“Oh,” Julia said, “I can’t even imagine what sixty billion anythings would look like.”
I thought about it.
“Neither can I,” I said.
Cade and Monica sat away from us, drinking. Cade had his arm around Monica, and occasionally I could hear the wet sounds of their kissing. I didn’t really get their relationship at all. Cade was athletic, smart, energetic, and high maintenance; Monica was quiet, brooding, and dissatisfied. Monica’s wardrobe came in one color: black. And she only listened to bands like the Smiths and the Cure. As far as I could tell, Cade and Monica had only one thing in common.
It was a miracle they were still conscious, too. And they fully intended to have Julia drive us to Blake Grunwald’s party, where they would certainly drink more alcohol.
That’s what kids do.
“Not many people change schools in May,” I said. “Where did you come from?”
Julia smiled. She was startlingly beautiful. I looked directly into her eyes and saw tiny moons floating in them.
Twenty miles.
Twenty miles.
Then she said, “I came from up there.”
Julia Bishop nodded toward the moon and stars.
I said, “Oh, yeah. Well, you know, I guess we all did.”
“No.” Julia said, “I mean I came through a Lazarus Door, just like you.”
“Oh,” I said. It was a groan, actually.
Lazarus Doors.
This is the truth: In the book my father wrote, The Lazarus Door, the tiny, atom-size particles the angel-aliens came through to arrive at the endless orgy and dinner table of Planet Earth were called Lazarus Doors.
“You read that book too?” I said.
“Hasn’t everyone?” Julia asked.
Cade Hernandez, now animated and enthusiastic, said, “I never read books. Sorry, Finner.”
Then he burped and laughed.
Monica Fassbinder said, “What book?”
Here is another truth: My father once said to me that sometimes the smallest thing—a Lazarus Door–size idea—can force an entire book to squeeze out through it.
Poof!
I believed this.
My father told me the inspiration for his book came from the scar on my back.
Imagine that.
Once they got here, the incomers from Dad’s novel decided to surgically remove their wings, in order to blend in better with human beings.
Human beings were not very smart. We never have been, to be honest.
One human in the story, the hero, figured out he could identify the fallen angel–cannibal aliens by examining their naked backs. And the other thing about the incomers was this: They all had heterochromatic eyes.
I was trapped in that book and I couldn’t get out.
So the entire story came to my father because a dead horse fell one hundred sideways miles and broke my back.
This is why I only take my shirt off around people who don’t read—like Cade Hernandez and pretty much everybody associated with the Burnt Mill Creek High School Pioneers baseball team.
But Julia Bishop had been looking at my naked back that night, examining me as I lay facedown and practically naked in a puddle of piss on my living room floor. She noticed things. She’d seen my eyes. And anyone who’d read my father’s novel would know right away that the scars on my back were exactly the same marks carried by the predatory incomers.
“When are we going to the party?” Monica asked. Her cell-phone battery was dying, and she needed to get inside, to somewhere that had electrical outlets and objects moving faster than me and Julia.
Cade, supportive of his date, said, “Yeah. Let’s go. Moons are boringer than shit.”
So I stood and extended a hand to help Julia to her feet.
Our atoms touched.
It was electrifying, and I knew then that most of her and most of me had come from exactly the same churning stew of nothingness all those billions of miles away from where we stood, under a perigee moon, at exactly that moment.
Twenty miles.
“Um. Look,” I said to Julia, “Cade said he was sorry about not reading because my father is the guy who actually wrote that book. My last name is Easton. And my dad, Mike, writes as Easton Michaels.”
Julia Bishop stared at me.
Her eyes widened, and the little moons got brighter.
“Really?” she said.
I nodded.
“Really,” I confirmed.
• • •
Julia Bishop drove a brand-new Ford Mustang.
Cade complained about two things. The first being that Julia made him store his remaining beers inside the locked trunk.
Then he said, “This car’s so small, if I get a raging hard-on back here, it’s going to deploy your goddamned airbags.”
“Nobody would want that,” I said.
Monica Fassbinder giggled.
I offered an apologetic explanation to Julia Bishop. “Uh. Cade’s kind of obsessed with his . . . uh. . . . Well, he’s drunk. So, shut the hell up, Cade.”
And Cade speculated, “What you would see if I held a mirror in back of my nutsack, Finner.”
Then he poked a finger into my shoulder blade.
I rolled my eyes and sighed.
This was Cade Hernandez: set on a course of ruining everything.
Julia crawled her car across the creekbed and onto the highway.
“Do you think you could stop for a second at my house, just so I can be sure Laika made it home?”
