38

Ghost Rider

JULIAN DIDN’T LIKE THE WAY ASHTON WAS BEHAVING TOWARD him.

They were constantly arguing. It was so unlike them. But the more Julian regained his strength, the more belligerent Ashton became. He was upset Julian had started boxing again, going to the gym, working out, running. He was upset Julian wasn’t fully committed to Nextel, that he didn’t like any of the girls Ashton kept trying to fix him up with, upset with how he left his ridiculous books all over the apartment. But especially, especially, Ashton condemned how much time Julian continued to spend with Devi.

“What’s wrong with you?” Julian exclaimed one night, after they’d been at each other’s throats about the stupidest bullshit. “What do you care how often I have lunch with him? You go out with Nigel four fucking nights a week, do you hear a peep from me?”

“Nigel is a hard drinker but a good man,” Ashton said, over Julian’s objection. “You on the other hand have sold your soul to the satanic shaman, and your bargain with him has no exit.”

“And your bargain with Nigel does? You’ve never said no to him, never! Look, I’m sick to death of talking about this with you.”

“Your greatest pain is nothing but amusement to that man,” Ashton said. “He led you to the blue hole and fed you to the tiger as a ritual sacrifice. You think you can save her, and he cackles because he knows you can’t, but keeps pushing you to have at it until you die.”

“He doesn’t think I can save her! What are you talking about? You know he keeps telling me I can’t.”

“At the end of every trip, you’re ripped apart, and she is ripped apart. Your body is giving up on you. And he just laughs and laughs.”

“He’s not laughing! He’s the only one trying to help me.”

“Fuck you! I don’t see him here with you, watching you unable to walk on your fucked up feet, yet hitting the gym every morning in preparation for more torture. He’s not watching you die day by day.”

“What about you, my friend?” Julian said, flinging his arm out to half their kitchen counter, overflowing with liquor bottles.

“You know what, worry about yourself,” Ashton said, “and I’ll worry about myself. Is my body breaking apart, literally disintegrating before your eyes?”

“Yes!”

“Fuck off. This isn’t about me. He keeps squawking, you’re blessed, you’re lucky, yet the opposite is true. Who else does that, tells you something is good when it’s actually the fucking worst? Only the devil. And him. You’re killing yourself in front of me, and you wonder why I’m pissed.”

“Again—talking about yourself much, Ashton?”

“Fuck you! I’m never going to Greenwich with you again. Count me out.”

“Did I ask you to go with me even once?”

“Yes, because I’ve been doing it for me.”

“Go to hell.”

“I’m already there, buddy. What, you can’t see me? I’m right next to you.”

“Shut up! What the fuck is wrong with you?”

Things changed. Their camaraderie left them. It was replaced by a dour silence, a pervasive rumbling anger. Their every interaction was bloodied by hostility. Once they were brothers, for twenty years as casual and profoundly close as two unrelated men could be. But now Ashton was acting as if Julian had betrayed him.

“What is wrong with you!” was how their arguments usually ended, with Julian yelling this open question into Ashton’s closed face. “What the fuck is wrong with you?”

And then one night, Ashton told him. “You want to know what’s wrong with me? I’ve been duped. And I don’t like being played for a fool.”

“Who duped you, me?”

“Yes, you. I always knew you wore a costume to reinvent yourself, hell, I helped you pick it out. I helped you put it on. Mr. Know-it-All, Mr. Substitute Teacher, botanist on the side, night class professor, Silent Partner. But now I see my own delusions, and who likes to come face to face with those? Now I know—I only saw what I wanted to see, not what was really there. I thought that under the disguise of a hapless nerd, you were the friendly neighborhood Spider-Man, or, at the very worst, Deadpool. If only!” Ashton stood stone cold, his arms flung down. “But I’ve finally come to realize what you really are. You’re fucking Johnny Blaze. You are Ghost Rider. You’ve been deceived by the devil during your agony of grief. Oh, sure, you’ve been given inhuman endurance and the ability to travel between dimensions, and maybe even some power of regeneration, but in return, you’ve traded away your only life. And fuck knows what else. I can tell by your face there’s a lot you know that you’re not telling me. You’re doing the devil’s bidding, Julian, because you’ve allowed your soul to merge with a demonic force. And for that, what did you get? Fucking nothing. But you’ve doomed yourself to ride the night—a ghost in both worlds, this world and the other, over and over, ever and ever, forever.” Taking a breath, Ashton ran his hand through his hair. He looked so sick, so fed up, so busted. “Since I met you, you’ve been my ride or die. But I don’t want to be on your fucking flaming motorcycle anymore. I want out.”

