We All Looked Up (26 page)

The barracks were empty but for the few people who'd stayed behind out of physical necessity. Peter did a quick sweep of the room but didn't see anyone left that he recognized. It was the first crack to appear in his newfound happiness, and he'd only been out of bed for a few minutes. Misery was gone. Hopefully, she'd gotten a ride home. He had no idea what he'd say to his parents if he had to show up without her.
Sorry, but I got distracted having sex with this girl I cheated on Stacy with last year. You're going to love her.

Outside, the sky was a blank slate, and the air had that after-storm clarity to it. Peter let go of Eliza's hand only long enough to climb into the driver's seat of the Jeep.

“I have to go home,” Eliza said. “I wanna see my dad.”

“I should too.” He put the key in the ignition but didn't turn it right away. “You know what's weird? After last night, I kinda thought it was all over. I thought if I could just be with you, everything would turn out fine. Did you think that too?”

She squeezed his hand. “Will you love me less if I say no?”

“Maybe a little.”

“Then yes. I thought that too.”

On the way to Eliza's house, they were stopped by a police officer in a battered cruiser. He looked like he hadn't shaved in a week, or maybe even slept. He told them to stay wherever they were going once they got there.

But that was easier said than done. As soon as Peter turned onto Eliza's street, she threw open the passenger-side door, crying out wordlessly. If he hadn't slammed on the brakes, she probably would have jumped out of the car while it was still moving. He undid his seat belt and ran after her, toward the burned-out husk of a three-story apartment building.

Police tape was stretched across the doorless doorway like a thick yellow spiderweb. Eliza tore it away, revealing the ravaged interior. Everything in sight was scorched and crumbling, and the ceiling above the stairs had collapsed in a pile of burned wood and blackened masonry.

“My dad was up there.”

“I'm sure he's fine,” Peter said.

Eliza turned on him. “You don't know that! I should have come home right away! What was I thinking?”

“This fire is at least a day old, Eliza. It wouldn't have made a difference.”

“But what if I can't find him? What if I never see him again?”

Peter didn't know what to say. All he could do was stand there, on a bed of ashes, and hold her.

A
ndy

“TOSS IT, YO!”

Bobo's eyes were transformed by the flame of the Molotov cocktail into a pair of fiery asteroids. He was almost too drunk to make the shot. The neck of the bottle hit the edge of the window, but momentum carried it on into the store. It landed just next to a burial mound of building blocks and plastic figurines that they'd erected on the other side. A dozen SpongeBob SquarePants began to crinkle and blacken, sending up a plume of chemical smoke. The bottle exploded. A moment later the fire caught scent of the gaso­line they'd poured all over the carpet. Orange streamers wrapped around the racks of candy-colored board games and Rubik's Cubes. They watched from the sidewalk as the place lit up like one giant firework.

“‘Virtue needs some cheaper thrills,'” Bobo said.

Andy recognized the quote. “Calvin and Hobbes.”

“Damn straight.”

They drove back to the ma-in-law with their headlights on, fearless. It was past curfew, but there were basically zero cops left on the beat these days; why risk your life just to make the world infinitesimally safer for a couple more days?

“So, I know this may be a sore subject,” Bobo said, “but now that you've blown it with Eliza, how are we gonna get you laid?”

“Who said I blew it with Eliza?”

“Well, it's been almost a week since you two hooked up, and you haven't seen or spoken to her. Plus, the world is ending next Tuesday. All of which means you've got about as much chance of nailing her as I do of nailing Taylor Swift.”

“One man's opinion.”

“One genius's opinion, yo.”

Andy still hadn't told Bobo the whole story of the morning after the party. How he'd looked everywhere for Eliza, hoping that they might finish what they'd started on that piano bench. How he'd found the staircase to the upper floor. How he'd found her asleep in the pale light of sunrise, curled into Peter's chest. How he'd barely made it back out into the hallway before going down on his knees and vomiting up the whole night's worth of drinking—a seemingly endless cascade of all the hatred and sadness and rage that was inside him. He thought he would choke to death on it, on the harsh truth he'd been trying to ignore his entire life: that no matter how bad he wanted it or how he hard he tried to get it, he would never be worthy of anyone's love.

But he didn't choke. And when he rose to his feet again, he felt newly baptized in bitterness—the religion of Bobo and Golden and everyone else who'd discovered that there was no point or meaning to anything anymore. The karass was finished. Misery hated him. Peter hated him. Eliza hated him. Anita hated him. All he had left was Bobo.

They spent the next couple of days walking aimlessly around the city and smoking the rest of Bobo's weed. One night, just a few blocks from Andy's place, they found a house that someone had just set on fire. Crimson flowers bloomed from the windows, and the roof was one wide crown of orange and gold.

“It's kinda beautiful,” Andy said.

“Yeah.”

“If Ardor lands, the whole world may look like that. Could be worse.”

The next day they'd started making their own flower arrangements.

Their first target was a Christian bookstore in Greenlake. Say what you would about the Bible, but it made for damned good kindling. They stood staring at the inferno for over an hour, passing a flask of Jack Daniel's back and forth and singing Pogues songs. Andy couldn't believe how long everything took to be consumed. You could almost imagine that you were liberating the material world somehow, as if every object had a secret desire to transcend its physical form and become light and heat, even if only for a few seconds. When everything was burning up right in front of you, you could imagine parts of yourself burning along with it—all your disappointments, all the things you'd done that you wished you hadn't, even all the bad memories (for example, things you might have seen on the top floor of a navy-base barracks). In his short time as a professional arsonist, Andy had become a lot less worried about the end of the world, because he'd become an agent of it. There was nothing quite like the feeling you got walking away from something on fire, knowing that it was disintegrating back into nothing, the way everything eventually did.

