30 November 2015
I sat alone and watched the stars and dreamed of Diego. I saw the world from the stars’ point of view, and it looked unbearably lonely. It took so long for starlight to reach me in the sluggers’ ship orbiting Earth that some of those stars were already dead. When their light set out, we were younger, not even born. Our parent’s parents weren’t born. Humanity was still waiting to crawl out of the ocean and evolve. It was beautiful to think that starlight persisted even after the star itself had died, until I realized that humanity would vanish from the planet, the planet would disappear from the cosmos, and no one would remember we existed. No one would care.
Jesse was my star. He was gone—buried and rotting and cold—but he lingered. He sat with me in the transparent bubble of the slugger ship as I dreamed of Diego and watched the clusters of stars, other galaxies filled with other people like me and not, staring back, touching their lips and wondering if anyone would remember them. Spoiler alert: they won’t.
I blinked. I was in Diego’s bedroom, waiting for him to return with sodas; I blinked, and I was on the slugger ship. No sluggers greeted me; none poked at me or prodded my body with their strange alien instruments. The holographic Earth and the button were missing as well. I think I would have pressed it. I screamed for those slug-headed bastards to send me back, but they didn’t. When my voice was raw, I walked into the darkness and arrived in the star room, where I remained.
I wonder what preventing the destruction of Earth means to the sluggers. In all of the universe, are we unique? Is there something humans possess that makes us worth saving? Maybe out of all the billions of planets, music is unique to Earth. Or books. The sluggers have fallen in love with Kerouac and Keats and Woolf and Shakespeare, and hope I’ll press the button to preserve our literature for other alien races to explore. Then again, maybe we really are the ants. If I don’t press that button, the sluggers will simply collect a couple of breeding pairs and restart the human experiment on another planet.
It seems unfair that an entire civilization could vanish from the universe and leave no trace behind, while Jesse lingers on. It isn’t fair that he burned out, but his light remains to remind me of everything we had and would never have again.
But that’s the difference between people and stars. A star’s light still shines even if there’s no one to see it, but without someone to remember Jesse, his light will disappear.
Maybe I would have pressed the button when the sluggers abducted me from Diego’s house if they’d given me the chance. Maybe it was better that they’d taken me before things with Diego went too far. Maybe we were better off just being friends.
It doesn’t matter. Maybes won’t save the world.
• • •
The one thing I never thought to hope for was to not be awakened by a sandy kick to the ribs from a homeless man with curled, yellow toenails because aliens from outer space had dumped me in the middle of nowhere mostly naked again. I’d prayed to God for money and for my parents not to get a divorce, I’d begged Santa for a new computer, I’d even offered the devil my soul in exchange for a passing grade on my Beowulf exam, but I’d never thought to hope for something useful. Not until after the fact, anyway.
“Kid, you okay?” I peeked through my crusty eyes as a fungal zoo of a toe prodded my arm, and a grizzled, bearded face framed by ashy predawn light leaned over me. He reeked of piss and seaweed.
My mouth felt like I’d gargled used urinal cakes, and my cracked lips stung.
“Kid?” The man dipped nearer. His foul breath jolted me awake as surely as if I’d been electrocuted by sluggers.
“Where am I?” I asked instinctively, though the familiar sand dunes and sea oats were a dead giveaway. A cool breeze blew off the water, misting me with salt. Though it could have been any beach on any part of the planet, I knew it wasn’t. It smelled like home.
The old man cackled and coughed and hacked up a glob of phlegm that he spit into the sand too near my feet for comfort. “Must’ve been some party.”
“What time is it?” I asked. The sun was still little more than a vague promise in the eastern sky. “God, what day is it?”
“Bit young to be living so rough,” the bum said, and I wanted to laugh at the irony of being told off by a man who clearly hadn’t showered since Clinton was president.
“Just . . . what day is it?”
“Monday. I think.” He scratched his beard and tapped at the sky, mumbling about dates, trying to recall where he’d been yesterday. “Definitely Monday. Maybe.”
That meant I’d been missing since Thursday, which wasn’t possible. People only went missing for that long in sitcoms, which always ended happily, or horror movies, which rarely ended happily unless you were white and chaste and not gay.
I remembered kissing Diego—Diego who liked me and wanted to kiss me and didn’t care who knew—and he’d gone to get us drinks. Then the sluggers abducted me. Which meant that when Diego had returned to his bedroom, I’d disappeared without saying good-bye. He must have thought I’d freaked out and run away. I instinctively reached for my phone, but the aliens had stripped me of everything but my festive turkey boxers. Gobble, gobble.
“I have to go.” When I tried to stand, I stumbled, but the old man caught me. His fingers were rough and grimy, and left streaks of filth on my arm that I fought the urge to wipe off. “Thanks,” I muttered, and pointed myself toward the road, ignoring his offer of help.
