Looking for Alaska (23 page)

At Room 43, after quickly offered and accepted apologies, the Colonel said, “We’ve made a tactical decision to push back calling Jake. We’re going to pursue some other avenues first.”

AS DR. HYDE
shuffled into class the next morning, Takumi sat down next to me and wrote a note on the edge of his notebook.
Lunch at McInedible
, it read.

I scribbled
Okay
on my own notebook and then turned to a blank page as Dr. Hyde started talking about Sufism, the mystical sect of Islam. I’d only scanned through the reading—I’d been studying only enough not to fail—but in my scanning, I’d come across great last words. This poor Sufi dressed in rags walked into a jewelry store owned by a rich merchant and asked him, “Do you know how you’re going to die?” The merchant answered, “No. No one knows how they’re going to die.” And the Sufi said, “I do.”

“How?” asked the merchant.

And the Sufi lay down, crossed his arms, said, “Like this,” and died, whereupon the merchant promptly gave up his store to live a life of poverty in pursuit of the kind of spiritual wealth the dead Sufi had acquired.

But Dr. Hyde was telling a different story, one that I’d skipped. “Karl Marx famously called religion ‘the opiate of the masses.’ Buddhism, particularly as it is popularly practiced, promises improvement through karma. Islam and Christianity promise eternal paradise to the faithful. And that is a powerful opiate, certainly, the hope of a better life to come. But there’s a Sufi story that challenges the notion that people believe only because they need an opiate. Rabe’a al-Adiwiyah, a great woman saint of Sufism, was seen running through the streets of her hometown, Basra, carrying a torch in one hand and a bucket of water in the other. When someone asked her what she was doing, she answered, ‘I am going to take this bucket of water and pour it on the flmes of hell, and then I am going to use this torch to burn down the gates of paradise so that people will not love God for want of heaven or fear of hell, but because He is God.’ ”

A woman so strong she burns heaven and drenches hell.
Alaska would have liked this Rabe’a woman,
I wrote in my notebook. But even so, the afterlife mattered to me. Heaven and hell and reincarnation. As much as I wanted to know how Alaska had died, I wanted to know where she was now, if anywhere. I liked to imagine her looking down on us, still aware of us, but it seemed like a fantasy, and I never really
felt
it—just as the Colonel had said at the funeral that she wasn’t there, wasn’t anywhere. I couldn’t honestly imagine her as anything but dead, her body rotting in Vine Station, the rest of her just a ghost alive only in our remembering. Like Rabe’a, I didn’t think people should believe in God because of heaven and hell. But I didn’t feel a need to run around with a torch. You can’t burn down a made-up place.

 

After class, as Takumi picked through his fries at McInedible, eating only the crunchiest, I felt the total loss of her, still reeling from the idea that she was not only gone from this world but from all of them.

“How have you been?” I asked.

“Uh,” he said, a mouth full of fries, “nah good. You?”

“Not good.” I took a bite of cheeseburger. I’d gotten a plastic stock car with my Happy Meal, and it sat overturned on the table. I spun the wheels.

“I miss her,” Takumi said, pushing away his tray, uninterested in the remaining soggy fries.

“Yeah. I do, too. I’m sorry, Takumi,” and I meant it in the largest possible way. I was sorry we ended up like this, spinning wheels at a McDonald’s. Sorry the person who had brought us together now lay dead between us. I was sorry I let her die.
Sorry I haven’t talked to you because you couldn’t know the truth about the Colonel and me, and I hated being around you and having to pretend that my grief is this uncomplicated thing—pretending that she died and I miss her instead of that she died because of me.

“Me too. You’re not dating Lara anymore, are you?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Okay. She was kind of wondering.”

I had been ignoring her, but by then she had begun to ignore me back, so I figured it was over, but maybe not. “Well,” I told Takumi, “I just can’t—I don’t know, man. That’s pretty complicated.”

“Sure. She’ll understand. Sure. All good.”

“Okay.”

“Listen, Pudge. I—ah, I don’t know. It sucks, huh?”

