Mars in Retrograde. Chapter 19.
Jamie's interlude.
What softness can be made for the wretched and damned? All of it, I hope. All of it.
Chapter 19. Jamie’s interlude.
It’s normal for a person to tie sensation to memory and feeling but for Jamie the feeling of sound is inextricable from the form of being. When a person speaks too quietly, afraid of startling him, it can feel as though all of his skin is being peeled back as the person draws him nearer toward their whisper and then backs away at the approach that they practically begged him for. When a person is too loud, assuming that his silence is a symptom of deafness, they will yell into his face in a way that makes his lungs stutter and his every cell shudder at a sharp frequency. Generally, most things are too loud. The humming refrigerators in the Quik-Mart. His younger sisters playing games where they make their dolls suffer cancer and loss and death for entertainment. Cars rushing by on the highway. Bright white lights. Another man glancing his carefully veiled queerness. The ambient sound of mass misery. Jamie can hear it all and it buries him under the overwhelm.
Jamie never thought that he might find a silence unbearable–it’s where he’s most comfortable–and yet the silence in his truck, following the trail of sad crumbs back home, is undoubtedly unbearable. And it’s a combination of things, of course. Lana’s betrayal. The burning of the cult. Marshall’s near death. The realization that Marshall does not know what he is doing–and not in a charming and helpful way. It could have been any one of them being sacrificed. It could have been carried to completion. They trusted Marshall, the three of them, for reasons Jamie cannot discern now and Marshall led them astray. He led them into danger.
Just the thought of the man he left behind stirs tears to the rims of Jamie’s eyes. Time has peeled him away like a tangerine and left him bare and sensitive to everything that surrounds him. The months he and Marshall spent kissing, heavenly kissing, were all consuming and buoyant like a breeze lifting fallen leaves and suspending them in the air. Sound spilled downhill toward some distant valley that he would never know and all that was left was the endless feeling of lips parting lips and erections teasing the hems of briefs.
They could have stayed like that in a blissful liminal state if the want hadn’t inevitably stripped their clothes back and pressed their taut bodies together in a tender heat like aloe on a blistering sunburn. Time would have danced circles around their feet and kept them spinning in suspended sweetness if they’d kept their socks on and their hips to be tended to only in quiet loneliness.
Ah, but Jamie has felt enough regret in his short life. Words that tumbled from his mouth onto decidedly deaf ears, boys who loved him with an incorrect quiet, hours whittled away at a plastic counter selling America to people addicted to furthering their own misery. Jamie has let a lot of his choices be made with perfect passivity and to avoid the gaze of others but he does not, cannot bring himself to regret Marshall. There was nothing passive about his decision to love that boy and all of his cascading faults.
When Marshall was sixteen, he killed his father, which everybody knows because his mother told anyone who would listen down at the bars or out back by the dumpsters where needles are plentiful and free. He doesn’t think that Marshall knows the extent to which his reputation is known in their small town–it’s insulated, news that has never traveled beyond their borders, but it’s as common as kudzu.
Jamie remembers the day it happened because he saw Marshall shortly after the deed had been done though he’s quite certain that Marshall does not remember.
He came into the Quik-Mart at sundown with dots of blood still decorating his boots like inlaid rubies, dirt pressed into his hands and knees. Normally how it went is Marshall would come in and walk slowly past the counter pretending that he wasn’t watching Jamie out of the corner of his eye and when he’d turn down the aisle he’d pull his pants up to clearly define his ass which wasn’t much to look at back then and when he’d come to check out with a smattering of randomly chosen items, he’d say something like ‘oh’ as if he were just noticing Jamie’s presence. He’d pay or he wouldn’t pay and Jamie would let him take whatever because he was quietly devoted or because he was spiting his parents or because he just didn’t really care about sales and profits or because if he gave enough to a boy he might get something back. And Marshall would say, ‘have a nice evening, Jamie’ and it was always at the right volume and with an understated obsession and when he said that, Jamie would always decide to have a nice evening and only when Marshall said that was his evening nice.
