jadlkfj;ad
continued from here
Going to Wichita
And so, you know, we began having our little thing. Or our monumental and life-altering thing, depending on who you were talking to.
All this anger between us, all this stuff that we never said to each other, like half the time Mulder didn’t know whether he wanted to hit me or kiss me, and I knew this was fucking him up, driving him insane, he couldn’t deal with it, couldn’t get his head around it, but that wasn’t really my problem, not yet.
And anyway, we still had a good time. Had a fucking amazing time, actually. I mean, it was the off-season. What else were we gonna do with our days?
Drunk and bored didn’t count. New Year’s Eve didn’t count. And as for the rest of it, well, it just got to be a habit, something we weren’t really thinking about that much. So I guess that’s my excuse, not that I need one.
We just weren’t thinking.
Mulder, he’d had to surrender something on New Year’s, I know that. When he was getting ready for the party, he’d probably taken a long look in the mirror, made some kind of vow to himself, not gonna let that happen again, not gonna talk to Zito, not gonna look at him. And then . . . I don’t know what happened out on the path, I don’t know what happened when we were so close to midnight we could taste it in the air, I don’t know what went through his mind right before he kissed me, but I don’t think it was anything easy, it looked more like being ripped free, viciously tearing away his better judgment.
I don’t think Mulder really wanted to sleep with me again. I mean, obviously he did, but only with one half of his mind, the other half so dead-set against it, and it’s weird to think that I could overcome him like that, that he should lose control like that, and just over me.
Weird.
But, anyway, it happened, and now here we were. In the midst of it. And I forgot to make sure that I had a way out, I forgot to memorize an escape route, because I didn’t know that I’d ever want to escape this.
Spent most of our time over at my apartment. Easier that way, don’t you know. No roommates and all. Mulder, he just made the place his own, started keeping his favorite cereal in my cabinet because no self-respecting person over the age of ten eats Lucky Charms (his words, not mine. Lucky Charms fucking rock.), started stealing the remote control away from me like he lived there, started telling me in the morning, “We’re out of sugar,” started commandeering the sports section, but none of that bothered me too much.
We still never had that big discussion, never laid out the guidelines and figured out where we stood. He’d just show up at my place and we’d hang out, same as always, except, you know, for the making out and stuff.
About once a week or so, he’d get all touchy and short-tempered, and I knew it was getting to him, this very very weird situation that we’d found ourselves in, and I would just hang back, let him work his way through it, always kind of wondering if this was it, if it was gonna be too much for him, but he always came back to me. Like he couldn’t stay away.
I wasn’t really paying attention, so I don’t know exactly when it was that I got in over my head. I was keeping it pretty casual, you know, no big deal and everything, but sometimes it’d strike me, like getting hit by a train, slamming into me, some crystalline moment when I would open my front door and Mulder would be standing there with his pockets full of candy and a grin on his face, when I would wake up in the middle of the night with his head on my stomach, when he’d be pacing around the living room bitching about the bridge toll and winging his hands through the air, when he’d lean over and kiss the side of my neck during a commercial, all these sparkling moments out of time when I’d think suddenly about falling, drowning.
But I could shake that off pretty easy.
It was January, the halfway California cold, our hands bereft, and we were finding baseballs in our sock drawers, in kitchen cabinets, between couch cushions, everywhere, we were holding onto each other because we had nothing else to hold onto, talking all the time about our dead heroes and the sun-drenched near-perfection of our most recent summers, and never about what was going to happen, what was going to become of us, it was January and we were way too far gone, we were becoming permanently carved into each other’s hearts, and we were looking forward to heartbreak, young and stupidly romantic, brashly proud, not believing that there was anything that we wouldn’t be able to handle, it was January and we didn’t know then that we were already lost, and that January was as perfect a thing as I’ve ever known.
* * *
Early in February, Mulder tried to warn me, but I didn’t listen.
We were lying around in bed, and it wasn’t even nine o’clock at night yet, because for some reason we’d been unable to keep our hands off each other that day, trying to make dinner but constantly distracted, Mulder eventually pushing me against the refrigerator, kissing me hard, knocking the magnets off, the photos floating dreamily to the ground, and dinner was given up for lost as we stumbled to the bedroom, shedding clothes and half-wrestling, and now we’d gotten that out of the way, but it was too early to go to sleep, so we were just lying around, and Mulder said, “Phoenix in two weeks.”
