This was Steve’s exact phrase: more normal. It registered with me so suddenly, so immediately. I felt a kind of bliss. I wanted to hold Steve like a child. It’s freakier before you see it up close. It’s like tire tread. It’s like a shag rug. It’s like rope burn scars; it’s like a badly paved road; it’s like bent wheel spokes pressed into taffy. I told him the truth: that I didn’t know; that I didn’t know anymore if I wanted to be more normal or not. I had stopped being normal so early that it was hard to imagine being any other way than the way I was. This was normal for me. As far as I could tell, except on days when something went wrong with the routine, I lived a normal life.
Steve looked at Kevin and Kevin looked at Steve and they both said, “Normal life!” while touching their beer cans together like wineglasses, only at waist level, so that no car going past the tucked-away-between-buildings little liquor store parking lot would be able to see them. You know: in case a cop went past. I understood this right away, at some basic level, without having to ask. And this was the source of my bliss, my total quiet contentment: that we were three people who, if it came down to it, could communicate with one another using only gestures.
In the natural course of the conversation I ended up telling them about Carrie and Lance and they asked me if I was going to go to jail. I told them jail wasn’t really on the table, but there was a good chance I’d end up going broke. Kevin told me he sort of knew how I felt, because his mom had kicked him out of the house a while back, and he’d had to sleep in the car until he got up the courage to call his dad. It had taken him a week to do it. He asked his dad if he could stay over at his house until he could save up enough money for first and last and security deposit. He had known that was the most he could ask. His dad didn’t really have any money.
The sun was bright by now. Sometimes you feel like such an old man. For example, when you ask young men what they figure they’ll do with their lives. And you see the look on their faces that says What the fuck are you even talking about, but they’re not saying it to you, they’re bouncing it off each other using a complicated system of facial tics and gestures, which they know they can do because you probably don’t get it. Which is what makes me different: I do get it. I see the gestural semaphore and can read it without having to think twice about it. It is an excruciatingly painful thing to see and feel, so I try to avoid it, but I sensed some connection with Steve and Kevin, so I asked them what they figured they were going to do, you know, after summer, maybe.
Steve said, “Fuck if I know,” and Kevin said, “I’m going to stay as high as I can,” and they bumped fists and then at the exact same moment raised their free hands flat into the air, their palms toward me. They were asking me to give them the high five. I gave them the high five. I felt like the sun had just risen inside me.
“What about you, though, dude?” said Steve. “What the fuck are you going to do?”
I knew what I was going to say; I paused for effect. “I’m going to go home and eat candy and stay high as long as I can,” I said.
Kevin and Steve said staggered No doubts, automatically, reflexively, but then Kevin said: “That whole court thing, though, dude. What are you going to do?” He pulled at his beer.
“Fuck ‘em,” I said. When I pronounce the letter f, I spit. Neither of them flinched. I thought a little about Carrie’s parents, to whom I usually bore no particular ill will, because I always try to put myself in the other guy’s shoes. If I had a kid who killed herself because she’d gotten confused about some game she was playing with some stranger far away, I’d hate that stranger, too. That is usually how I think. But I said it again, and I meant it. “Fuck ‘em.”
Again Steve and Kevin thunked their beer cans together. “Fuck ‘em!” they said, in near unison. I smiled my horrible smile.
8
I felt so terrible when Carrie died. Trying to explain the feeling I had is like trying to describe what you see when your eyes are bandaged: it’s not impossible, but it’s different from describing something you can actually look at, something you might see in the course of a normal day. It is trying to describe something at which you are unable to look directly.
She never wrote to me as often as Lance did; it was usually him writing the letters and signing on behalf of them both. They played as a team: L+C, two capital initials with a plus sign in between. In the margins of their letters, sometimes, or after the sign-off, she would also write something. Or if somehow Lance had been sidelined. One July, when his family took him down to Branson on vacation, for example: that was the week when Carrie sent in a turn so there’d be news for Lance when he came home. L is on vacation so I thought if I make a move & it’s good he will be excited when he comes home so here it is I know all turns are final but please don’t let me do something stupid we have so much fun together, she wrote. She had decided to have the two of them hide behind a dumpster until the sun went down, because it was hot in the town through which they were passing, and the mutants who had overrun the town were carnivorous and could smell less keenly once the air got cool.
I’d sent her a little note in reply. It was both sweet and painful to me to think of how much L+C meant to each other, how their lives seemed almost made for each other. When I was in high school, I’d only ever had two girlfriends: one for almost no time at all — two weeks early in freshman year, at the way station between junior high and the new social order being established at high school — and Kimmy for even less time than that, really just an unsure day or two right before the accident. Technically, I guess, she had still been my girlfriend when she visited me in my bandages at the hospital, but those visits were of a different order. I understood a little about how good it must feel to have someone who loves you out there in the wilds of high school; for a few days I’d known what that was like, too. But what Kimmy meant to me in the aftermath was something different and higher, a singular thing in the world with no readily available points of comparison. She was just sixteen, but she had the stomach to stand near a smoking wreck.
On the Xeroxed move I took from the file cabinet, I wrote: Good work to both of you Carrie. It’s safe behind the dumpster. Tell Lance when he gets home that you kept him from harm. I remember feeling a little guilty, because while it’s possible to make a move that kills off your character within the game, it’s almost never possible to walk straight into a fatal trap; telling somebody their game is over is a bad business move, and I’d known that before I ever took out the first ad. So staying put until dark was a good move, one that would advance the player painlessly toward the short-term objective of reaching the city limit unharmed; there was no real danger. But the wrong move could have delayed the team until winter, scaling hospital exteriors to get at the one uncontaminated bottle of disinfectant or a snakebite kit. There was a colony of snakes in the ditch just a few hundred yards away: she might have chosen HEAD FOR THE DITCH instead of REST BY THE DUMPSTER. So I hadn’t lied. I had just played up the bright side.
When Lance got home and sent in his moves, he was excited. I remember his excitement, how I could see it in the way the pencil dug into the page. I was piecing together what I knew about him while picking out clothes for the hearing. Vicky had come in to help me dress. I didn’t need her help — I can dress myself — but I was grateful. Sometimes I wondered what Vicky made of my work, since she never asked me about it and I didn’t usually volunteer much; our conversations stuck mainly to simple things like food or the weather or how we were feeling. She told me about her family sometimes. If she found me at my work she mostly left me at it.