Julian gasped at the hurt of it, at the stinging truth of it. “You want out? Who’s keeping you? You don’t know where the door is? You don’t know where Heathrow is?”

“And what are you going to do if I split?”

“You think this is helping me?”

“Fuck you!”

“Fuck you! What, you want to drive me away, too? Then keep going, Ashton, you’re doing great.”

Ashton flung his glass to the floor and stepped toward Julian. For a black moment, they clenched their fists, they nearly came to blows.

Words of anger and even hate can set things in motion in the human soul that cannot be undone. Julian knew this, had bitterly learned this. He unclenched his fists, took a deep breath, lowered his head, and backed off. Literally, backed out of the kitchen, raising his hands to placate, to surrender. After that night, he stopped asking Ashton what was wrong with him.

They didn’t speak for days, then in monosyllables for weeks, and after that, talked only about the most impersonal shit. Will you pick up some beer. Did you pay the rent. That was their truce. They talked, but about nothing. Ashton went out without Julian, didn’t invite him to come along, and Julian wouldn’t have gone even if asked. In the mornings, Julian left before Ashton woke up, to go to the gym before work. At work, they remained professional, though without their usual banter, and after work, one man went one way and one another. By the time Ashton came home, Julian was in his room. On the weekends, Julian was at the gym or with Devi.

Except one Sunday night when Ashton was still on the couch with the TV on when Julian returned late from Quatrang.

“What are you doing?” Julian said. The TV was on so quiet, Ashton couldn’t have possibly heard it.

“Nothing, what are you doing?” Ashton didn’t turn his head.

Julian perched on the arm of the couch and stared at the screen for a few seconds and at Ashton’s glazed face.

“Well, I’m going to bed,” Julian said.

“Do you know anything, you fucking idiot,” Ashton said. “I don’t want to leave. What I want”—he covered his face—“is for you to stop leaving.”

Julian sank into the couch. “Ash … what are you talking about? I’m right here.” They lay across from each other, old and wiped out.

“I don’t see you right here. I see the Penance Stare you keep trying to shame me with. Don’t you know I’m like the Punisher? I’m immune to your stare because I have no regrets.” Ashton inhaled. “I don’t see you right here. I see your broken body that you’ve super-glued together and are now putting through the meat grinder again. I don’t see you doing anything that looks remotely like life. I see you training to go back into your gloomy portal—another skeleton ride of damnation and suffering. My God. Can’t you see what’s happening to you—you’re losing the momentum of your entire material being.”

“Are you talking about me or you?” Julian got defensive again, raised his voice. Why did Ashton keep provoking him like this? “I’m not losing my fucking momentum. I have one life. This is it. There’s only one river that runs through the present and the past, and I’m on it, paddling. I’m trying to find her, I’m still trying to save her.”

“That’s right,” Ashton said. “There is nothing else, certainly not here with me. But it’s not there with her either. Because there is no there there.”

There is a there there, Julian thought defiantly, turning his head away. But Ashton wasn’t totally wrong. There was no there here.