I brushed my chin across his hair, walked my fingers across his arm onto his chest. “Two and a half,” I told him.
He sighed and rolled away from me, staring up at the ceiling. His voice sounded strange, when he spoke again. “You know, things are gonna have to change, once spring training starts.”
Maybe I knew what he was trying to say. Maybe I always knew he was gonna say it. But I tamped that down, I didn’t let myself think about it. I leaned my head on my hand, looked down at him. “Things change every year. We’ll be all right, we’re game-day players, the whole team.”
Pretending that it was just the team he was worried about, pretending that was the only thing that had any claim on our hearts.
He glanced at me, his eyes flickering, trying to do the right thing. “Spring training . . . once the season starts, we can’t . . . we’re not gonna be able to . . .” He trailed off, his mouth tightening, his eyes working fiercely, and he looked at me briefly, hopelessly, then sighed again, pulling his arm up over his face.
I poked his side, spread out my hand, molding to the warm curve of his ribs, feeling the rise and fall of his breath. “Whatever happens, man, we’ll be okay,” I told him, thinking that that was the truth, as long as I had my hand on him, as long as I could be sure of this, that was the truth.
When he took his arm down, he didn’t look at me, scanning over my bedroom. One wall was all but covered by a huge world map, prickling with green pins for the places I’d been, yellow pins for the places I wanted to go (I stole the box of pushpins from the Coliseum’s press office. They never missed ‘em.).
Mulder said, his voice sounding far away, “Let’s get out of here, Zito. Let’s go someplace.”
I yawned, rubbed my face, nodding. “Okay,” I answered agreeably. “Where’d you have in mind?” thinking that he meant like down to Santa Cruz or something, a day trip.
His eyes traced the map, the places I’d been, the places he’d been, and then smiled, saying like he loved the feel of the word in his mouth, “Wichita.”
I blinked, having not expected that. “Kansas?”
His smile crooked a bit. “You ever been there before?”
“No. You?”
He shook his head, still looking at the map. “It’s a whole new place. No one will know us there.”
I rolled my eyes, joking, “Well, naturally, seeing as how there’s nobody *in* Wichita.”
Mulder slanted me a look. “That west coast arrogance of yours isn’t as charming as you think it is.”
I hiked an eyebrow. Okay, boy, you wanna play? Let’s play. “All right, so what would we do there?”
He shrugged, unconcerned with the question, running his knuckles along the stubble he always let roughen a few days before shaving. “Find a place to live with grass on both sides. Get jobs.”
I laughed. “Jobs? Doing what?”
Flipping his hand through the air, he answered easily, “Whatever regular people do. Something with computers, maybe.”
I slipped my hand back onto his body, keeping my palm perpendicular to his stomach like a shark fin, sleepwalking along. “Well, my job experience consists of the bike shop I worked in when I was sixteen, and then nothing but baseball, so I’m sure I’d have no problem landing a good gig.” I paused, a little taken by the idea despite my sarcasm. Wichita, and we could run away, we could leave all this behind. “And then what?”
Mulder thought about that for a long moment, taking my hand in his and studying it, pulling out my fingers, pressing our palms together to see whose hand is bigger (his was, but only by about a centimeter), and he said, his voice low and calm with possibility, his smile graceful, “We’ll come up with fake names. Nobody’ll know who we are. In the summer, we’ll play for the company softball team, in the city park as the sun’s going down, and we’ll be the best out of everybody, we’ll never have to buy our own drinks. We’ll call in sick to work sometime in June and drive all day and night to Chicago, go out to Comiskey wearing sunglasses and caps so that we won’t get recognized, and then over to Wrigley Field for the Cubs’ night game. Sleep in motels and eat breakfast in gas stations, you’ll read the newspaper out loud while I’m driving and we’re sharing a bottle of orange juice. Swim in Lake Michigan. Come home to Kansas when the sky gets too blue for us to take. We’ll mark off sixty feet and six in the backyard and keep sharp, I’ll show you how to throw the ball faster than you’ve ever dreamed and you’ll teach me your curve, but even once I’ve been sworn to secrecy, I’ll still believe you when you tell me it’s magic. On hundred-degree days in August we’ll sit on the lawn under oak trees and eat Popsicles, talking about California and missing the ocean. No one will know where we are. No one will think to look for us in Wichita. In autumn, before harvest, before the World Series, we’ll drive out of town in the middle of the night and chase each other through the corn fields, our faces and hands sliced all to hell by the edges of the stalks, but it’s okay, it won’t hurt, we’ll heal cleanly out there, no scars. And when the winter comes we’ll quit our jobs and pull down the shades, let the snow pile up outside our door, blocking us in, burying us, and we’ll dream about spring and forget all the stuff we used to know and then we won’t need anything else ever again.”