And it wasn't just the physical world they were burning up. It was time. Six days had gone by since the end of the protest. That meant there were only seven days left until the end.

“And a week without sex just ain't right,” Bobo said. “I'm not gonna let you die as the Virgin Mary. Let's get Misery and Eliza off our minds tonight.”

“And how are we going to do that?”

“The Independent, yo. Golden's always got girls around who are ready to go.”

Since the collapse of the quest, Andy had stopped caring whether he managed to get laid before Ardor came, and he had no particular desire to hang out with the thugs downtown just for the hell of it. But he didn't have any desire to do anything else, either. “Why not?” he said. “It beats the shit out of sitting here.”

Golden's home and place of business was well known to anyone who'd bought product from him: the Independent, one of Seattle's oldest apartment buildings—low-rent but with its own brand of faded glamour. Usually its name was lit up in bright-green neon above the awning over the front door, but without power, the tubes had gone dead and gray. Someone had decorated the lobby with about a million long white candles. Along with the high arched ceilings, the gaping maw of the marble fireplace, and a whole lot of dusky paintings and velveteen couches, they lent the place a distinctly Gothic feel. It would have been swank, if not for the fact that every single object and surface looked as if someone had gone at it with an electric sander. The sofas were all decrepit and moth-eaten, the Oriental rugs threadbare, the wood beneath them marred with scuffs and peeling varnish.

“Where do you think everybody is?” Andy said.

“Dunno. Upstairs probably.”

The elevators weren't running, but there was a candle or two burning on every landing of the stairwell, like beacon fires. Andy opened the roof door to a blast of chill air.

“Hot damn,” Bobo said.

A makeshift living room had been set up outside—shabby couches and coffee tables and beanbag chairs—all of which must have been sourced from abandoned apartments downstairs. There were a dozen gas-powered heat lamps, burning bright orange. A large generator was protected by a white canvas tent, with cables running directly to a nearby sound system and a couple of tripod-mounted speakers. Just outside the stairwell, a guy with a big red beard and a Slayer T-shirt stood smoking.

“Bleeder?” Andy said.

The lead singer of the Bloody Tuesdays grinned. “Fucking Andy? And Bobo! What's up?” They all bumped fists. “Welcome to the
casa
! There should still be some beers left in the cooler.”

“And what about girls?” Bobo said. “You got any of them left?”

“You know it.”

“Sweet.”

“Hey, I'm glad you guys are here. You've got something to do with this thing at Boeing Field, right?”

For a moment, Andy didn't know what Bleeder was talking about. The Party at the End of the World—yet another grand idea that would end up coming to nothing.

“I think it's pretty much canceled,” he said.

Bleeder looked genuinely dejected. “For real? I told my sister in California she should drive up for it. Everyone said it was gonna be a rager.”

“Don't know what to tell you, man. That's just how it is.”

They walked on, through cumulus bursts of pot smoke, in and out of the rings of heat put off by the lamps. Golden stood all the way at the edge of the roof. He was looking into a telescope—one of those stumpy professional ones, rather than the typical skinny kind—and had it pointed at a fire burning down by the water.

“Shit's getting
crazy
out there. I swear I saw some guy jump out of a window.” He raised his head from the eyepiece. “What's up, boys?”

“Nothing much,” Bobo said. “We were looking for a party.”

“Well, you found it.”

Andy glanced around the roof. There were maybe a hundred people there, but most of them looked way too out of it to do much in the way of partying. It was a little sad, actually. “Where's that girlfriend of yours, Bobo? She know you're on the prowl tonight?”

“She's pissed at me.”

“For what?”

“You remember her brother? The guy we ran into at the Cage?”

“Of course. The big man.”

“Well, he and I got in a fight, and I won. Misery didn't like that much.”

Golden laughed. “I bet she didn't.”

“So I guess that means we're done.”

“Just like that? Nah, man. You gotta tell her you were just doing what you had to do. Make her understand.”

“I tried.”

“Try harder.” Suddenly Golden jumped up onto the narrow ledge of the roof. “Come on up here with me. Both of you.”

Andy laughed nervously, “We're, like, fifteen stories up, yo.”

Golden pointed right at Ardor. “And that fucker is, like, a week away from smashing your head open. So what are you afraid of?”

Bobo climbed up first. The ledge was only two or three feet wide, and slippery with rain. Andy's stomach turned over as he slowly stood. It hadn't seemed all that windy on the roof, but on the ledge, every little breeze felt like a tiny hand trying to topple him.

Golden inhaled deeply. “This is why I love that asteroid,” he said. “We spend all our lives standing up on a ledge like this, but we pretend not to notice. Everybody working away at their jobs, saving their pennies, having their kids, when all it takes is one shove . . . and down you go. I felt like I was the only one who noticed that. But not anymore. Now everybody's up here with me.”

He turned his silver-bullet eyes on Bobo.

“You don't wanna go out of this world with regrets. If there's something you want to do, you do it. You take this life by the balls and you tell it that you existed. You understand what I'm saying?”

Bobo nodded. “A hundred percent, yo.”

Andy shivered, though he wasn't sure whether it was because of the wind, or the rain, or else because of the sudden fear he had that Bobo really did understand what Golden was saying.

Golden cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted across the lightless city, “I existed, goddamn it! Say it with me!”

“I existed!” Bobo said.

“I existed, goddamn it!”

“I existed, goddamn it!”

“Again!”

“I existed, goddamn it!”

“Again!”

“I existed, goddamn it!”

Then they were both saying it, over and over again, and then the call was coming from all around them, from everyone up on the roof, like a war cry. But for some reason, Andy couldn't bring himself to join in.