Every day now Gordon is somewhere: standing in the hallway with his hands in his pockets when I flick on the overhead light, ducking quickly into the water-heater cabinet, pulling the little door shut behind him. Sometimes I whisper from the other side, “What are you doing?” But he doesn’t say anything and when I open the door he’s gone. Other days I’ll go out to start the car in the morning and he’s lying faceup in a snowdrift by the driveway, just staring up at the dark sky. When I go out again later, the sun is coming up and he’s gone again. He’d find it funny, I’m sure, how uncomfortable I get. He’d probably say, “Stop acting like a girl.” He was always trying to scare me and shit. Now he’s dead. And I’m left with this.
When he first disappeared it felt like I was lodged in a narrow pipe, stuck like a clog, waiting to be flushed—and then, months later, like I was dead too, a shriveled-up corpse inside another bigger corpse, trying to find my way out. Grief builds up around me like plaque.
The whole time, people kept saying he’d run off to Chicago or Bowling Green with some girl, or his dealer. Gordon wasn’t someone you could count on. But I knew. Somehow.
Now the fucking van kids come and drag me out into the cold to party all night. “It’s a proper funeral!” they say. “A fun one! We have to do it, for Gordon! You need this.” Like they’re trying to help. It’s an excuse to use drugs. Everything is.
We head out into the country, where someone’s parents own a cabin and a giant barn. From the stables to the barn doors there is dancing. Everywhere is the smell of animals and animal waste. The barn looks like it’s been cleaned, but the smell lingers. Someone has tied a bubble machine to a rafter and it fills the air around us with trembling orbs. We haven’t been here ten minutes and for some reason I’m grinding, half-assed, against this Persian chick I hardly know from Steelville.
Eventually, I do some back flips—straight up and then down. I almost land in the spot where I jumped. Everyone has cleared a spot for me. The Persian chick gets swallowed by the crowd like a weak drink. The subwoofers are covered in forty ounces. I wonder if I could down them all. When the spotlights rise, I watch the liquid shudder inside the bottles. The synthesizers are squealing and the sound lights up the stables—all red and smoldering. “Holy shit,” someone says, and then I’m pressed between all these fucking people, standing on my toes to see what’s going on. I take someone’s Olde English from the speaker. A tablet has settled in it—almost dissolved. I can see the last orange bit. The “holy shit” was about me, I realize—someone going on about the flip. I just tip the bottle and gulp, taking even the hot froth. The strobe lights go quick and a giant bubble descends like a glass planet—impaled tenderly on a glow stick.
I wonder how I’ll get home.
I watch through a circular window as the snow blasts across the harvested fields. Reflecting in the glass, over the cut rows, a mirror ball revolves. Finally, I break a fucking sweat.
They found Gordon three days ago, after years of searching, and then not searching anymore. His bones and teeth, at least—every piece covered in bright algae. They showed his mother a photo of the spot. They offered her the remains. She called me and told me to go get them. “They’re yours,” she said. “That doesn’t make any sense,” I said, but she was like, “You damn well know it does.” She hung up on me. The body was not a body anymore. What was it? A joke told incorrectly? A handful of glowing stones?
Or something. Go figure—he was always saying this, meaning he expected bad things to happen. And pretty much they did.
Girls bounce by—tits, big asses—their slick ponytails pivoting behind them like the tails of actual ponies. What else? The Marishi sisters pop and lock on a speaker box wrapped in blue Christmas lights. Their expressions match—bitchy—and their limbs glitch in unison. Some punk in an arm cast fakes a sweep drop near the kegs. The other people here are totally gone. Only their sweaty bodies are left, shiny and empty as athletes.
I hide beside the fog machine, freestyling, trying to lose myself. I used to be able to do that. I attempt a couple of air flares. When I open my eyes the girlie boys have huddled around me like pets. Like they want something.
Gordon was a terrible dancer. He didn’t know what to do with his arms. His body flailed. He could fight though, and somehow was graceful as an animal at it.