Mulder’s face settled quietly as he told this story, painted this world for me, his eyes drifting shut, our hands tangled together atop his chest. I pulled mine free and passed my palm over his eyes, watching them come open, and I asked hoarsely, my throat thick, “And we’ll never come back?”
He looked at me, his eyes depthless and sad, then slowly shook his head, whispering, “No, we’ll never come back.”
I leaned forward, pressing a kiss to his mouth, tasting something like tears on my tongue, and he sighed against my mouth, shuddering, like he was holding himself back.
Mulder’s eyes were closed, the way you close your eyes against pain, and he said with his voice rough and just this side of scared, “We’re in trouble, Zito, you know that?”
I slid my arm around his back, cupping his shoulder in my palm, placing a kiss on the spot where his jaw met his throat and hiding my eyes in his neck, telling him softly, “Yeah, I know.”
* * *
Didn’t change much. We didn’t buy plane tickets or anything. Didn’t start planning our exodus. We still had time, and we weren’t really going to Wichita, that was just a dream, something to think about while falling asleep, nothing serious, and we still had time.
I thought we did, anyway.
And there was a night when we were watching ESPN Classic, the game where Ripken broke Gehrig’s record, and Mulder fell asleep with his head resting on my back, cradled between my shoulder blades, his hand curled in the valley at the small of my back, me lying on my stomach with a pillow under my chin, and I could feel his breath on the back of my neck, muted the television and just lay there for awhile, not sleeping and never wanting to move again.
And there was a day when the pipes burst in Mulder’s kitchen and I went over to find him and Chavez standing ankle-deep in water, shouting at each other until they saw me laughing at them in the doorway and both started shouting at me, unearthing the phone book and calling a plumber, and while we waited for the guy to show, we folded ships out of the newspaper and set them afloat, sitting at the kitchen table with our shoes and socks off, pants rolled up, kicking water at each other.
And there was an afternoon when we were driving over the bridge with the windows down, the wind howling through, and we had to yell to be heard, Mulder laughing and calling out my name, white ocean birds ducking on knotted flight paths through the cables and struts, the city piled clumsily together and we were high enough that we could see every rooftop for miles.
And there was a morning when I had to get up early for a dentist’s appointment and Mulder rumbled something threatening and possessive as I tried to slip out of bed, tightening his arm around my waist and pulling me back against him, rubbing his face on my shoulder, something like, “mine,” something like, “don’t go,” and I resolved to start flossing on a more regular basis to make up for missing my check-up.
And there was the yellow pin sticking out of Wichita on my world map, and the way I wasn’t sure which one of us had put it there.
And there was the red circle on the calendar in my kitchen, the black circle around the same date on the calendar in Mulder’s bedroom, there was Phoenix getting closer and closer and we couldn’t stop it from happening.
* * *
The night before we were due to report, Mulder showed up with the thirty bucks he owed me and a T-shirt I’d left over at his place a couple of days before.
I was maybe halfway packed, everything strewn around, unfolded jeans on the back of the couch, the coffee table swamped with shirts, a little sock community starting up on the floor by the bookshelf. I kept getting distracted, by something on television, by the squawks of my computer informing me that I had an email or instant message, by my need to go study the contents of the refrigerator, leaving the packing job in the middle, wandering back a while later and saying, “Shit, I still haven’t finished this? I suck.”
And then Mulder was knocking on the door, and as I let him in, I asked, “Hey, are you done packing yet?”
He gave me a disbelieving look, scanning the debris with an exasperated gaze. “I did my packing two days ago. It’s not, like, a vast undertaking, dude.”