But that day, the day of the obvious murder, Marshall’s eyes were trained on nothing, he was seeing nothing if that were possible. He turned down the aisle and let his Levi’s sag, leaving his ass undefined and his shoulders sloped and his frame so slack that he looked as though nothing were holding him together except for maybe gravity or shame. His body was awkward and lanky then, his bones growing faster than his skin could bear and so he stood in front of the ice cream freezer looking like a tattered scarecrow warding children away from the temptation of sweets. He must have stood there above the glow of chilled light for a contained century. Long enough that Jamie abandoned his post at the counter (he never did this. The counter, depressing as it was, made up his only defense against the onslaught of people and held everyone in their clearly defined roles as customer versus person in service to the customer) and he joined Marshall at the freezer. Marshall’s eyes were dull and red, his jaw slack. He stared at the pints of Ben & Jerry’s, the Klondike’s and the Rocket Pops as if they made up his father’s shallow grave.
Jamie put a hand on Marshall’s shoulder and that was all the permission the boy needed to give into his own weight. Down on his knees, in prayer, down on the dirty floor where dust collected in spaces no one cared to reach. Jamie joined him at the altar of ice cream and neither of them were praying, just listening.
Jamie’s hand skated from one shoulder to the next so now Marshall was inside of the semi circle of Jamie’s embrace. His head tilted into Jamie’s chest at some point and his eyes closed like windows and he fell asleep there in Jamie’s arms on the floor of the Quik-Mart. Jamie dared not move. He stayed with Marshall on the floor for a very long time. Customers skirted around them, took items to the counter and then left with them when they realized that no one was coming to ring them up. Isadora came after her violin lesson to help close up and Jamie offered her a nod and so she locked the door and shut the lights and all the while Marshall sagged like a rotted porch against Jamie’s solid chest and Jamie stayed awake to keep him safe.
Marshall’s hair was long then when he was young and Jamie wrapped it around his fingers like rusty rings. The scarecrow smelled like a creature who had been born without innocence. The hard floor pressed bruises into Jamie’s knees but he’d been dreaming of bruising himself for this boy for a long time so he didn’t mind. It was perhaps the quietest moment of his life. Despite the terror and the sadness that was trying to claw its way up Marshall’s throat, Jamie felt lovely and perfect caring for the boy he loved quietly.
Marshall whimpered quietly as his dreams let reality fold into the creases. Jamie pressed his lips into the scarecrow’s scalp and hummed safety back in through the cracks.
When the sun came up and still Marshall had not stirred, he took the boy in both arms and carried him a mile down the road to the trailer park. Outside Marshall’s home, Truck Willis did his best to mock the display of men showing affection but even he couldn’t quite bring himself to hate either of them for the ways that an existence can grind bones down into an opiate powder. Elaine was nowhere to be found and so Jamie laid the boy down in his bed, kissed his forehead and placed a glass of water by his wracked head and then he left for school.
The next time he saw Marshall, the boy carried out his usual performance for no one’s benefit and Jamie knows that he didn’t remember sleeping in the Quik-Mart in Jamie’s arms because he could still bring his eyes to meet Jamie’s and he still said ‘have a good evening, Jamie’ on his way out where there should have been a veil of shame across his pale face for needing someone else. Jamie doesn’t mind though that the memory is just his. It was enough just to hold the boy and to know that silence can exist between two people and it does not have to deafen.
Such a silence cannot exist between him and Beaver, not after the way time collapsed around them like a broken magnet. They drive back to Georgia carelessly, on highways and past malls with cameras, rolling through yellow lights just to fling themselves toward misery on a quick arrow. The ride is fast too because the roads are only lightly trafficked and everyone seems to be in a hurry. A television horrifically attached to a pump at the gas station warns them that a highly contagious virus is ravaging humanity once again. People are inside. People have forgotten about murder and runaways. The problems of people have shuffled the past into the dark once more.
They use the tents once for a fitful night of sleep and then the next day they are home, faster than seems possible. Beaver has nowhere to go and so he goes to the place for people who have nowhere to go.
