“JULES?”
Julian opened his eyes. He was on the floor, in the corner of Ashton’s bedroom, by the sliding glass doors leading to the pool. Ashton was sitting up in bed, having just woken up, staring at Julian.
Julian’s body was stiff from sleeping coiled on the hard wood. Next time he might consider a pillow and a sleeping bag.
Next time? Next time he was going to have a nasty piece-of-shit dream and get so shook that he’d have to walk to Ashton’s house, break into his friend’s bedroom and sleep on the floor like a dog?
“Had a bad dream.” Julian struggled to his feet.
Ashton appraised him. “Bad enough for you to sneak into my bedroom in the middle of the night?”
“Worse than that.”
“Have you considered upping your dosage?”
“Go to hell.”
“What was the dream about?”
Julian waved him off, made a joke, refused to say. But the dream was so awful that before he lay in the corner, he leaned over Ashton’s bed, and pressed his hand against his friend’s sleeping head to make sure it was still warm.
He creeps on black ice, slipping and falling and crawling, trying desperately to get to something in the frozen grass. With his hands numb from the cold, he digs through the hard blades and when he looks at his hands he is missing all of his fingers and black blood is pouring out onto the ice. With the mutilated nubs of what’s left he scratches through the grass to get to the ditch underneath. In the trench, dozens of pale babies, sculptures made of ice, crawl on their cracking and breaking limbs. Julian’s blood drips onto their snowy backs. And underneath their crystal knees lies a dead and mangled Ashton.
* * *
Mirabelle sauntered into his gym a day later while Julian was training Buster. She was fresh and dewy, wearing a strapless, casual, pull-on milk-chocolate sundress. Her hair was styled half-up, half-down in meticulous cascading waves, and she wore open-toe platform sandals, not boots, and lots of bangles on her wrists, bangles that jingled with her every bouncy step. And that wasn’t the only thing that was bouncy. She wasn’t wearing a bra, her perky breasts bobbing as she sashayed toward him, the nipples eye-popping through the thin cotton fabric.
When Julian saw her, he forgot to duck and got walloped by the guy getting ready for a title fight.
“See, this is why you should switch to tennis,” Mirabelle said, coming close to the apron of the ring and peering at him through the ropes as he lay on the floor. “If you screw up in tennis, it’s 15-love. If you screw up in boxing, it’s your ass.”
“I didn’t screw up,” he said, pulling himself up and moving his sore jaw around. “You distracted me.”
She smiled like that was the best thing she’d heard all week, that she distracted him. He didn’t smile back. He didn’t, because he couldn’t.
He leaned over the ropes looking down at her gazing up at him. “What are you doing here?” A boxing gym was no place for beguiling gleaming girls.
From her bag Mirabelle pulled out his book. “I went to Book Soup last night and picked up a copy. Boy, do they love you there. You have a whole display. Book’s amazing, by the way. I finished it in one sitting.”
“It’s not exactly The Brothers Karamazov.”
“It’s much more readable. First of all, it’s in English.” She kept on smiling. “I want more. When’s the sequel coming out? Can you sign it for me?” She took out a Sharpie, like he had come off the stage, and she was waiting for him at the barricades, waving her playbill around.
He was sweaty, dressed in a black tank and boxing shorts, in other words barely dressed. She had her eye trained solely on him, while every guy at the gym was focused only on her. Except for Julian. He could barely look at her. He told her he’d meet her outside in fifteen, then realized he’d just asked a girl to wait out in the parking lot for him, knowing she didn’t have a car. Real classy, Jules. He gave her the keys to his Mercedes. “Turn on the AC if you want. I’ll be right out.”
She was sitting on top of his hood with her legs crossed humming to herself when he walked out, showered and dressed for the day: jeans, a collared shirt, a thin black leather jacket.
“I don’t know how men do that, get ready so quick,” Mirabelle said, hopping off and smiling. “It took me two hours to put myself together this morning.”
Julian said nothing. Two hours and she forgot to put on a bra.
“Can you sign my book?” She handed him a pen.
To Mirabelle, he wrote, may you never get sucker punched, but if you do, know how to take it. Best, Julian.
They stood in the morning California sun, she twinkling at him, he like a gloomy Sunday. She tried again. “I learned a boxing joke,” she said. “Want to hear? Why don’t boxers have sex before a fight? Because they don’t fancy each other.”
“Ha.” Julian said ha. He didn’t actually do ha.
