Fic: Flicker, Flash, & Fade
Author: Stephanie
Title: Flicker, Flash & Fade
Characters/Pairings: Mark, Roger/April, Roger/Mimi (to be Mark/Roger)
Rating: Pg-13
Word Count: 4,690
Summary: Worse than Roger dying is Mark watching him clinging on and unable to accept that this is it. He's spent every day by his bed, waiting on Roger to break through and come back to him, unaware of how blissfully at peace Roger is struggling to stay trapped.
Story: Act One: Scene One and Two, Act Two: Scene Three and Four
Flicker, Flash, and Fade
Act One: Scene Five
If he could get a little closer, no…
Closer, please. Mark can see his finger tips, stretched way behind their limits, aching as they force themselves to stretch out. He isn’t even sure it’s possible, for finger tips to stretch, but in his mind he keeps chanting. Closer, closer, closer. Willing them to keep getting longer, getting there. Inch by inch by inch, if he could just reach a little further.
His hand keeps growing, pushing, trying so hard. Closer, closer. It’s right there, it’s right there in front of him and miles and miles away, but he knows if he could just get even a little closer, he could grab on.
Someone in the back of his mind keeps talking, and Mark wishes he would stop because he’s reaching, almost there, so close. He just needs to keep reaching out and he’ll make it, but the voice is there to bother him, prodding at him. Try and remember your friend how he was, part of the grieving process before you let go.
No, don’t let go. Keep reaching out, through the dark, until he can’t even see his arm around, his hand completely gone but he has to keep reaching. Keep going until he can pull him back. Find him.
“Jesus!” Mark opens his eyes to blinding white, and it takes a moment to adjust. He’s slumped over the hospital chair, arm fast asleep from where he was leaning on it all night, head still swimming with images. The dark is his head refuses to mesh with the horrible colors on the hospital walls.
In the background is the mechanical beat of Roger’s heart, and once again it hits Mark where he is, like it hits him every time he wakes up. Every now and then, especially when he’s fast asleep, it will slip out of his mind for just a moment. And then it hurts again, waking up to the same damn scene. Hospital scenes, they never last this long in the movies. It’s only ever for a quick shot or two, and then the person is dead or at home.
Right back here in limbo, the space between the next to acts where Roger is floating, or the thing that looks like Roger anyway. The thing wearing his skin, sagging and bruised and pale. The person with his long hair, grown out and curling around his face now. The thing Mark falls asleep next to, waiting for some sign of life, the movement of death. Anything, anything at all.
“So, this is what happens when you move out of your mother’s house? You start to curse like a Christian.”
Still shaken from waking up in the hospital, even after a week of waking up in the same damn chair, Mark takes his time to stretch out, trying to pop his spine back into place. He doesn’t know who would talk to him like that, but after so long of getting sleep only an hour or two at a time, after so long of watching his best friend turn into a fucking corpse that they have clinging to life just so Mark gets to witness every second of his death, he’s found his ability to give a shit about anything has been shot.
Being stuck in a rerun of the worst day of your life, every day, will do that to a person.
The guy who spoke to him is hunched over, leaning heavily on a cane. His skin is sagging and sallow, covered in lesions worse than even Roger’s. And he’s smiling, bright and kind, right at Mark. “David?”
“Hey there…” The guy, the walking death guy that happens to look like an uncle he once had and love sits next to him, shaking so hard he almost falls out of the chair. “You’re mom called, told me about… Roger, right?” He lays a hand on Mark’s and his skin is warm, but only barely. Other than that, it is like Roger’s hand, looking ready to snap off any moment, and yet he’s still smiling. Why does he keep smiling like that? “It’s nice to see you again, Mark…”
This is just a test, he realizes, to see if he could possible hurt anymore. Turns out he can.
*
Seventeen should be old enough to understand things, especially if you happen to be a seventeen year old who spends his summer locked away in his room watching foreign and indie movies, trying to copy the looks with his own camera. An Arriflex, Ari for short, and his first love to whom he writes love notes to in the form of trying to repeat what he sees on the screen of these small budget movies. Most of these movies are about sex, drugs, cousins loving cousins, government power abuse, family abuse, boys loving boys, war, terror, and more sex. They are not innocent movies, and Mark is hardly some naïve suburban kid. Sure, he spends time at the JCC doing family friendly actives like learning Hebrew and how to tango, but the things that really stick to him are black and white French films where everyone smokes and fucks.
His lips movie along with dialogue he doesn’t really understand. He pushes his glasses up his nose and gets this serious look, like he’s struggling to solve a math problem for his SATS, his entire future at stake. Honestly what he is thinking is how did the director get that shot? The camera couldn’t possible be pressed between them, could it?
Mark was far from an innocent seventeen year old boy. Not that many seventeen year olds are all that innocent, anyway. But at least he isn’t sitting around his room watching porn (well, not straight out porn, and not all the time) and somehow, it makes Mark feel like he’s more grown up then anyone around him, and he should be treated that way.
Still, his mom seemed to think he was an idiot, or at least still her little ten year old boy who thought that girls were gross and had never seen a pair of breasts up close. She seemed to think all him and Nanette ever did was tango, and even if she knew more happened, she was all to happy to repress the idea and go along thinking of Mark as a little kid.
As part of this denial, when Mark asks whatever happened to his uncle, his mom doesn’t even look at him. She just shrugs and says, “Oh, you know… What would you like for dinner, honey?” The kind of answer you would give a five year old when you wanted the, to stop asking so many questions about where babies come from.
