“I want to stay here for a while,” Michael says, later, when we are back in the cabin.
“It might not be a bad idea,” I agree. “And yet, I am not willing to stay here with you, and I am not willing to travel to Lassador without you, so you’ll have to come with me for a time.”
“You should be with your family,” Michael agrees. “And I guess my family should see that I’m alive. What did they do to get a crazy kid like me?”
I don’t say that I’m sure they had a hand in his madness, and of course, we can’t leave today. The brothers invited us to eat with them, and then we stayed for prayer, but now we are back here and tired all over again.
“I’m taking the train back. There’s only one stopover. Chicago. We can be in Lassador in two days,” I say. “And you can be back here whenever you feel you need to be.”
That night we sleep in the same bed, naked and embracing, do all the things lovers do.
“Are we together again?” Michael whispers, pressing his bearded chin to the top of my head.
“It’s such a weird question. How do you gauge something like that? Yesterday I thought you were dead.”
Then I say, “Have you learned to love things?”
“I think,” Michael says, his thigh pressing between mine, “that I’m learning I always did love things.”
“Well,” I say after a while, “If you’re going to end up back here for a time, then why say we’re together? When you have had all you need of this place, and we can live our life together, then we can be together.”
“Yes,” Michael says, his lips pressed to the back of my head. “Yes, that makes sense.”
When I left Lassador it was in Dalton’s car. Now I return in Michael’s. My parents came here because my dad got a job when I was eleven, and I’ve been here ever since. The city is cold and grey like a dirty window, that winter time dirty window where, once you clean it, you look out and things are still grey, dirty and frozen. The motor plants and the factories we pass over as the expressway winds toward downtown are old, and the buildings of downtown are tall and grey. Approaching East Birmingham there is a dumpster fire near the vacant hotel and a congregation of the homeless in fingerless gloves with gas stained faces, holding their hands out to the blaze. We pass under a viaduct and I see a clumsy, swastika spray painted onto the scum of the wall. The lights of our car shine on the puddles and trash and briefly on a man in an orange winter coat curled into a nest of blankets and luggage. Snow collects along the curbs and the cars are stained with salt and mud. The expressway takes us over the black, swollen river, away from downtown and to the north side.
“Why are we still here?” I wonder. “Why did we never leave?”
I can’t help but shake the idea that Ohio is an unhappy place, and if we’d left it long ago, we might be better off. Lassador is so huge. I am almost oppressed by its size. It doesn’t have the charm of a small town or the function of a properly big one. It isn’t like Chicago. It’s like a post industrial Midwestern city too huge for a personality, that you must drive forty minutes across to find anything you need. When we were in high school, Saint Ignatius was (and is) on the north side, I lived on the High Northside and so did Michael, and yet, the north side fanned out so far that it took a good twenty minutes to get to school or to Michael.
“I wonder if part of depression is not knowing you can move,” Michael says. “I know part of it is being afraid because no matter where you go, you take yourself and your shit with you.”
Two nights later we make the rounds, heading to Mom and Dad’s house for a later Christmas dinner and presents. I want to pretend that at thirty gifts don’t matter, but they do, and later on that night we go to Michael’s mom. Back in my apartment we sit watching the news. There is a Black mother, and I can’t pretend she looks like my mother or my life. She’s in the Old West End talking about the police violence and how they locked up her son for no reason, and there’s a small riot outside the courthouse that must have happened while we were coming back into town. It would take us forty minutes and a drive across the river to get to the Old West End from where we are in a part of Lassador that’s almost no longer in the city, and yet the report makes me feel unsafe and claustrophobic.
“They beat up my boy and it’s a wonder he wasn’t killed, but why should it have to be a wonder?” she demands. “Why should we be worried the police will kill us?”
Michael says, “This shit makes me angry. I’m going to walk around the block and have a smoke.”
“It’s cold as fuck out there,” I say.
But the truth is, even though Michael is very, very white, the news makes me scared for him walking out there in a way I wasn’t when we were in North Dakota.
