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Oren wasn’t my best friend at first. He wasn’t even my friend at all but I never thought I’d have to kill him. Not til later.
We were in Sixth Grade in the same homeroom, in Mrs. Crosslyn’s class. Oren was one of the mean kids who were good at sports and I wasn’t; I didn’t care, but I figured he hated me.
I should have been good at school and mostly I was. But Oren was better. Equal to me in spelling I guess, better in math. I had trouble concentrating on the timed multiplication tests, a hundred problems, five minutes. I was too slow. Oren always finished first, always got them all right. All hundred. Every week.
Oren probably didn’t even notice me. Not until the first thing we did together anyway.
I was sitting under the big blue vacuum chute outside the shop classroom, piling rocks up on the curb at the edge of the teacher’s parking lot. The vacuum sucked up wood and metal shavings and dropped them into drums near where I was sitting. It was off during the lunch period, and I sat here because it was out of the sun and kind of away from everybody else. Oren was standing over by the soccer goal posts, swinging off one of them, talking to Joe Allen. I couldn’t hear anything they were saying, they were too far away.
I saw Mrs. Crosslyn’s car, parked over in the sun, the windshield blinding me, and the name just popped in my head: Mrs. Crosseyes. It was a mean name, and I felt bad, but I never said it out loud. Oren couldn’t have heard me if I did. But I turned to look at him, and his eyes shined like the chrome on Mrs. Crosslyn’s bumper, and I knew he heard me. He heard me say it in my head. I saw him smile, but I felt him smile too. We overlapped, Oren and I. For a second.
Later that afternoon, Joe Allen stood up in homeroom and said “Mrs. Crosseyes, can I go get a drink of water?” and I’m not even sure he meant to say that, but he got sent to the office for detention anyway.
I could feel Oren again, where he sat toward the front of the classroom, close to the door. He was looking at me, but inside my head.
It was a week later that I saw a long, white bus pick Oren up after school: Ascension Church Camp, Montauk.
Oren swept his blond hair out of his eyes as the door flopped open for him, and he looked back at me, crossing the basketball courts behind school on my way home. His eyes locked on mine, blue meets brown, and I could almost hear him then. I could have sworn he said words inside me, but I might have been wrong, like when you hear your name and realize you’re alone in your house.
A few days later, Oren woke me up in the middle of the night. There was no one in my room, I was alone, but he was there. Moonlight burned through my window like a bar of sterling silver, lit my sheets, my bedspread printed with ringed planets, spaceships. I kept quiet. Closed my eyes again, pretended to sleep.
“Lukas,” Oren said. “Come outside with me.” He was talking into my mind, not into my ears.
I thought back at him: No.
“I know you can hear me. I hear you too. I won’t tell if you won’t.”
I won’t, I said.
“Come outside.”
I knew what he meant. My stomach felt cold and thick, like I was being examined. Discovered.
“I saw you in my room last night,” Oren said into me. “Don’t tell me you haven’t watched me sometimes.”
My physical face turned red, my cold-iron stomach dropping. The night before, I had dreamed I was in Oren’s bedroom, a small room in a big beige house, all new windows and clipped lawns.
It wasn’t a dream, is what he was saying.
“Come outside.”
“I imagined that, just like this,” I said, with my voice.
“No, come to my room now.”
I sat up from my body, and I was there. In Oren’s room, the room I thought I dreamed. Oren lay on his bed, his body anyway, the bullion bar of moonlight across him. We had the same Jockey underwear. His bedspread was back-to-back rainbows, more grown-up than mine, mature.
I could see myself here, the part of myself I came with, and I could see him, within that physical form that was his. Oren talked without moving his lips.
“Rodion. I like that name.”
“It’s not my name, how do you know that name?” I demanded, a mental door slamming. My parents had named me, for Crime and Punishment, the book they bonded over in grad school, for Rodion Raskolnikov. I would never use that name, I go by Lukas, my middle name, and always have. Lukas Haan.
“You tell me mine now,” Oren said, Oren Trenton Lawson, whose mom and dad weren’t married when he was born, whose dad wasn’t his relation biologically, his father not the man his mom married.
I told him that, thought it to him, and I knew more about him then just because I decided to. This person, not real to me at all before, was laid out for me. I saw Oren lying there, and it was me, his thoughts were my thoughts. Oren saw me, my room, my closet, my knowing, and it was all his own.
Did shared secrets finally make us friends? I don’t think there was any option. We knew too much about one another, too instantly, to remain separate. We faded into each other, more and more in the weeks that followed, but the overlap began that night.
The next day we saw each other at school, like usual, but had no contact that anyone else knew. We pretended school was the same. We pretended we were the same. But we talked without speaking a word, all day long.