“Are you hungry?” she said. “There’s a place called HomeState around the corner from me. They make great breakfast tacos with spicy chorizo.”
He knew the place well. Many mornings he and Ashton ate there before Treasure Box. “I can’t, I’ve got stuff.”
“Always with the stuff. Even busy people make time for breakfast. It’s the most important meal of the day, you know.”
“How did you get here?” He looked around the lot.
“Z dropped me off. She’ll be in Sacramento the rest of the week. So the apartment’s all mine for a change.” A beat. “There’s no one home.”
“Ah,” Julian said, not meeting her eye. “Well, do you want me to drop you off at home or at HomeState?”
There was another brief breathy silence. “Why don’t you come over? I’ll make you breakfast.”
“I can’t, I’ve got a meeting at CBS and . . .”
“What about after CBS? How about dinner? I’ll cook. What do you like to eat? I’ll make whatever you want. Burgers? Steak? I can make roast potatoes and Yorkshire pudding. My mom taught me. I bake mean chocolate chip cookies. You like those, don’t you?”
“Yes, but I can’t tonight.”
“So when’s good? Any night this week is okay.”
His head was swimming. There was nowhere to look. At the ground were her long bare legs and red-painted toenails. If he looked up, there were her glossy smiling red lips and her Bambi eyes. And in between were her eager standout nipples. What was that easy-on, easy-off dress even held up by? There were no straps, no sleeves, barely any elastic. One deep breath, one tug and—
Julian pulled out his phone. “How about I call you.” He couldn’t look into her bright beaming face. She read off her number to him, he punched it into his phone, and she stood next to him, looking over his hand, telling him to press the call button to make sure he got all 10 digits right. Her bare arm pressed against his leather jacket. She smelled of coconut lotion, of freshly washed hair, of coffee and mint breath, of musk.
Julian didn’t call her. A few times she called him, left messages. He didn’t return them. He stopped going to Coffee Plus Food and to HomeState. For the first time in many years, he skipped the gym in the mornings and arranged with Buster to meet up later in the day instead. Maybe soon she’d get the drift and stop calling. He really hoped so. Because the next step was going to be changing gyms and getting a new number.
Nearly every night Julian thrashed through dreams from which he would wake drenched in sweat, panting, sometimes even screaming. He became afraid of closing his eyes at night.
He kept disturbing Ashton with his dementia at all hours. He dreamed of Riley shaking Ashton’s body, shrieking at him as if they were in a fight, not realizing he was already dead. Everyone was in the ditch with Ashton—ice babies, Riley, Julian. He dreamed of dragging what he thought was a man’s corpse through London streets, looking for a place to dump him, but when he threw the man in a ditch, it was Mirabelle. And sometimes, it was Ashton. And sometimes it was Julian himself. He dreamed of being choked, of being pelted with rocks and glass, sometimes with parachute mines, and sometimes with babies.
He dreamed of Normandie.
Pushing, pushing, pushing past the backs of people, like he just had to see what was there, and on the street lay a dead Ashton. And a dead Mirabelle. Unsayable things happened on Normandie, the street he had never been on before last week and which now was a boiling river of blood.
In the middle of one especially smothering night, he and Ashton climbed upstairs on the roof deck, sat in their shorts with jackets draped over their naked shoulders, sat shivering in the dark, high in the mountains, and stared at the gleaming lights of Los Angeles valley, listening for the sound of the coyotes, trying to make sense of things.
Julian hid his face from his friend. He didn’t know what was happening to him. Everything had been all right for years. Since the craniotomy and the induced coma, he had lived mostly dream free. It’s true, when he had been under the coma’s evil spell, he dreamed then, too, though he’d forgotten about what. Something unbearable. In some ways it was worse than this. At least now he could wake up. Then, he was forced to keep dreaming until the circle-jerk doctors deigned to bring him out of it. He had been at their mercy, they never gave him a choice. Had they asked him, he would’ve told them what to do with their fucking induced coma.
He had told Ashton about some of the dreams, about the embattled, endangered girl whom he had just met, whom he barely knew. He didn’t tell him about the worst of the worst—the infant boy in the fire and the heart eaters—which he simply could not put into words. But he had told him about the great burning city and the black screaming caves.
Tonight, Julian told him nothing.
He couldn’t confess to Ashton about the bloodied ice babies shattering like glass over his corpse.