Of course, nothing pisses of a teenager more than being treated like a child.
“Mooom…” And probably the whiny voice doesn’t help to make Mark’s point that he was an adult, Goddamnit. “Come on…” Mark had always been close to his uncle, possible because David did treat Mark like an adult, like filming wasn’t just some passing fad but a real passion. He even got Mark his first real camera, and so would always be mark in his mind as a Truly Great Man. Besides, David was just cooler than anyone at school, any other relative and not just because of the camera gift, or the fact that he willingly took Mark up to New York on day trips just to spend time in the city with him, or that he didn’t lie to Mark about the big stuff.
Well, as far as Mark knew.
“You already know he moved out to California with Robert.” Everyone called David’s boyfriend Robert. Never Robby like his friends, never his boyfriend or partner. No one even ever said roommate, since that could be too close to the truth. Just Robert. “I don’t know what else to tell you….” And then she went back to making dinner, ignoring him and shrugging the question off again. It just makes things worse.
“He hasn’t called.” Mark points out, slumping down in the chair at the table, pouting and generally acting like he was seven instead of seventeen. “And no one has talked to him in, like, a month. Isn’t that weird?” Only maybe it isn’t too weird, since no one really talked to David all that much anyway, other than Mark and occasionally his mom, but even she stopped talking to him and about him a while ago. It was like they were trying to phase his uncle out of his life.
Only David is the only person who listened to Mark talk about his films, the ones he hasn’t started yet but is planning on, the ones that will change the world. David is the one who showed Mark how to use a condom, bought him his first drink and sat him down to explain to him why Reagan was ruining the country. David was the only sane adult that Mark knew, and he wasn’t just going to forget about him.
“I don’t know what to tell you,” his mom said again, and Mark couldn’t keep arguing in circles all day. And then David never really did call, and Mark had his films and college and, eventually, his girlfriend and a sick roommate to take care of and just… life got in the way. It seems selfish, but it’s true, and when you‘re losing friends and lovers, you just have to add people to the list and move on.
Given enough time, everyone can be phased out to just a few memories.
*
“David….”
Mark still can’t believe this, even after swearing that nothing could shake him up. Fucking amazing what life will throw at you just to prove you wrong. This can’t be him and even if it is, how can Mark remember his face after this long? Sure, he has pictures and even films but, well, this isn’t David’s face.
It’s the same, almost, but beaten down, weathered out. Sick. This is too weird, too much. All of it spinning around in his head and making no sense at all. Fuck, he’s going to be sick. His stomach turns, but that is about it. Not like he’s eaten anything in two days. There is nothing to throw up.
The worst part is that this person, this corpse like person that could be David, just keeps smiling. It isn’t a bright, gorgeous smile, it’s the same smile Mark gets from everyone else. Pity, hurt for him, a sad and pathetic smile. “How are you holding up?”
“Where the fuck have you been?” Of all the things he could have said after seeing his uncle for the first time in, God, how many years now? Seven, right? Has David really been gone that long? Mark doesn’t feel any more grown up than he was seven years ago, holed up in his room with bad French films. A little more tired, but not much else.
David pulls his hand off Mark, placing it over his cane. The metal end wiggles under his trembling hands, banging against the hard linoleum. Mark doesn’t mind. At least it’s something to listen to other than the machines. “It was your parents decision,” he says, as if Mark understands what he’s talking about. “After I found out I was sick, they figured it would be best if you didn’t know. I mean… Eight years. No one lives eight years with this, Mark. We thought one, two at the most. You shouldn’t have to hear that.”
That only made it hurt worse, his head with all these new thoughts to take in. David is here. David is sick. David didn’t tell him because he didn’t think Mark could handle it. He’s just like every one else in his life, lying to try and protect Mark like he was a kid. David is dying. David is saying all this right in front of his best friend, currently in a fucking coma. Why would he say this in front of Roger? Not that Roger can hear him, but why would he rub it in that he got eight years when Roger hardly gets four?
Mark doesn’t want to hate David, it’s just all so much to take in that his thoughts scramble up and come out like that. It’s unfair. He shouldn’t have to lose Roger, and David disappeared so long ago he might as well have already been lost.
It’s probably just his lack of sleep, even the urge to sleep is slowly dying out as his body becomes use to just sitting in place, staring down at Roger in wait, but he can’t really stop all the thoughts bouncing around in his head. It would be easier if David had died after a year or two, didn’t show up now and remind Mark that sometimes people pull through for longer than others, people like Collins. People like David. And then some people get to fucking waste away in a hospital bed, making their friends watch every agonizing second until they want to pull the plug themselves just to stop it from dragging out any longer.
It would just be so much easier if every just died already and Mark didn’t have to punish himself by watching.
“Your mom called,” David continues after the long pause, where Mark can’t speak because anything he said right now would be hurtful, and he wouldn’t really mean it. At least he has enough sense to keep his mouth closed, not letting all those loss thoughts escape. “She told me about Roger… She’s worried about you.”
Sometimes it feels like everyone is worried about him, and no one is worried about Roger. Maybe everyone else has given up. Maybe everyone else is smarter than Mark is, and why he hates himself for clinging to this idea of Roger, the passionate and life filled Roger who could never, ever die because rock stars don’t die, maybe everyone else is right. On some level, Mark knows they are, and he wants so bad to just move on.
