Unnatural Disasters, page 20
“People will listen to you! They’ll understand. Your mom—”
“Don’t talk to me about my mother.”
Jenna yanked me back by my arm. “People didn’t understand what she did back then. They will now. I do. Piers does. She’s a hero to all of us. An inspiration. She saw what was coming and she did something about it.”
“Jenna—”
“What have you done, Lucy? Anything? You spent four years of high school floating around, not doing shit that was worth anything to anybody, and you were planning on doing the exact same after graduation. You have a chance now to do something that matters. That means something.”
We were close enough to the mansion to hear the throb of the music. Spotlights flared in time with the beat, throwing colored beams out into the woods. Camouflage patterns of light and dark danced across Jenna’s face, making it seem to shift and move. I wrenched my arm out of her hand.
“Fuck you, Jenna.”
She called after me but I didn’t turn around, didn’t stop moving. Soon the woods broke and the mansion appeared at the end of the lawn. The music was deafening, an electronic hammer pounding at my ears. Someone had focused one of the floodlights on the gray stone face of the house. Others had moved in front of it and were throwing giant shadows against the walls. They reached their arms up toward the roof and mimed pulling it down. Each try was timed to a wave of screams, then laughter, then screams again.
* * *
The road that led away from the mansion was long and winding, turning through towering woods and silent neighborhoods full of dark-eyed houses. There was no sidewalk, only a broken, weedy shoulder. My stupid suitcase caught on every crack and seam, tumbling over, refusing to move. I yanked at it so hard, crying and cussing, that I was pretty sure the muscles in my shoulder were about to shred. Most of the streetlights were out. The mansion was long gone behind me.
After I left Jenna, I’d gone back into the party and shared the better part of a bottle of vodka with some kid in a werewolf mask whose name I didn’t know. At first the liquor was warm and sweet, but it grew fangs quickly, gnawing at my stomach, at my brain. Eventually the werewolf grabbed my ass. His eyes were bloodshot beneath his mask. Unsteady. I punched him in the chest as hard as I could, then went stumbling out of the house and into the dark.
Another crack caught my suitcase. I pulled hard and there was the sound of plastic breaking. One of the wheels had snapped in two.
“Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck!”
I tried to pull the thing on one wheel, but it was practically impossible. The suitcase teetered and twisted and dropped on the side of the road. I went to pick it up again and that was when my stomach decided to rebel. I hit my knees, doubled over, and puked into the weeds. When my stomach stopped convulsing I stayed where I was, too wiped out to move. My head was buzzing and spinning. There was a whirlpool in my gut. Mom’s suit was damp with sweat and flecked with bits of vomit. I peeled off the jacket and undid the scarf. The gravelly road was hard, so I sat on the suitcase. I dropped my head in my hands and shut my eyes.
I was with Mom the day Hurricane William hit Florida. It was a Saturday. We were sitting in the waiting room at the mechanic’s counting the seconds until our car was fixed. I was reading and Mom was fiddling with her phone. There was a TV playing in the background, but it was on a news station so I wasn’t paying any attention to it. Someone’s name was called over the loudspeaker. People moved in and out. I flipped through my book, bored and anxious, wondering how much longer it would be before we could leave. I was thinking about making another visit to the table of free cookies when the feel of the room suddenly changed. It was like the air had gotten heavier. I looked up and everyone in the place, fifteen or twenty people, was staring at the TV, utterly silent. I didn’t get it. All I saw was a man standing in the rain with a microphone. Palm trees were bent nearly in half behind him and waves crashed. It was a hurricane. We’d seen hurricanes before. Dozens of them.
An old man by the door shook his head and said, “Category six. The third this season. Unbelievable.”
“The keys are already gone,” someone else said. “Miami is half drowned.”
“State’ll never survive. Not after last year.”
A man by the door dialed his phone. When someone answered, he said, “Are you seeing this? Are you?”
An older woman let her gossip magazine sag in her hands. “Those poor people,” she said.
The woman next to her closed her eyes. “Those poor people.”