Jamie pulls into the driveway of Lana’s old home and puts the car into park. He kills the engine and stares at the lifelines cutting across his hands on the steering wheel. Is there really nothing tying him and Beaver together without Marshall?
They sit for longer than they need to, trying to find words that matter.
Eventually, Beaver just raps his knuckles against his own helmet and says, “don’t be a stranger,” which makes Jamie smile for some reason.
He turns to face the boy that Marshall placed on his counter like a baby so many months ago and he finds that the kid barely looks like a kid anymore. “I’m sorry you had to grow up so quickly,” he says.
Beaver shrugs. “I’ve got an old soul, Jamie. I’m just growin’ into it.”
Jamie gets out of the car to hug the boy who is shooting up like a bean sprout. He could be taller than Marshall by the end of the world. They can’t bear to stop hugging but they also can’t bear to carry it on longer than is necessary.
When they pull apart, Jamie wipes his own tears from Beaver’s cheek with a tough thumb.
“Love you too,” the kid says. Then he tightens his bag around his shoulders like an echo and he climbs the front steps to a house that belongs to no one and everyone.
The drive down barren roads to a convenience store that is also a house already feels like a distant memory. The windows are dirty from lack of upkeep. Four of the sign’s central neon lights are burnt out so they read only ‘Quit.’ Weeds crawl through the cracks in the pavement and rejoice in their tenacity. The truck slides back into its spot of its own accord and releases a deep sigh that sounds like an old man’s last breath.
Inside, the lights are all on but no one is at the counter and so Jamie takes his apron off its hook and ties it tightly around his waist. His muscles have gotten thicker from farm work and his gut has expanded from his own cooking. Here is the land of food made without care. Plastic bags with a handful of chips, boxes of identical chocolate cakes, bottles of flavored sugar, paper rolled up to contain addiction that you pay for. Nothing in here is food, just more emptiness.
Jamie places his forearms on the counter and exhales like a knackered dog by the fireplace. No one comes in for a long time. Few cars roll by on the main road. The store is quiet and a neat headache settles in behind his eyes after months without the burden of fluorescence pricking needles into the soft of his pupils.
His hands are restless. They shift and skitter across the counter in the motions he’d grown used to carrying out through the day. He misses cooking. The flick of the wrist as he doled out the perfect dash of oregano, freshly chopped basil from the garden, just a pinch of salt. The women he worked with called him The Octopus because his hands seemed to work separately from the rest of his body when he cooked. Pots and pans moved from burner to hotplate to the angled tilting as ingredients combined without so much as a drop of sauce splattering his pristine apron cinched tightly around his waist. One hand diced an onion with delicate precision while the other stirred, lifted the wooden ladle to his lips, soaked his tongue in rich broth and identified every flavor as it slid down his welcoming throat and warmed his stomach. Nothing had ever moved Jamie so freely in his life. Not the guitar lessons he took when he was fifteen, not the karate classes his dad threw him carelessly into, not even in this job that he’s worked for years do his limbs find such a natural and satisfactory rhythm. To say that cooking had become a passion for Jamie would be a cliche understatement. There is none of that here. His limbs are hollow, his shoulders slouched and his spine shrinking into his frame like a marionette with slack strings. Apathy is all this place can foster in him.
When Isadora walks through the door sometime later, she stops only to register the return and then sheds her coat with a perplexed sigh. She has a paper mask strung across her mouth. She disappears into the break room and returns with her apron and a crate of sodas to be stocked.
“Where the hell have you been?” She calls out with her head half stuck in the fridge.
“Missouri,” Jamie says.
“You look different.”
“You look the same.”
He says it in a funny way but she doesn’t laugh. She’s never found anything particularly funny and Jamie thinks that’s why they’ve never really liked each other the way twins are supposed to. Even if he’s quiet about it, Jamie finds humor in most everything from the classic banana peel beneath a dirty sneaker to a cat that mewls like a person might scream. Dora has always rejected anything that might make a person laugh, maybe out of a refusal to let anything move her in any particular direction. She’s always been too stubborn like that in a fiercely independent way that makes Jamie sad.
