certainly wasn’t. And then you let each of them watch one another in the privacy of their own personal hell. You studied their faces as they watched, realizing that they learned more about each other from that half hour than they had in all the years they’d shared the same bed.

So, when you came to the city destined to be a filmmaker, you had a bit of a cushion to fall back on. Your stunt had stunned your parents into thinking that you might actually have a future in this ‘line of work’ (because it certainly wasn’t a profession, or, god forbid, a career), but you knew it wouldn’t last for long. You milked it for all it was worth, fondly calling your parents by their favorite nickname--Western Union--until, finally, their wallets could no longer stand the shame of a son who passed up a guaranteed early admission to Harvard medical school to walk around some filthy, loud city with a camera on his shoulder like Geraldo Rivera.

Less than a month after they cut the cord, you met Harper.

It was the summer of 2007.

*********************

vintage red dress
see a certain girl I’ve had in mind

The day you met Harper was a weird day. You were somewhere in between miserable and happy, having adopted the habit of cataloging your moods from your mother. In fact, you were your mother that day, trying to comfort and ground yourself in your new studio by rearranging the place. You’d purchased a book the day before, Feng Shui for Dummies, in an effort to fool yourself into believing that you weren’t having a neurotic meltdown. But you hadn’t even cracked the spine.

There was something so oddly transparent about Harper when she stood outside your studio--her former studio, Justin’s former studio, Alan’s former crash pad—the day you met her, and yet shrouded at the same time. The next time you saw her you were wandering around in that bookstore again about to buy some book, probably Documentaries for Dummies, when you saw her sitting on a loveseat, drinking a cup of a coffee, flipping through a book from the bargain bin. It was a collection of black and white photographs of Marilyn Monroe and other Hollywood legends. You ditched the book you were carrying and walked over to her.

“Harper, right?”

She didn’t even look up, “Hi, Sam.” But somehow you knew you weren’t getting the brush off; it was like she already knew you were there. “Okay if I sit?”

“Can you get us some coffee, first? Mine’s cold.” She handed you her mug with a smile.

“Sure.”

Now, had some Connecticut social-lite done that to you, you would’ve done it, and then spent the rest of the evening ranting about how fucking entitled rich women think they are, but with Harper, you were more than happy to oblige her.

“How are you?” she asked when you returned with coffee for two and sat down beside her.

“I’m good. You?”

“Can’t complain,” she said.

A woman who can’t complain. How delicious.

The book she was flipping through ended up halfway on her lap and halfway on yours, and the two of you talked about pictures and camera and angles and lighting and everything under the sun to do with photography for over an hour until your stomach growled and brought you back to reality: man cannot live on coffee alone.

“Harper, I’d like to take you out to dinner,” you said.

“When?” she asked as if it was the last thing she was expecting you to say.

“Right now.”

You left the book on the loveseat.

*********************

pasta
she acts like summer and walks like rain

Dinner was chatty, though you can’t really remember much of what she said. Mostly, you just remember looking at her face and thinking that she was beautiful in that 16 mm kind of way, that her face, the sparkle in her eyes, would destroy you if you filtered it through the lens of your camera and then watched it all grainy and true. She had some kind of freeze-dried nostalgia about her, and she was charming you by accident, leaning in with her elbows on the table, fiddling with her bracelets, her necklace, sliding her rings on and off her fingers as she talked, getting a little drunk. Once you had to catch her before her breast went in her salad.

Your mother would’ve been dazzled by her accessories and mortified by her manners.

She was absolutely perfect.

At some point during dinner, you told her about your aborted med school ways, and she informed you, “Well, you go to med school to learn to be a doctor, and you piss off and disappoint your parents in order to become an artist. So, congratulations. You’ve graduated with honors.”

“If it only came with a diploma,” you lamented.

“You’re an artist,” she said, “Make it yourself.”

“Will you frame it for me?” you asked.

“Sure,” she replied, “If it’s any good.”

……

You were completely unaware that the next few hours of the evening would occur to teach you a lesson that you would’ve never learned had you stayed in your homogenous New England life: when you meet a woman that you’re interested in, always know more about her than she knows about you. Consider it a condom for the first few months of your courtship.