“Yeah.”

SIX DAYS LATER,
four Sundays after the last Sunday, the Colonel and I were trying to shoot each other with paintball guns while turning 900s in a half pipe. “We need booze. And we need to borrow the Eagle’s Breathalyzer.”

“
Borrow
it? Do you know where it is?”

“Yeah. He’s never made you take one?”

“Um. No. He thinks I’m a nerd.”

“You
are
a nerd, Pudge. But you’re not gonna let a detail like that keep you from drinking.” Actually, I hadn’t drunk since that night, and didn’t feel particularly inclined to ever take it up ever again.

Then I nearly elbowed the Colonel in the face, swinging my arms wildly as if contorting my body in the right ways mattered as much as pressing the right buttons at the right moments—the same video-game-playing delusion that had always gripped Alaska. But the Colonel was so focused on the game he didn’t even notice. “Do you have a plan for how, exactly, we’re going to steal the Breathalyzer from
inside the Eagle’s house?
”

The Colonel looked over at me and said, “Do you suck at this game?” and then, without turning back to the screen, shot my skater in the balls with a blue paint blast. “But first, we gotta get some liquor, because the ambrosia’s sour and my booze connection is—”

“
POOF
. Gone,” I finished.

 

When I opened his door, Takumi was sitting at his desk, boxy headphones surrounding his entire head, bouncing his head to the beat. He seemed oblivious to us. “Hey,” I said. Nothing. “Takumi!” Nothing. “TAKUMI!” He turned around and pulled off his headphones. I closed the door behind me and said, “You got any alcohol?”

“Why?” he asked.

“Uh, because we want to get drunk?” the Colonel answered.

“Great. I’ll join you.”

“Takumi,” the Colonel said. “This is—we need to do this alone.”

“No. I’ve had enough of that shit.” Takumi stood up, walked into his bathroom, and came out with a Gatorade bottle filled with clear liquid. “I keep it in the medicine cabinet,” Takumi said. “On account of how it’s medicine.” He pocketed the bottle and then walked out of the room, leaving the door open behind him. A moment later, he peeked his head back in and, brilliantly mimicking the Colonel’s bossy bass voice, said, “Christ, you comin’ or what?”

“Takumi,” the Colonel said. “Okay. Look, what we’re doing is a little dangerous, and I don’t want you caught up in it. Honestly. But, listen, we’ll tell you everything starting tomorrow.”

“I’m tired of all this secret shit. She was my friend, too.”

“Tomorrow. Honestly.”

He pulled the bottle out of his pocket and tossed it to me. “Tomorrow,” he said.

“I don’t really want him to know,” I said as we walked back to the room, the Gatorade bottle stuffed in the pocket of my sweatshirt. “He’ll hate us.”

“Yeah, well, he’ll hate us more if we keep pretending he doesn’t exist,” the Colonel answered.

 

Fifteen minutes later, I stood at the Eagle’s doorstep.

He opened the door with a spatula in hand, smiled, and said, “Miles, come in. I was just making an egg sandwich. Want one?”

“No thanks,” I said, following the Eagle into his kitchen.

My job was to keep him out of his living room for thirty seconds so the Colonel could get the Breathalyzer undetected. I coughed loudly to let the Colonel know the coast was clear. The Eagle picked up his egg sandwich and took a bite. “To what do I owe the pleasure of your visit?” he asked.

“I just wanted to tell you that the Colonel—I mean, Chip Martin—he’s my roommate, you know, he’s having a tough time in Latin.”

“Well, he’s not attending the class, from what I understand, which can make it very difficult to learn the language.” He walked toward me. I coughed again, and backpedaled, the Eagle and I tangoing our way toward his living room.

“Right, well, he’s up all night every night thinking about Alaska,” I said, standing up straight and tall, trying to block the Eagle’s view of the living room with my none-too-wide shoulders. “They were very close, you know.”

“I know that—” he said, and in the living room, the Colonel’s sneakers squeaked against the hardwood floor. The Eagle looked at me quizzically and sidestepped me. I quickly said, “Is that burner on?” and pointed toward the frying pan.