I waved my hand around dismissively. “Whatever, whatever. I still got thirteen hours.”
Mulder smiled a little vaguely, and I cleared a space for him to sit on the couch, calling as I went into the kitchen to get some Cokes, “Don’t mess up that pile of shirts, man, they’re in order.”
I came back, handed him a can, Mulder cocking an eyebrow at me. “What possible order could your shirts be in?”
I shoved my duffel bag off the chair, shrugging as I sat down. “Order of coolness. Cleanliness. You know. There is a system here.”
He smirked, then looked down at his hands, rolling the can between his palms. His forehead was lined, and he didn’t look like he’d gotten much sleep the night before.
“Look,” Mulder said, still not looking at me. I didn’t know what he was gonna say.
I swear to God I didn’t.
“When . . . when we get down there, we’re not gonna be able to . . . do this anymore.”
I, of course, didn’t understand. “Not gonna be able to do what anymore?” I asked, unworried, ignorant.
He took a long moment, staring at his hands like the can of Coke was some fascinating artifact, something from long ago. His eyebrows were pulled down, his mouth drawn tight, splatters of off-white on his shirt from when we’d painted the garage door of his house.
“You and me. The . . . the thing where we sleep together. That’s . . . it’s gonna have to stop happening.”
And I . . . I don’t . . . no, that’s not right, this isn’t how it’s supposed to be.
My eyes maybe got bigger. My heart rate might have picked up, but not by much. My hands got still. But it wasn’t much more than this, slow disbelief and immediate refusal, a blink of motionless panic and then I was gonna fight it, talk him out of it, because I didn’t know what he was saying, I couldn’t fathom it.
My voice was surprisingly easy, which pleased me, in an abstract kind of way, “What do you mean, just while we’re in Phoenix? ‘Cause of the whole living-with-the-team thing? That’s cool. I mean, I was gonna maybe suggest that myself, keep it kinda quiet, no need to take risks or nothing, we’ll just have to be careful.”
And Mulder was shaking his head, his hands clenching, denting the metal. “No, Zito,” he said, cutting me off. “No, man.”
He looked at me then, his face weary, devastated, his eyes dark and certain, like he already knew that there was nothing I could say to change his mind.
“I can’t . . .” he continued, pulling the words out one by one. “I can’t be with you and still . . . still be what I need to be on the field. I need to give everything to the game . . . everything. And once the season starts again . . . we won’t be able to get away with it anymore, they’ll be watching us and we’ll get caught and then . . .”
He trailed off. I was thinking that all that stuff was probably true, he had good reasons, and I must have known that it would have had to end sometime, I must have known that, somewhere, because it was improbable and ill-considered to begin with, so it wasn’t anything so crucial, we were both too temporary to have any real claim on the future, and it’s not the kind of thing that ever works out anyway, not for guys like us.
And I was thinking this and watching him set his Coke down on the coffee table, his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands.
So I wasn’t really expecting the slightly cruel drag in my voice, understanding as I did that this was bound to happen, I wasn’t really expecting to hear myself say, “You’ve never had a problem being with girls during the season. They never take you away from the game.”
He was staring down at the floor, saying tonelessly, “You’re not a girl.”
I scoffed, harsh, biting off the words, “Well, five points, man, are you just getting that now?”
Pulling his hands over his hair, weaving his fingers together at the back of his neck, Mulder said, his eyes still down, “It’s different with you.”
Sure it was, of course. Naturally. Because I wasn’t a girl. Because I was a teammate. Because I was a friend. Because our lives were already too connected, already too much of me in him and vice versa.
I didn’t want to be mad at him. Because, you know, if this was the end, then it should end calm, reasonably, so that we could get back as much of ourselves as possible, if he was walking out I shouldn’t stand in his way, because I knew this had to happen, I always knew.
I didn’t want to be mad at him. I kind of wanted to hit him until he was unrecognizable, but I didn’t want to be mad at him.
Mulder spoke slowly, spelling it out for me. “I can only . . . only do one thing well at a time. When it’s something like this, I can’t do both at once. I can’t do right by you and right by the game at the same time. I’m not set up for that.”