*********************

girl cut out
we look at each other
wonder what the other is thinking


You ended up walking back to your studio, and everything felt so easy and natural that when she began to tease you about your bins and labels and your Brother P-Touch Industrial Handheld Labeling System, you fessed up and told her that it was your mother’s fault, that she was crazy, spent all of her time in the basement labeling Ziplocs of colored plastic. So, Harper told you that her mother really was crazy, and you thought she was kidding because she can be that way sometimes, but she said no, that she wasn’t kidding and smiled and just kept walking around your studio looking in all of your containers like she was browsing at a flea market.

You began to feel anxious, like you were on display—only inside out—and you weren’t sure if you should apologize or shut up or end the date or excuse yourself and disappear through the bathroom window. The studio belonged to her first. Fuck, you thought, she can just have it back.

“But my mother’s dead,” she added and then she looked at you.

Thank god, you thought, not that her mother was dead because that’s a horrible thing to think, but because you knew what to say. There’s only one thing you can say in that situation, “I’m sorry.”

The words brought you relief.

Temporarily. Because you would soon learn that Harper decides what your words mean, not you.

……

“You think I’m mad at you.” Harper can ask questions that don’t sound like questions; it’s one of the many disarming skills in her arsenal.

“I think I’ve upset you,” you told her. You were going with honesty at that point.

“Why?”

You couldn’t answer that, not when you’d just met her, not when the answer didn’t even matter anymore. It was time to cut your losses. You put your hands in your pockets, defeated, “Can I walk you home?”

She stayed right where she was, “No.”

……

And then the moment just hung there in the air like really cheap air freshener.

……

You looked at her and tried not to look frustrated, but then she picked up your label maker and turned it on. You sort of threw your hands up in the air and sat on your sofa, your head resting on your hand. She smiled in a way that made you calm down, not a victory smile that you were expecting, and then began to punch keys on your label maker. You sat there and watched her, laughing when she made a mistake and had to figure out how to go back and fix it. You weren’t going to tell her; she was on her own. Finally, she was done, and her finger hovered over the machine, searching while she chanted, “Print, print, print. Oh there it is.” And then the label maker buzzed and spit out a long piece of tape. She picked up a pair of scissors, and you stopped her, “It has a blade.”

“I know; I just wanted to see if you’d tell me.” She sliced the label free and placed the machine back in its case, and then walked over and sat beside you on the sofa. You sat there patiently while she peeled the back of the label off and then turned to face you, “Here,” she said, pressing the long, red label on your jeans.

You looked down at it and laughed:

 

 

 

 

I LIKE YOU A LOT. YOU NEED TO RELAX.


“You do?”

She did.

……

You shared a bottle of wine and box of Oreos because that was all you had, and after a while, you knew the wine was talking, but you didn’t care because she was so pretty and quirky and alive next to you, her bare feet sticking out of her jeans, her knees spiking up between you, a perfect arm rest.

“It’s really weird to be here on a date with someone,” she said.

“Why?”

“Because I’ve had more sex in this place than you can possibly imagine.” When you laughed, she said, “Oh, shit. That was worse than me telling you about my mother, wasn’t it?” covering her mouth as if that would keep the words from falling out.

“It’s okay. I’ve had sex here, too,” you told her.

“You have?”

“Yeah, you know, by myself.”

When Harper’s drunk, she can’t laugh without snorting. When she finally stopped, she said, “Me, too.” And then started up again. “But mostly, with two other guys.” And then you had to catch her before she hit the floor.

“Whoa. Be careful.”

“Ohmygod, that’s such bullshit. Justin’s gay. He just watches.” And then she cackled like Broom Hilda on Ecstasy. You ended up on the floor with her in hysterics. You weren’t even sure what you were laughing at.

Legend has it that everyone who rents that studio ends up having sex with Harper in one way or another--no wait--just having a lot of sex with a lot of people or whatever, but either way you didn’t care. You just wanted her to stop laughing long enough for you to kiss her. And the first kiss was nice and sweet and it surprised her and when it was over, she looked at you very seriously and said, “I don’t think I should get involved with a guy who’s named after a cocktail.”

You pulled back a little and stared at her for a second, your brain a little slow, and then said, “That’s a Tom Collins.”

“Oh…shit.”

It was the second time you’d seen Harper blush; the first being when you’d met her outside your studio. “You blush at the funniest times,” you told her.