I tugged at Mom’s sleeve, but it was like I wasn’t even there. Her eyes were locked on the screen and her face was drained of color, like someone who’d been shaken awake from a nightmare. We didn’t talk on the ride home and, after dinner, Mom and Dad sent me to bed early and stayed up to watch the news. Reporters’ voices filtered up through the floorboards. I caught bits and pieces as I lay there, unable to sleep. The southern half of the state was practically underwater, and the north wasn’t faring much better. Constant rain had caused floods that swamped buildings and ripped houses from their foundations. High winds tore palm trees from their roots, sending them hurtling through the air like javelins while cars and trucks tumbled end over end through parking lots and down city streets. Highways turned into canals. Monster waves ripped coastlines apart.
At one point the governor came on and said, through tears, that he didn’t believe there was any way his state could survive. He was right. Thousands died over the next few days, but it was nothing compared to what came later. People began running out of food and water, and every safety net that had been put in place to help people like them collapsed under the weight of so much need. As local governments went bankrupt one by one, the state turned to the federal government for help. But after years of wildfires and mudslides in California, and the droughts in the southwest, and competing hurricanes in Louisiana and Texas, the feds threw up their hands. The governor announced that there was nothing left to do but call it quits. The state government disbanded. The people fled. Some towns were absorbed into Georgia and Alabama, but Florida was no more. Fifty states became forty-nine.
I lay there listening all through the night and then, not long before dawn, the news reports mixed with another completely unfamiliar sound—Mom and Dad, shouting. I crept out of bed and found a spot halfway down the staircase where I could see them but they couldn’t see me. Dad was on the couch, slumped over with his head in his hands. Mom was pacing back and forth in front of him, talking fast, slashing at the air with her hands.
“. . . and the thing is, it doesn’t even matter. This storm? It doesn’t fucking matter. None of them do!”
“Laila.”
“Systems matter. Governments matter. The planet is a closed loop. Yes? More heat in the loop means more disasters—more floods, more droughts, more heat waves, more wildfires. People lose their homes. Their jobs. There’s not enough food. Not enough water. They try to flee, but there’s nowhere to go. No one wants them. It all puts pressure on systems. Too much pressure and they break. Governments fail. Countries collapse.”
Mom dropped onto the coffee table in front of Dad. The bones of her face seemed to strain against her skin.
“Laila, please.”
“Governments folded all over the Middle East and North Africa, and who swooped in to take advantage? The al-Asiri. A few million refugees flooded Europe and everyone started voting for the second coming of Adolf Hitler. And then Russia—”
“Okay, I get it.”
“And we think we’re safe!” She threw back her head and laughed. It was a horrible, wrenching HA! “We’ve convinced ourselves that the world is ending for those people, not for us. Never for us! All we have to do is close our borders and pretend nothing’s happening. But I swear to you Roger, it’s coming for us too. All it’s gonna take is a spark, just one single spark, and the whole goddamn world is going to lose its mind. We’re going to end up cutting each other’s throats over a glass of water and we will fucking deserve it. Because no one is listening! No one even FUCKING CARES!”
“Keep your voice down! Lucy is right upstairs!”
“Good!” Mom howled. “Lucy needs to hear this! She needs to know what’s coming!”
A car horn sounded, shocking me out of the memory. The world wavered, then came into focus. A pickup truck was idling beside me. There was an electric whir as its window lowered.
“Lucy Weaver! Need a lift?”
I looked up and saw a bald head, a beaming smile, and electric blue eyes.
* * *
Toby gulped at a pint of whiskey as he steered us through town. The last thing I needed was more to drink, but when he handed over the bottle I tossed some back. It tasted like a mixture of licorice and battery acid. I liked the way it burned.
“You’re not a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle,” I said, my voice coming out all slow and sludgy.
He laughed. “Right. That. No, we never got a fourth. Besides, there was a change of plans. A big change!”
He took a turn too fast, sending us skidding off onto the shoulder with a spray of gravel before swerving back onto the road.
“You don’t have autonomous on this thing?”
Instead of answering he took another swallow of booze. “Man! I can’t believe I saw you! Tonight of all nights. I mean, I go out on a whiskey run and you’re right there on the side of the road? That’s supposed to be a coincidence? It’s fate. It’s convergence. Multiple roads coming together at the same time.”
