“Mark, I’m sorry about your phone!” he tried, for maybe the fourth time. A white-green semi roared by, throwing up mist and drizzle from its long spooling wall of tyres, and he had to wait until it passed to try again. “I’m sorry, I was only trying to- Mark that’s not a crossing-”
He darted over the little side-road after Mark, picking up his feet to avoid getting clipped by a Toyota waiting to turn. The driver raised his hands at him in a frustrated pantomime behind the windshield.
“See, even this guy gets it,” said Antonio, skirting the car’s front bumper and hurrying to catch up again. “Mark, listen, I’m sorry, I promise I won’t-”
“I don’t care about the phone,” said Mark. Antonio could only judge the veracity of this statement from his sped-up sort of trudge, the hard rigid set of his shoulders inside the soft blue quilting of his jacket, the way his backpack was drawn too tight against his back by his arms set tight in the pockets, like a thing that had been assembled in store to only pose one way, ready to snap if you tried to make it bend.
“Well, okay, but the- that video, Mark, can we-“
“I don’t want to talk about it,” said Mark. “It’s fine.”
“I mean, it’s clearly not fine,” said Antonio, making a sort of wide panicky arm motion that encompassed the whole way they’d come, the bus depot a tiny grey clam-like lump somewhere in the far distance, the great empty stretch of road under the early sun. “You’re not fine, you’re- you’re mad! I can tell you’re mad, and- and this wasn’t the plan-“
“New plan,” said Mark.
“-no, well, just, hold your horses, Mark, could- could you please just slow down and- talk to me? Come on, I- I thought we were over this.”
“We are,” said Mark, to the horizon, or at least the closed-down steakhouse that was in the way of it. To his credit, although he was rather out-of-breath, to most people he would have sounded fairly calm, but Antonio knew him far too well to mix up Mark truly calm and Mark making a cold-blooded, conscious decision not to engage his emotions or his full attention, even if he couldn’t see his face. “We’re over anything we need to be over.”
He was still going very fast. The next intersection had a long pothole-studded gravel trap instead of a kerb, and it just so happened that he stumbled and slowed a bit on the runoff when he came to the next turning, and therefore walked neatly behind the large Securicor truck as it thundered across, instead of straight under it.
“Jiminy Christmas,” jittered Antonio, hopping on the spot as he waited to be able to cross and catch up. When he did, or at least got back to within raised-voice range, he said, “I’m just worried, Mark! I just want you to-”
“What?” There was an edge to Mark’s voice now, something that might have been mockery if it hadn’t sounded so flat. “What do you want me to do? Smile? Turn that frown upside down?”
“You know that’s not what I meant, Mark. Sometimes I feel like that’s the kind of thing you want me to say. Jeez, it’s like- it’s like you’re testing me or something.”
Mark did look at him, then. His step faltered as if his legs had temporarily forgotten which order to go in, almost tripping him, and he stared back at Antonio like he’d just casually remarked that the Everglades had finally lost their patience with the planet and flipped back up into space.
“If you were me,” he said, at last, “if you can imagine that.” He paused. “If you can imagine. If you were me, would you trust you?”
Antonio had to unravel the various pieces of the question’s construction before finding an answer. There were at least less opportunities for Mark to turn himself into a statistic on this block, most of it being a wide fenced-off opening to what had once been a minigolf course. Attempts had been made to catch the attention of passing traffic, the most obvious remaining being a goofy concrete alien about ten feet high. It had probably looked pretty astonishing when the course had been open, when the CRAZY SPACE GOLF sign had been fresh and new, but time and neglect and the Florida heat had not been kind to it. The green-and-pink neon paint was holding on in shreds, and the stained rebar was poking through the concrete in places, giving the lumpy tentacles and clustering eyeballs a grim, zombie-ish look.
“I mean... I trust you, Mark.”
“I bet,” said Mark, drily. “Last time I checked I can’t tear fucking doors in half with my hands, why wouldn’t you trust me? What could I do to you?”
“That’s- not really fair.”
“I don’t have to be fair,” Mark snapped back, so quick he seemed to have been sitting on the response. “But you tell me, what’s fair, Antonio? Personally, I feel like fair is not blaming you for everything you did before you- before you’re telling me you ‘changed.’ See, I don’t get to know what that really means,” he said, taking a few incidental steps backwards, describing a vague shape in the air with the hand not wrapped in a death-grip around his backpack strap. “I just have to believe you’re not lying, and I’m a little short on belief, here. Have you got any idea how much I hated you?”