And then her expression changed again; she was wearing something seductive, her hand was sliding around your waist as she was pulling you back down. “C’mere,” she whispered.

“What?” you asked, leaning down.

She whispered in your ear, “You don’t have an uncle named Harvey Wallbanger, do you?”

And that was when you knew that Harper was the one because you both had crazy mothers, artistic proclivities, and unchecked sex drives, because she found your penchant for labeling things adorable at first and ‘symptomatic of a much larger issue’ later, because she loved motherhood as much as she feared it, because she could hate your parents just like you did and then pretend she didn’t long enough to deposit the five thousand they sent you for your birthday, but mostly because she laughed and then really kissed you when you answered her question…

“Only by marriage, but we only have to see him every other Christmas.”

*********************

girl ghost in the hall
you won't give up the search
for the ghosts in the halls


So when you walked into your bedroom that night and saw Harper curled up and asleep, you took off your clothes and got into bed next to her, really next to her since all of this shit had happened. And when you went to put your arms around her and realized that she was wearing Ruth’s night gown, you weren’t able to view this tragedy through the luxurious distance of a camera lens any longer because it was right beside you—living, breathing, and scaring the shit out of you.

The trunk that has always been at the foot of your bed belonged to Harper but first to Ruth and it was filled with everything Harper had left from her mother. You never opened it yourself; she’d officially shown you the contents once. It was filled with souvenirs from her childhood visits to Ruth’s hospital room: bracelets, blankets, a few pictures, some of Ruth’s clothing, random medical supplies that Harper had stolen because they reminded her of her mother. To this day, Harper keeps her jewelry in her top dresser drawer in a small, sea green, kidney shaped pan that she took from her mother’s room. The trunk was too large for its contents, but Harper refused to put anything else in it. You wondered now if that would change because all Alan’s death had done was rip the band-aid off of Ruth’s. And you weren’t sure who you were lying next to anymore—your wife, the mother of your child, or a little girl broken into a million pieces like a gingerbread cookie.

You knew all of this was coming the minute you saw Sarah, the minute you felt her in Daniel’s place. You felt comfortable leaving Harper and Amelia there, all alone with her, and Daniel must’ve picked up on your vibe because he said to as you rode together in the cab to the restaurant, “You know, sometimes I think I’d make a better shrink if I’d screw my dick off.”

“Is that why you gay guys get so much more work done than I do?” you asked him.

“All we needed was a matriarch. Why didn’t I know that?”

“Well, it’s not like they’re in the yellow pages,” you told him. He didn’t answer you; he just stared out the window. “The only people we even know that have decent mothers are Zeek—“

“And she made the food.”

“Right. And Justin, I guess.”

“Well, that’s true. We have a bit of a maternal vacuum.”

“That sounds vaginal,” you told him.

“Freud would agree.” And then as the cab stopped in front of the restaurant, “She’s going to be all right, Sam.”

“I know.”

……

But you didn’t know.

And the only thing either of you had to fall back on was each other and Daniel and your friends. You got out of bed to find something to help you sleep, and when you walked back in the room, Harper was awake. She’d rolled over and was facing your side of the bed.

“You’re home,” she said.

“Yeah, have been for awhile.”

You got back into bed next to her, and she not been wearing her mother’s night gown, you would’ve urged her to take it off. But instead, the thin, white cotton kept you at bay. And then she sat up as if something frightened her, “Oh shit, ‘Melia’s thing. I forgot to set it up,” and she was tossing the covers back in a panic.

You stopped her, “Harper, she’s fine. I did it.”

She lay back down, “Oh, thank god. How was dinner?”

“Good. Long. Free.”

“Free?”

“Apparently, Brian’s so rich that people see him and just want to give him more free stuff.”

“The circle of wealth, huh?”

“Yeah. He’s very smooth about it, though.”

……

See you’d told Harper during one of your first lovemaking extravaganzas at your studio that her talent was spotting people with a trap door to crazy and yours was spotting people with a drawbridge to money. She was already madly in lust with you then, so she didn’t slap you…

“For instance,” you told her, “Your friend, Justin, or voyeur-in-residence, or whatever he is, he’s loaded.”

“He is not,” she insisted.

“Yes, he is.”

“He is not; he could barely pay the rent on this place. That’s why we’re at Daniel’s; because it’s free.”