“Please, bro, I don’t need your penance stare in the middle of the fucking night. We have four meetings tomorrow. I need to be sharp, I can’t deal with this.”
“I think you need to make peace with your father,” Julian said.
“What?”
“I know. It’s not easy. He hasn’t been . . . you’re the child, and he’s the parent; you’re not supposed to make the first move. But he isn’t going to. He’s only the way he is because he lost his own father too young, and he doesn’t know how to be a dad to anyone past the age of twelve.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I told you my dad didn’t have a dad.”
“The one-armed man who raised him.”
“You’re nuts. And how did you know he was one-armed? Did I tell you that?”
“I don’t know,” Julian said. “Did you?” The one-armed man walked through nearly every vivid street of Julian’s dreams. Someone in his dreams was always without arms, or fingers, or eyes. Especially Julian. In his dreams, he was always one-eyed and mutilated. He took a breath. “Ash, do you remember how you once told me you wished you could live your life over, so you could live it without regret?”
“I never said that. Live your life over? Now that sounds like a nightmare.”
“You said it. You said you wanted a rewrite.”
“Jules, I promise you, it’s not even close to something I think, much less would say.”
“Your dad lives with a lot of regrets. Let him know who you are. You’ll be glad you did.”
“Yeah, ’kay. I’m going to get right on that. Can I go to bed now?”
“Trust me, Ashton, there comes a time in every man’s life when he says or does something that surprises the shit out of him. The regret thing may not sound like you, but in a few years, you won’t recognize yourself. You’ll stop being the person you are and become a person who says shit like that.”
“So have I said it to you or not?”
“One hundred percent you said it to me. What has your story been so far? You’ve been wandering like most of us, living in all the long minutes of your life. And you’ll continue to have your bright days before you end up alive in the horror.”
“What are you talking about, what horror?”
“Despite your hard knocks, you don’t hate the world or God or the moon, and that’s good. In one of my dreams,” Julian said, “I drifted down a very long river, and at the end of it you were saved. I don’t think I’ve ever felt happier in my life.”
“In the dream or in real life?”
“Yes,” said Julian.
“So now they’re happy dreams?”
“Now,” Julian said, “you’ll go on, like you’ve been going on. You’ll make new friends to go drinking with and for years you’ll sit with them, ceaselessly talking about nothing.”
“Jules, I swear . . .”
“Look, I know you’re a mule, but shut up and listen. I can’t answer all your questions, and trust me, you don’t want me to, but I’m begging you, stop doing the thing you always do. You think you can wade ankle deep in your life, and that everything will somehow work out fine because it has so far.” Julian shuddered. “But, Ashton, some things are not going to work out.”
“What things?”
Julian wouldn’t say. Couldn’t say.
“Is it possible to be slightly less, oh I don’t know—crazy?” Ashton said.
“You want me to be less crazy?”
“Yes—fuck—please.”
“Give Riley back her life.” Like Julian was giving Mirabelle back her life.
“Riley?”
“She needs to be free of you,” Julian said. “I don’t know how else to say it.” Ask him to do something, he heard a wise man’s voice in his head say. If he obeys, he can be healed. If he doesn’t, he cannot.
“Riley and I are great, we made up, we’re all good,” Ashton said. “You do understand that I can’t operate in the real world because you saw something idiotic in your phantom world, you do understand that, right?”
“You will hang them both like puppets on a string,” Julian said, “and the string will break. And everybody will break with it. There will be nothing left.” At last, Julian stared into Ashton’s face. “Nothing.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” Ashton exclaimed. “You need to have your head examined. I think all your old injuries have resurfaced. Who’s them both in that scenario?”
“Maybe she hasn’t come yet. And maybe she has.”
Ashton said nothing.
Julian nodded. “You’re playing it cool. I’m used to it. You act as if nothing is real, or will last, or has meaning. Eventually you’ll be right. By not choosing, you’re choosing. You’re choosing not to choose. You’re choosing nothing, not even yourself. Remember how you wrote that your heart searches all your days for something it cannot name?”
“I never in my life wrote that or said that!”
“You did. You will. It’s written on your grave.” Groaning, Julian looked away. He couldn’t bear to see his friend’s face. “And just so we’re clear,” he said, “in case there is any doubt, I like Riley, I love Riley, but you know that you’re the one I’m trying to protect. You are my ride or die. I’m begging you, Ashton. Let her go—and save yourself.”