A prime minister survived a vote of no confidence, and then was ousted by the electorate. A president was re-elected, and then lost his majority because half the policies he was proposing were hated by half the electorate. Gas prices went up. Then they went down. A film won an Oscar for best picture that many thought should not have won. Someone got nominated who shouldn’t have, and someone didn’t get nominated who should have. Interest rates went down, savings rates went down, mortgage rates went down, the price of butter went up, beer up, cigarettes up, taxes up, cars became lighter, more efficient, and more dangerous, then heavier, less efficient and less dangerous. It was cold, then hot, then windy, then not. In L.A. it was seventy-three. Except that one time when it rained, and that other time when the wildfires came. In London it rained and was 45ºF in the winter and rained and was 54ºF in the summer, same numbers, transposed. Someone shot up a burger joint, someone got real offended. There was desecration of tombstones, or perhaps just vandalism. Insurance rates went up, healthcare services went downhill. A business closed, another took its place. There were protests on college campuses. There was too much free speech, and not enough, too many hammer and sickle flags and not enough, too many babies and not enough, too many babies of the wrong color and not enough. There was too much diversity, too much rage—and not enough. There were too many guns, too many murders, too many arrests, too many people in prisons, too much crime, too much pollution, too much abortion by all the wrong people. Your favorite show got cancelled, your favorite singer hadn’t released an album in years, or released one just a month ago and it was underwhelming, or it was his best work yet. The computer in your hand got smaller, lighter, thinner, blacker, waterproof. It was a black box. Your life should’ve been made of what the computer in your hands was made of. What profit had a man of all his labor which he took under the sun? That which was crooked could not be made straight. That which was wanting could not be numbered. Your closest friend still made all the wrong choices, but now he made them drunk, and the girl you loved still died, and nothing you did made any difference, all that maddening outrage at your own irrelevance, and nothing ever changed and on and on and on and on and on and on and on.

“My advice,” Devi said to Julian when he heard his bitter lament, “when you fall into despair like this, is to remember she doesn’t have that luxury. In abandoning yourself, you abandon her. And not just her—but the one you call your friend. How has he been? Have you asked how he has been, have you even thought to care? Your despair turns a cold Judas back on you all.”

Julian tried to get more involved, tried to care. It wasn’t easy. The quantity of his available effort for others was a pound less than what any human being required, even one as low maintenance as Ashton.

“Have you heard from Riley?”

“I don’t want to talk about Riley.”

“Okay. Have you heard from Z?”

“I don’t want to talk about Z.”

“With me or with anyone?”

“You specifically.”

“Right now or ever?”

“Ever.”

But a few days later, Ashton threw at Julian a print-out of the email Zakiyyah had written him.

It was brutal.

Mr. Razzle-Dazzle,

Stop calling me. Stop texting me. Leave me alone. Here’s your solo, and hers, and mine. I’m sure it still won’t be enough.

For you, nothing is ever enough.

Your hunger for love is so great and the hole so unfilled that everything gets swallowed up inside it.

And yet on the edges of that black hole, you dance, drink, laugh, as if that’s everything. In order to appear capable of love, you seduce us all with your great boundless self. You act the part. You charm, sweep off feet, romance, make come, make weep. Oh—anything for applause. But when the real thing is before you, you flee, because intimacy, real intimacy, terrifies you. Yes, yes, I know—you love it when I watch you from the front row. As long as I don’t get up on stage with you.

So sorry. You should’ve told me the razzle-dazzle was only there to hide your emptiness. You shouldn’t have left me to figure it out for myself.

But finally I’m on my way. I’m off the stage, Ashton. I’ve given up on us. I’ve given up on you. You were my biggest mistake.

Don’t worry—I’m sure you’ll have no trouble filling your Theatre of Longing with other hearts to break.

Zakiyyah

Julian folded and refolded the piece of paper, and tried to give it back to Ashton, who wouldn’t take it. “She’s being deliberately awful, she doesn’t mean it. She’s just mad, Ash. It’ll pass.”

“Yes, she does, and no, it won’t,” Ashton said. Julian had never heard his friend sound so despairing.

Julian’s was not the only inconsolable heart playing to an empty house.