“It’s a drawbridge, Harper. It’s there when he wants it. Trust me.”

“You think he has a trust fund or something?”

“I’m not sure. There’s definitely some trust and some funds involved, but the rest, I’m not so clear on yet.”

“Ooh, it’s a mystery.”

“Well, you could just ask him,” you pointed out.

“That’s no fun.” (That was pretty much half of Harper’s nutshell.) “And, besides, everyone’s entitled to their secrets.” (And that was the other.)

At that point, your relationship with Harper had hit the ground running, and you had no intention of looking back; she was a whirlwind in bed, in her studio, at dinner, even walking down the street. Every moment felt like exactly what you were meant to do until you got to your studio one morning to find Harper already there, sitting on your sofa.

“Hey, what’s up?” you said. She never came by in the morning; Harper doesn't officially recognize mornings. She stood up and that’s when you realized that she was crying. “What’s wrong?” But she wouldn’t answer you. “What? Tell me.”

But she couldn’t.

She just uncrossed her arms so you could see the label on her shirt, entitling you to her secret:

 

 

I'm Pregnant

 ********************
girl in bubble

I sank into Eden with you

Trying to talk to Harper after that morning was nearly impossible. She wouldn’t stay on the phone with you; she wouldn’t have lunch with you; she wouldn’t stay in one place long enough for you to finish a sentence. You kept at her for four days and then finally decided that you were going about it the wrong way, so you called her, and when she answered and said, “Look, I can’t talk right now,” instead of, “Hello,” you said, “I know. Come over when you’re ready. I’ll be waiting,” and hung up.

Since your first date with Harper, you’d felt nothing but alive, almost resurrected, but now you’d gone completely numb because you didn’t know what she was going to do, and you loved her although you’d never told her, and this was an accident, and now you’d fucked everything up. And she was carrying your child and you were trying to offer her a drawbridge but were terrified she was going to slip out a trap door like a lizard you try to catch right before he disappears down a storm drain and you were never going to see her again.

She didn’t call.

She didn’t email.

She just showed up twenty four hours later. And in that twenty four hours you’d done a lot of panicking, a lot of thinking, and only left the studio once to run a very quick errand. You’d been eating, sleeping, showering there; you weren’t going to miss her. You were ready. You let her come in, let her pace, let her talk, pretended there was a camera on your shoulder forcing you to accept the distance,

“I’m sorry about this, Sam.”

“It’s not your fault. It was an accident.” She stayed on the perimeter of the room, just like you thought she would.

“I’m not sure if I want to keep it.”

“Whatever you want to do, it’s up to you,” you reassured her.

“I don’t want you to think I planned this or something.”

“Harper, I don’t think that.”

She was almost where you needed her to be, her fingers skimming the shelves. You were glad you’d dusted for the occasion.

“It’s just that I don’t think that—"

And then she stopped because she was finally there.

You watched, holding your breath, as she pulled the plastic bin off the shelf. She stared at what was inside: pictures you’d taken of her, coupons for Oreo cookies, the cork from your first bottle of wine, menus of places you’d eaten, brochures from galleries and museums you’d visited, and then she ran her finger over the brand new shiny label you’d put on there just for her:

 

will you marry me?
……

……


“You bought new tape for me?” she asked.

“Yeah.”

She put the basket on the table in front of her and walked over to you, “You’re lowering the bridge for me?”

“For both of you.”

“Because you love me.”

“Insanely.”

……

“You don’t have to do this. This is isn’t a reason to get married.”

“It is if I love you, Harper.”

“You barely know me, Sam.”

“True,” you conceded, “But I love what I know.”

……

“This is crazy,” she said.

“Right, but, hey, stick with what you know.”

And then she laughed and was finally only a few inches away.

……

“Okay,” she said, and then she kissed you and made it clear that she wasn’t just, “Going to take your last name and become ‘Mrs. Tom Collins.’”

“No, you’re not,” you said, “Because you’re pregnant and you can’t drink, so I’ll change my name and be Mr. Tom Collins and you can be—"

“Miss Shirley Temple.”

And when Amelia was born, that was more or less whom she embodied, and neither you nor Harper even believed that that part of Amelia’s conception was an accident.

********************
ALAN HARPER’S POV

red curtain
I can see my life before me

There was nothing normal about your life, so it stood to reason that there would be nothing normal about your time in the AfterDeath either.