“No one can know,” Oren told me.
“We should tell everyone!” I doodled on my notebook in pre-algebra. I saw Oren, felt him really. He was struggling with an essay in Howard’s World Studies class and I lent him a thought or two, moved his pen through sentences. I was better at World Studies than him; he would get a 92% on the essay.
“We should tell everyone Oren,” I kept up, trying to convince him, while helping with his essay writing.
“No,” he said. “Our secret.” Our secret now, together, like my fear of heights, his fear of spiders, my dislike of cold water, his wish that his mother loved him (he was correct, she did not), my embarrassment at having less money, at living in a condo instead of a real house.
This was our secret alone, these secrets were our secrets.
“I want to bring you on the bus with me,” Oren said on Friday of the following week. I was tying my Reeboks after school. We were walking part way home together like we did now, having a secret and secrets we shared. During school we continued to not know each other as far as anyone else knew. After school we would meet at the SOUTH WOODS JUNIOR HIGH sign, and then we would talk with our mouths and voices, sharing sounds. Being friends.
I knew which bus he meant.
“What’s the Ascension Church whatever?” I asked. I dusted my hands on my Levi’s and we kept walking. This bus went somewhere I couldn’t see in Oren. If he had memories of where, I didn’t know them yet.
“It’s not really a church bus,” he said. “It’s a camp. For kids like us.”
“Kids who know things?”
Oren spoke the answer into my mind. He dealt me a picture just like an ace of spades, a picture of a place further out Long Island, a beach path with soft sand and a concrete palace of underground rooms. “Bunker” is the word that appeared to me, and I could feel the sand of the path on my feet, like flour with sticks in it, there was a broken slat fence leaning into the sea grass at the sides of the path, funneling it out to the beach, to the waves and ocean beyond. I could smell it, the saltwater freshness of it, and there was a smell of oil too, diesel fuel, this place was cold and alive, and I was running, my bare feet splashing in the soft sand, pricking at every step from the sticks in it, the ocean was out there, ready for me. Someone took my hand.
It was Oren. We were at a stop sign. A truck honked, but not at us, its windshield flashed in the sunlight.
Oren let go my hand. “I had to get you back,” he said. “Sometimes you go deep, huh?”
I guessed I did. There were times when I felt lost, like I was somewhere else. My mom or my sister Vy would say “Lukas, hello, where are you!” I truly never knew. But I was starting to figure it out. Figure out that I really was somewhere else, sometimes.
The Ascension Church Camp bus picked us up for spring break the following Friday, one week later.
Mom had just been happy I was going someplace with my friend, she signed the form I put in front of her right away. Then she read it, Ascension Church Camp Montauk. Her only question was the Church part.
“I didn’t think you wanted to go to church?”
“Mom, I don’t! It’s Camp, not Church, they have archery!”
I thought into her then. You’re not worried about this.
I had done things like that before, sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn’t. This was different, I knew. Oren and I overlapped, it was two against one.
“I’m not worried about it,” Mom said. “Just have fun okay?” She hugged me then, and I hugged her back. I didn’t feel bad. I hadn’t made up her mind for her, just nudged her past something she would have gotten past anyway. I helped her.
Oren was excited. He had to have a partner, he said, and he knew I was his partner.
“For what?” I asked.
“For Scouts!” he told me, out loud. Like the other day with your mom, he said into me. Only bigger.
Oren’s thoughts made my toes tingle, like high places or champagne on Thanksgiving.
Then it was Friday. Oren/Lukas, we, waited for the bus together, smelling milkweed and black-eyed susans in front of the condo complex where I lived.
The bus pulled up, and we stepped into the milk-white inside, light filtered through the painted windows. There was no archery at this camp, I knew that much.
We dozed as we rode, but it seemed such a short time, then the bus lurched, the emergency brake squeaked. I woke Oren.
The doors at the front flopped open, and we descended silently, carrying our one backpack each. The bus driver, a flat-featured woman, stared ahead, and revealed nothing to us.
Off the bus, we stood on a grassy headland. I smelled that ocean, from when I had been here in my mind, when Oren showed me.
“Where is everyone?” I asked. I was expecting a camp dropoff, parents and campers everywhere.
“We’re here. We’re probably the only ones this week.” Oren shouldered his backpack. His was as light as mine, neither of us packed much. “They have uniforms,” Oren had told me, and so I only packed a couple of t-shirts and a toothbrush and toothpaste.
I followed him along a grassy ridge, to a place where it sloped down and I could see the bunkers. The palace from my mind. The word sizzled in my thoughts again, and I could get a glimpse of their insides, concrete block warrens, freshly painted.
