Gray (10 page)

It made sense. I liked him even more.

•   •   •

The sun is coming up now over the Atlantic, big and red, setting the sky on fire. We’re standing on the balcony, the Animal and me, drinking tallboys. The crazy kid is out there with us too, still shirtless, the blood dried in midtrickle down his face. Pretty much everyone else had passed out, the girls curled up in chairs, eyes closed tight,
mouths small and taut, peaceful, innocent, beautiful, the way all girls look when they’re asleep. It was kind of magical, the air effervescent with ocean mist, the morning sky glowing like embers. Beneath us, the waves rush the beach, then quickly retreat with a soft hiss . . . God’s white noise, the kind psychiatrists pay good money to fill their waiting rooms with. My old life seems so far away now. I’m stoned and happy. My eyelids are getting heavy. I’m not long for the world. Then, without being prompted, the kid starts talking.

“I wuz pretty much born in an abortion clinic,” he says, waking the Animal and me from our trances. “I wuz born in Tampa in May of ’82. They razed the hospital, and by January ’83 it was an abortion clinic.”

He’s just staring out at the Atlantic, his face expressionless, and I can’t help but laugh. Lines like that are showstoppers, and I definitely heard the record skip in my brain. Finally, I’m compelled to ask this crazy kid what his name is, and he tells me it’s John. John Miller. It’s sort of a letdown. He deserved a better name than that, something like Talon or Falcon or Buck, something befitting a wild-haired feral child, the kind that crawls out of the jungle once every fifty years. The kind of name suitable for a big-game tracker, or a roughneck on an oil derrick, or a drunken, dusty gunslinger. Instead, he got stuck with John Miller. It makes him sound like a chiropractor. His parents really fucked him over.

“Well, John Miller,” I said, eyelids drooping like some cartoony drunk’s, “your name fucking sucks.”

“Yeah, I know it,” John Miller winced, finishing his
umpteenth tallboy of the night (or morning). “My parents really fucked me over.”

Great minds. Kismet. All that bullshit. I love this kid.

“I think we should hang out more,” I told him, leaning on the railing of the balcony for support. “You should give me your e-mail address, and the next time we’re in here we should hang.”

“Yeah, definitely, I love doin’ dumb shit,” John Miller said, then staggered inside to get a pen or throw up or something. The Animal and I stare out at the quickly brightening beach. We should be going soon.

“That kid is great.” I laugh.

“Eh, he’s okay,” the Animal snorts. He’s a man of few words.

We go back to staring at the Atlantic. There’s really nothing else to say. The sun clears the horizon, making the surface of the ocean shimmer like a tray of diamonds, and from the other side of the motel comes the sound of the first trucks of the day, downshifting on their way out of town. We should’ve been back on the bus by now. People are probably starting to worry.

Then there’s another crash behind us, and we whirl around to see John Miller standing there, holding a sheet of paper in his hand. On it, he’s scrawled his e-mail address:
[email protected]
.
It’s strangely perfect.

“Nobody ever calls me John,” he said, handing the sheet to me.

“Yeah, I can kind of see why.” I laugh.

And then, the Animal and I are in the lobby of the motel, calling our tour manager from a courtesy
telephone. He asks where we are and says he’ll send a cab to get us. He hangs up in a huff. I think we woke him up. We sit out on the curb and watch the trucks rumble by, off to who knows where, back who knows when. You can feel the heat rising from the ground already. Finally, the cab comes to get us, one of those old bangers with the velvety interior that always smells like cigarettes, the kind they have in every city that’s
not
New York, and we have the driver take us back to whatever the arena was called. I roll down my window, lean my head back on the velvet, and close my eyes. The last thing I see is the cabdriver checking me out in the rearview. He looks like the kind of guy they’d cast to play a Vietnam vet in some movie.