You’re dead, Roger. He wants to scream it. He wants to tear out all the little cords that are supposed to be keeping him alive. He wants to move on like everyone else has. He wants so much.
You’re dead, and I’m stupid for sitting here, waiting for a dead person to wake up.
“You look like you need sleep…” How can David just come into his life like this and tell him what he needs to do? Mark knows what he needs to do, and even if he hadn’t figured out by now that eating and sleeping and moving on where what would be good for him, he has plenty of people to tell him that every day. David didn’t need to fly all the way back to New York and nearly give his nephew a heart attack, ruin his opinion of him, just to tell him he needs some more sleep. “Why don’t you go home for a few hours, get some sleep, take a shower…”
“David.” Mark doesn’t mean to snap like that. He’s not a bad guy. He’s nice and goofy and, yeah, a little to obsessed with his film that sometimes he forgets things like eating, showering, his girlfriend, but he’s a nice guy. At least he likes to think he is, or was before he spent so much time trapped in a small hospital room with a corpse. “Look, if you came back just to tell me what to do…”
“No…” David sighs, running a hand through what little hair he has left. He might still be able to walk, but he doesn’t look much better than Roger. Finally, it hits Mark, the hurt and the pity and no, he doesn’t want this man to die. He doesn’t want to see his uncle sick. He loves his uncle, he owes everything to him, meeting Roger and Collins and just being himself instead of being yet another suburban kid with a good job and good home and all that shit.
Maybe his parents did the right thing, not telling him. He doesn’t want to see David dying. He doesn’t want any of this anymore. “No I just.. I know what you’re going through,” David explains, and the smile is totally gone now as he looks down at Mark and, God, he hasn’t cried yet. Not when Angel died, not for Mimi, not when Roger passed out on the floor and wouldn’t move. He hasn’t and he isn’t going to now, but this time it’s fucking hard and it burns at his throat, holding it all back. “I just wanted to be here for you, so you know you’re not alone in this.”
“Yeah…” Mark knows he isn’t alone. He knows that Collins, Maureen, Joanne.. They’re all hurting just as much as he is, they just have to deal with it in different ways. He knows this like he knows that Roger is all but dead, it’s all facts and Mark is a smart kid. He’s figured all this out. But none of that really matters right now. Because it feels like he’s the only one who still cares, and maybe if he sits here long enough… Maybe something will change, and so it doesn’t really matter that he knows it won’t.
“I know,” David says, his shaking hand patting Mark’s shoulder, barely a weight at all. Probably about the same if Roger tried. That same lack of weight, same lack of life. After so many hours of watching your friends die, it all starts to get to you, and not even a camera works to keep your distance. Mark is just starting to figure that out.
Goddamnit. Everyone thinks you’re dead, Roger, so stop pretending and we can go home.
Act One: Scene Six
How he found April…
No. no, no. Something are too raw, to real to be thought about. Roger twists in bed, pulling the white sheets up over his head. It’s warm in here, safe. Like heroin, all encompassing. Nothing can harm him.
She used his razor, taking out the blades, shoving them into her wrists.
She used his blades, his paper to write the note, his bathroom. She had an apartment of her own, but she came over to the loft, just to use his things. Just to get the message across, she carves his razors into her arms and let herself bleed out on his floor. His girl.
God, she screamed.
No, she must have screamed. Before he found her, sprawled out on the titles, blood following the little square pattern. Long gone before anyone found her, before anyone heard her.
When he found April, already dead. Too late to save her.
No.
Roger takes a deep breath and throws the blanket aside, letting it fall to the ground. Why is he all alone in this cold room? Why is it cold at all?
How he found her, laying half over the toilet, stomach acid on her lips. How no one ever tells you that if you’re in enough pain, your body tries to close itself down. You vomit. You piss. You shit.
How he found her like that.
“April.” Roger sits up on his bed, looking around. Where is his girl? Where is her smile? He doesn’t like being so alone.
On the other side of the loft, the bathroom door. The walls to the bedroom are down, he can see it perfectly. White, tale, unbreakable.
“April?”
How she once asked him, “What do you think of kids?” Like it’s the most natural question in the world, like what do you want for dinner? She asked him, and Roger didn’t say anything for a while. Just sat there with his guitar in his lap. What did he think of kids?
He must have been wearing a funny sort of expression. She laughs, a soft giggle that sounded better than any of the music Roger was writing. She leans against him, bony shoulder bumping against his. She’s gotten so skinny, they both have, and not just from the lack of food.
Skinny like skeletons, sick looking, hair falling out, gashes through their wrists. No.
No, not yet. Now April is beautiful.
Now she is alive, and she asks, “What would you name them, if you had a kid?”
“Kurt Zander for a boy and Billy Kim for a girl,” Roger answers after the shock is gone, and it really doesn’t seem like such a strange question. Lots of couples probably talk about kids, right? Only, it did seem odd to bring it up now and… “April, you’re not…”
She laughs again, and Roger relaxes. “No, of course not,” she giggles and Roger smiles at her, kissing his girl. “But one day…”
One day Roger would find her sprawled out in the bathroom smelling like death which smells like shit. They never tell you that. They never tell you that suicide smells like a decaying corpse, that it isn’t some beautiful.
They never tell you that the paramedics don’t even question why the body of your dead girlfriend is covered in vomit. They’re use to people throwing up on the scene.
No, no, no. He couldn’t think about that, had to get out.
No, not April, he couldn’t save her. She stuck his blades in her wrists and no, fight it. Don’t think.