“They’re from World War II,” Oren said, leading us down to a notch on the hillside. “We got them after, for Scouts.”
Inside the notch there was a portal with a large steel blast door. A numeric keypad sat at the edge of the doorframe, and beside it there was a large red button. Oren pushed it. There was no sound. Maybe a buzzer somewhere inside, I thought.
The steel blast door clicked open with an outgasp of air, which smelled of rust and a trace of public-space cleaner, like a bus stop.
Oren pulled the door open and we entered a square room, with a single wire-caged bulb lighting it from above. A blue bench sat against one concrete wall, and on it were two neat piles of clothing.
“We change here,” Oren said. He started to undress, and I pulled my shirt off. We weren’t shy around one another anymore, we had seen everything about each other already. More than that, we knew what we thought of everything. Changing clothes together was nothing.
The piles were thin coveralls, one set each. They were light pink, a gentle material like paper but stronger and softer.
“No underwear, no watches, no socks,” Oren said. “Put everything in your backpack.”
I pulled on the coveralls. “Do we get shoes?” I asked.
“No but the floors are super clean. You’ll see.”
I zipped my pack closed and we stood, barefoot in our off-pink coveralls under the dim bulb. My toes dizzy-tingled nonstop now, feeling Oren/Lukas mixed in continuous thoughtstream.
I wasn’t afraid because of us. He and I were going to be fine. Light as feathers in the gauzy coveralls.
The door in the rear wall clanked. There was a buzz somewhere within. A notification for someone that this door was unlocked.
They knew we were here.
The door pushed open then and a tall, rosy woman entered, thin and straight in a cardigan sweater and black slacks.
“Lawson and Haan,” she said. “I’m your Scout Leader, Mrs. Anderton.” She turned then and led us through into a dim gray-green hallway. The door hung open behind us. I wondered if someone would come close it.
“The door will shut automatically,” Mrs. Anderton said.
The floors were smooth and bore an edge-to-edge application of epoxy or some other industrial sealant, sea green. The floors and walls were immaculately clean like Oren said, and I could feel the slight give of that coating as we walked.
We entered a small dining area, like a miniature of the school’s cafeteria, orange plastic chairs and wood-grain laminate folding tables. The walls here were gray-blue, the paint thick, like the floors felt.
“Dinner is in ten minutes. I will see you after.” Mrs. Anderton left us at the door. Oren found a table and we sat.
“Are there other people here?” I asked. I wasn’t whispering, but thought maybe I should be.
“They’re here somewhere,” Oren said. Then he spoke into my thoughts. “You can’t see anything either right?”
I answered: no.
Dinner arrived then, pushed on a cart by a Hispanic man with watery eyes. He said nothing to us.
There were only two portions, one for each of us, two sets of dinnerware, stainless steel, two glass bottles of Coke. The food was better than anything in school for sure, better even than I would have at home. Roast beef with gravy, fresh broccoli, baked potato. I even ate the broccoli.
No one checked back, no one joined us, nothing else was brought.
After dinner, we had to Scout.
Mrs. Anderton retrieved us, brought us down the epoxied hall to another room, another heavy door. There was a plastic sign on this one, like a doctor’s office: Scenic 2a.
The room was painted a mist-pink shade, lighter than our coveralls. It contained two cots, deep green and worn, Army surplus. One had a number stenciled in Roman numerals, a IV.
Oren took IV, and I took the other. Mrs. Anderton remained standing, a yellow legal pad and Bic pen in her hands.
“You may leave your eyes closed or open,” she said. “We’ll start in a moment. There’s no need for concern. We’re just getting a baseline today.”
I closed my eyes and merged with Oren. I knew his eyes were open. He might close them later.
We overlapped.
“This is easy,” he thought into me.
“There is a ship,” Mrs. Anderton said. “Off the south coast of Long Island. It is blue. It is technically within the twelve nautical mile territorial boundary.”
Oren’s breathing and my own, interlinked. The only sound aside from her voice.
“Tell me the name of the vessel.” Mrs. Anderton moved slightly. Her pen scratched.
“Tamerlane,” Oren said.
“How big is it?” I asked.
“It is not the Tamerlane,” I heard Mrs. Anderton’s pen scritch again. I kept my eyes closed.
“Tamerlane is a fishing boat,” Oren said.
“How big?” I asked Mrs. Anderton again.
She inhaled through her nose. “It is a large ship.”
I knew I was supposed to be looking, but not how, not where, I couldn’t concentrate, there was a multicolor blotch eroding the dark behind my eyelids, kaleidoscope, TV static winding on a black screen.