I didn’t know what he was talking about and didn’t really care. Ever since I’d gotten in the truck, he’d been referring to something that was going to happen that night. (Or maybe something that had already happened? It was all a little vague.) He seemed excited about it, but I hadn’t asked him what it was and I hadn’t checked my phone either. I was sick of knowing things.
I rested my head against the cool glass of the passenger side window. “So. Who do you think should be in charge when it’s all over?”
“What do you mean?” Toby asked. “Like what country?”
I shook my head, which was a mistake since it set off a wave of spins.
“No, no, no. They’ll all be gone. Wiped out. So what takes over? I mean, okay, listen. First there were these single-celled amoeba thingies. Right? And for a while they were tops, but then some of them turned into fish and the fish took over. And then the fish crawled up out of the water and turned into dinosaurs and that was it for the fish. Tyrannosaurus was in charge. Of course, he didn’t know he was called Tyrannosaurus. He probably thought he was, like, Tim or something.”
Toby laughed and took the bottle from me. “Tim the Tyrannosaur.”
“But then that asteroid came and wiped out Tim and all his friends, which gave these tiny little mammal thingies a shot. And then eventually they turned into apes and the apes turned into us, and so I’m wondering who do you think should take over once we’re gone.”
Toby drifted into the oncoming lane, then back again. He drank and handed me the bottle. A dreamy grin spread across his face.
“Nothing,” he said.
I tipped the bottle back and hissed at the burn. A car’s horn blared as it went by us. Toby jerked the truck to the right and laughed. I did too. Whiskey was sloshing inside me. My limbs were like putty. Nothing. I imagined an immense darkness drawing over the whole earth like a blanket. Not a gray room, a black one. No sound. No movement. No heat or cold. In that moment I was sure I’d never imagined anything sweeter, or more beautiful.
“Nothing,” I said, loving the feel of the word on my tongue. “Absolutely nothing.”
We passed through Bethany and out again. If Toby had a destination, it wasn’t my house. Not that I cared. I could go anywhere. After all, I had my black suitcase. I watched the landscape pass. Houses. Shops. Trees. I lowered the window. The air was scented with far-off traces of smoke. There was something closer, too, something that smelled sharp and chemical.
“Toby? Can I ask you something?”
He let his arm fall out the window, his hand undulating like a wave in the breeze. “Sure.”
“Why do you always smell like gasoline?”
He didn’t take his eyes off the road. His hand dipped into and out of the wind. After a moment he turned to me and he smiled and said, “Funny you should ask.”
* * *
He parked the truck on a back road. There were no streetlights, so when his headlights went out it was fully dark. There was a click, and then a flashlight beam lanced through the windshield.
“Come on. We have to walk a bit. I’m so glad I found you. You have to see this.”
He pushed his door open. I got out too and staggered around to the back of the truck.
“See what? Where are we going?”
“This way.”
The flashlight cast a cone of brightness into a stand of trees by the side of the road. The way was uneven, choked with brambles and old leaves and cracked ground. Luckily, I’d skipped Esperanza Belén’s heels and opted for flats instead. Still, with all the booze sloshing around in my stomach and clouding my head it was a miracle I didn’t fall and break something. Ahead of me Toby was whistling a merry tune and practically skipping. Water was rushing somewhere nearby. I could still hear the thump-thump-thump of the party music in my head. See the shifting lights and the bonfire and Jenna. After a while the trees ended and we were out in an open field.
“Toby? Where are we going? I don’t—”
“Almost there,” he called back. “Not long now. Stay close. Light’s going out.”
The flashlight beam disappeared. All I had left to follow were Toby’s footsteps and his whistling. I kept close. Only a step or two behind. He stopped short and I nearly ran into him. There was a squeak as a door opened, and then we were inside. Not a house. Someplace bigger. Wide open. Tile floors. Dim safety lights up above. Glowing exit signs. There was a smell I recognized. I’d been in this place before. When my eyes finally adjusted I looked around and saw banks of lockers and classroom doors. School. We were at school.
“Why are we here?”
“It’s a surprise.”
