Away We Go - Emil Ostrovski Page 0,4
Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, Groucho Marx’s pithy grouchiness, cheese fries, all of it so fragile as to be reduced to nothing by a really big rock sling-shotting randomly through space. An end so banal it’s featured in at least a dozen AwayWeWatch movies starring large-muscled men who shout, “Get it together, man!” at their panicked teammates during times of high apocalyptic stress.
Yes, the world is full of clichés.
Pandemics, killer comets.
All that’s missing is a zombie or two.
Before we add zombies to our end-of-the-world recipe, though, I must visit the most confusing person in the world.
His name is Zach, and he is the main reason I stick around.
POSSIBLY THE MOST CONFUSING PERSON IN THE WORLD
Possibly the most confusing person in the world is lying in bed with his laptop on his lap top, listening to an audiobook through AwayWeRead. He grins weakly upon seeing my face. He’s pale and sweaty, sometimes has difficulty catching his breath. We end up talking about vegetables while an adolescent narrator named Winston describes in a haunted tone a seemingly utopian city called City, the last bastion of human civilization on a ruined earth.
“Today’s a good day,” Zach says, playing with his shirt collar. He’s the only guy I know who doesn’t look like an asshole with the top couple buttons undone. “I ate a baby heirloom tomato. Managed to hold it down, too.”
“A baby tomato,” I repeat.
“A baby heirloom tomato, kid, just popped it in my mouth. Someone had them in the fridge down in the multipurpose room—”
“You stole someone else’s baby tomato?”
“Baby heirloom tomato,” he says, nodding vigorously. “I know, I know, I know. I’m a monster.”
“You always were a bad role model.”
“The worst!” he exclaims in triumph. “I’m a madman.”
“Lovecraft called. He wants his Mountains of Madness back.”
He laughs, and his laugh pokes a small hole in my heart, as does each line of banter, each repartee. He is trying heroically to pretend things aren’t awkward between us, and I am trying heroically not to make things more awkward by asking him why they have to be awkward in the first place, when his presence gives me, I don’t know, such an ease of being. He makes the emptiness lift, briefly, makes me feel—tangible.
It doesn’t hurt that, even sickly and soon to depart, he is beautiful in the morning light. He pushes himself up a bit and presses a key on his laptop to pause the audiobook’s narration, leans back against his headrest with a sigh.
I want to say something memorable, to do something other than make him laugh. I want to make him feel something more dangerous than amusement.
“What were you listening to?” is what I ask instead, even though I already know. Dystopians are the latest craze on AwayWeRead. Everyone at Westing, myself included, reads every dystopian they can get their hands on and then talks shit about anyone who reads every dystopian they can get their hands on, since what we’re supposed to be doing is paging through Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks or Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw. But who is to say that some stories are better than others? When your time is limited, who is to say you should spend seven hundred pages trodding through the decline of an infuriatingly mediocre family of German merchants when Winston’s adventures are so much more fun, and better paced? And if there is no such authority who decides which stories are better and which worse, then does that mean all stories are equal? And if all stories are equal, what does it mean to live a good life? Is there such a thing? And if there isn’t, then you start to feel like a whole lot of nothing, again. . . .
“You’ll make fun of me,” he says with a smile. “God, you’ll make fun of me. Promise me you won’t?”
“I make no guarantees.”
He laughs again, and there goes the pain in my chest.
“The City of Light,” he says, and eyes me with expectation, waiting for me to crack. He adds, “You can’t tell anyone. Especially not our fellow Polo aficionados. What would they say about their glorious leader?”
“I made no guarantees,” I remind him.
“We’ve established I’m a monster, though, kid. Do you want to mess with a monster?”
“Do your worst.”
“Don’t make me eat another baby heirloom tomato, Noah.”
“Say baby heirloom tomato. One. More. Time. Zach.”
Before he can say what I know he wants to say one more time, my phone buzzes. I ignore it, but he nods at my pocket.
“Could