It’s not important. Like I said, after a while, you don’t remember the days, just the events. I’ll remember this day because there were
two
of them. The first was meeting the Disaster. The second happened when I got back to the bus, climbed into my bunk (the good-luck one), and checked my e-mail before I passed out. Only one new message was in my in-box. Sent at 3:47 a.m. From Her. I stare at it as the bus engine purrs to life, as we slip out of (I think) Daytona Beach. I can feel my heart pounding, and I’m pretty sure I know why. I should probably just delete it, go on with my life, but I don’t. The computer takes forever opening it, as if God or Steve Jobs were asking me, “You
sure
you really wanna do this?” But then, there they are: Her words, filling my screen, and there’s no turning back. I make it as far as the first line before I feel my heart burst in my chest.

I miss you
.

I
’m
drunk and I probably shouldn’t be writing this. But I really miss you tonight. I know I’m not supposed to—everyone tells me that—but I have for a while now, and it’s not going away. I tried calling you the other night, from a pay phone so you wouldn’t recognize the number, but the call didn’t go through. Maybe Ma Bell doesn’t want us to be together. Maybe God doesn’t either. But I do. My life has come off track without you. I hardly know myself anymore. I need you.

I’m sorry about the past. I know I should’ve supported you; I was just scared of losing you. I didn’t want to share you with everyone else. I was being selfish and I know that’s what drove us apart. I forgive you for what you did. I would’ve probably done the same thing. I don’t even care about it, to be honest. I just know that I need you back in my life, in any way possible, because it’s getting harder and harder to get out of bed in the morning. It’s scaring me.

Please write back.

I lie in my bunk, just reading the last line over and over. It’s brutal. Beautiful. The saddest sentence I’ve ever
seen. Three little words; so much weight, so much desperation alive within them. They’re either the beginning, or the end, or both. Probably both. Rain pelts the window of the bus. Big, angry drops. Drops with a
purpose
. I watch the flat expanses of Florida blow by in a blur, nothing but swamps and palm trees and alligators. Things get less exotic the farther north you head: gated neighborhoods that back up to the interstate. Shopping malls on the horizon. Billboards for Jesus. The sky is low and pregnant and gray. The rain makes it even more depressing. I am stalling now.

I go back to that last line.
Please write back.
It paralyzes me. I close my eyes tightly, pull my blanket over my head, like a frightened kid trying to wish away the monster under his bed. I figure it’s worth a shot. Sometimes I am willing to believe in anything if it means ignoring the reality of a situation. I open my eyes.
Please write back
. Fuck. I wish I had just deleted Her message. None of this would be happening if I did. I’d probably be asleep right now, dreaming of that fiery sunrise and that shimmering Atlantic. Instead I’m lying here, disarmed. Impotent. My head feels like I can’t sit or lean on anything on the inside because it’s all been freshly painted. Grays and pinks. And open some windows ’cause the air just isn’t circulating the way it should. I realize I am stalling again. Fuck off.

She’s always been succinct, but this line is Her masterwork.
Please write back
. It’s funny because, according to my shrink, this is exactly what I’ve always wanted, what I’ve moaned and wailed and bled for my entire life: complete and total control. The past, the present, the future, it’s all mine. I can erase history. I can eliminate what might be.
I can either write Her back, or not. It’s that simple. Only it doesn’t feel that way. It feels
profound,
frighteningly, cripplingly so. This is a fork in the road. A
Choose Your Own Adventure
book. A catastrophe waiting just around the corner. For the first time, it’s
all up to me
. I realize in this instant that perhaps control isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. There’s a reason I’ve never been able to grab the reins: I’m not strong enough to do it.

So now, not only am I paralyzed, but I’m furious at myself. I am useless. Weak. A boy in over his head, hiding behind tattoos and one-night stands. Trying hard to make sure nobody notices that he’s drowning. The rain really gets angry now, hammering the roof of the bus like machine-gun fire. Heavy bullets from heaven. Heavy thoughts in my head. Do I really miss Her? Did I ever love Her? Can I hurt Her again? I’ve been staring at Her e-mail for more than an hour, and my computer is running on fumes. Just a tiny red sliver remains in the battery icon. I wish humans came with the same kind of indicator . . . it would make things much easier. You would know how to deal with every person on the planet, and I’d always be in the red.
Please write back.
The computer is dying. The rain is pushing the bus off the road. There’s a twister coming. Make a decision. It’s only a goddamn fucking e-mail. It’s only my goddamn fucking life.