• • •
Charlie’s legs stuck out from under the Wrangler when I trudged home twenty minutes later, and country music filled the morning silence. It wasn’t loud, but I was still surprised Mr. Nabu hadn’t called the cops to complain. He complained about everything, including the fact that we still had our Christmas lights up in July. By that time, Charlie refused to take them down because it was already closer to next Christmas than it was from last.
I exaggerated my stride, letting my feet smack the driveway so I didn’t startle Charlie. When I got within two feet of the Jeep, he froze and said, “Zooey?”
My throat felt like a lemon was lodged behind my Adam’s apple, and I tried to work up a mouthful of saliva to swallow so I could answer. “Nah, I’m much prettier.”
Charlie scrambled out from under the Jeep. His face was smeared with grease, and he was wearing his WIZARDS DO IT WITH WANDS T-shirt. In one motion, he embraced me and squeezed out my breath, wordless but shaking. He’d pinned my arms to my sides so I couldn’t even hug him back, not that it seemed to matter.
“Where the fuck have you been?” He held me at arm’s length, examining me.
“Nowhere.”
“We called the fucking police, bro.”
“When?”
“Saturday.” Charlie knuckled his temple. “Some guy came by looking for you Friday. Said you were at his house on Thanksgiving.”
“Diego?”
Charlie grabbed a rag from his back pocket and tried to clean his hands, but they were so filthy, all he did was smear the dirt around. “Maybe. Yeah, I think so. He was worried about you.”
Diego had come to look for me. I was an asshole. He’d probably spent the weekend searching Calypso for me. I had to let him know I was okay. “Do you have your phone?”
Charlie swore. “I gotta let Mom know you’re home.” Even though Mrs. Melcher was standing in her front yard with her fluffy dog, Barron, and I was in my boxers, shivering, I waited while Charlie called her. “Yeah, Mom? He’s home. I don’t know. I don’t know. Okay, hold on.” He shoved the phone at me.
I shook my head and backed away. I couldn’t deal with Mom until I’d had coffee and a shower; I needed time to figure out what to tell her. She couldn’t handle the truth, but I didn’t know what lie I could conjure up that would satisfy her rage. No matter what I said, I was in for it when she got ahold of me.
Charlie curled his lip like he wanted to punch me. “Yeah, Mom . . . he’s going to take a shower. He’s fine. Okay . . . okay . . . I’ll tell him.” Charlie tossed the phone into the Jeep. “Mom wants you home right after school.”
“Thanks, Charlie.”
“Don’t thank me.” Charlie frowned at me with disgust. Growing up, he’d called me a botched abortion, shit stain, fucktard, faggot, asshat, dipshit, and Henrietta. But in all our years together he’d never looked at me like he was ashamed to be my brother. “Where the fuck were you, Henry?”
“Nowhere.”
Charlie shoved me with so much force that I stumbled backward and fell onto the lawn. I threw my hands behind me as I fell, and landed on my ass. Dew soaked my boxers, grass stained my palms. I scrambled to my feet. “What the hell, Charlie?”
“You’ve been gone for days—days, Henry—and ‘nowhere’ is all you can say? Mom thought you were beat up again, or worse!”
I had a pretty good idea what worse meant. When I found out that Jesse had hanged himself in his bedroom, I overheard my mom tell Nana that she couldn’t imagine anything worse than finding her son’s dead body, but I knew that wasn’t true. Worse would be never finding me, never knowing what had happened, but I wouldn’t have done that. Not to her, not to anyone.
“I’m sorry,” I muttered.
Charlie shook his head. He could barely look at me. “No shit.”
“What’s wrong with the Jeep?” I asked, unsure what else to say.
“Nothing.”
“Then why aren’t you in bed?”
Charlie sneered. “If you think any of us could sleep not knowing whether you were dead or alive, then you don’t know dick about this family.”
• • •
I walked into Faraci’s class, rubbing my head to try to ease the persistent pounding in my temples. Not even ten minutes brushing my teeth had been enough to scrub the sticky film from my mouth, and if I took any more aspirin, I’d probably start leaking blood from every orifice.
Relief flooded Audrey’s face when she saw me, and she started babbling the moment I sat down. “Your mom came to my house, looking for you. Did you talk to her? Are you all right? I told her you were probably fine, but she said you hadn’t come home in a couple of days and I hadn’t heard from you and you weren’t answering your phone. She was really worried.”
My eyeballs throbbed, and it hurt to smile, but I forced one for Audrey. “I’m good. She knows I’m okay.”
“Thank God.”
“Thanksgiving was kind of a mess at my house, and I lost my phone.” I hoped if I were vague, she’d drop it, but Audrey was tenacious.
