Читать книгу Do Not Go On - Bryan Furuness - Страница 10

Ana was looking at a brochure for Tufts when a single sheet of paper slipped out of the middle. At first, when she saw the question blazing at the top of the page—Are we alone?—she thought it was someone’s idea of a joke, or maybe a plea for help (she imagined a soul-sick grad student tasked with stuffing ten thousand packets slipping this paper into the brochure like a message in a bottle) but then she realized it was an essay prompt. Part of the application. And the blank space under the question wasn’t a visual echo of the wide, cold universe, but rather a space for her answer.

Ana found the question disturbing.

It had been a week since her father’s “accident,” as everyone was calling it. The swelling in his brain was going down, but he was still in the hospital with no clear prognosis or release date. In the farmhouse, the phone rang night and day. Ana did not pick up. It might be her mother, and Ana didn’t want to tell her what happened, much less put up with all her I-told-you-sos.

“Why don’t you unplug the phone?” said Logan when she complained about the incessant ringing at school. Logan knew her mother no longer lived with them, but that was the extent of his knowledge about their situation. “I should totally do that,” said Ana. She wanted to get away from her parents, away from the craziness they’d whipped up, and yet she knew she wouldn’t actually unplug the phone, wouldn’t blow a kiss to her father while backing out of the hospital room, Sayonara, Pop, good luck with the trial, I’m outta here. She totally should, and she totally wouldn’t.

Are we alone?

No. Unfortunately.

* * *

School, lunch. While other kids slouched toward the cafeteria, Ana went against the stream, carrying the sack lunch Karen had slipped into her hands on her way out of the diner. Opening the door to the library, she was greeted by the smell of old glue and bookmust. The ancient librarian looked up from a copy of MAD magazine. Her red hair was so thin Ana could see her entire scalp. The old lady nodded, tortoise-like. “Good afternoon, Miss Easterday.”

Ana nodded back, hoping she hadn’t hesitated too long. She still wasn’t used to her new last name. Really, she only heard it from her gym teacher (“Easterday! Get your head in the game!”) and her priggish English teacher (“Can you favor us with your attention, Miss Easterday?”). Hearing her first name was almost worse, though, because it was tied to her old life. Every time someone said Ana, it plucked that string, making her feel how much she had left behind.

She passed the rolling cart of books and the copier with its hot ink breath, and wound her way back to the supply closet, where she found Logan turning down the roaring white noise on the TV/VCR cart.

“Well, well,” he said in his flattest tone. “Look who decided to show up.”

Logan had been experimenting with sarcasm. He probably hoped it would become his defining characteristic, dislodging his reputation as the gay porn kid who worked at his family’s video store.

Ana told him to shut his stupid mouth, which might have been the kindest thing anyone had said to him all day. “You got here like five seconds ago,” she said. “The movie’s not even loaded yet.”

“I’ve been waiting here for ten minutes, twat.” He leaned in to explain in sotto voce. “Waiting is another of those social niceties you know nothing about. Like ‘promptness,’ or ‘consideration for others.’”

On her way to the library, Ana had stopped by the main foyer to call her father on the pay phone. He still couldn’t talk, but it reassured her to hear his breath, the TV playing in the background. Sometimes her father tapped the receiver a couple of times with a fingernail. No way her call had taken ten minutes, but that wasn’t really Logan’s point: pretending to be annoyed was his way of expressing his gratitude that Ana hung around him. It was his nerdy shtick.

“I was giving you time to finish playing with yourself,” she said. “See, I am considerate.”

“I finished early.”

“Oh?”

“I thought of you and my boner died.”

She slugged him in his squishy bicep. That was her shtick.

“Ow, you crazy bitch,” said Logan, unable to contain his grin.

This was the AV Club. When Ana joined, she doubled the membership from the previous year, when Logan had abandoned the combat zone of the cafeteria for the bunker-ish safety of this repurposed supply closet.

She had not asked to join his club. She came into Morocco with the mentality of a short-timer: no friends, no joining, no roots. Do the time, get her father through the trial, leave for college, forget about this ugly chapter of her life. That was the plan, anyway, before Logan barnacled onto her.

The first week of school, he’d asked Ana to join his club. She said no, but the next day he asked again. She said yes, then stood him up. The next day he asked again. What gave him hope? Maybe the fact that Ana couldn’t bring herself to call him names. Or maybe he recognized a fellow castaway.

Ana finally caved when a group of girls waved her over to their lunch table, threatening to befriend her. A friendship with Logan, she reasoned, was naturally exclusive. Dude was a pariah nonpareil. Logan: other friends::garlic: vampires.

Plus he was funny, in his nerdy way. And totally sluggable. And the fact that he had access to pretty much every movie on VHS was a bonus.

The movie for this session of AV Club was Terminator. Logan slotted in the tape and settled into his bean bag. His bag was old and covered with Xs of duct tape, a visual history of blowouts. Ana’s bag—which Logan claimed the school had bought with money from a grant to “promote film literacy,” though Ana suspected he’d purchased it himself—was still new enough to be slippery. When she squinched into it, she could feel each styrofoam pea through the vinyl.

They laid out their lunches by the light of the Interpol warning, which was Ana’s daily cue to tell him he had to start eating better, or his heart would go supernova before he was twenty.