His whistling got faster. More disjointed. I started to smell gas. It got stronger with every step, combining with the alcohol, making my head feel like it was full of helium. I stopped and puked in a corner. I called out for him, but he didn’t answer. Then a brighter light appeared at the end of a long hallway. When I stopped heaving and was able to walk again I moved toward it, staggering along. As the light got brighter and brighter, I found myself in the cafeteria. Toby had toppled all the tables and pushed them to the center of the room, along with dozens of chairs, heaps of papers, and a library’s worth of books. Beside him were two large metal cans. He picked them up and splashed their contents onto the pile. Gasoline. A small lake of it sat on the floor, shimmering in the light. The smell was overwhelming. More than a smell, a physical thing, a humid fog, pouring into my mouth and up my nose, pushing out the air.
“Toby, what are you . . .”
My vision blurred and dimmed. My knees weakened. Toby came toward me, smiling. That was the last thing I saw before everything went black.
* * *
I woke up on the soccer field. My head was pounding. The stink of vomit was all around me. I groaned as I pushed myself upright.
“Feeling better?”
Toby was beside me. When I didn’t say anything he laughed and pulled something out of his pocket. A small, shiny stone. No, not a stone. A box. There was a metallic ping as he flicked it with his thumb. A cover fell back on a hinge. It was a lighter. He turned the wheel and a flame appeared, lighting his face in flickering orange
“I love school,” he said, almost tenderly. “Ever since I was little. The way it smells. You know? That school smell? And the teachers? It’s like they’ve got all the secrets of the universe and they’re just handing them to you.”
“So why—?”
“Do you know what a sand mandala is? I saw one in a museum once when I was a kid. These Tibetan monks get down on their hands and knees and they use colored sand to create a huge painting on the floor. Five feet square. Incredibly intricate. It takes them weeks. The one I saw was so beautiful, I cried. I didn’t understand how something like that could even be possible. But that wasn’t even the most incredible part. Do you know what the most incredible part was?”
I shook my head. Toby snapped the lighter shut again, dropping us into darkness.
“The most incredible part was, as soon as they were done, the monks swept up all the sand and tossed it in the nearest river. Can you believe that? I saw them do it. This astounding thing, this thing they sweated over, that they broke their backs over. Gone. I was so mad I grabbed one of the monks by his robes and I said, ‘Why? Why would you destroy something so beautiful?’ And do you know what he said?”
Toby leaned in close like he was imparting a great secret.
“He said the only reason they made the mandala in the first place was so they could destroy it. You see? People are unhappy because they get attached to things and they don’t want them to change. But the nature of the universe is change. Destroying the mandala was about acknowledging that. It was about letting go. Even of the things you love the most. Once you do that, you can reach nirvana.”
Toby produced a clear glass bottle from the darkness beside him. It had something sloshing around inside of it. I thought it was a beer at first, but then he pulled a white rag out of his back pocket and stuffed it down through the neck until the fabric met the liquid. The odor of gas filtered out into the air around us. Toby said, “Did you know that the word nirvana literally means ‘blown out’ or ‘extinguished,’ like a candle? Or like a fire that’s gone out because all the fuel has been burned up. It’s peace. Perfect peace.”
He put the lighter into my hand. The metal was warm and smooth. The ping when I flipped the cover off was bell-like. Toby tipped the bottle and its rag wick toward me. I was shocked by how much I wanted to light it, how much I wanted to take the bottle in my hand and throw it as hard as I could. The muscles in my arm hummed just like they had the day Toby and I smashed those panes of glass in the courtyard behind Jimmy’s. But this would be better. A thousand times better. There’d be the crash of the bottle shattering and then the whoosh of flames as they raced toward the river of gas inside the school. In my head I watched the fire flood the halls and classrooms, burning desks and chairs and old posters. It would take the library and the gym and the cafeteria. Finally, it would invade the auditorium, consuming its papier-mâché trees and pipe cleaner flowers; its cheap, bullshit magic. It wouldn’t be long before there’d be the gunshot bang of timbers exploding, then bricks crumbling, and then the final sigh as it all collapsed into a heap of ashes. Just thinking about it set off a gnawing hunger deep inside of me and I thought, Is this what my mother felt?