The Eagle wheeled around, looked at the clearly not-on burner, then dashed into the living room.

Empty. He turned back to me. “Are you up to something, Miles?”

“No, sir. Honestly. I just wanted to talk about Chip.”

He arched his eyebrows, skeptical. “Well, I understand that this is a devastating loss for Alaska’s close friends. It’s just awful. There’s no comfort to this grief, is there?”

“No sir.”

“I’m sympathetic to Chip’s troubles. But school is important. Alaska would have wanted, I’m sure, for Chip’s studies to continue unimpeded.”

I’m sure
, I thought. I thanked the Eagle, and he promised me an egg sandwich at some point in the future, which made me nervous that he would just show up at our room one afternoon with an egg sandwich in hand to find us
A.
illegally smoking while the Colonel
B.
illegally drank milk and vodka out of a gallon jug.

Halfway across the dorm circle, the Colonel ran up to me. “That was smooth, with the ‘Is that burner on?’ If you hadn’t pulled that, I was toast. Although I guess I’ll have to start going to Latin. Stupid Latin.”

“Did you get it?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah. God, I hope he doesn’t go looking for it tonight. Although, really, he could never suspect anything. Why would someone
steal a Breathalyzer?
”

At two o’clock in the morning, the Colonel took his sixth shot of vodka, grimaced, then frantically motioned with his hand toward the bottle of Mountain Dew I was drinking. I handed it to him, and he took a long pull on it.

“I don’t think I’ll be able to go to Latin tomorrow,” he said. His words were slightly slurred, as if his tongue were swollen.

“One more,” I pleaded.

“Okay. This is it, though.” He poured a sip of vodka into a Dixie cup, swallowed, pursed his lips, and squeezed his hands into tight little fists. “
Oh God,
this is bad. It’s so much better with milk. This better be point two-four.”

“We have to wait for fifteen minutes after your last drink before we test it,” I said, having downloaded instructions for the Breathalyzer off the Internet. “Do you feel drunk?”

“If drunk were cookies, I’d be Famous Amos.”

We laughed. “Chips Ahoy! would have been funnier,” I said. “Forgive me. Not at my best.”

I held the Breathalyzer in my hand, a sleek, silver gadget about the size of a small remote control. Beneath an LCD screen was a small hole. I blew into it to test it: 0.00, it read. I figured it was working.

After fifteen minutes, I handed it to the Colonel. “Blow really hard onto it for at least two seconds,” I said.

He looked up at me. “Is that what you told Lara in the TV room? Because, see, Pudge, they only
call
it a blow job.”

“Shut up and blow,” I said.

His cheeks puffed out, the Colonel blew into the hole hard and long, his face turning red.

.16. “Oh no,” the Colonel said. “Oh God.”

“You’re two-thirds of the way there,” I said encouragingly.

“Yeah, but I’m like three-fourths of the way to puking.”

“Well, obviously it’s possible.
She
did it. C’mon! You can outdrink a girl, can’t you?”

“Give me the Mountain Dew,” he said stoically.

And then I heard footsteps outside. Footsteps. We’d waited till 1:00 to turn on the lights, figuring everyone would be long asleep—it was a school night after all—but footsteps, shit, and as the Colonel looked at me confused, I grabbed the Breathalyzer from him and stuffed it between the foam cushions of the couch and grabbed the Dixie cup and the Gatorade bottle of vodka and stashed them behind the COFFEE TABLE, and in one motion I grabbed a cigarette from a pack and lit it, hoping the smell of smoke would cover up the smell of booze. I puffed the cigarette without inhaling, trying to smoke up the room, and I was almost back to the couch when the three quick knocks came against the door and the Colonel looked at me, his eyes wide, his suddenly unpromising future flashing before his eyes, and I whispered, “Cry,” as the Eagle turned the knob.

The Colonel hunched forward, his head between his knees and his shoulders shaking, and I put my arm around him as the Eagle came in.