The televisions had yet to come on for Cody when one suddenly came on for you. You walked over, reluctantly at first because it wasn’t your turn, but then you couldn’t ignore the tug in your chest any longer, so you gave in. And when you got front and center, you immediately wanted Chris and Cody to get lost, but they seemed stuck—Cody still on the ground staring up at a very threatening Chris--like rivals in a wax museum. You wanted privacy; what you were watching, it was personal. It was Stitch.

But it wasn’t going to happen because Emma, Daniel’s mother, the woman who’d tried to comfort you when you first arrived in the AfterDeath, was beside you again, whispering to you as the second television had started to glow, “What’s going on?”

You shrugged, “I have no idea,” and then walked over to the statues and snatched the remote off of Cody’s chest.

“You can’t do that,” Emma scolded you.

“Why the fuck not? He’s not using it.”

She looked over at Chris and Cody, and then began to scoot over so she was practically smashed against you, “I don’t know what’s going on over there, but that’s just inappropriate.”

“Look,” you told her, pointing to the set that had come on for her.

As that image came into focus, you could both tell that it was Daniel…in his office at home under the stairs…in his pajamas. He’d taken his contacts out and was wearing his glasses, sitting in front of his computer. But he wasn’t alone. Zeek was with him, wearing nothing but a pair of jeans.

“Oh my goodness,” Emma said into her folded hands, “Please don’t make me watch this, Jesus.”

You laughed and reassured her, “I don’t think you need to worry about that. Zeek is not your son’s type.”

Emma looked almost offended, “Well, maybe my son is that…that big man’s type.”

“His name is ‘Zeek,’ and I seriously doubt that,” you told her.

“Why? Are you saying my son’s unattractive?” (The things dead people worry about sometimes.)

“No. I just mean that,” and then you had to think about how to phrase it, “He probably just talks too much.”

“Well, of course he does,” she said. “He’s a psychiatrist. That’s his profession.”

Now she was just annoying you, “I meant during sex.”

……

……

“Alan, I think I’d prefer it if we just changed the subject,” she told you, smoothing her shirt and letting the last word of her sentence hit the high note the way she always does when she’s smoking her morally superior crack.

“Fine with me. I’m trying to watch this.”

“Well, good. I’m so glad we got that settled.”

********************
JONATHAN MASSEY’S POV

stopwatch
you never could get it
unless you were fed it


When the phone rang at midnight that night, Father Dick told you to, “Inor ih, peas,” because he was sucking you off, but he knew you couldn’t do that.

“Can’t. It might be Jesus.” But when you grabbed the phone expecting to see the phone number of your answering service and saw Daniel’s number instead, you flashed the phone at Father Dick, “Sorry, wrong martyr.”

“I’m going downstairs to get something to drink then,” he told you, “Want anything?”

“Holy water on the rocks.” He flipped you off on his way out of the room, and then you greeted Daniel, “To what do I owe this coitus interruptus?”

“I just sent you an email.”

“Well, thank you for the call, but normally my computer does this thing that notifies me of such events. It’s very reliable.”

“Stop being a smart ass, and look at it.”

“Okay, hang on.”

Father Dick walked back into the room just in time to catch you as you were falling off the bed. “What the fuck are you doing?” he asked you.

”Please take me off speakerphone. You know I hate that.”

“I’m trying to get my laptop.”

”I’m serious.”

“Daniel, can you wait a second?” Richard asked as he picked you up off the floor, “He almost broke his neck.” And then he told you, “You know, for someone who went to med school, you do some really stupid shit sometimes. Why can’t you get up and get things like normal people?”

“I like it when you come to my rescue,” you told him after he righted you again, “You’re like my pope in shining armor.” Father Dick rolled his eyes at you, pointed to your cock, and mouthed, hurry up. “Okay, Daniel. I’m looking at my email.”

”Read it.”

“Is this a patient thing, or can I look?” Father Dick asked.

"You can look.”

So you and Father Dick followed the link Dan sent you and read the obituary. “Okay, we read it. Am I supposed to know who that guy is?”

"Okay, well, remember that this morning was when everyone went under the street with Stitch?”

“Yeah.”

"Well, Sam filmed it, and I got to see the footage when they got back.”