Then pictures of a ship. They appeared in multiples, Polaroids flipped onto a tabletop in my head; one, two, three. Then two more.
“Yorimba,” Oren said. I could see the name then, on the rear part of the ship, the word stern floated through me.
“Tell me about it,” Mrs. Anderton said.
“Lukas, go,” Oren whispered.
“It’s a container ship,” I said.
Mrs. Anderton’s pen scratched. “Yes.”
“She’s flying the Singapore flag, but that’s not her home port.”
“What is the home port?” Mrs. Anderton tapped her pad.
“Algiers,” I said. I didn’t know where Algiers was, wouldn’t know the flag of Singapore if it were right in front of me, and then it was, a picture of it, as if on request. Red and stars, crescent moon.
“She’s bound for Kingston, Jamaica, doing nine knots in open water.” The words spilled out of me, I was too full to keep them. I felt Oren sit up on his cot.
“How do you know that?” he asked.
“Mr. Haan,” Mrs. Anderton’s voice was flat. “Tell me. How do you know.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Someone on board knows.” I slitted my eyes open, let some of the fluorescents seep in. I felt pasty and pulled open, couldn’t focus.
Oren came and sat beside me. That helped. I was sour and chilled, starving suddenly though we just ate.
“Very good. Both of you,” Mrs. Anderton said. “The Tamerlane is a fishing vessel, Mr. Lawson. Not far off the starboard bow of the Yorimba, as it happens.”
“Is it blue?” Oren asked.
“I don’t know, Mr. Lawson. But I’ll find out.”
After baselining, I didn’t think I would make it to our room. I couldn’t walk right, I was wrapped in cotton, my eyes closing on their own.
The beds were comfortable. I fell into mine and was asleep right away on a sensation of floating, ocean swell surging somewhere, a tiny speck on an invisible sea, carried in darkness.
Oren and I woke together, shuffled to the bathroom. New jumpsuits were laid out, we showered and brushed teeth, then padded to breakfast hair still wet.
I felt great. Rested. We ate pancakes and Oren drank syrup right from the fat-lady bottle, drizzling it into his mouth so he didn’t put his lips on the squirter tip and I laughed at him and made him drip on his cheek.
Mrs. Anderton took us back to Scenic 2a. That day was coordinates. Oren of course got this right away, and I didn’t, but we overlapped continuously now. What he understood, I understood. I wanted to get it for myself, but I thought I would have time later.
Mrs. Anderton showed us a bunch of numbers. “Tell me what you see there,” she said.
They unfolded for me as a space, easting and northing, a location.
I laid down on my cot. I had IV today. Oren came and lay beside me.
There was so much empty. Dirty, scrubby weeds. Prairie, is a word I knew for this. Oren held my hand.
There were pointy tubes in the ground, they were huge.
“Missiles,” Oren said. “But not really.”
“They don’t work,” I said. “They’re a display.”
“There’s a big red brick fence with a gate, and an old sign above it.”
Mrs. Anderton’s pen scratched. “What does the sign say?”
Oren squeezed my hand. “Francis E. Warren Air Force Base,” I said. “It’s in Wyoming.” I had only a general idea of what Wyoming was. Cowboys and way out West.
I was asleep then without meaning to be. My body emptied like a battery on short, my self taking up all the energy to see further.
The next day, if it was the next day, we woke, showered, dressed.
This was the day Mrs. Anderton explained the Chair Room to us.
It didn’t sound that hard. We would sit in the Chair, and “amplification techniques” she called them, would be used. To see if we could see more, further, better.
“I heard of the Chair Room,” Oren said into me. “Senior Scouts.”
We followed Mrs. Anderton into a tissue-blue hallway, our bare feet padding on the flexible epoxy. At the end was the Chair Room.
The Chair itself was not a chair. It was a flatbed trailer with cables strung from it. There was a plastic coating over it, and technicians moved urgently in protective suits. Like an operating room in a garage.
“Hop up,” Mrs. Anderton said, the words unsteady on her tongue.
Oren climbed into the Chair itself, a webbing harness like a hammock, suspended in a mesh of wired things and monitors. I climbed in with him. It seemed intended for one person, a grown-up, but it fit us both well enough.
“Oh, Mr. Lawson. The Tamerlane. It is blue.” Mrs. Anderton shut a door behind her, a seal activated with a crump of air compression.
The lights above us dimmed.
Two people flanked us, one on either side. Garbed in white protective suits, masks and hair coverings they were impossible to read as male or female. They moved our bodies so that we were accessible, our shoulders touching. I reached for Oren’s hand again, and he took mine.
It’s okay right? I asked silently.
“It’s okay,” he answered. I felt what he meant. It’s okay I think.