Beep… Beep… It’s a lulling, mechanical nose. He’s laying back in bed, cold, can’t move, but nothing hurts.
“She told me about Roger… She’s worried about you.” Who is that? It isn’t Mark. Roger isn’t use to new voices, only Mark. Mark and his friends and sometimes doctors or nurses to say the same thing every damn time. No changes, nothing.
Who is in his room, talking to Mark? He knows he has to be there, Mark never leaves him. Safe from the images of April spread out, bleeding, cut open. No, not again.
Deeper, Roger tells himself, get deeper and don’t think. Not about Mark, not about strangers. Not about hospital rooms or razor blades. Just…
“April?”
He presses his hand to the white bathroom door. He can hear her choked sobs, but he wasn’t here. He couldn’t stop her. It’s unfair, he couldn’t stop her.
“April?” Roger grabs the handle, shaking the door. The cries are getting louder, feeling his head. He never heard anything like this. Never had a chance to save her. “April, I’m coming baby…”
Please, God, let him open the door. Jerking and fighting with it, clawing away at the paint and he can hear her dying, goddamnit. Screaming and bleeding, he can actually hear it, the sound of her heart slowing, fighting off the pain of open gashes in her wrist. Roger shouldn’t know what that sounds like.
He never had the chance to save her.
“April!” Listening to her die like Mark is watch him, no don’t think it. Just get to his girl, his April, open the door.
“Calm down, baby…” Roger pauses, looking over his shoulder at the hand on his shirt, nails painted a rainbow of colors and chipped down. April smiles at him. Calm, beautiful.
He can still hear her screaming for him in the bathroom. She changed her mind, she doesn’t want this, Roger please. Please help me, call the hospital, please, I don’t want to, you’re supposed to help…
And she smiles and wraps her arms around him. “It’s okay, baby.” Nipping at his ear, because she knows how much he likes that, giggling at the shiver that goes through him. She laughs and leans back on the bed, taking out her little kit. “It might pinch a bit.”
Roger rolls his eyes. Make up covered eyes, his dad would kill him if he saw. Not that Roger cares. He’s so different from that kid back in the suburbs now, make up and everything. He’s still nervous around her, though, because April can do that to a guy. She’s so full of life, charm, sex. You have to be nervous around her.
Picking at the trashy sheets, Roger tries to smile confidently. It isn’t like he’s never had heroin before. He’s smoked it plenty. A needle just seems scary to him, like when he was little and had to get the flu shot. Needles and shots hurt, not like April, who can hurt but only out of love and passion and the sex. “I’m not a baby, April.”
Only he is, in a whole lot of ways, just a baby. Too new to the streets still. Too hopeful. Too overly romantic, and April knows this and she laughs again, crawling closer as she ties off his arm. “Don’t worry,” she whispers, pressing the cold needle to his skin, and it would be sexy as hell if Roger couldn’t feel a sharp point inches from his vein. “I’ll take care of you.”
Roger, please, I changed my mind.
Licking his lips, he looks down at the needle before glancing back to April, her eyes and hair wild, her smile fierce. He’s over romantic, she knows that. He’s young and in love and would do anything for that smile. “Naught nurse is really only fun when you’re naked,” he jokes, trying to be more confident, more of the punk rock star he wants to be.
And April laughs again, and the needle goes through his skin.
“It’s alright, baby,” She whispers against his ear, tugging him back towards the bedroom, away from the screaming, the clawing. Please, Roger, please, oh God, I can’t get up, Roger.
“No!” Pushing her off his back, Roger lunges for the door, shoulder square against the wood. Not again, he can’t do it again. The withdrawal, the loss, the funereal and her parents and thinking about her every night. He doesn’t want heroin, he wants April. “April!” Screaming for her, don’t give up baby, he’s going to get through this door. It’s his head, he can get through this door if he just pushes and slams against it, don’t stop screaming and don’t give up.
The noise in his head, the noise in his room, it all feels like it’s bound to explode. He just wants to get to her. Save April this one time.
He’s not going to wake up, not until she’s safe.
“Fuck!” The door gives way, breaking off all together and Roger stumbles into the bathroom. Into the living room, the white light streaming in from the street.
He holds a hand up to his eyes, looking around the bright white room. Where is she? He knows she’s here, he can smell her, that shampoo she always uses. He loves that smell, it means she’s hear.
Smiling, he shrugs off his jacket, walking to look behind the couch, in the kitchen, in the bathroom. She giggles, giving herself away.
“Found you…” Roger opens the bedroom, leaning against the doorframe and grinning at her. She looks like a kid in his shirt and boxers, eyes crinkled in a smile and hair in her face. It smells like her shampoo, like nights at the club, like a new addiction to hit his system.
“Of course you did.” Sitting up, she stretched out her legs, back arched, trying to look sexy. Only she looks like a little sister in his over sized clothes, curves all covered. He laughs and goes to fall at the foot at the bed, at her feet. “I wasn’t really trying to hide.”
“Come here…” Roger holds out his arms, and she fits right in, pressed up against his side, curled around him. They’re warm, so long as they stay pressed together like this. “Mimi?”
She twists her head up, hair still all in her face. Some gets in Roger’s mouth when she kisses him. Tastes like her, too. “Yeah?”
“I found her.”
“I know.” Laughing, she lays her head on his chest, and he takes in a deep breath. He doesn’t really remember what the shampoo is called or what it really smelled like. He just remembers loving her, and the smell, and everything. “You’re safe now.”