“Congratulations. We’re both so happy for you.”

"Shut up and listen. Alan and Stitch have been recreating all of this art in the tunnels—Picasso, Van Gogh, Monet—"

“So, they have good taste.”

"And Justin’s. The last thing Sam filmed was a mural Alan painted. It was a reproduction of one of Justin’s paintings.”

“Okay.” Father Dick lay back on your bed and started playing with himself. “Daniel, long story short, please.”

”Remember that painting Justin painted three years ago, right after he got back from that instant vacation he took? You know, he was working on it after my mother died?”

“Yeah, I remember.”

”The name on the tombstone in that painting corresponds to that obituary I sent you.”

Father Dick sat up, and you read the obituary again. “Okay, so—"

”Now read the second link I sent you.”

So, you clicked the next link which took you to a front page article in the Pittsburgh Post from 2001. The headline read:

All-American Athlete Lets More Than His Team Down

You were halfway down the page when you realized what you were reading. “Oh my god.”

”Yeah.”

……

And then you scrolled further down the page.

“If that is Brian ten years ago, the man has hardly aged.”

”That is not the point.”

“I know; I’m just saying.”

……

“Whoa,” you said when you finished, and then you looked at Father Dick. He wasn’t playing with himself anymore; he was under the covers.

“My mojo just flew out the window,” he told you.

“No shit.”

”I forwarded you something else that Zeek showed me.”

“Okay.” You clicked on the next email and started to read an article from 2005 about the bombing of a gay club, “Babylon, a gay club owned by advertising executive Brian Kinney.”

“I’ve heard of that place,” Father Dick said.

“Not the one in the bible,” you told him. He smacked you. “Dan, you just found out about all of this tonight?”

Yeah, long story. I started with the name on the tombstone and the obituary and started working backwards.”

“He never told you, did he?”

”Justin? No.” And then he paused, ”Well, unless-"

“You were trying to listen when you should’ve been looking.”

”Yeah…

He sold that painting within weeks of finishing it. I can’t remember who bought it. Do you?”


You did remember because it sold the night before one of Justin and Harper’s shows at a dinner you and Daniel had for the two of them at your place, a dinner attended by a gaggle of elite, snobby New York physicians—all of them social has-beens with way too much money and a deficit of self-esteem. You remembered because the doctor who bought it had spent that evening and many prior hitting on Harper until she’d finally gotten so irritated with his roaming advances that she told him to fuck off.

He’d gotten his revenge by snubbing her work and buying one of Justin’s paintings instead.

“Yeah, I remember,” you told Dan. “It was Stan Abernathy. Don’t you remember that party? That quiche we got was horrible.”

And then he did, ”Yes, yes, now I remember. Hang on a second,” and then you could hear him opening a door, talking to Zeek, ”It was that plastic surgeon, that creepy guy who used to hit on Harper at all her shows. You remember him, don’t you?”

Zeek remembered, ”Christ, Franken-stan bought that painting? Harper got so pissed at that guy one time she told me to go kick him in the nuts.”

“Did you do it?”
you heard Daniel ask.

”Hell, no, but I told her I did.”

“All right, Nancy Drew, mystery solved. We have to go back to The Case of the Interrupted Blow Job,” you told Daniel.

”This is the thing I couldn’t figure out,” Daniel told you, ignoring your plea to be released from the conversation.

“What? That their love is laced with PTSD?”

”Yes, Jonathon, but every time you oversimplify you come off as dismissive and like you’re trying to minimize my feelings.”

“My apologies. I’ll adjust my medication. Do you feel better now that you know?”

……

He sighed, ”No, not better, really. Just sad…and worried.”

“Daniel, sad and worried is better for you.”

”Shut up.” And then he told your fallen angel, ”You know you can do better than him, right?”

Richard laughed, “Probably, but right now I’m just trying to do him, period.”

”Fine. Good-bye. Enjoy your blasphemous orgasms.”

You hung up the phone, shut your laptop and smiled at Father Dick. “What?” he said.

“It’s just…I feel like I just watched my little amputee take his first steps.”

“Oh, you’re definitely going to Hell for that.”