The technician on Oren’s side used surgical scissors to slit through the chest of his coveralls, up and down the arms and legs. My tech opened my suit the same way. Electrodes were attached to our temples, downy wires snaked away, more attached to our chests. Something was velcroed to our wrists, our ankles. I felt someone attach something between my legs.
A needle stabbed my left arm and felt like it hit bone. I saw the other tech inject Oren, and his fingers laced with mine. Whatever was in the syringes entered us, frigid stillness. Blank liquid, crystal alloy inside our mind.
I woke up first. In our room. Both of us were laid in Oren’s bed, my head hurt, the lights were low but they burned my eyes like coals. Oren, beside me. Bruises on his shoulders, at his throat. My arm had some too, I knew there would be more if I looked.
But Oren breathed easily. I could touch him. We still overlapped, he was not seriously hurt. Just asleep, or unconscious still, from whatever was in the hypodermics.
The next day, the fourth day, I was sick.
“I can’t do it,” I said when Mrs. Anderton came to get us. For the Chair Room again we assumed. “I don’t feel good.”
It was true. I didn’t. A purple bruise had spread across my chest, along with those on my arms. Oren showed me more on my back and my buttocks, through his eyes. I really didn’t feel good. Not at all.
“I’ll go,” Oren said. “It’s no problem, I’ll go.”
I still don’t know if he was simply brave. Or maybe really believed this, that it was no problem.
He followed Mrs. Anderton and slipped around my thoughts, a warmth. “Get better,” he thought into me. My stomach was a hard heat. I needed water. There was some left in a bottle near the bed, and I drank as much as I could, then curled up and let Oren think quiet around me and I slept again.
I knew before the door opened. It was later, and I wasn’t even really awake yet, but I could feel the wet hurt of him. The door clicked ajar and I opened my eyes.
A man I had not seen yet, black official clothes without tags or emblems. He dropped Oren onto the bed opposite me and shut the door.
The lump didn’t look like Oren. I jumped over to him, hugged him not too tight so as not to hurt him any more. I felt him over, his skin, his bones, his wounds, his bruised inside. My hands came away slick with blood.
His eyes were mostly swollen shut. I asked him with my mind, asked him what happened. He couldn’t answer.
“What happened?” I whispered. “What happened?” I put my lips to his ears. “What happened?”
I leaned close to his mouth, hoping for a reply, but there was only a series of clicks, the flexing of his swollen jaw and throat.
I slid my hands along him, trying to find the source of the bleeding, determine the injuries. There was no single answer. I could only think that he had been dropped from a height, or hit by a car.
I turned him on his back. His belly was swollen, fingers blue. I didn’t understand how to help, what to do. Oren, who I trusted, we overlapped, without him I was unmoored. I was just me, one Lukas. I pulled him to me, the bloody mess of my friend, I held him, held onto him, could not let go.
But I had to.
He pressed a single thought into me, a thumbprint in preschool clay. “You have to take me outside.” Then no more. Just silence where we met.
The tears came then, hot and oily and I wiped my eyes on his shoulder. He was right. I had to. I understood what to do.
I pulled Oren close. Then I gripped his throat on either side of the Adam’s apple, pressed down hard, closed the blood vessels that surged there. I felt that pulse, pressed harder still.
After minutes, how many I couldn’t count, the pulsing stopped. The Oren sack rested against me, skin already cooling. He was gone.
“Let’s go,” Oren said. Oren himself, without the body sack, no need now for the remnant of pain and bones. “Let’s go outside.”
I stood. We overlapped, stronger now. Two against however many. We.
I opened the door. It was unlocked. They always were, I supposed, after all where were we to go? I ran down the hall, quiet on the epoxy, smeared with Oren smears and my own. I didn’t hurt now. Not my body anyway.
I passed a girl in the hallway. She was alone, older, threadbare and confused. She wore the same light pink coveralls I did. She didn’t say anything as I passed. I saw her face was bruised. Had she been stronger than Oren, and hurt less? Or not as strong. I didn’t know.
Oren and I reached the main door, the blast door. “Open it,” we said to each other. My fingers touched the numeric pad and the magnets holding the lock released. Two against one. The door clanked open.
Outside, I ran into the sea smell, toward the beach I knew was ahead along the path. Past the broken-down slat fence in the sea grass sea. I felt the flour sand between my toes, felt the prick of the little sticks. Behind us somewhere was a noise, an alarm sounding. We were found out. The scent of the ocean began to lift me. I turned to see him, Oren, smiling at my side in the morning sun. We were outside now. We were okay.
Oren took my hand and we ran together, across the powdered beach and toward the surf beyond.