“Diego called me, freaking out. He told me what happened, and he was scared he’d messed things up, but I thought maybe you’d . . . Jesus, Henry, I was worried sick.” She glanced around the room, but we were the only people in it other than Ms. Faraci, whose head was cocked to the side slightly. She appeared to be grading papers, but her pen hadn’t moved since I’d walked into class.
My cheeks burned as I wondered how much Diego had told Audrey. “I’m not going to hurt myself, Audrey. Everything’s just complicated.”
“You can’t disappear like that.”
“It’s not like the sluggers gave me a choice.”
Audrey fell silent while I stewed. I was tired of apologizing for things that were beyond my control. I didn’t ask to be abducted. I didn’t ask for Diego to kiss me. I didn’t deserve any of it. I only wanted to lie low until the end of the world.
“Diego really likes you, Henry. I knew he liked you.”
“Aren’t you smart?” A mob of students entered the classroom as the warning bell rang, and Marcus was among them. I tried to shush Audrey, but she wasn’t listening.
“Have you talked to him yet? He went crazy when you disappeared.”
“Disappeared?” Marcus stood over my desk, flanked by Adrian and Jay. “Abducted again, Space Boy?” His red-rimmed eyes held no laughter. They were hollow. He was hollow.
I tried to ignore him, but Audrey snapped. “Thank God aliens never abducted you, Marcus. I’d hate for you to represent our entire fucking species.”
“Is there a problem?” Ms. Faraci asked from the front of the room.
“Did you hear what she said to me?”
Ms. Faraci glanced from me to Audrey to Marcus and offered a shrug. “I did not, Mr. McCoy. But if I hear you call anyone Space Boy again, you’ll find yourself in Saturday detentions for the remainder of the year.”
• • •
It would have been best if I’d faced Diego at lunch and gotten it over with, but instead I hid in an empty classroom and watched him wait by my locker, pacing back and forth, checking his phone every few seconds. After ten minutes passed he punched the locker door and left.
Regardless of what he said, I doubt he believed my stories about the sluggers. Who would? Maybe it’s for the best that they abducted me before things between us got serious. There’s so much I don’t know about Diego. Jesse used to say I was oblivious to the world around me. I thought he was referring to things like poverty and hunger and wars in countries I didn’t know the names of, but now I think he was talking about himself. I didn’t know what had been going on with my own boyfriend, and we’d spent nearly every waking second together for more than a year. I’ve only known Diego for a few weeks.
Despite my brother hating me and my mom waiting to yell at me and the whole end-of-the-world thing, all I could think about was Diego. It was ridiculous. I hated movies and books where people ignored bullets whizzing by their heads and zombies chasing after them so that they could make out, but I finally understood. Kissing Diego dominated my every thought. I tried to think about something else, but I always returned to him, and I wasn’t sure what to make of that.
Instead of going straight home, I took a detour to the beach and sat on the rickety staircase to watch the tide go out. The ocean retreated, exposing the bones of the shoreline. It was one of those days that was neither rainy nor sunny. A layer of clouds muddied the sky, bleeding the surrounding color, leaving everything monochrome and drab. If this was how dogs saw the world, it was no wonder they humped anything they could mount. It was probably the only thing that kept them from committing doggy suicide.
The steps creaked behind me, and I scooted to the side to let whoever it was pass, but they didn’t.
“I figured I’d find you here,” Diego said. “Also, I already tried everywhere else.”
Diego Vega was the person I most and least wanted to see. He sat down beside me, leaving space between us that hadn’t existed the last time we were together, and it was all I could do not to push him to the ground and kiss him until he knew I was sorry. He handed me my cell phone.
“Was it a dream?” I asked.
“Was what a dream?”
It was raining over the ocean, the wall of it so heavy that it appeared nothing existed beyond. The world consisted of only me and Diego and the beach. Maybe that’s all it ever was. “Thanksgiving? Your bedroom?”
Diego shook his head. “Was it them?”
“Yeah.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. I asked. I begged them to send me back, but the sluggers aren’t keen on taking commands.” I wished I knew how to make Diego believe me; I wished the aliens had abducted him, too, so we could have watched the stars together. “Maybe it was for the best, though.”
“How do you figure?”
Finding the words to explain to Diego that I couldn’t be with him—that no sane person should want to be with a disaster like me—was one of the most difficult things I’d ever done. But Diego remained silent until I was ready to talk. “In case you haven’t heard: the world is ending. I can’t start something with you knowing it can’t last.”
Diego tensed like he was afraid to move. “If you’re not over Jesse, if you need more time to grieve, tell me.” He caught my gaze for the first time since joining me on the staircase, and utterly disarmed me with the intensity behind his hazel eyes, like the endless fire of the Crab Nebula burning in space.
“I hate Jesse,” I said. “And I love him. I’ll never be done grieving for him.”