Title: Flicker, Flash & Fade
Characters/Pairings: Mark, Roger/April, Roger/Mimi (to be Mark/Roger)
Rating: Pg-13
Word Count: 4,690
Summary: Worse than Roger dying is Mark watching him clinging on and unable to accept that this is it. He's spent every day by his bed, waiting on Roger to break through and come back to him, unaware of how blissfully at peace Roger is struggling to stay trapped.
Story: Act One: Scene One and Two, Act Two: Scene Three and Four
Flicker, Flash, and Fade
Act One: Scene Five
If he could get a little closer, no…
Closer, please. Mark can see his finger tips, stretched way behind their limits, aching as they force themselves to stretch out. He isn’t even sure it’s possible, for finger tips to stretch, but in his mind he keeps chanting. Closer, closer, closer. Willing them to keep getting longer, getting there. Inch by inch by inch, if he could just reach a little further.
His hand keeps growing, pushing, trying so hard. Closer, closer. It’s right there, it’s right there in front of him and miles and miles away, but he knows if he could just get even a little closer, he could grab on.
Someone in the back of his mind keeps talking, and Mark wishes he would stop because he’s reaching, almost there, so close. He just needs to keep reaching out and he’ll make it, but the voice is there to bother him, prodding at him. Try and remember your friend how he was, part of the grieving process before you let go.
No, don’t let go. Keep reaching out, through the dark, until he can’t even see his arm around, his hand completely gone but he has to keep reaching. Keep going until he can pull him back. Find him.
“Jesus!” Mark opens his eyes to blinding white, and it takes a moment to adjust. He’s slumped over the hospital chair, arm fast asleep from where he was leaning on it all night, head still swimming with images. The dark is his head refuses to mesh with the horrible colors on the hospital walls.
In the background is the mechanical beat of Roger’s heart, and once again it hits Mark where he is, like it hits him every time he wakes up. Every now and then, especially when he’s fast asleep, it will slip out of his mind for just a moment. And then it hurts again, waking up to the same damn scene. Hospital scenes, they never last this long in the movies. It’s only ever for a quick shot or two, and then the person is dead or at home.
Right back here in limbo, the space between the next to acts where Roger is floating, or the thing that looks like Roger anyway. The thing wearing his skin, sagging and bruised and pale. The person with his long hair, grown out and curling around his face now. The thing Mark falls asleep next to, waiting for some sign of life, the movement of death. Anything, anything at all.
“So, this is what happens when you move out of your mother’s house? You start to curse like a Christian.”
Still shaken from waking up in the hospital, even after a week of waking up in the same damn chair, Mark takes his time to stretch out, trying to pop his spine back into place. He doesn’t know who would talk to him like that, but after so long of getting sleep only an hour or two at a time, after so long of watching his best friend turn into a fucking corpse that they have clinging to life just so Mark gets to witness every second of his death, he’s found his ability to give a shit about anything has been shot.
Being stuck in a rerun of the worst day of your life, every day, will do that to a person.
The guy who spoke to him is hunched over, leaning heavily on a cane. His skin is sagging and sallow, covered in lesions worse than even Roger’s. And he’s smiling, bright and kind, right at Mark. “David?”
“Hey there…” The guy, the walking death guy that happens to look like an uncle he once had and love sits next to him, shaking so hard he almost falls out of the chair. “You’re mom called, told me about… Roger, right?” He lays a hand on Mark’s and his skin is warm, but only barely. Other than that, it is like Roger’s hand, looking ready to snap off any moment, and yet he’s still smiling. Why does he keep smiling like that? “It’s nice to see you again, Mark…”
This is just a test, he realizes, to see if he could possible hurt anymore. Turns out he can.
*
Seventeen should be old enough to understand things, especially if you happen to be a seventeen year old who spends his summer locked away in his room watching foreign and indie movies, trying to copy the looks with his own camera. An Arriflex, Ari for short, and his first love to whom he writes love notes to in the form of trying to repeat what he sees on the screen of these small budget movies. Most of these movies are about sex, drugs, cousins loving cousins, government power abuse, family abuse, boys loving boys, war, terror, and more sex. They are not innocent movies, and Mark is hardly some naïve suburban kid. Sure, he spends time at the JCC doing family friendly actives like learning Hebrew and how to tango, but the things that really stick to him are black and white French films where everyone smokes and fucks.
His lips movie along with dialogue he doesn’t really understand. He pushes his glasses up his nose and gets this serious look, like he’s struggling to solve a math problem for his SATS, his entire future at stake. Honestly what he is thinking is how did the director get that shot? The camera couldn’t possible be pressed between them, could it?
Mark was far from an innocent seventeen year old boy. Not that many seventeen year olds are all that innocent, anyway. But at least he isn’t sitting around his room watching porn (well, not straight out porn, and not all the time) and somehow, it makes Mark feel like he’s more grown up then anyone around him, and he should be treated that way.
Still, his mom seemed to think he was an idiot, or at least still her little ten year old boy who thought that girls were gross and had never seen a pair of breasts up close. She seemed to think all him and Nanette ever did was tango, and even if she knew more happened, she was all to happy to repress the idea and go along thinking of Mark as a little kid.
As part of this denial, when Mark asks whatever happened to his uncle, his mom doesn’t even look at him. She just shrugs and says, “Oh, you know… What would you like for dinner, honey?” The kind of answer you would give a five year old when you wanted the, to stop asking so many questions about where babies come from.