“Don’t talk to me about my mother.”
Jenna yanked me back by my arm. “People didn’t understand what she did back then. They will now. I do. Piers does. She’s a hero to all of us. An inspiration. She saw what was coming and she did something about it.”
“Jenna—”
“What have you done, Lucy? Anything? You spent four years of high school floating around, not doing shit that was worth anything to anybody, and you were planning on doing the exact same after graduation. You have a chance now to do something that matters. That means something.”
We were close enough to the mansion to hear the throb of the music. Spotlights flared in time with the beat, throwing colored beams out into the woods. Camouflage patterns of light and dark danced across Jenna’s face, making it seem to shift and move. I wrenched my arm out of her hand.
“Fuck you, Jenna.”
She called after me but I didn’t turn around, didn’t stop moving. Soon the woods broke and the mansion appeared at the end of the lawn. The music was deafening, an electronic hammer pounding at my ears. Someone had focused one of the floodlights on the gray stone face of the house. Others had moved in front of it and were throwing giant shadows against the walls. They reached their arms up toward the roof and mimed pulling it down. Each try was timed to a wave of screams, then laughter, then screams again.
* * *
The road that led away from the mansion was long and winding, turning through towering woods and silent neighborhoods full of dark-eyed houses. There was no sidewalk, only a broken, weedy shoulder. My stupid suitcase caught on every crack and seam, tumbling over, refusing to move. I yanked at it so hard, crying and cussing, that I was pretty sure the muscles in my shoulder were about to shred. Most of the streetlights were out. The mansion was long gone behind me.
After I left Jenna, I’d gone back into the party and shared the better part of a bottle of vodka with some kid in a werewolf mask whose name I didn’t know. At first the liquor was warm and sweet, but it grew fangs quickly, gnawing at my stomach, at my brain. Eventually the werewolf grabbed my ass. His eyes were bloodshot beneath his mask. Unsteady. I punched him in the chest as hard as I could, then went stumbling out of the house and into the dark.
Another crack caught my suitcase. I pulled hard and there was the sound of plastic breaking. One of the wheels had snapped in two.
“Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck!”
I tried to pull the thing on one wheel, but it was practically impossible. The suitcase teetered and twisted and dropped on the side of the road. I went to pick it up again and that was when my stomach decided to rebel. I hit my knees, doubled over, and puked into the weeds. When my stomach stopped convulsing I stayed where I was, too wiped out to move. My head was buzzing and spinning. There was a whirlpool in my gut. Mom’s suit was damp with sweat and flecked with bits of vomit. I peeled off the jacket and undid the scarf. The gravelly road was hard, so I sat on the suitcase. I dropped my head in my hands and shut my eyes.
I was with Mom the day Hurricane William hit Florida. It was a Saturday. We were sitting in the waiting room at the mechanic’s counting the seconds until our car was fixed. I was reading and Mom was fiddling with her phone. There was a TV playing in the background, but it was on a news station so I wasn’t paying any attention to it. Someone’s name was called over the loudspeaker. People moved in and out. I flipped through my book, bored and anxious, wondering how much longer it would be before we could leave. I was thinking about making another visit to the table of free cookies when the feel of the room suddenly changed. It was like the air had gotten heavier. I looked up and everyone in the place, fifteen or twenty people, was staring at the TV, utterly silent. I didn’t get it. All I saw was a man standing in the rain with a microphone. Palm trees were bent nearly in half behind him and waves crashed. It was a hurricane. We’d seen hurricanes before. Dozens of them.
An old man by the door shook his head and said, “Category six. The third this season. Unbelievable.”
“The keys are already gone,” someone else said. “Miami is half drowned.”
“State’ll never survive. Not after last year.”
A man by the door dialed his phone. When someone answered, he said, “Are you seeing this? Are you?”
An older woman let her gossip magazine sag in her hands. “Those poor people,” she said.
The woman next to her closed her eyes. “Those poor people.”