“Eeegh,” said Antonio, sucking an unhappy little breath in his teeth. “Is, uh, is that a rhetorical-”
“So, yeah, I’m being fair, and I’m testing you. Like how I took you to Dad’s place with me, because I thought watching me dig around and take all that stuff would upset you,” he said, with a clear and vicious emphasis, “if you were still just there to make sure I didn’t make trouble for them.”
“What about the part where your new dad showed up and we pushed him off the balcony?”
Mark looked away, across the empty yellow swathe of asphalt. The rain was getting a little harder, speckling the reflection of the road in his glasses with a fine blueish mist. “That... wasn’t part of the test.”
“So- so when do you stop testing me, Mark? Because- because while you’re doing that, let’s just shelve that for a moment,” Antonio made a sort of cubing gesture, defining the limits of an invisible object between his hands, squaring it up neatly like a whole stack of Better Homes, “just tabling all that for a second here, if we can just have a little ol’ chat about all the stuff we’re doing now? I totally get it, and I get why it’s important to you, but- heh- I just- I’m not sure you know how much they...”
It felt as if he was choosing all the wrong words, but the better ones were hiding. Antonio hesitated, swallowing another terminally nervous chuckle, finding himself suddenly way too far in to put on the brakes, with Mark’s eyes on him and his tongue withering in his mouth. He gathered his thoughts, or at least as many of them that he could drive into a corner. They kept getting away from him, scrambling everywhere like frightened sheep. The place he’d arrived at felt dangerous, heavy, needling in a way he didn’t fully understand. His guts felt tight, the bug drawing close, gripping like it was trying to hold him together.
“I’m not sure you- I don’t think you understand, they really don’t like this kinda thing, Mark. They don’t like having their… they don’t like it when people…”
He struggled.
“I’m worried, if we go too far, I mean, if we don’t stop before… if…”
“Stop what?” asked Mark.
“Well, stop making them mad.” Yielding to a burst of nervous energy, Antonio grabbed a bunch of the front of his shirt in both hands and wiped his running nose and eye on it. “Stop poking that big ol’ bear so much, Mark. Be-”
“How much,” said Mark. “Poking. Am I allowed. To do.”
Antonio thought, not for the first time, that a person really should need to apply for some sort of license to use punctuation like Mark did, as if it was a deadly weapon. The next minute, he was too frightened to think anything at all, because Mark started walking backwards again, eyes fixed on him, and now with a sudden deliberate movement he had stuck out his thumb and was holding it out as he walked, aimed towards the road.
“What are you doing, Mark?” Following again, quite slowly now, Antonio tried to smile, although it felt like the effort nearly tore something, just from the sheer resistance of his throbbing face and everything involved in the mechanism. “Is this another kind of test?”
“Yeah,” said Mark. A few cars had passed without any signs of stopping, and he glanced to the road and stepped closer to the verge, for better visibility. “Sure. It’s the kind of test where I leave, and you don’t get to know where I’m going.”
He kept walking. Antonio watched helplessly, fighting the urge to sprint forwards. It was hard enough for him to hold on to time and place, and his worry for Mark and his panic twisted the world, blurring it until he couldn’t be sure whether he was trying to keep pace with Mark on a long road under the rainy morning sky, or in a black twisting hallway where the ceiling gaped like a ruptured chest, if he was chasing after Mark or if Mark was trailing doggedly behind, or if there was no difference and they were trapped, chained to an unstoppable thing beyond both of them, a turning wheel crushing them both. Struggling to escape, going nowhere, dragging each other along or sitting side by side, his right shoulder to Mark’s left, meaningless cycles of motion and stillness, over and over and over and-
The thought tripped him up, stopped him where nothing physical could have. Somewhere in his head he knew that he did not want to be trapped and he did not want Mark to be trapped, and although when he thought of Mark just picking up and being carried away without him the panic was horrible, that was all it was. The more he thought, the more something else rose under it, hot and lurching, destructive and new.
He stuck out his thumb.
Mark looked at it, and him, his own thumb still out like he’d forgotten it was there.
“What- what’re you doing?”
