Two Boys Kissing
Page 19

Complacency. Craig realizes now that this was complacency. One of the reasons he liked the sound of Harry’s voice was because it meant he didn’t have to use his own. But eventually this strategy backfired. Eventually Harry realized what was happening, and didn’t feel right about it. He wanted Craig to fight a little more, but by the time Craig started fighting for them to stay together, he had already lost.
Now he’s fighting for something different, something that feels more elemental. He’s fighting to stay standing. He’s fighting to go without food, without a bathroom. He’s fighting to keep his lips on Harry’s for seven more hours. And he’s fighting to help Harry do all of these things as well.
It’s one of the secrets of strength: We’re so much more likely to find it in the service of others than we are to find it in service to ourselves. We have no idea why this is. It’s not just the mother who lifts the car to free her child, or the guy who shields his girlfriend when the gunman starts to fire. Those are extremes, brave extremes, which life rarely calls on us to offer. No, it is the less extreme strength—a strength that is not so much situational as it is constitutional—that we will find in order to give. How often did we see this, as we were dying? How many soft-spoken lovers turned into fierce watchdogs over our care? How many reticent parents shed that reticence to be there with us? Not all. Certainly, not everyone showed strength. Some supposedly strong people in our lives showed that their strength was actually made of straw. But so many held us up in ways they would not have held themselves. They saw us through, even as their worlds crumbled through their fingers. They kept fighting, even after we were gone. Or especially because we were gone. They kept fighting for us.
We are gone, and maybe our spirits are gone, too, as the ones who knew us stop remembering us so often, or come to join us. But the spirit of that strength—it carries through. It is there for the taking. You just have to reach for it and find it, as Craig is doing now. He would never grasp at it for himself, not in this way. But for Harry, he will.
Cooper, meanwhile, refuses to grasp. He refuses to hold. He refuses to feel.
We watch him letting go, but we will not let go of him.
He is driving without realizing he is driving. He knows there is a destination out there for him, and he is working his way toward it. In the meantime, he is taking the empty census of people who love him. He is not afraid of hurting anyone, because he doesn’t think anyone cares about him enough to be hurt. Surely, they will go through the motions. They will have their tears once he’s left. But underneath that performance of sadness, he feels their relief. They don’t want him to come back, so he won’t.
Love, he thinks, is a lie that people tell each other in order to make the world bearable. He is not up for the lie anymore. And nobody is going to lie to him like that, anyway. He’s not even worth a lie.
We want him to take a census of the future. We want him to consider that love does make the world bearable, but that does not make it a lie. We want him to see the time when he will feel it, truly feel it, for the first time. But the future is something he is no longer considering.
In his mind, the future is a theory that has already been proven false.
What a powerful word, future. Of all the abstractions we can articulate to ourselves, of all the concepts we have that other animals do not, how extraordinary the ability to consider a time that’s never been experienced. And how tragic not to consider it. It galls us, we with such a limited future, to see someone brush it aside as meaningless, when it has an endless capacity for meaning, and an endless number of meanings that can be found within it.
Sing us that old refrain.
Where do you want to go?
I don’t know—where do you want to go?
What do you want to do?
I don’t know—what do you want to do?
The feed of the two boys kissing stays on in the background as Neil and Peter play video games in Neil’s room. Peter senses something is not quite right with Neil—his heart doesn’t seem into the game, and it’s the game he brought over a few days ago, desperate to make it to level thirty-two by the end of the week. Peter is afraid it’s still about the stupid text he got from Simon, or about something else that’s them-related. So he doesn’t say anything, because he knows Neil will bring it up when he’s ready to bring it up. Maybe it isn’t anything at all.
For his part, Neil doesn’t understand why he isn’t talking to Peter, why he’s killing Russian assassins instead of telling Peter that his world has shifted. He’s waiting for Peter to ask him what’s happened, because he thinks it’s clear something’s happened, and why should he always have to be the one to point it out?
Peter pauses the game.
“Are you hungry?” he asks.
“Not really” is Neil’s reply.
“Thirsty?”
“No.”
“Do you want to do something else?”
“Do you want to do something else?”
“Are you in the throes of constipation?”
Neil is not in the mood for this. “No.”
“Pregnant?”
“No.”
“Sick of this game?”
“Which game?”
“The one you’re playing.”
“Which one am I playing?”
“The one on the screen right now. Balkan Bloodbath 12.”
“Oh. No. I’m fine.”
Here’s where Peter should say it. What’s going on?
But instead he unpauses the game.
“If you’re fine,” he says, “I’m fine.”
They continue to play.