I tugged at Mom’s sleeve, but it was like I wasn’t even there. Her eyes were locked on the screen and her face was drained of color, like someone who’d been shaken awake from a nightmare. We didn’t talk on the ride home and, after dinner, Mom and Dad sent me to bed early and stayed up to watch the news. Reporters’ voices filtered up through the floorboards. I caught bits and pieces as I lay there, unable to sleep. The southern half of the state was practically underwater, and the north wasn’t faring much better. Constant rain had caused floods that swamped buildings and ripped houses from their foundations. High winds tore palm trees from their roots, sending them hurtling through the air like javelins while cars and trucks tumbled end over end through parking lots and down city streets. Highways turned into canals. Monster waves ripped coastlines apart.
At one point the governor came on and said, through tears, that he didn’t believe there was any way his state could survive. He was right. Thousands died over the next few days, but it was nothing compared to what came later. People began running out of food and water, and every safety net that had been put in place to help people like them collapsed under the weight of so much need. As local governments went bankrupt one by one, the state turned to the federal government for help. But after years of wildfires and mudslides in California, and the droughts in the southwest, and competing hurricanes in Louisiana and Texas, the feds threw up their hands. The governor announced that there was nothing left to do but call it quits. The state government disbanded. The people fled. Some towns were absorbed into Georgia and Alabama, but Florida was no more. Fifty states became forty-nine.
I lay there listening all through the night and then, not long before dawn, the news reports mixed with another completely unfamiliar sound—Mom and Dad, shouting. I crept out of bed and found a spot halfway down the staircase where I could see them but they couldn’t see me. Dad was on the couch, slumped over with his head in his hands. Mom was pacing back and forth in front of him, talking fast, slashing at the air with her hands.
“. . . and the thing is, it doesn’t even matter. This storm? It doesn’t fucking matter. None of them do!”
“Laila.”
“Systems matter. Governments matter. The planet is a closed loop. Yes? More heat in the loop means more disasters—more floods, more droughts, more heat waves, more wildfires. People lose their homes. Their jobs. There’s not enough food. Not enough water. They try to flee, but there’s nowhere to go. No one wants them. It all puts pressure on systems. Too much pressure and they break. Governments fail. Countries collapse.”
Mom dropped onto the coffee table in front of Dad. The bones of her face seemed to strain against her skin.
“Laila, please.”
“Governments folded all over the Middle East and North Africa, and who swooped in to take advantage? The al-Asiri. A few million refugees flooded Europe and everyone started voting for the second coming of Adolf Hitler. And then Russia—”
“Okay, I get it.”
“And we think we’re safe!” She threw back her head and laughed. It was a horrible, wrenching HA! “We’ve convinced ourselves that the world is ending for those people, not for us. Never for us! All we have to do is close our borders and pretend nothing’s happening. But I swear to you Roger, it’s coming for us too. All it’s gonna take is a spark, just one single spark, and the whole goddamn world is going to lose its mind. We’re going to end up cutting each other’s throats over a glass of water and we will fucking deserve it. Because no one is listening! No one even FUCKING CARES!”
“Keep your voice down! Lucy is right upstairs!”
“Good!” Mom howled. “Lucy needs to hear this! She needs to know what’s coming!”
A car horn sounded, shocking me out of the memory. The world wavered, then came into focus. A pickup truck was idling beside me. There was an electric whir as its window lowered.
“Lucy Weaver! Need a lift?”
I looked up and saw a bald head, a beaming smile, and electric blue eyes.
* * *
Toby gulped at a pint of whiskey as he steered us through town. The last thing I needed was more to drink, but when he handed over the bottle I tossed some back. It tasted like a mixture of licorice and battery acid. I liked the way it burned.
“You’re not a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle,” I said, my voice coming out all slow and sludgy.
He laughed. “Right. That. No, we never got a fourth. Besides, there was a change of plans. A big change!”
He took a turn too fast, sending us skidding off onto the shoulder with a spray of gravel before swerving back onto the road.
“You don’t have autonomous on this thing?”
Instead of answering he took another swallow of booze. “Man! I can’t believe I saw you! Tonight of all nights. I mean, I go out on a whiskey run and you’re right there on the side of the road? That’s supposed to be a coincidence? It’s fate. It’s convergence. Multiple roads coming together at the same time.”