“Don’t worry,” he says with a grin. “We live too far out for me to run into any cops.”
Later he says, “When I used to get angry it turned to sadness, and then despair, and then I wanted to die. I wish I wanted to break things. I wish anger made me want to change the world. But that’s not how it’s been for me. So I need to take walks. I need to sort my shit out again.”
I’ve stopped worrying about him. You have to. I wasn’t even worried when he went out west until Kate called me. I shower and am going to bed when he comes back and gets in the shower. I’m asleep with only the little light on for him when he comes in, turns the light off and climbs in bed beside me
“You’re still awake, right?”
“A little.”
“I was thinking. You may be right. It may be time to do something new. When I get back, let’s think about that.”
“Michael, as long as we think about it we’ll never do it. Let’s just do it.”
“You’re right.”
“I know.”
“Good night.”
It’s still Christmastime when he heads back out west. I am tempted to say, want to say desperately, “If you ever think about killing yourself again, at least let me know you’re planning it. At least let me talk you out of it.”
But I think that’s not the way to start a new life. That’s not the thing to say. All day I stop myself from talking that way.
But before Michael leaves, he leans down and kisses me deeply. As our lips part he says, “If I plan on doing something stupid, I’ll let you know. I won’t leave you out ever again.”
And then he adds, “But I don’t plan on doing anything stupid. I’m done with that.”
As the train rounds a long turn near South Bend, Indiana, Michael wonders, can you possible be done with that? Done with being suicidal? Can you simply wipe your hands of your suffering and sadness, shrug them off and move on? That is insulting as fuck, insulting to the people who couldn’t be done with it. He remembers the girl his age at Morelton who couldn’t be done with wanting to die and who finally was able to carry it out. He remembers Tony Fabian. If they simply couldn’t “be done with that” were they losers? Was his sheer strength of mind and ability to escape suicide a sign of his superiority? And if it was, why the fuck didn’t he feel superior?
South Bend is an ugly town, or at least the part the train shows is. Now he understands the phrase wrong side of the tracks. People won’t put their trains in pretty places, so passing through these towns all you see is the ugly places and goddamn, this summer there is plenty of ugly to see. But it doesn’t matter. He looks at the backs of ragged houses and it doesn’t matter. He passes cars on cinder blocks and it doesn’t matter. . Someone has spray painted a huge, detailed image of Abraham Lincoln with a bullet hole in his head and Michael is so surprised, he takes out his camera to film it as he approaches. The train has, miraculously, chosen this time to slow down as he films the wonder of the murder of the sixteenth President, and later, when he rewinds it, he makes out the Latin words: “Sic semper tyrannis”.
They pass through ragged high weeds and ditches of discarded auto parts and none of it matters. Above all of those are high trees. Untouched by trash are the sparkling creeks they pass over. There is the reservoir pool, green with summer, trees and algae, sparkling like a strange jewel, and now, as they break through it, there is the high sky, looking like God polished it just for them with clouds high as skyscrapers piled up and up and over each other.
And Michael sighs because when he said so many months ago after Christmas, I’m done with that, he felt freed, redeemed from a devilish grip and thankful. Thankful to God? Maybe. And now, as Jay lies passed out, head lolling inelegantly, and he props his best friend up a little, what Michael really feels is relieved, released, overjoyed.
“Jay,” Michael whispers, leaning forward and nudging Jay with his foot.
In response Jay gives a great snore.
“Jay,” he whispers again.
James Strickland murmurs something, and Michael gets up, sits next to Jay and whispers, unnecessarily “Are you asleep?”
“No,” Jay says tiredly, “because you won’t fucking let me be.”
“Are we still going forward with our plan?”
“I always go forward with my plans,” Jay says.
“Leaving?”
“Yes.”
“And we don’t know where.”
“And we don’t even care,” Jay grins without opening his eyes.
“See what I did?” he says. “I made a rhyme. Now please let me go the fuck back to sleep.”