“Well, I guess I’m helping you get a ride, Mark,” said Antonio, with a kind of cheerful, gritted-teeth mania. The heat was behind his eyes, sending words into his mouth that didn’t come from anywhere he recognized, and he had to work hard to keep them out. “Two thumbs are better than one!”
“I don’t want your help!”
“It’s literally the only thing I can do, Mark!”
“That’s not my problem!” yelped Mark, with a kind of frustrated low-energy flail that nearly sent him into the swamp. “You- you think anyone’s gonna stop for you? You know what you look like right now?”
“Okay, well, you could be a little less personal!”
“You could fix your fucking face,” said Mark, deliberately and very loudly. His voice carried across the maybe ten feet that separated them. The minigolf alien loomed above, almost exactly between, set back a little from the sidewalk, its mouth a yawning cave studded with goofy tombstone teeth. A dirty sign in one disintegrating feeler proclaimed that Nine Crazy Golf Holes could be played for Nine Dollars, including the Unmissable Gravity Well, and that the prizes were Out of This World.
“Wow,” said Antonio, because what did you even say to that, honestly, “wow, Mark, you can’t just ask someone to-”
“Do you think making me look at that little ouchie all day is gonna make me feel- what? Sorry for you? Or bad that I-” Mark made another sharp movement, like he was pushing something sharply away, forcefully sweeping an idea into the stratosphere. Rain glittered off his jacket, sliding across the waterproof quilting in shining beads. His voice was strained and harsh, shivering on the edge of fury. “I don’t feel sorry for you!”
“I don’t want you to! I just want you to be okay!”
“I AM OKAY!” screamed Mark, spit flying, taking a wild kick at a small rock. It spinged across the space between them, smacking into the base of the concrete alien and splashing off into the hidden swamp. “I’m as okay as I need to be to get this DONE!”
“Sure you are!” yelled Antonio. The heat in his insides burned through the last of the things holding it in place and snapped free, clawing out of him in a violent burst, just as loud as Mark. “Great, then I’m okay too! I am so amazingly okay right now! Clearly! Because only people who’re totally okay and truly happy with where they are in life wind up SCREAMING AT EACH OTHER OUTSIDE THE CRAZY GOLF!”
They stared at each other, across the distance. If nothing else, Mark finally looked startled. He glanced up at the alien, as if he’d only just noticed it, but Antonio barely registered his surprise. He had started, and now he couldn’t stop.
“I can’t fix this, Mark! I can’t fix my face, I can’t fix what happened to you, or what I did to you, I can’t fix ME! I would if I could! I don’t want to look like this! I didn’t ask to be like this! I didn’t ask to be made with something all hecked up in me, if that’s even what happened, I didn’t even ask to be MADE!”
He struggled for words. Above the sign, the forest of badly-painted concrete eyeballs rose to the cloudy sky like so many grubby grey balloons. Some of them looked horribly like they were looking at him. Mark was definitely looking at him, speechless, like he’d just beamed down from whatever neon-crazy-golf-based planet the alien was supposed to be from.
“Everything’s just hard, and… weird, and… I don’t know what I’m doing,” said Antonio. He felt tired, leaden like something only half-alive as the heat faded, like half of him was inert stone dragging down at the rest and it was an effort to even keep talking. It didn’t even really feel like an admission- could something be an admission if it was so clearly written on your face? It was as if something had popped inside of him, and even the black goop slowly dripping from his chin didn’t feel like it mattered enough for him to wipe it away. “I don’t want you to feel sorry for me, I don’t want you to feel like you’re- stuck with me, but… I can’t help that while I’m with you, while I- while I know I’m helping you- at least I feel like I’m... doing something right.”
There was a distant, bassy rumble, the sky clearing its throat. The hiss and spatter of the rain falling around them picked up into a new gear, and a grey curtain came sweeping across the road and the dull lights of the few passing vehicles, blurring everything, driving the winding rivulets dyed dark from Antonio’s feet to the gutter and plastering Mark’s hair down into his face.
The overhang of the crazy-golf-alien’s mouth was an okay sort of shelter, damp and stale-smelling and a bit buggy. There was a sort of moulded lump near the floor against the back, a rough low bench flaking with streaks of neon-pink paint, part of some long-gone photo opportunity.
Hugging his knees, Antonio watched a mosquito land on his arm, tiptoe its way fussily between hairs and raindrops, legs poised and antenna quivering with dainty care, picking out a place for its delicate proboscis. He watched it dip its head and pierce his skin, pause, twitch, convulse, head and body and legs twisting like a bit of paper curling in a flame, and fall stone dead from his arm.