And of course it would be because of the game. Not just because the things he was saying were true, but because that’s always been the ace, the safe word, the only thing that would make me go without much of a fight. Because if baseball was no longer what mattered the most to us, then we wouldn’t be the same guys anymore, probably wouldn’t like each other as much as we did.
Mulder knew this about me, knew what the invocation of baseball would do to me. Of course he did. It’s one of the things we’ve always had in common.
“Okay,” I whispered, not really to him, just to myself, breathe it out, find some solid ground. Trying to work my way through this, trying to figure it out, how am I going to handle this, how am I going to make it through?
What am I gonna do without him?
And panic seized in my throat, dense and choking, pounding through me and I wanted to get out of this, I wanted to run away and not listen to him anymore, I wanted just one more day.
“Well,” I said shakily, holding him still with my eyes, feeling terrified. “Can we at least . . . while we’re in Phoenix? Before Opening Day? We could have another month. We can still . . . we don’t have to stop right this second, we can . . .”
But he was shaking his head, and I was looking at the spots of paint on his shirt, imagining laying him across the couch, knocking the clothes out of the way, and playing connect-the-dots on his chest, drawing one to another, sketching out a net, him smiling with his hands behind his head, stretched out.
Mulder said, “We can’t,” low and resolute and I was wrenched back into anger, my hands tightening on my knees.
“Why not, man?” I said sharply, not holding it together. “Who the fuck would it hurt?”
He lifted his eyes, looking desperate, half-wild, inexplicably beautiful and heartbroken and maybe I never wanted him more than I did at that moment, as he answered, his voice fraying at the edges, “Can’t you . . . can’t you see that I won’t be able to do this in a month?”
I whispered, not begging him but almost, “Then don’t do it at all.”
He shook his head, putting his hands up over his eyes. “That won’t solve anything.”
“And this will?” I cried out, surprised by the vehemence in my voice, the uselessness of it.
Mulder looked at me, looking so tired, and he told me quietly, “Babe, I have to . . . we have to end this now. Before it’s too late.”
I replied almost inaudibly, “Who says it’s not already too late?”
Something snagged across his face, this brief rip of pain, and he looked away, out the window, saying with nothing but sorrow, “Don’t say that. It’s not true.”
And I was used up, I was thinking of everything that had happened, my mind slamming past each image, so strange to think that it had only been two and a half months, not even a full summer’s vacation, so strange for Mulder to become such a fixture in me after only two and a half months, and he was leaving, he was making as clean a break as he could, which was the smart thing, the right thing, and all I could think was that fighting Mulder on this wasn’t something I had the strength for, and anyway, Mulder had always been so much stronger than me, there was no way I could win.
I sank back into the chair, feeling slow and stunned, and I breathed out, “ . . . no. You’re right. It’s not true.” Couldn’t be true. Too horrible to think about.
He looked at me for a long time, my friend Mulder, kept staring at me and I got tired of trying to figure out what he was thinking, tired of trying to read his eyes, nothing in there I wanted to know, anyway, and I thought maybe if I stand up right this second, go grab his hand and pull him off the couch, drag him out of here, stuff him in my car and take him to the airport, nothing but the clothes on our backs and paying cash for the first flight to Wichita, not even that, the first flight to Chicago because it’s more convenient, and we’ll rent a car and drive out to Kansas, rolling in before dawn, crazy with exhaustion and missing the freeway exits, if I stand up right now and don’t let him say another word, we could still go, it’s not too late, we could still do it, there’s nothing standing in our way and Wichita like everything I’ve ever wished for, getting smaller as I pulled away, grew up, moved on, until what was left wasn’t big enough to believe in, and then Mulder stood up.
Stood up and came over to me, reached down, his fingers on my face, the heel of his hand against my jaw, and I was staring up at him as he pulled his thumb slowly over my mouth, all the things he knew that I didn’t, all the ways in which this was the right thing to do, and Mulder whispered, “We did the best we could,” and I closed my eyes, thinking that if I cried right now, the tear would run down and touch his hand, but I wasn’t crying, and Mulder’s fingertips touched my eyelids and then he was gone, and I didn’t open my eyes until I heard my front door close, and I was surrounded, I was alone and this was not the way it was supposed to be.