“You don’t come to the Shoe Factory anymore,” the boys say, bumping hips, one after the other in a long row, before sending it back again in the opposite direction. “The kid on the Wavetable tonight is serious. Too bad it’s a Yamaha. That’s fucked-up about Gordon,” they say.
Man, they’re rags, downers.
That they would even say his name, it splatters like poison.
“My buddy says it’s probably not Gordon,” the one in red glasses confides. “He says it’s some hippie who drove his car into the strip pit five years ago.”
Fuck you. What do you know? Everyone wants to siphon the grief out. They can’t suck hard enough. It never rises to the surface.
I just stare at their made-up faces, balancing the empty beer bottle on my fingers before I fling it, stunningly, really, into a garbage can a few yards away. I squint at the boys. The coils of the portable heaters glow like little burning fences, corralling everyone.
Someone says, “My brother has a Yamaha, dude. Shit sounds like Phil Collins giving anal-birth to Celine Dion!” Their laughter is thin and sharp as a pocketknife.
“What’s wrong with Collins?” I ask. I’ve interrupted the joke. They’re trying to refigure their taste now.
I should leave. I should catch a ride back into town, head into the snow and wait for this pill to kick in. Tonight the world is an icy eyehole. I want to crawl inside it, I want to burrow in it, to be so cold it burns. But, I see Gordon here too. Damn, and he’s climbing onto the speaker box with the Marishi sisters. He wedges himself between them. Or creases? Or has grown there, all of a sudden, in that infinitesimal fucking space between their bodies. It’s like Gordon owns them. He’s grinning a big ol’ clown grin, because he thinks girls love to get owned. He gives them both a leg so they can ride him—two kids mounting a seesaw. The Marishis are trying to climb Gordon like a little ladder.
All three of them flicker like an evil robot before the strobe—a single human engine on the verge of total fucking transformation—turning more and more monstrous between the stabbing segments of light.
Something is happening with the pill.
Over the throb of the bass beat, one of the girlie boys, the one with rhinestones glued to his face, yells, “Who’s your ride? You drive out here?”
Shut up.
“I came in a van, but the van kids are doing horse in the stables,” I say.
Again, the girlie boys laugh. “Ride the dark horse!” they say. Together, they make a sick sound. The music keeps changing. The lasers scan the barn like they’re searching for a clue. I’m scanning too. No way I’m riding with them.
What is Gordon now? A memory? A missing older stepuncle? My grandmother’s boyfriend’s brother? I never know how to say it. People put us together. We were a team, even when I didn’t want to be. He was a hand down the front of my jogging pants in the bedroom of an abandoned house last summer.
“I see them,” I say. In a corner stable, with hay stuck to their faces and arms, the van kids are fucking. It looks as if everyone, somehow, is penetrating everyone else.
Was it August yet? In that abandoned farm house in Pope County? A man becomes a skeleton, gets divided into mismatched parts. He’s all wrapped up in the world, and then ripped from it. His skin slips, or is torn off his bones by the jagged chassis of his buddy’s vintage El Camino. He gets done in—a hot blade into the fat heart of his small, stupid life.
Someone has flung open the top half of the barn doors. In spirals, in giant breaths, in wide sparkly crests the snow comes, stinging, and suddenly all the people are turning toward it and yelling and covering their eyes and dancing. Now it’s like the DJ is playing for the snow, toggling his synthesizer as the gusts fold into the barn. I’m chilled, instantly—a burnt-out filament.
“I’ll be outside,” I yell to the van kids, who are far off, still penetrating one another, not listening.
Outside people are gathering, trudging like pioneers through the drifts, passing before the electrified snowflakes in the headlights. Is it after midnight? Is it morning? There’s someone I know—Gordon, again?—dressed like a girl, slamming the car door on a silver Benz, a black feather boa surging between his throat and the wind. “Hello, hello, friend!” he calls. It’s not his voice, but it’s Gordon’s body doddering forward like a bitch, in green high heels. His hands are full. He’s holding several glass vials? Test tubes with something living, something fleshy crammed inside each one?
Finally I find the van and stand behind it and let myself throw up.