Of course, nothing pisses of a teenager more than being treated like a child.
“Mooom…” And probably the whiny voice doesn’t help to make Mark’s point that he was an adult, Goddamnit. “Come on…” Mark had always been close to his uncle, possible because David did treat Mark like an adult, like filming wasn’t just some passing fad but a real passion. He even got Mark his first real camera, and so would always be mark in his mind as a Truly Great Man. Besides, David was just cooler than anyone at school, any other relative and not just because of the camera gift, or the fact that he willingly took Mark up to New York on day trips just to spend time in the city with him, or that he didn’t lie to Mark about the big stuff.
Well, as far as Mark knew.
“You already know he moved out to California with Robert.” Everyone called David’s boyfriend Robert. Never Robby like his friends, never his boyfriend or partner. No one even ever said roommate, since that could be too close to the truth. Just Robert. “I don’t know what else to tell you….” And then she went back to making dinner, ignoring him and shrugging the question off again. It just makes things worse.
“He hasn’t called.” Mark points out, slumping down in the chair at the table, pouting and generally acting like he was seven instead of seventeen. “And no one has talked to him in, like, a month. Isn’t that weird?” Only maybe it isn’t too weird, since no one really talked to David all that much anyway, other than Mark and occasionally his mom, but even she stopped talking to him and about him a while ago. It was like they were trying to phase his uncle out of his life.
Only David is the only person who listened to Mark talk about his films, the ones he hasn’t started yet but is planning on, the ones that will change the world. David is the one who showed Mark how to use a condom, bought him his first drink and sat him down to explain to him why Reagan was ruining the country. David was the only sane adult that Mark knew, and he wasn’t just going to forget about him.
“I don’t know what to tell you,” his mom said again, and Mark couldn’t keep arguing in circles all day. And then David never really did call, and Mark had his films and college and, eventually, his girlfriend and a sick roommate to take care of and just… life got in the way. It seems selfish, but it’s true, and when you‘re losing friends and lovers, you just have to add people to the list and move on.
Given enough time, everyone can be phased out to just a few memories.
*
“David….”
Mark still can’t believe this, even after swearing that nothing could shake him up. Fucking amazing what life will throw at you just to prove you wrong. This can’t be him and even if it is, how can Mark remember his face after this long? Sure, he has pictures and even films but, well, this isn’t David’s face.
It’s the same, almost, but beaten down, weathered out. Sick. This is too weird, too much. All of it spinning around in his head and making no sense at all. Fuck, he’s going to be sick. His stomach turns, but that is about it. Not like he’s eaten anything in two days. There is nothing to throw up.
The worst part is that this person, this corpse like person that could be David, just keeps smiling. It isn’t a bright, gorgeous smile, it’s the same smile Mark gets from everyone else. Pity, hurt for him, a sad and pathetic smile. “How are you holding up?”
“Where the fuck have you been?” Of all the things he could have said after seeing his uncle for the first time in, God, how many years now? Seven, right? Has David really been gone that long? Mark doesn’t feel any more grown up than he was seven years ago, holed up in his room with bad French films. A little more tired, but not much else.
David pulls his hand off Mark, placing it over his cane. The metal end wiggles under his trembling hands, banging against the hard linoleum. Mark doesn’t mind. At least it’s something to listen to other than the machines. “It was your parents decision,” he says, as if Mark understands what he’s talking about. “After I found out I was sick, they figured it would be best if you didn’t know. I mean… Eight years. No one lives eight years with this, Mark. We thought one, two at the most. You shouldn’t have to hear that.”
That only made it hurt worse, his head with all these new thoughts to take in. David is here. David is sick. David didn’t tell him because he didn’t think Mark could handle it. He’s just like every one else in his life, lying to try and protect Mark like he was a kid. David is dying. David is saying all this right in front of his best friend, currently in a fucking coma. Why would he say this in front of Roger? Not that Roger can hear him, but why would he rub it in that he got eight years when Roger hardly gets four?
Mark doesn’t want to hate David, it’s just all so much to take in that his thoughts scramble up and come out like that. It’s unfair. He shouldn’t have to lose Roger, and David disappeared so long ago he might as well have already been lost.
It’s probably just his lack of sleep, even the urge to sleep is slowly dying out as his body becomes use to just sitting in place, staring down at Roger in wait, but he can’t really stop all the thoughts bouncing around in his head. It would be easier if David had died after a year or two, didn’t show up now and remind Mark that sometimes people pull through for longer than others, people like Collins. People like David. And then some people get to fucking waste away in a hospital bed, making their friends watch every agonizing second until they want to pull the plug themselves just to stop it from dragging out any longer.
It would just be so much easier if every just died already and Mark didn’t have to punish himself by watching.
“Your mom called,” David continues after the long pause, where Mark can’t speak because anything he said right now would be hurtful, and he wouldn’t really mean it. At least he has enough sense to keep his mouth closed, not letting all those loss thoughts escape. “She told me about Roger… She’s worried about you.”
Sometimes it feels like everyone is worried about him, and no one is worried about Roger. Maybe everyone else has given up. Maybe everyone else is smarter than Mark is, and why he hates himself for clinging to this idea of Roger, the passionate and life filled Roger who could never, ever die because rock stars don’t die, maybe everyone else is right. On some level, Mark knows they are, and he wants so bad to just move on.
You’re dead, Roger. He wants to scream it. He wants to tear out all the little cords that are supposed to be keeping him alive. He wants to move on like everyone else has. He wants so much.