* * *
(this is where the wheels come off)
It’s been a couple of years since the last big fire in the hills. The burning off. With the dusty heat, it’s tinderbox dry out in the corn-colored grass that snaps between your fingers like a matchstick. Just lying in wait for the first of the summer lightning, for the sun to spear off a broken glass bottle lying on the side of the path, for the unthinking cartwheel of a cigarette flicked out an open car window. And then the hills will burn and you’ll be able to see the smoke for miles, be able to smell it in your hair, on your skin, leaving handprints of ash on everything you touch.
Been even longer since the last big earthquake, and this is what we are waiting for the most. I wasn’t there, I only kind of remember. I was twelve years old and sitting on the carpet of the living room, at the foot of my dad’s chair, and he was using the top of my head as a table for his beer, balancing, telling me seriously, “Hold still now, my son, we’ve almost got it,” and I was giggling, squirming, trying to be motionless. We were waiting for the World Series to start, and my mother was in the kitchen with one of my sisters, drinking tea and talking about graduation, college, the future, all these irrelevant topics that I couldn’t find any footholds in, because my father’s hand was on my head and the World Series was going to be on soon.
And it was exciting, because this was a California World Series, the Bay Bridge Series, taking place four hundred miles north, which is a long way for the American West, a long way for anyplace, but it was better than the three thousand miles we were used to, the echo of the Yankees and Red Sox and Mets that came to us second-hand, all the east coast asleep as our cowboy teams took the field.
A California World Series, and I swear, I was rooting for the A’s that day, I was, enough Dodger-inspired Giant antipathy in me even though we didn’t live in Los Angeles, the Padres were my team but they’d been out of the race since August, so what else was I supposed to do? I was rooting for the A’s, who were favored to win, anyway, a safe bet.
The low-slung suburban home of my childhood, the ravine down at the dead-end of the street, where we used to build forts and fight afternoon wars, overgrown with vines and roots and the weirdly clear creeks, cut like tear tracks through the wilderness, here where I played in the street at sunset with my friends who lived nearby, running around with our dirty sneakers slapping the asphalt, chasing down bright orange rubber balls with hockey sticks, scratching out tuck-and-hook plays in the dirt, the football under my knee, learning how to field ground balls off the curbs and sewer grates the way Boston outfielders learn how to field off the Monster, dive-bombing off the roofs of our houses when our parents weren’t home, dropping like silver coins into the bushes, an explosion of leaves and dust, our noses pinched shut.
San Diego and my life there, and the first spanning views of the Bay Area on the television as game time neared, islands and bridges and hills, so different from this victorious desert, and just as the color men began to introduce their perfect autumn day, the camera shuddered, the whole screen fuzzed, there was a burst of chaotic noise, panic, people crying out, my dad’s hand going still on my head, and I looked up to find him staring at the screen, something like shock or fear, foreign expressions on my father’s face, the kind of look that you get when you realize, with complete and utter certainty, that people will die before this day is out, die bloody, die trapped, that moment when you know this and know simultaneously that there is nothing you can do about it.
The screen had gone blank, and my father was rising, calling my mom, saying, “I think something happened up north,” and then they were trying to call my Uncle David in Marin County but the phone lines were down, and then the special bulletin had come on TV, the earliest reports, before even the aftershocks had hit, before the earthquake was even finished with its destruction, and no one knew the extent of anything, but I was twelve and all I knew was that the World Series was supposed to be on and it wasn’t, and this was unthinkable, the World Series occupying at the time in my mind the same general and unquestioned authority as the sun rising in the morning, something beyond the base laws and tragedies of the rest of the world, this idea that whatever happened was bad enough to stop the World Series, even just delay it, I might as well have been told that the warm ocean where I had learned to swim was nothing more than a practical joke, an illusion, this kind of absurd.