I didn’t know what he was talking about and didn’t really care. Ever since I’d gotten in the truck, he’d been referring to something that was going to happen that night. (Or maybe something that had already happened? It was all a little vague.) He seemed excited about it, but I hadn’t asked him what it was and I hadn’t checked my phone either. I was sick of knowing things.
I rested my head against the cool glass of the passenger side window. “So. Who do you think should be in charge when it’s all over?”
“What do you mean?” Toby asked. “Like what country?”
I shook my head, which was a mistake since it set off a wave of spins.
“No, no, no. They’ll all be gone. Wiped out. So what takes over? I mean, okay, listen. First there were these single-celled amoeba thingies. Right? And for a while they were tops, but then some of them turned into fish and the fish took over. And then the fish crawled up out of the water and turned into dinosaurs and that was it for the fish. Tyrannosaurus was in charge. Of course, he didn’t know he was called Tyrannosaurus. He probably thought he was, like, Tim or something.”
Toby laughed and took the bottle from me. “Tim the Tyrannosaur.”
“But then that asteroid came and wiped out Tim and all his friends, which gave these tiny little mammal thingies a shot. And then eventually they turned into apes and the apes turned into us, and so I’m wondering who do you think should take over once we’re gone.”
Toby drifted into the oncoming lane, then back again. He drank and handed me the bottle. A dreamy grin spread across his face.
“Nothing,” he said.
I tipped the bottle back and hissed at the burn. A car’s horn blared as it went by us. Toby jerked the truck to the right and laughed. I did too. Whiskey was sloshing inside me. My limbs were like putty. Nothing. I imagined an immense darkness drawing over the whole earth like a blanket. Not a gray room, a black one. No sound. No movement. No heat or cold. In that moment I was sure I’d never imagined anything sweeter, or more beautiful.
“Nothing,” I said, loving the feel of the word on my tongue. “Absolutely nothing.”
We passed through Bethany and out again. If Toby had a destination, it wasn’t my house. Not that I cared. I could go anywhere. After all, I had my black suitcase. I watched the landscape pass. Houses. Shops. Trees. I lowered the window. The air was scented with far-off traces of smoke. There was something closer, too, something that smelled sharp and chemical.
“Toby? Can I ask you something?”
He let his arm fall out the window, his hand undulating like a wave in the breeze. “Sure.”
“Why do you always smell like gasoline?”
He didn’t take his eyes off the road. His hand dipped into and out of the wind. After a moment he turned to me and he smiled and said, “Funny you should ask.”
* * *
He parked the truck on a back road. There were no streetlights, so when his headlights went out it was fully dark. There was a click, and then a flashlight beam lanced through the windshield.
“Come on. We have to walk a bit. I’m so glad I found you. You have to see this.”
He pushed his door open. I got out too and staggered around to the back of the truck.
“See what? Where are we going?”
“This way.”
The flashlight cast a cone of brightness into a stand of trees by the side of the road. The way was uneven, choked with brambles and old leaves and cracked ground. Luckily, I’d skipped Esperanza Belén’s heels and opted for flats instead. Still, with all the booze sloshing around in my stomach and clouding my head it was a miracle I didn’t fall and break something. Ahead of me Toby was whistling a merry tune and practically skipping. Water was rushing somewhere nearby. I could still hear the thump-thump-thump of the party music in my head. See the shifting lights and the bonfire and Jenna. After a while the trees ended and we were out in an open field.
“Toby? Where are we going? I don’t—”
“Almost there,” he called back. “Not long now. Stay close. Light’s going out.”
The flashlight beam disappeared. All I had left to follow were Toby’s footsteps and his whistling. I kept close. Only a step or two behind. He stopped short and I nearly ran into him. There was a squeak as a door opened, and then we were inside. Not a house. Someplace bigger. Wide open. Tile floors. Dim safety lights up above. Glowing exit signs. There was a smell I recognized. I’d been in this place before. When my eyes finally adjusted I looked around and saw banks of lockers and classroom doors. School. We were at school.
“Why are we here?”
“It’s a surprise.”