Good morning,
I write to Her.
It’s a new day.

I press
SEND
, launch my reply out into the ether. I cannot control what happens next. If it finds Her, it was meant to be. Cosmic chance, divine fate, karma chameleon. Whatever you want to call it. After a few moments,
my heart stops pounding and a strange calm fills my body. I am such a smug bastard that I think I’ve learned some sort of deep lesson from all this. I get out of my bunk and walk to the front lounge of the bus, feeling good about myself. A placid, Buddha-like smile slides across my face. I am enlightenment. I am Zen. I am not only the vase, I’m the space around the vase, and the space
within
the vase. You know, all that really deep stuff. I sit in the lounge and watch the towering storm clouds shower the flatlands and strip malls of Florida. Everyone else is asleep. I probably shouldn’t be feeling good about myself. It was only a goddamn fucking e-mail.

I
t’s
a few weeks later. She’s started sending me love letters now. Love e-mails, perfumed and pink, coquettish. Always in lowercase. You know what I mean. The first one caught me off guard . . . it was just a normal e-mail about some dream she had, about how she was standing on this cliff, overlooking the great expanses of the West, and below Her, on
another
cliff, a guy in a rhinestone suit, a game-show host, was tossing elephants up to Her, and she had to try to catch them on the head of a pin while a studio audience watched intently—that was the point of the game show—and how the elephants would drop out of the sky like great, bouncy balloons, and she’d try to balance them on the pin, only she couldn’t do it, and they’d tumble down into a canyon and explode on the rocks below, in bright bursts of reds and blues, like cans of paint dropped off the roof of a building. Each time she’d let an elephant fall off the pin, the audience would boo a little louder, would hiss and inch a step closer to Her, until she was at the very edge of the cliff, looking down into the
canyon, at the husks of elephants and the great, spattered rocks, and the game-show host would smile hideously, would pull a lever, and more elephants would start falling from the heavens, and the audience would lash out at Her, would tear Her clothing off and try to force Her onto the rocks, and how, just as the elephants began to rain down on Her, at the very moment Her heels were tipping back over the edge, Her roommate shook Her awake because she had been crying in Her sleep. Apparently, she had been having this dream ever since she was a child, though I’d never heard Her mention it before. Anyway, that’s what she was going on about, and I was reading along halfheartedly, my eyes skimming over the endless sea of lowercase letters and parentheses (she loved parentheses), until, at the very end, they got snagged on three words,
i love you,
which she had planted at the very end of the e-mail, like a strategically placed bit of C-4, packed on just out of sight, waiting to detonate.

Of course, I caught it. I saw what she was up to. We terrorists know all the tricks of the trade. The problem was, I didn’t do anything about it. I should’ve defused the bomb right then and there, should’ve cut the wires and tamped out the fuse, but I didn’t . . . maybe because I felt sorry for Her, for the way I had treated Her, for the way Her life had come off track. Or maybe I still loved Her too. Either way, I let the
i love you
go unchecked, and that emboldened Her. A day later, she wrote another e-mail, used
i love you
twice, and after that, it was too late. There was no turning back. The messages have started to come with alarming frequency now—sometimes two or three a
day—and I can do nothing to stop them. For a few days, I tried ignoring Her, but that just leads to even
more
e-mails . . . panicked, frightened ones, sent at four in the morning, full of spelling errors and run-on sentences and lines like
im sorry for being crazy
. You know what I mean. I am beginning to worry about Her. She is hardly sleeping, she is never going to class, she is fixating on me and slowly coming unraveled. I am beginning to think this was a terrible idea.