“I just wanted you to understand,” he said. Mark was watching the rain, or at least he presumably was, between the condensation and the strands of wet hair stuck across his glasses it was hard to tell. “I know you know what you’re doing, Mark. I’m not gonna stop you. I’m just... worried, about afterwards.”
Mark looked down into his own lap, and smiled. Antonio could have put up with a lot more than the difficult scene they’d just floundered through- any number of additional personal comments about his face, for example- rather than see that smile. There was no surface to it, nothing for anyone outside to see, only a cold inner humour that said plainly it wasn’t meant for anyone else except Mark. Mark, appreciating the joke in something nobody else could grasp. Especially Antonio, who was only there, who’d only said the words.
“Afterwards,” he said, like it was the punchline. Antonio sat quietly, knocked numb on the inside by the truth that had just sidled up between the two of them in this musty shelter and hit him smack between the eyes, the truth he’d felt in the heart of him but put aside for days, turned from and stopped his ears against and refused to hear fully, until he couldn’t ignore it any longer; that Mark did not want, or mean for there to be, an afterwards. Here, in the calm of the storm, it didn’t feel like a revelation, anything to be gasped at or leapt upon; just a sad, simple fact.
“I thought I’d died,” said Mark, in the same neat, matter-of-fact way. “In there. I knew I was dead, or as close to dead as it was ever... going to let me be. It’s not really like I was thinking, but it’s like... you know things. I knew it was over, and this was my... afterwards. I knew I was never going to be able to fix anything, or make any of it better or... save anyone else from walking into the same trap. And I knew- that’s what I deserved.”
He paused, his throat jerking as he swallowed.
“So everything since you got me out of there... every day… it’s just been one more day to fix my shit. Just a whole bunch of one more days I never thought I’d get, to- to at least make them pay for everything they did. If I could,” he said, slowly, arming wet hair out of his eyes, “I’d leave everything no worse than it was before I started helping that fucking thing. I- I can’t do that, but I’m sure as fuck going to make them wish they never chose me. And I keep waiting for when the other shoe drops, and I’m going to lose the chance to fix anything, or it’s going to turn out I never had a chance in the first place. I keep waiting to find out how they’re still- playing with me.” This, with difficulty, through a clot of hatred in his throat. “But... what I have, while it lasts... you gave me this. If it’s real… it’s because of you.”
There was a silence. Antonio sniffed. Mark had given him some napkins from the Waffle House, and he was holding a wad of them to his face.
“I can’t think about afterwards,” said Mark. His voice was thin, small. “I don’t think I… even want to think about what that’d… be like. I… don’t know.”
For once, there was no sarcasm, no front. As far as Antonio could tell, he only sounded as weary as Antonio felt, blank, and honest. It was strange to hear Mark speaking to him in this way at all- as if he was another real person, and there was genuinely something he wanted him to understand.
“I hoped we could find that out, Mark,” he said, gently. “I’ve just started too, you know.”
They sat, quiet, the rain beating on the alien’s hollow shell and trickling through making a hollow, near-musical sound. To Antonio, this silence felt different, on the scale of all the silences he’d known- awkward ones, hating ones, dangerous ones, empty ones. This felt only like tiredness, without the tight restless anxiety that had followed them up until now. Despite the wet, the pouring rain and the smell like an old sneaker forgotten in the bottom of a laundry hamper for a year, it felt curiously comfortable. Mark took off his glasses, pulling a corner of his decrepit grey sweater from under his jacket and drying them off as well as he could on the ravelling wool.
“We get this done,” he said, at last. “Then we talk about afterwards. Okay?”
“Okay.”
They looked at each other. Antonio kind-of-smiled, in a tentative, barely-there way that didn’t pull too much at his face, and Mark, replacing and poking his glasses, which always wanted to lean towards the mended side, as straight as they would go, almost sort-of-smiled back.
Squishing the napkins into a wet black ball and tossing them into the rain, Antonio watched Mark pull his phone from his pocket, wipe the rheumy fug from the screen on his sleeve, and start to type.
“We’re not hitching a lift?”
“Fuck that,” said Mark. “Nobody in their right mind’s gonna stop for us. I’m calling an Uber.”