You’re dead, and I’m stupid for sitting here, waiting for a dead person to wake up.
“You look like you need sleep…” How can David just come into his life like this and tell him what he needs to do? Mark knows what he needs to do, and even if he hadn’t figured out by now that eating and sleeping and moving on where what would be good for him, he has plenty of people to tell him that every day. David didn’t need to fly all the way back to New York and nearly give his nephew a heart attack, ruin his opinion of him, just to tell him he needs some more sleep. “Why don’t you go home for a few hours, get some sleep, take a shower…”
“David.” Mark doesn’t mean to snap like that. He’s not a bad guy. He’s nice and goofy and, yeah, a little to obsessed with his film that sometimes he forgets things like eating, showering, his girlfriend, but he’s a nice guy. At least he likes to think he is, or was before he spent so much time trapped in a small hospital room with a corpse. “Look, if you came back just to tell me what to do…”
“No…” David sighs, running a hand through what little hair he has left. He might still be able to walk, but he doesn’t look much better than Roger. Finally, it hits Mark, the hurt and the pity and no, he doesn’t want this man to die. He doesn’t want to see his uncle sick. He loves his uncle, he owes everything to him, meeting Roger and Collins and just being himself instead of being yet another suburban kid with a good job and good home and all that shit.
Maybe his parents did the right thing, not telling him. He doesn’t want to see David dying. He doesn’t want any of this anymore. “No I just.. I know what you’re going through,” David explains, and the smile is totally gone now as he looks down at Mark and, God, he hasn’t cried yet. Not when Angel died, not for Mimi, not when Roger passed out on the floor and wouldn’t move. He hasn’t and he isn’t going to now, but this time it’s fucking hard and it burns at his throat, holding it all back. “I just wanted to be here for you, so you know you’re not alone in this.”
“Yeah…” Mark knows he isn’t alone. He knows that Collins, Maureen, Joanne.. They’re all hurting just as much as he is, they just have to deal with it in different ways. He knows this like he knows that Roger is all but dead, it’s all facts and Mark is a smart kid. He’s figured all this out. But none of that really matters right now. Because it feels like he’s the only one who still cares, and maybe if he sits here long enough… Maybe something will change, and so it doesn’t really matter that he knows it won’t.
“I know,” David says, his shaking hand patting Mark’s shoulder, barely a weight at all. Probably about the same if Roger tried. That same lack of weight, same lack of life. After so many hours of watching your friends die, it all starts to get to you, and not even a camera works to keep your distance. Mark is just starting to figure that out.
Goddamnit. Everyone thinks you’re dead, Roger, so stop pretending and we can go home.
Act One: Scene Six
How he found April…
No. no, no. Something are too raw, to real to be thought about. Roger twists in bed, pulling the white sheets up over his head. It’s warm in here, safe. Like heroin, all encompassing. Nothing can harm him.
She used his razor, taking out the blades, shoving them into her wrists.
She used his blades, his paper to write the note, his bathroom. She had an apartment of her own, but she came over to the loft, just to use his things. Just to get the message across, she carves his razors into her arms and let herself bleed out on his floor. His girl.
God, she screamed.
No, she must have screamed. Before he found her, sprawled out on the titles, blood following the little square pattern. Long gone before anyone found her, before anyone heard her.
When he found April, already dead. Too late to save her.
No.
Roger takes a deep breath and throws the blanket aside, letting it fall to the ground. Why is he all alone in this cold room? Why is it cold at all?
How he found her, laying half over the toilet, stomach acid on her lips. How no one ever tells you that if you’re in enough pain, your body tries to close itself down. You vomit. You piss. You shit.
How he found her like that.
“April.” Roger sits up on his bed, looking around. Where is his girl? Where is her smile? He doesn’t like being so alone.
On the other side of the loft, the bathroom door. The walls to the bedroom are down, he can see it perfectly. White, tale, unbreakable.
“April?”
How she once asked him, “What do you think of kids?” Like it’s the most natural question in the world, like what do you want for dinner? She asked him, and Roger didn’t say anything for a while. Just sat there with his guitar in his lap. What did he think of kids?
He must have been wearing a funny sort of expression. She laughs, a soft giggle that sounded better than any of the music Roger was writing. She leans against him, bony shoulder bumping against his. She’s gotten so skinny, they both have, and not just from the lack of food.
Skinny like skeletons, sick looking, hair falling out, gashes through their wrists. No.
No, not yet. Now April is beautiful.
Now she is alive, and she asks, “What would you name them, if you had a kid?”
“Kurt Zander for a boy and Billy Kim for a girl,” Roger answers after the shock is gone, and it really doesn’t seem like such a strange question. Lots of couples probably talk about kids, right? Only, it did seem odd to bring it up now and… “April, you’re not…”
She laughs again, and Roger relaxes. “No, of course not,” she giggles and Roger smiles at her, kissing his girl. “But one day…”
One day Roger would find her sprawled out in the bathroom smelling like death which smells like shit. They never tell you that. They never tell you that suicide smells like a decaying corpse, that it isn’t some beautiful.
They never tell you that the paramedics don’t even question why the body of your dead girlfriend is covered in vomit. They’re use to people throwing up on the scene.
No, no, no. He couldn’t think about that, had to get out.
No, not April, he couldn’t save her. She stuck his blades in her wrists and no, fight it. Don’t think.