And by the time the television was showing us pictures of the collapsed Bay Bridge, the pile-ups on the freeway, a woman sitting on the curb weeping, her clothes smeared black and still smoldering, the grasping panic of downtown San Francisco once the power went out, people walking through the toppled shelves of grocery stores in a stupor, staring at the wreckage, feet crunching on bags of chips, sticking to the pools of soda on the tile floor, by the time they started talking about the fault line and showing us geological survey maps, marking out the epicenter, the bulls-eye rings to show where was most affected, where was least, by the time someone brought up 1906 as buildings were burning in the background, by the time we fully understood what had happened, and had gotten through to Uncle David, assured the continuance of his blessed life (“How’re you doing, little man?” he asked me when my dad put me on the phone. “When’s the game gonna be back on?” I replied, one-track mind, and he laughed.), by the time everything had begun to settle down a bit, my parents and sisters were able to joke nervously about close calls and dancing on the edge, my mom taking the opportunity to refresh my earthquake-preparedness training, which had been a part of my life since my second day of public school, and that was the first time that I really comprehended what an earthquake was, after all the warning they’d given me, for the first time I figured out the power of it, the cruelness and beauty, because an earthquake had stopped the World Series, and for me, that made it the most fearful thing I could imagine.
That was the first time I understood that my home was not a safe place, that my careful life was not beyond this kind of catastrophe, that was when I lost my sense of security and gained a sense of utter recklessness, because we live moment to moment and when the fault line shifts again, no one will be surprised to find themselves dying young.
And so here we are now, out here in California where nothing lasts forever and nothing is ever yours to keep, here we are well-stocked with canned goods and bottled water, here we are in San Francisco, San Francisco like something we were promised when we were kids, here where everything is more precarious, built on uncertain and fantastic foundations, built as a dare by men who came looking for gold, and here, take this city, it’s no good to me now, take these hills and this ocean, take the wildness of the land that can never be quite beat back, take this place that is already marked as gone, take this place and write nothing down about what will become of us, because here we are already planning for the next disaster, when last earthquake finally tears us free and we can go floating off, sinking down, the new Atlantis, we are here, where if we don’t drown we’ll burn like the hills, and it is a natural thing, brushfires, heartfires, it is the way the soil is replenished, the way you have to die to rise from the ashes, and so fitting that it should all happen here, in this place of loss and renewal, where we talk about rebirth and escape and whether or not we could swim to Alcatraz, this is San Francisco on the very edge of the world, as far west as you can get, and here in San Francisco we are waiting for the earth to break under our feet, waiting for all the dire and magnificent promise of this place to be revealed, all the pure immolation to come home to us, and we’ll be martyrs then, we’ll be forgiven all our sins and our hands will be clean.
* * *
Now this happens, okay. I get poetic, romantic, rhapsodic, at the oddest moments. Being abruptly destroyed will do that to a person. Young enough so that everything that happens has a veil of the epic about it, a sense of the lyrical. Some stuff, the only way you can really talk about it is to have it fall into stanza, start seeing metaphors and imagery, there’s some stuff that you can’t help getting philosophical and profound about. Baseball. California. The ocean. The potential for violence and boundless love drifting heavily down on these quiet streets. You can’t help it.
And I don’t sleep too much these days. And I’m tired of staring at the desert and I know we didn’t mean anything by it, I know, and I don’t want to think about it anymore, and I don’t like the way the future looks, I don’t like the way everything is happening faster than I expected, and I swear to God, I didn’t think it’d hurt this bad.
And I still see Kansas in your eyes sometimes, man, do you know that? I still see that life we weren’t brave enough to live, I see two young men under a blue sky, out where we won’t have to worry about falling into the ocean, out where things won’t be so complicated, the Midwestern sun and the strength in your arms, chaff in my hair, I see a mess of blankets on the bed, the light so fresh and clean, sprawling over us, I see us swimming in a river somewhere, swinging out on a rope tied to a tree branch, leaves sticking to our wet arms and legs as we lie on the bank and wait to dry, I see us running so fast, right out of our shoes, sprinting barefoot and whirling, spinning, until between laughing and racing each other we’ve run out of breath and collapse panting onto the warm ground, I see you repaired, fused back together, and all the things that have hurt you are far away and forgotten, and we’re keeping each other safe, out there in Wichita, rescuing each other, and I cannot escape your vision of the life we gave up, I can’t get it out of my head, because it’s in your eyes and sometimes your eyes are the only thing I can see.
All my protests about blame, about liability and guilt, all the times I’ve tried to talk my way out of this, claiming blindly that it’s not my fault, can’t hold it against me, it doesn’t count, all that stuff, it’s bullshit. You should know this, I should know this.
This, it’s my fault, everything.