“Can’t change when you’re stuck in one place,” Dora says. She turns a bottle round and round in her hands that look like Jamie’s. “You sound different, too.”
“I talk more now, I guess. But only a little bit.”
Dora doesn’t say anything for a while and Jamie assumes she’s put her headphones on and gotten back to work. He hadn’t expected a welcome home party but some naive crack in his heart had hoped for something more. But much like with his decision to withhold his words, Jamie is discovering once again that the absence of something rarely brings the presence of something better. He’s been on a pilgrimage while back home time stood still just like it always has.
When Jamie was fifteen he discovered his five sisters all had a group chat that did not involve him. Even his youngest sister Mirabel was roped in–she was only six! Such a discovery should have surely turned him into a violent misogynist but Jamie’s insecurities weren’t so easily influenced. He’d realized long before then that he was the outcast of the family, his opinion lowly regarded, his presence insignificant and it had nothing to do with him being a man and everything to do with his constant need for someone to listen to it. For a while, it was just him and Dora and then Gabi and then Luz and then Carolina and finally Mirabel and with each sequential sister Jamie thought surely, this one will get me or at least I can spread out my need to be understood across the lot of them (his parents were never an option and this was clear from the beginning) and still, and still, nothing seemed to permeate, nothing seemed to solidify him in the world through the eyes of others. He floated through it all, untethered with every part of him scattered across time.
Until, of course, someone did see him. And so it always comes back to Marshall and not to Jamie’s chagrin. He’d gladly orbit around that boy and his otherworldly pull for all time even if it never brought him close to the surface.
“So, you were with him the whole time?” Dora said, turning to face him now. They look like two people from entirely different lives.
Jamie nods.
She closes the fridge door with her hip. “You came back because he went crazy or whatever?”
Jamie frowns.
“It’s been all over the news today,” she says with raised eyebrows. “Like, right behind you.”
Jamie’s head swivels in a hurry and his neck angles painfully toward the TV looming above the counter like a comet posed to strike the planet. Most of the screen is covered in various banners pertaining to news about the virus, its strange origin and how things are quickly collapsing across the ocean but Jamie cares little about any of that. His eyes lock onto Marshall’s face and they stay there for a long time. The TV is muted but his eyes follow the subtitles that move too slowly and with every word, his eyes widen and regret clenches his gut and urgency floods his nervous system so every last bit of him tenses like a coiled up spring before its release.
When the clip finally ends and the story shifts back to whatever thing is happening that doesn’t pertain to Marshall, he cannot pull his eyes from the dull screen, the place where Marshall’s grainy photo had just been, some old high school yearbook photo diluted through a bunch of filters to make him look dark and possibly evil, up to the viewer to decide but pretty obvious how a person is supposed to feel looking at his young face maybe full of potential but ultimately squandered by the violence he’s capable of. All of this irrelevant, none of it swaying Jamie except for the fact of what is happening. Under his breath, he says to himself, “He’s fighting.”
Just then, the bell above the door rings and Jamie turns, dizzy, to find a haggard face, a portrait of worry looking back at him. He blinks at her, not understanding. Dora, by the fridges, calls out, “Hi, Elaine.”
Marshall’s mother greets Jamie’s sister, then quickly returns her attention to Jamie. “You’re here,” she says.
His words leave him. Always when they are most needed, he cannot formulate a lexicon to bridge the gap between returning to this town to flee the man he loves and the man’s mother standing in front of Jamie like he’s the one she’s been looking for. His lips form shapes that don’t come close to making words. At a loss.
Elaine tries to smile. “You’ve been with him, haven’t you?” There’s something different about her that he can’t quite place, a shift in composure from the handful of times he’s seen her at the bars or swapping bills and bags in the alley between the Quik-Mart and the hardware store. Marshall would be able to identify the change if he were here but Jamie is too out of place. He shouldn’t be here.