Beep… Beep… It’s a lulling, mechanical nose. He’s laying back in bed, cold, can’t move, but nothing hurts.
“She told me about Roger… She’s worried about you.” Who is that? It isn’t Mark. Roger isn’t use to new voices, only Mark. Mark and his friends and sometimes doctors or nurses to say the same thing every damn time. No changes, nothing.
Who is in his room, talking to Mark? He knows he has to be there, Mark never leaves him. Safe from the images of April spread out, bleeding, cut open. No, not again.
Deeper, Roger tells himself, get deeper and don’t think. Not about Mark, not about strangers. Not about hospital rooms or razor blades. Just…
“April?”
He presses his hand to the white bathroom door. He can hear her choked sobs, but he wasn’t here. He couldn’t stop her. It’s unfair, he couldn’t stop her.
“April?” Roger grabs the handle, shaking the door. The cries are getting louder, feeling his head. He never heard anything like this. Never had a chance to save her. “April, I’m coming baby…”
Please, God, let him open the door. Jerking and fighting with it, clawing away at the paint and he can hear her dying, goddamnit. Screaming and bleeding, he can actually hear it, the sound of her heart slowing, fighting off the pain of open gashes in her wrist. Roger shouldn’t know what that sounds like.
He never had the chance to save her.
“April!” Listening to her die like Mark is watch him, no don’t think it. Just get to his girl, his April, open the door.
“Calm down, baby…” Roger pauses, looking over his shoulder at the hand on his shirt, nails painted a rainbow of colors and chipped down. April smiles at him. Calm, beautiful.
He can still hear her screaming for him in the bathroom. She changed her mind, she doesn’t want this, Roger please. Please help me, call the hospital, please, I don’t want to, you’re supposed to help…
And she smiles and wraps her arms around him. “It’s okay, baby.” Nipping at his ear, because she knows how much he likes that, giggling at the shiver that goes through him. She laughs and leans back on the bed, taking out her little kit. “It might pinch a bit.”
Roger rolls his eyes. Make up covered eyes, his dad would kill him if he saw. Not that Roger cares. He’s so different from that kid back in the suburbs now, make up and everything. He’s still nervous around her, though, because April can do that to a guy. She’s so full of life, charm, sex. You have to be nervous around her.
Picking at the trashy sheets, Roger tries to smile confidently. It isn’t like he’s never had heroin before. He’s smoked it plenty. A needle just seems scary to him, like when he was little and had to get the flu shot. Needles and shots hurt, not like April, who can hurt but only out of love and passion and the sex. “I’m not a baby, April.”
Only he is, in a whole lot of ways, just a baby. Too new to the streets still. Too hopeful. Too overly romantic, and April knows this and she laughs again, crawling closer as she ties off his arm. “Don’t worry,” she whispers, pressing the cold needle to his skin, and it would be sexy as hell if Roger couldn’t feel a sharp point inches from his vein. “I’ll take care of you.”
Roger, please, I changed my mind.
Licking his lips, he looks down at the needle before glancing back to April, her eyes and hair wild, her smile fierce. He’s over romantic, she knows that. He’s young and in love and would do anything for that smile. “Naught nurse is really only fun when you’re naked,” he jokes, trying to be more confident, more of the punk rock star he wants to be.
And April laughs again, and the needle goes through his skin.
“It’s alright, baby,” She whispers against his ear, tugging him back towards the bedroom, away from the screaming, the clawing. Please, Roger, please, oh God, I can’t get up, Roger.
“No!” Pushing her off his back, Roger lunges for the door, shoulder square against the wood. Not again, he can’t do it again. The withdrawal, the loss, the funereal and her parents and thinking about her every night. He doesn’t want heroin, he wants April. “April!” Screaming for her, don’t give up baby, he’s going to get through this door. It’s his head, he can get through this door if he just pushes and slams against it, don’t stop screaming and don’t give up.
The noise in his head, the noise in his room, it all feels like it’s bound to explode. He just wants to get to her. Save April this one time.
He’s not going to wake up, not until she’s safe.
“Fuck!” The door gives way, breaking off all together and Roger stumbles into the bathroom. Into the living room, the white light streaming in from the street.
He holds a hand up to his eyes, looking around the bright white room. Where is she? He knows she’s here, he can smell her, that shampoo she always uses. He loves that smell, it means she’s hear.
Smiling, he shrugs off his jacket, walking to look behind the couch, in the kitchen, in the bathroom. She giggles, giving herself away.
“Found you…” Roger opens the bedroom, leaning against the doorframe and grinning at her. She looks like a kid in his shirt and boxers, eyes crinkled in a smile and hair in her face. It smells like her shampoo, like nights at the club, like a new addiction to hit his system.
“Of course you did.” Sitting up, she stretched out her legs, back arched, trying to look sexy. Only she looks like a little sister in his over sized clothes, curves all covered. He laughs and goes to fall at the foot at the bed, at her feet. “I wasn’t really trying to hide.”
“Come here…” Roger holds out his arms, and she fits right in, pressed up against his side, curled around him. They’re warm, so long as they stay pressed together like this. “Mimi?”
She twists her head up, hair still all in her face. Some gets in Roger’s mouth when she kisses him. Tastes like her, too. “Yeah?”
“I found her.”
“I know.” Laughing, she lays her head on his chest, and he takes in a deep breath. He doesn’t really remember what the shampoo is called or what it really smelled like. He just remembers loving her, and the smell, and everything. “You’re safe now.”