His whistling got faster. More disjointed. I started to smell gas. It got stronger with every step, combining with the alcohol, making my head feel like it was full of helium. I stopped and puked in a corner. I called out for him, but he didn’t answer. Then a brighter light appeared at the end of a long hallway. When I stopped heaving and was able to walk again I moved toward it, staggering along. As the light got brighter and brighter, I found myself in the cafeteria. Toby had toppled all the tables and pushed them to the center of the room, along with dozens of chairs, heaps of papers, and a library’s worth of books. Beside him were two large metal cans. He picked them up and splashed their contents onto the pile. Gasoline. A small lake of it sat on the floor, shimmering in the light. The smell was overwhelming. More than a smell, a physical thing, a humid fog, pouring into my mouth and up my nose, pushing out the air.
“Toby, what are you . . .”
My vision blurred and dimmed. My knees weakened. Toby came toward me, smiling. That was the last thing I saw before everything went black.
* * *
I woke up on the soccer field. My head was pounding. The stink of vomit was all around me. I groaned as I pushed myself upright.
“Feeling better?”
Toby was beside me. When I didn’t say anything he laughed and pulled something out of his pocket. A small, shiny stone. No, not a stone. A box. There was a metallic ping as he flicked it with his thumb. A cover fell back on a hinge. It was a lighter. He turned the wheel and a flame appeared, lighting his face in flickering orange
“I love school,” he said, almost tenderly. “Ever since I was little. The way it smells. You know? That school smell? And the teachers? It’s like they’ve got all the secrets of the universe and they’re just handing them to you.”
“So why—?”
“Do you know what a sand mandala is? I saw one in a museum once when I was a kid. These Tibetan monks get down on their hands and knees and they use colored sand to create a huge painting on the floor. Five feet square. Incredibly intricate. It takes them weeks. The one I saw was so beautiful, I cried. I didn’t understand how something like that could even be possible. But that wasn’t even the most incredible part. Do you know what the most incredible part was?”
I shook my head. Toby snapped the lighter shut again, dropping us into darkness.
“The most incredible part was, as soon as they were done, the monks swept up all the sand and tossed it in the nearest river. Can you believe that? I saw them do it. This astounding thing, this thing they sweated over, that they broke their backs over. Gone. I was so mad I grabbed one of the monks by his robes and I said, ‘Why? Why would you destroy something so beautiful?’ And do you know what he said?”
Toby leaned in close like he was imparting a great secret.
“He said the only reason they made the mandala in the first place was so they could destroy it. You see? People are unhappy because they get attached to things and they don’t want them to change. But the nature of the universe is change. Destroying the mandala was about acknowledging that. It was about letting go. Even of the things you love the most. Once you do that, you can reach nirvana.”
Toby produced a clear glass bottle from the darkness beside him. It had something sloshing around inside of it. I thought it was a beer at first, but then he pulled a white rag out of his back pocket and stuffed it down through the neck until the fabric met the liquid. The odor of gas filtered out into the air around us. Toby said, “Did you know that the word nirvana literally means ‘blown out’ or ‘extinguished,’ like a candle? Or like a fire that’s gone out because all the fuel has been burned up. It’s peace. Perfect peace.”
He put the lighter into my hand. The metal was warm and smooth. The ping when I flipped the cover off was bell-like. Toby tipped the bottle and its rag wick toward me. I was shocked by how much I wanted to light it, how much I wanted to take the bottle in my hand and throw it as hard as I could. The muscles in my arm hummed just like they had the day Toby and I smashed those panes of glass in the courtyard behind Jimmy’s. But this would be better. A thousand times better. There’d be the crash of the bottle shattering and then the whoosh of flames as they raced toward the river of gas inside the school. In my head I watched the fire flood the halls and classrooms, burning desks and chairs and old posters. It would take the library and the gym and the cafeteria. Finally, it would invade the auditorium, consuming its papier-mâché trees and pipe cleaner flowers; its cheap, bullshit magic. It wouldn’t be long before there’d be the gunshot bang of timbers exploding, then bricks crumbling, and then the final sigh as it all collapsed into a heap of ashes. Just thinking about it set off a gnawing hunger deep inside of me and I thought, Is this what my mother felt?