My fault for wanting him for so long, my fault for loving the way he looked, my fault, I started it, I wasn’t playing fair, it was me, all me, and now I’ll never be able to get away from him, I’ll never be shook free, and neither will he, and I’m sorry, Mulder, I’m so sorry, I shouldn’t have done this to you, I didn’t mean it, I’m so fucking sorry, please, man, forgive me, please, because I have to go out there alone now and I’m not sure I can, because none of this was supposed to happen and there’s nothing inside me now and I don’t think I can do this, man, I don’t think I’ll be okay.
But, no. He doesn’t listen. He won’t hear. It’s nothing I’d ever say out loud, anyway, not until my knees hit the concrete and I can’t take it anymore.
And what good would it do? Who would that save?
We had our chance. Wichita, and the one thing missing from Mulder’s dream of Kansas was baseball, the one thing he didn’t mention, the fact that neither of us have ever been able to live without the game, and we’d be without it there, with our regular jobs, our grass-lined house, even with the poor substitutes of sixty feet and six marked out in the backyard, the softball games under the darkening sky, those won’t count, and it was perfect, wasn’t it, because if we were running away we should run away from everything, we should let nothing hold us back, not even the game. Especially not the game.
If this is true, if there is a life somewhere for me and him, then yes, I would sacrifice baseball, I would, I swear to God, if that meant we could be free, I would give it up, never stand on the mound again, feeling the crush of fifty thousand voices screaming, all alone out there, never again work my fingers over the stitches, lean in to squint at the signs, never again hike my knee up and whip my arm around, so much power, so much joy, never again, I would let it go, all of it, if that’s the price I have to pay, then it’s worth it, it is.
But the game’s not the only thing that’s holding us back.
Sometimes I think Mulder was right, ending it like he did, when he did, for those reasons. Surely we would never be able to deal with both the game and each other at the same time, surely we would have destroyed each other before the All-Star break, torn apart because there’s only so much room inside one heart. I would have gotten tired of him, he would have gotten tired of me, because we are neither of us the kind who see stuff through, we give up too easily, we kill things before their time because they’re going to die anyway, and better that it happens now, by our hand, so that the end will be ours, like the creation and the life of it. So that this will still be ours.
And most of the time I recognize Wichita for the fantasy that it was, when Mulder’s done something unbelievably dense and thoughtless (I don’t have to be sleeping with him for him to annoy the living shit out of me), when I don’t want to crawl back into his arms so much as haul off and put his teeth down his throat, times like these I know that we could never have made it out in Kansas, so far away from our ocean and our game, there’s no way we would have lasted.
But every now and then, despite my best efforts to avoid it, I’ll see it, in his eyes, in my own, in the width of my hand, in the sleekness of his back, in the wreck of his grin, in these scars that won’t heal, in our friendship and all the things that we’ve left behind, in my demand that our existence be implicitly gorgeous, every now and then I’ll see it, laid out for me clear and unmistakable, I’ll see me and Mulder, together somewhere in the middle of nowhere, I’ll see that life not lived like a sucker punch stealing my wind away, and I’ll know how close we came, how we were inches away from being perfect, being happy, being at peace.
* * *
All right, you want this to end? Yeah, me too.
Don’t worry about it. We’ll be okay. The season’s started again, we don’t have to think about anything but baseball anymore. The way he wanted it. The way I wanted it too, okay, fine.
It’s just one of those things, you know? And you try to find your way through it, but you only ever remember to try in the middle of the night, and then it’s too dark to see anything, you just get more mixed up, turned around. But it doesn’t need all this analysis. I mean, it was only two and a half months. What kind of damage could we really do to each other in just two and a half months? Nothing so bad.
But yeah, okay. And something true, I guess. To finish it up. Because everything is all shadowed with memory and it’s hard to tell what really happened, where my hand was, what he said, how his voice sounded, what was going on in my head, how honest we were being with each other. You can never quite figure out the reality of something if all you’ve got is the recollection of it.
And anyway, I’m tired now, I’m ready to be over this.
But one last thing, one last, and this I am certain of, this is the only thing I believe anymore.
What I said earlier, about me not being stupid enough to fall in love with Mark Mulder?
Yeah, that was a lie.
THE END