It was right before he disappeared, I punched Gordon, all awkward, in the neck. I’d aimed for his mouth but missed. “What the hell?” Gordon said to me. “Don’t be such a girl. Stand the fuck still.” It was sweltering. The sweat stung my scratched mosquito bites. Gordon moved his hand around inside my jogging pants until something happened. “If I have it, you have it too. That’s how it works. What’s the point of getting tested?” What? Probably nothing. Total anarchy. It was not sexy—that’s the last thing—not relief or satisfaction from his greasy hand tugging at me, trying to draw it out and use it to flood the fucking room around us. What else? Like he was trying to drown in it? Like I deserve to be left with this, the audacity of a haunting. I get closer to the trees, with the parked cars at my back, and cup some good, clean snow, pack my mouth full and let it melt. I’ve been thirsty. There’s nothing like it. First I was just the sticky clog. That was right after. Now I don’t know. My one reasonable desire: thirsty. I’d break-dance all night if I thought I could sweat it out. But then, like, out of nowhere—damn, he’s so fast. He always was. He’s off in the trees. He’s running. What is that shit? A giant fucking buck? A ten-pointer? Its antlers all dripping with velvet. He’s running after it in his neon heels. “Gordon, dude,” I yell to him. “What do you think? I’m going to follow you?”
I pull my hood up. Hot and cold. Freezing. Burning. What are they? Opposite thresholds that intersect somewhere in our brains? Two extremes that ultimately cross back into each other? Gordon’s like way back in there. He’s bending to get some snow too. His hands disappear, up to the elbows. His skirt is so short, showing off his muscular legs. What the fuck is he doing? He’s like drilling into the snow. He’s making a hole. He’s making a place to bury something. A used condom? A wadded-up piece of paper?
All his boring secrets, and mine. Go figure.
I just stand there and watch and try to make out what’s happening. It’s bad though. It’s really bad. How can he stand the cold like this? Finally, it’s so loud, the deafening burrowing he’s doing, and I want to make it stop so I just go to him, dragging my feet through the snow. When I get to him, he shows me what’s in the hole and it’s hard to see but I’m like, “Holy shit, dude, we really do have to bury this.” We dig. We dig until we hit bottom but even then he says it’s still not deep enough. I tell him to follow me. We start walking, farther into the frozen woods, searching for a better place. He takes my hand and I let him because it’s cold and he seems confused. He has a look on his face, under the fake eyelashes and lipstick, like he’s forgotten what he’s doing or where he was headed.
“I don’t have any friends,” I say. “I’ve never been good at it. I got tested, bro,” I lie to him. “I don’t have it. Why do you think you’re still here, following me?”
“That’s a dumb question,” he says, lifting up my hand to kiss my cold knuckles. “Does it matter why I’m here, man? I just am.” He kisses my hand and wrist several times before letting my arm drop.
Maybe he loves me. It’s hard to say. My breath rolls out like exhaust fumes in the freezing air. I spot the buck again, raking his antlers against a small tree. “There it is,” I say, hoping to jog Gordon’s memory.
“Yes! It’s the wrong season for that,” Gordon says. “We have to do something.” He’s upset. He’s shaking his head, like maybe it’s his fault this is happening.
“Some things just get mixed up,” I say. “It’s been happening to me a lot. It’s not your fault.”
“Hell, I know that, dude. If anyone’s to blame, it’s you. My mother called you. You need to talk to her. She knows. You should just accept that.”
Quickly the wind kicks up, dumping snow from the branches. He lets go of my hand and then he’s gone. I don’t see him anywhere. The buck raises his head up, smelling the air around us. He treads softly into the woods and then he’s gone too. I’m alone out here. I don’t know where I’m at. There’s only the sound of the snow, an infinite amount of crystal particles forming and falling apart for miles in every dark direction.
I’ve never had to miss anyone I was afraid of. Some days all I wanted to know was where he’d went to. And others . . . I was so fucking cold—all the way down to my bones—expecting him to show back up, to be standing in the kitchen when I got home or walk up behind me in the gas station. But I was also hoping, I can say it now, that he never actually would.