Ryan hasn’t had to spend much time thinking about where to take Avery next, because already they are running out of cool places in Kindling. If they’re not on the river or at Aunt Caitlin’s or in the Pancake Century Diner, there are very few places worth exploring. The Kindling Café is the one that’s left, but that’s where everyone is. He wants Avery to meet his friends, but not yet. He still wants them to be alone together, with no one watching, no one even noticing. This is Ryan’s relationship to this town: He doesn’t really want to leave any marks, and he wants Kindling to leave as few marks as possible on him. He knows he’s been defined by this town. And, of course, the more he’s tried to resist definition, the more they’ve defined him. But this—this time with Avery—needs to exist outside definition. Or, at the very least, he and Avery need to get a chance to define it themselves.
So he directs Avery to Mr. Footer’s, the old relic of a miniature golf course. It’s been closed for years now, but no one’s bought the land, so it sits in its abandoned state, nearly post-apocalyptic in its decay. There’s a lock on the gates, but the gates themselves have worn away in places, making it easy to come and go. At night it’s a breeding ground for stoners and crankheads, but during the day it’s graveyard quiet.
“Where exactly are you taking me?” Avery asks. Ryan has a flash of seeing the site through his eyes, and realizes this might be a mistake. But he doesn’t want to turn back now.
He tells Avery to park in front. “When I was a kid,” he explains, “this place was the best place around. Like, if you were really good and did all your chores, Mom and Dad would take you here. You’d play all the mini golf you could, and then there’d be ice cream and video games in the hut over there after.”
Avery takes it all in. “So what happened?”
Ryan shrugs. “One day it was here, and then the next day there was a sign saying it was over. It’s sat here ever since, abandoned.”
“And do you come here often?”
“Only with special people.”
“Oh, gee. I’m so flattered,” Avery deadpans. But in a way, he is flattered. Had Ryan driven over to Marigold, Avery would have been forced to take him to a T.G.I. Friday’s or a movie. This is definitely not that.
“Let’s go,” Ryan says. They leave the car and crawl through a gap in the gate. Inside, everything is broken. Toppled windmills, fetid moats, bottles left smashed and cans left crushed.
“Want to play?” Avery asks.
Ryan looks at the torn-up greens. The holes filled with cigarette butts.
“I’m not sure that will work,” he says. “There aren’t any clubs anymore. Or golf balls.”
“So?”
“So … it’s hard to play mini golf without those things.”
“Use your imagination,” Avery says, walking to the base of the first green and putting down an invisible ball. “This is the most amazing mini-golf course ever created. For example, this hole is patrolled by live alligators. If they swallow your ball, it’s three strokes. If they swallow you, it’s five.”
Avery takes an exaggerated swing with a nonexistent club, then makes a production of watching the ball soar into the air and drop to the green. “Comeoncomeoncomeon,” he murmurs. Then he sighs. “Not a hole in one, but at least I dodged the gators. Your turn.”
Ryan walks over and puts down his own invisible ball. “I hope you don’t mind that I took the pink one,” he says.
“I don’t mind at all.”
Ryan swings at the ball. They both watch it rise and fall.
“Not bad,” Avery says.
“At least I didn’t hit a gator.”
Ryan thinks Avery will stop then, will want to leave this desolate place. But he heads right over to where his ball is and makes the putt, then steps out of the way for Ryan’s turn. Ryan follows his lead, but misses the shot. He gets the next one in.
Avery makes a gesture of gathering the golf balls, then walks to the next hole.
“Your turn,” he says. “What’s the story?”
The story Ryan tells is that this green is riddled with troughs of chocolate; if your ball falls in, it will taste better, but will also slow you down. And actually, the golf ball is no longer a ball. It’s a golf-ball-size gobstopper.
The story Ryan feels is a different matter. The story Ryan feels is the one that’s being written with each minute, this confounding and enjoyable story of the two of them finding a good time in what he now sees is a remarkably dire place. He’s always appreciated how derelict it was, but that was when he was feeling pretty derelict himself. In the past couple of years, there was some catharsis in seeing his childhood so visibly trashed, as if there was some confirmation here about what growing up should feel like.
But with Avery, a little of that old wonder returns. Ryan plays along, and it’s a relief to be playing. By the fifth hole they’re not even golfing anymore; they’re just describing all the things they don’t really see. Avery erects the Taj Mahal on hole five, and Ryan presents the world’s first antigravity mini golf on hole six. At hole seven, they start walking hand in hand, surveyors of an imaginary landscape. Instead of solemnly holding hands, they swing them back and forth, stretch out and pull back together. The sun isn’t shining, but they don’t notice. If anyone were to ask them later, they’d swear that it was.
It is not as simple as Ryan looking at Avery and feeling they’ve known each other forever. In fact, it doesn’t feel like that at all. Ryan feels like he is just getting to know Avery, and that getting to know Avery isn’t going to be like getting to know anyone else he’s ever gotten to know.
There’s a wishing well in the middle of the ninth hole. This is not imaginary—it is sitting there, largely intact from its glory days. Avery reaches into his pocket and pulls out a penny.
“No,” Ryan finds himself saying. “Don’t.”
Avery shoots him a quizzical look. “Don’t?”
“I’ve thrown pennies in that well all my life. And not a single wish has ever come true.”