Dora closes the refrigerator door. “She’s been in here every week, trying to reach you. Through me,” she explains. “It’s been very annoying.”
Jamie points at himself.
Elaine steps toward the counter. She has something in her arms, a notebook maybe, he can see the little metal spiral pressing lines into the sun-spotted skin on her arms. “You know where he is,” she says, not a question.
Jamie tries to nod but can’t be entirely sure what his head is doing. Marshall’s face on the TV screen still swimming across his vision, layering over the face of his tired mother who really doesn’t look much like her son but who, through the fate of biology, is inextricable from him. Holding herself up like a sagging portrait of a different path Marshall might drag himself down.
Elaine, like Marshall, doesn’t seem to need Jamie’s words to understand. She nods, places the notebook on the counter. The cover is a worn down red, the edges all wrinkled and fraying from banging around in a densely filled backpack. Elaine smalls herself. “I just want you to give this to him if you see him again. Will you? See him again?”
Jamie finds himself definitively nodding now, though the confidence comes as a surprise. Everything comes as a surprise, all of his solitary actions out of alignment without his people around him.
Elaine tucks away her hands in her pockets and backs away, that same strangeness about her that he can’t quite place. “Alright. Good man.” Clears her throat. “You know, I always…Well, treat him well, is all I’m asking. He loves you big.” She turns and leaves then, little bell ringing again, tinny and high.
Jamie blinks. On the hard counter, he flips through several pages of the notebook, blinking at each one to clear the tears.
Dora is still standing by the refrigerator with her hands thumbing her belt loops. “Are you going back for him?” She asks.
He can’t answer through all the devotion looking back at him. Dora knows anyway.
She scoffs, not unkindly. “Well, why did you leave in the first place?”
Jamie remembers the morning after the incident at Lana’s. Waking up alone in his basement bedroom in the dark and finding the floor unoccupied. The feeling of potentially falling out of Marshall’s orbit forever sent him listing over the edge of his own fear. He couldn’t fathom a world in which Marshall didn’t strut down the aisles of the Quik-Mart every other day, hiking his jeans up on his waist so Jamie would be filled with the sudden desire to know what his asshole looks like. Would he ever have a good evening again?
He hadn’t even hesitated to throw everything he owned into a bag, fall into the truck and peel out onto the highway and when he saw Marshall and Beaver readying themselves to cross the road, he felt everything fall back into place and he knew where time would take him.
And then to finally land on the surface of planet Marshall and have that be the very reason he was almost killed. To watch his new home righteously burn, to see and hear it all collapse. He couldn’t see any other point. He can see now so clearly that he was being faced with a test of his devotion. He’d wavered in leaving Marshall behind. And for what? There was nothing left for him here and he’d known it for some time. But with Marshall? Maybe there’s a bit of danger being around a boy like that. A stellar mass, an unstable planet in retrograde. But maybe discomfort is better than this, whatever sharp complacency he knows he could settle into forever like the Willis men in their sagging lawn chairs. Something’s gotta give.
Jamie would prefer to be loved in the throes of chaos than to be unloved and unwanted in the blank expanse of tedium.
“I left because of me,” Jamie says. “I stopped trusting me. That was very silly.”
Dora nods. “That was silly. You were smart to get out of here.”
Jamie’s lip pulls up into a slant. “You could come too, Dora.”
Her headphones hang around her neck, cord snaking into her back pocket. She pulls them over her ears. “Think I’ve got my own weird path to figure out. Stay safe, brother.”
His apron is already pooled around his feet. “Stay safe, sister.”
The truck gasps back to life under his breathy touch. He didn’t even start to unpack, so that’s convenient. By the time he pulls back into Lana’s driveway, Beaver is already on the front steps waiting for him.
“I saw,” John Beaver says, tossing his bag into the back. “We gotta go save his stupid ass, don’t we?”
Previous chapter. Next chapter.
Love don’t make no sense, not a lick or even a smooch of it. As a reminder, if you wanna skip the wait for chapters, you can grab your own digital copy of the whole book on my website or on amazon for your e-reader. I leave that decision up to you.