Go.
Down an escarpment of limestone to the creek bed. “Go,” a whisper in his ears. Thunder in the background. Wagnerian.
Hardscrabble hands on smooth rocks. Rushing water washing mud and dried blood from fingers. A look back. Darkness. Void. “Go” reverberates.
It’s January 1. New Year’s Day. Where is the new world we were promised? he thinks. Where are the riches, the casual sex, the Apocalypse?
Go. Now. Whispered in frantic tones, harsh and unforgiving. A telic shove through a too-small opening. Ripped shirt. Filthy pants. Grease on cloth, on sneakers. Open air, rain on hot skin, steam rising from manholes. Subterranean barbecues.
Daniel looks at his hand in the twilight. Daniel sees the future. Daniel sees no future. Complete sentences return to his frontal lobe. Amos is almost surely dead. The blood has been washed from his hands.
Hunched like a vulture in a doorstep, downtown. Why had he come to the awful city? Why had he left Phoenix, with its achingly blue sky and its beautiful desolate spaces? Daniel sees insects in his peripheral vision. Click-clack of wings on carapaces. Amos is almost surely dead.
Hunched. Water in rivulets, streaming down from above, caressing his hair, forming a perfect curve along his jawbone, dripping off the peak of his chin. December 31. New Year’s Eve. The Last Day of the World.
Amos is not there. When did he leave? Cassandra is not there. She will return.
“You know the things you see when you close your eyes?” she asked him, once.
He closed his eyes. “Uh-huh.”
“You know when they sort of coalesce into human shapes?”
He waited. “Uh-huh.”
“Those are your ghosts, following you. Your own personal ones.”
Cassandra and Amos were back. “New Year’s Eve, Danny!” Amos said. “Party time!”
Daniel can barely see them. They are like ghosts. They wave bottles at him threateningly. But they are not threatening him.
“When did the world end?” Daniel says aloud to the creek. It’s January 1. As far as he can tell, the world is still there.
No one answers. Cassandra, he tells himself, Cassandra is almost surely dead.
“I love so many people,” he says. No one answers him. “I love my parents, even though …”
The word trail off. A father, a mother, unwilling to accept him when he told them. Not evil, just close-minded. His father couldn’t even say the word “gay.”
That was Phoenix. This is Portland, he tells himself, a city in Oregon. And Amos is almost surely dead. And Cassandra is almost surely dead. And the world didn’t end like Cassandra promised. And there was blood on his hands, wasn’t there? That he knew.
Daniel touches his forehead and his fingers come away sticky. In the half-light of late-afternoon dusk he cannot tell what it is, until he brings his fingers to his mouth. Blood. Blood from a wound across his hairline. He feels a tear of blood ooze into the corner of his eye. Insects in his peripheral vision.
Amos never cared who he was. Cassandra never cared. None of the people he met along the way cared. None of the people in Portland cared. The only people in the world who mattered did.
“Where did you get the money for this?” he asked Amos, when they were sitting under a bridge drinking actual champagne. This was right before the world was supposed to end.
“Does it matter?”
A silly question. Of course it didn’t matter, not to Daniel. But it did matter. How could he not have seen it?
“So you stole it.”
“Danny, Danny, Danny. I paid for it, just like regular folk. Believe me.”
He believed him. Amos took care of him. Amos was his friend. And now, Amos was almost surely …
He couldn’t grasp it. Amos was larger than life, therefore larger than death. He would always be there. Daniel still kneels by the stream. He sips water, uncaring if it was dirty. Cool liquid on his burning throat. What had happened?
Ghosts following him. Following Amos, Cassandra, Daniel. Amos lied to him. And now Amos was almost surely dead. “Where did you get the money for this?”
It was Cassandra who told him. Cassandra, dancing like a star on the girders of the Iron Bridge, spinning oh so close to the edge. Six minutes to midnight, and the Apocalypse. Of course the world would end. Cassandra had said so.
“Daniel, of course he stole the money. Where else would he get it? People like Amos,” she said, meaning people like them, “don’t have that kind of cash. You’re so naïve. He just didn’t want you thinking our gains were ill-gotten.”
“Like I care.”
“You care. Just like you care whether I go over or not.” She leaned out, too far for comfort, holding a metal bar with just her index and middle fingers. The river swirled below her. Four minutes to midnight.
“Cassie …”
She righted herself. “Look, here comes Amos. Just in time.”
But the world didn’t end. Why not? It has no purpose anymore, lurching along like an invalid, stripped of dignity and meaning. Gunshots in a cramped place. A refuge from the rain. A refuge from those chasing them. He wants desperately for the world to give up the ghost.
“Shit,” Amos had said, not too long ago. “Shit. They found us.”
“Where did you get the money?” Daniel asked him.
“Couple of guys. I think it was some kind of deal. They had a lot of cash. I only took some.”
“We’re going to die here,” Daniel said.
Cassandra said, “Have you considered we might already be dead?”
His parents would never know. His friends in Arizona would never know. Dying in Portland, among the only people who accepted him.
“Why did you run?” he asked Cassandra, once.
“Why do any of us run? There’s a whole wide world out there, Daniel, and it needs us. Not everyone has a good reason, like you do. I just left. And here I am.”
She explained time travel to him. “Time is just like the world,” she said. “A sphere. We always travel west, toward the sunset. But time travelers simply double back and travel east.” It made no sense to him. That didn’t stop him from nodding in agreement.
She explained life to him. “Life is like a baby tiger,” she said. “You look at it, beg your mommy to let you take it home, because it’s just so cute. And you nurture it, and play with it, and feed it, and one day it weighs a ton and has teeth as long as your arm and it eats you in your sleep. That’s life.” Under his bridge that night, he felt like tiger prey.
“You’re not in this, Daniel,” said Amos, who was about to become tiger prey. “You need to get out.”
“What about Cassie?”
But Cassandra had ended with the old year. Cassandra sat in a corner, rag-doll limp and confetti-scattered. Something had clicked off in her. In the new year, she said only one thing to him, around noon: “Didn’t I tell you the world would end? Isn’t oblivion beautiful, Daniel? Look at all the new colors!” Her eyes were opaque. Her prediction came true for someone, at least.
“We can’t leave her here! I can’t leave her here!”
Amos bent over her. “Cassie always had a problem with drugs, Daniel. You didn’t know because she was strong enough to disguise it. Last night and today … I don’t know how much junk she took. If I get out, I’ll get her help. But she’s happy, don’t you see? One of her predictions came true, at least.”
“Fuck you, Amos.” It was the last thing Daniel said to his friend. Then, Amos was pushing him out of the house, while the pounding on the door continued and Amos laughed without care.
Dusk was upon him. His hands were clean. He closed his eyes and saw his ghosts. Amos and Cassandra. His parents, somewhere in the Southwest. He would move on. He had to. The strange new world awaited.
**********
[They’re called “phosphenes,” in case you’re wondering.
Portland has a lot of homeless people. I’m not sure why; I don’t know if it’s the relatively mild climate or the laxity of the liberal government or a little from column A and a little from column B and stuff from other columns, as well, but it does. This story kind of came to be full-blown, which is good because it wasn’t that long, and it’s a story about specific homeless people and not the homeless in Portland in general. I wrote it after I moved to Phoenix, as I did these final few tales (we’re almost to the end!), so I threw a reference to my new home in there. I like the urgency of this story, and I hope you do, too.
The names are very deliberate, by the way.]