********************
STITCH’S POV

escher stairs
but god forbid you ever had to walk a mile in his shoes

When Lewis returned from his first trial run of many, something was wrong. First of all, you’d sent him by himself because it was a only a trial run, and yet he’d come back with more shit than he could carry, and second of all, he was a fucking basket case. This was exactly what concerned you about with Lewis. He’d be clean for over a year, but that hardly mattered because he was always a nervous wreck.

You had to leave the children in the kitchen where they were all coloring a giant mural for Alan, something that you could take to his funeral on their behalf because there was no way they could go. The minute those kids hit the street and the cops saw them, every single one of them would be taken away. “Lewis is back,” you told them. “Keep working. It looks great. I’ll be back in a while.” And then you walked out and turned around and walked right back in, “And don’t fight over those paints. Got it?”

“We got it,” one of the older boys, Derek, said.

You walked through the tunnel and back to your room and found Lewis sitting on your bed, trying to empty all of his pockets and sort through everything he had. “What the fuck happened?”

“I did what you said, Stitch."

“Then why do you have all this shit? And why are you freaking out?”

His instructions had been simple: learn Alan’s route, go to all the pick up points, meet people, get familiar with who you can trust and what you pick up on which days. Anything that businesses were going to throw away, Alan would offer to pick up if it could benefit anyone in your community. His contacts were strong; he’d been doing it for years.

Lewis took his coat off, threw it on the bed, and started emptying the pockets of his jeans. You watched as he tossed roll after roll of cash on the bed.

“Where’d you get that, Lewis? What’d you do?”

“Stop yelling at me,” Lewis told you. He was shaking when he’d finally finished and sat down on the bed.

“Okay, so talk.”

“I did what you said. I went to every place on the list, looked for Alan’s tag—"

“And did you find it?”

“Yes, I found it, but—"

“But, what?”

“They’d all been changed.”

“Changed?”

And then he picked up a pad of paper and a pencil and showed you. “Like this, Stitch. Every single one of them looked like this:”

 

 

RIP tag



And then you could barely understand him as he tried to tell you the rest, “And there was so much stuff, Stitch. I couldn’t even get it all: food and clothes and medicine and cards and flowers and all this money. So, I got the food and the money and most of the medicine. But I have to go back. There’s so much. I’m sorry; I tried.”

“It’s okay, Lewis,” you said as you sat down beside him. “This is my fault. I shouldn’t have sent you by yourself.”

“You didn’t know.”

"You did the best you could; let's put this stuff away."

And as you and Lewis went through everything, sorting it, counting the money, storing the food that had a shelf-life, the reality of not having Alan beside you became acute when you were staring at a can of yams and trying to decide whether to put it alphabetically with ‘potatoes’ or at the end by ‘yellow squash.’ You stacked all of the cards and letters on your dresser and then told Lewis, "You and me, we'll let everybody read these at dinner and then we'll give them to his sister with his other stuff. That's what we should do."

"Okay."

And then there was a knock at your door. “What?” you said, though it sounded more like a bark.

“It’s Marie,” a little voice said; she was one of the younger children working on the mural.

“Come in.”

She pushed the door open slowly and then walked into the room, “We were just wondering if you had any more yellow. We’re not fighting or anything; we're just trying to make some sunshine.”



Lyrics taken from Nine Days’s Absolutely (Story of a Girl), Matchbox Twenty’s Real World, Wonderwall by Oasis, the Talking Heads’s Burning Down the House, Beck’s Loser, the Goo Goo Doll’s Iris, Depeche Mode’s Personal Jesus, the Smashing Pumpkin’s Tonight Tonight, Green Day’s Good Riddance (Time of Your Life, REM’s Losing My Religion, Marc Cohn’s Walking in Memphis, The Temptation’s My Girl, Everlast’s What It’s Like, George and Ira Gershwin’s Someone to Watch Over Me, Train’s Drops of Jupiter, the Dave Matthew’s Band Ants Marching, Sarah McLachlan’s Building A Mystery, Live’s I Alone, Crosby, Stills, and Nash’s Wasted on the Way, Everlast’s What It’s Like again, and Vertical Horizon’s Everything You Want.

Icon bases used throughout this story came from basicbases, basebeat, khushi_icons, obsessiveicons, graphical_love, anithradia, simplybases, randomicons, bases_by_maggie, foryourhead, some icon communities at Greatest Journal, and the website Absolute Trouble.

Chapter End Notes:

Original publication date 11/26/06

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