“You miss him—I get that—but the world doesn’t stop because he’s gone.”
He was wrong. The world had stopped. The world had stopped and it was going to end, but I didn’t tell Diego that; Jesse was just a name to him. “Tell me why you moved to Calypso. You hardly talk about your family, and when you do, it’s all horrible.”
“That’s because it’s not important, Henry.” Diego rocked back and forth on the step. “This is confusing for me, too. You’re not the only one with a past, but unlike you, I don’t live in mine.”
“I like you, Diego—so much, it scares me. But what does it say about me that I can like you as much as I do and still not want to press the button?”
“We can forget it happened,” Diego said.
“I don’t want to.”
“Then where does that leave us?”
Diego ignored the past, and I believed we had no future. It was impossible to look at him and not want to kiss him. It was impossible to look at him and not know the world was going to end and drag us to hell with it. It was impossible to look at Diego and be anything but honest. “I don’t know.”
It wasn’t the answer Diego wanted—I could see it in his bent back and slumped shoulders—but it was all the truth that was in me. The world wasn’t worth saving without Jesse in it.
“My mom’s going to kill me.”
Diego kept his hands in his pockets as we walked up the stairs, like he didn’t trust himself not to touch me. “Do you want me to drive you home? Your mom might not freak out with me there.”
The offer was tempting, but Diego’s presence would only delay my mother’s wrath, and time had a way of concentrating her anger. “I’ll walk.”
“Try not to get abducted.”
“Funny.”
We lingered at Please Start. Diego sat on the rusted hood and traced lines in the dirt, while I kicked at the gravel on the side of the road. Maybe we were both thinking about that kiss on his bedroom floor. I certainly was. Making out with Marcus had always felt like a race to the finish line, but with Diego I felt like I’d already won.
• • •
The house felt lonely inside. Mom’s car was parked in front of the duplex, but it didn’t feel like anyone was home. Nana wasn’t on the couch, and it looked abandoned without her sitting on it, reading while she watched the twenty-four-hour Bunker live feed.
“Hello?”
Smoke drifted into the living room from the kitchen, a spectral finger beckoning me onward. Mom sat at the kitchen table, still in her uniform, the black apron stained with salad dressing and other unidentifiable food particles. She looked a little like a slug herself, flabby and limp, leaning on the table with her face buried in her hands. The only sign of life was the lit cigarette smoldering between her fingers.
“Mom?”
“Sit.” She took a hard drag from her cigarette, the cherry flaring, and lit the end of a new one off the old before stubbing it out. I chose the seat across from her, hoping to stay out of arm’s reach. “I can’t do this with you, Henry. I need you to be okay.”
I’d expected anger, rage. I’d come to the table, garbed in heavy plate armor capable of deflecting my mother’s barbed and poisonous words. I was not prepared for this. The emptiness of her voice. “Mom—”
“I put Mother in a home.”
“What?”
Mom sucked on the cigarette like it was the only thing anchoring her to the world. “My mother is sick and I put her in a home, my oldest son dropped out of college to have a baby out of wedlock, and I can barely gather the strength to get out of bed in the morning. I need you to be okay.” Mom looked me in the eyes, but I didn’t see my mom anymore. I saw a woman struggling and failing to hold the tattered shreds of her life together. “Are you okay, Henry?”
After the first abduction, my mom sent me to one doctor after another. She never believed the various diagnoses—she hadn’t believed I was being abducted by aliens either. When they said I was depressed, she refused to let them medicate me. When they said I had avoidant personality disorder, she told them I just hadn’t learned to be comfortable in my own skin. She didn’t believe the psychiatrists, she didn’t believe in aliens, but she always believed in me. Through everything, she held fast to the notion that I didn’t need help, that all I needed was time to figure out who I was. I’m not sure if she was right, or if I would have been better off on pills or locked up in a mental hospital, but her belief in me was absolute. If I told her I was still being abducted, that I’d been fooling around with the same boy who attacked me in the showers, that the world was ending and I could prevent it, but that I wasn’t sure I wanted to, it would have destroyed that belief, and it was the only thing holding her together.
I reached across the table and rested my hand on hers. I’d never labored under the false notion that my mom was infallible. I knew that my mom was a human being, frail and confused, but I’d always thought she was just a little less confused than everyone else. She wasn’t, though, and that’s the moment I knew it.
But in the end, it wasn’t her belief that kept me from telling her the truth. It wasn’t her frailty. It was the certainty that we’d all be dead in sixty days. It was the knowledge that none of our choices mattered, that all our pain and all our suffering would end with the world, and we’d be free of those burdens. No faulty memory, no baby, no shitty job, or dead boyfriend. Just the perfect peace of nothingness. That’s what I believed.
“I’m okay, Mom.”