“What are you talking about?” He rustled through the stuff he’d looted from the snack racks of the Video Emporium: Milk Duds, Raisinets, gummi worms. “Dairy, fruit, protein. Balanced meal.”

“Gummi worms are not protein, Logan.”

He inspected the package. “I’m pretty sure they contain ten percent worm.”

Ana snatched the gummies and tossed over her sandwich. “It’s bologna,” she said. “Twenty percent worm.”

Logan clutched his hands together, blinking cartoonishly. “How can I ever repay you?”

“By shutting up.”

“I pledge you my featly.”

“It’s fealty, you dingus.”

“All I ask in return, milady, is for the smallest token of your affection.” He laid his hand on her arm like a dog who wanted a handshake. “A barrette, mayhaps.”

Ana snorted.

“I would settle for a Kleenex.”

She picked up his hand and flung it away. “I hate to tell you this, Logan, but I don’t have a dick.”

He slumped in his beanbag. “That’s not true,” he sniffed. “You’re all dick.”

* * *

The movie came on and they settled in, bean bags squeaking like fresh snow. The supply closet was big, but it was still a closet, so Ana had to crank her head back as she waited to sink into the movie until it ran like a dream.

But today, every time she started to sink, she saw her father. On the ground under the tree, one hand grasping at the sky, legs swimming in pain. Or in the hospital bed, staring at the parking lot through the window, a blank notepad on his lap.

Every day after school she ran to the hospital, and every day she asked the same question of anyone who came through her father’s door, from orderlies on up: “Will he get better?” They tended to demur or prevaricate or offer generic hope, except for one doctor who said no.

This brought her up short. “No?”

The doctor had gray, bristly hair and seemed to vibrate with impatience. Glowering at her father’s chart, he pulled a pen from his shirt pocket. “When people ask that question,” he said, scrawling hard enough to make a rough music against the clipboard, “what they really want to know is: how soon can everything be like it was before? The answer is never.” He made one final scratch on the chart, then looked at Ana. His eyes were ice caves. “The sooner you let go of your old expectations, the better. For him and for you.”

He left and it was a minute before Ana could breathe again. She checked the chart. The whole bottom was an angry spirograph. Had he just scratched out the last doctor’s notes? She ran into the hallway, but couldn’t find him. That was three days ago, and she hasn’t seen that doctor since.

Lightning on the TV. The Terminator has arrived. Ana glanced at Logan as blue light illuminated his profile, his floppy curls that were not cool at this buzz-cut school, the stipple of acne on his cheek, a dark smudge on his neck.

“Forget to shower this morning?” she said, poking the smudge. He winced, so she looked closer. It was a bruise, too dark for a hickey. “What happened?”

Crossing his arms, he settled deeper into the bag. “Can we just watch?” he said. “I mean, this is AV Club.”

She sat up. “Who did it?”

“It’s just—you wouldn’t—oh, for the love of crap, you made me miss a good part.” Logan got up and fiddled with the rewind button on the VCR, despite the fact that he had a remote in his hand. When he settled back into his bag, he pulled his collar up high on his neck.

She studied him in the flickering light. Maybe Logan hung around her for the same reasons she hung around him: she repelled other people, and didn’t ask too many questions. Maybe that’s all he wanted.

“Fine,” she muttered, turning back to the screen, where a naked time traveler was putting his fist through some guy’s torso. “Fuck you, too, pal.”

When the bell rang at the end of lunch, Ana and Logan stayed in their bags without speaking. The next bell rang, and they ignored that one, too. They hid in the dark, waiting for a knock from the librarian that never came, watching the Terminator stalk a boy in an attempt to rewrite the future.

Are we alone?

More than you think. There is no “we.”

* * *

Later that day—after AV Club, after her obligatory trip to the hospital, after the doctor surprised her with some good news—Ana ran back to the farmhouse. She didn’t feel like going inside, didn’t feel like being alone in the dark rooms that didn’t smell like home, so she climbed the oak tree and straddled a branch, watching a combine shuttle back and forth over a cornfield while the sun melted on the horizon.

The combine toppled twelve-foot stalks and left stubble in its wake. After the machine made its last pass, Ana could see clear to town. She felt exposed. For a second, she tasted her father’s paranoia. What if he was right? Not about Zeeshan, necessarily, but in his general sense of doom?

Her father would be released soon. The doctor had told her this today like it was a happy occasion, but Ana wasn’t so sure. “You’re just trying to free up his bed,” she said. “Make room for more customers.”

The doctor laughed as though she’d made a joke. “He’ll get better faster at home than he will here,” he said, backing out of the room.

That was the problem, though: he couldn’t go home. The longer they stayed in exile, the worse he got.

He could die here, she realized. Maybe not from Zeeshan or any other outside threat, but from some toxic combination of doom and dismay. A self-fulfilling prophecy, no assistance needed.

She wanted to help her father, she really did. But what could she do?

In the field, the combine shut off with a rumble. Its headlights blinked out. The sky was a violet puddle.

Nothing. There was nothing she could do.

Not by herself, anyway.

Ana jumped. When she hit the ground, a sharp pain flashed in her ankle, but she got up and started running anyway. For a few limping steps, the pain pulsed like a bright new heartbeat, but it faded by the time she reached the end of the driveway. She was almost sorry to feel it go. A part of her wanted to feel that hot new pulse all the way to town.

Are we alone?

Only if we choose to be.