“Okay,” Julia said.
Cade whined, “We’re never going to get there! I want another beer!”
“Five seconds, Cade.”
One hundred sideways miles.
Cade was irritating me. It had been a tough night, but I didn’t want it to end.
Not yet.
• • •
When we got to my house, Julia opened her door so she could follow me into the backyard. She left the motor running.
“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” I said, eyeing Cade in the backseat. I felt certain he’d borrow that idling car of hers and drive off.
“Oh.” Julia nodded.
She turned off the motor and took her keys.
Then we went through the yard and toward the back of the house to check on Laika.
Across the fence, I saw Mr. Castellan, the bullfighter, dumping garbage onto his incinerator. Incinerators are illegal in the canyon, but nobody seems to care enough to complain. Manny Castellan had atoms he needed to set free.
I pointed toward the glow of Mr. Castellan’s fire and said to Julia, “My neighbor used to fight bulls in Mexico.”
“Did he ever lose?” Julia asked.
I shrugged and shook my head. “I never asked him that.”
Mr. Castellan didn’t see us watching him. I noticed a while ago that Manuel Castellan walked like a bullfighter. He moved his legs like a gaited horse and held his chin just a bit higher than most men do.
A guy who moved like he did would never lose to a bull, I thought.
Sometimes his trash fires stunk pretty bad, depending on the types of atoms the bullfighter was freeing. This night, the smoke smelled of cinnamon and orange peel.
We went into the backyard.
“So your father actually made up The Lazarus Door just because of you?” Julia said.
“Yes.”
“It must be cool to have a dad who’s a famous writer, and to know that parts of you are in actual books,” she said.
Books are the knackeries to what is real.
“Too many parts of me,” I said.
I caught her glancing at me, smiling with her mouth closed.
“Sometimes it’s like I’ve been trapped inside his book.”
Julia said, “Oh.”
“Besides, it’s just the same as having a dad who does anything else,” I said.
Laika’s crate sat on the concrete deck between the patio and our pool. My dog lay curled up inside it,
watching me.
Laika has a real issue with guilt.
I swung the little crate door shut and trapped her inside.
“Hah!” Julia said, “Sputnik 2.”
“Most people don’t get it,” I said.
“The space dog.”
“The dog they killed.”
“Maybe that’s why she’s attracted to dead things,” Julia said.
I nodded. “You’re probably right. You can’t just name a dog Laika and then expect her to not be morbidly fascinated by decay. The name carries an awful lot of baggage.”
“Space garbage.”
Julia walked to the edge of the pool. I watched her. While the bullfighter walked like a gaited horse, Julia Bishop glided like a cat.
“This is a nice pool.”
“I swim a lot. If baseball and swimming weren’t at the same time, I’d probably be on swim. I’m pretty good. So’s Cade. Maybe sometime you could, uh . . . come . . . swimming.”
I didn’t know that I honestly wanted her to. Just saying it made me feel flustered, worried, and more than a little turned on, thinking about how our unclothed bodies might actually be connected by all those sticky molecules of warm pool water.
“Let me see your back again,” Julia said.
“No. I don’t want to.”
“Oh, come on. I think it’s the coolest thing ever, and I already saw it anyway.” She said, “I loved that book. Meeting you is like a miracle.”
I shook my head.
Julia went on. “What would you say if I told you I took a picture of your Lazarus Door mark with my phone while you were lying on the floor?”
My face went straight.
“I would say that’s probably the meanest thing anyone’s ever done to me.”
Julia pulled her phone from the back pocket of her shorts and handed it to me. It was warm.
She said, “You can look at my pictures. I didn’t do it. I was only messing with you, Finn.”
I gave Julia back her phone, turned around, and looked at the moon as I pulled my tank top up over my shoulders so she could see it.
The Lazarus Door mark.
The little things in my father’s novel were called Lazarus Doors because you actually had to die to come through them—one atom at a time.
There was even a song people in the book sang, and soon everyone all over the messed-up, invaded, and cannibalized planet began to hear the song constantly in their heads. At first, some people thought they were receiving messages, that the song itself was the Voice of God.
The song went like this:
When the little door opens,
A tiny man crawls through.
He climbs down a ladder
And gets inside you.
One atom at a time,
One atom at a time.
“Well, what if you really did come through a Lazarus Door but you just don’t remember doing it?” Julia said.
“Um. Sure.” I sighed. “It’s a novel. Novels are fiction. Some people got really crazy over that dumb book.”
I pulled my shirt down and turned to face her.
“What happened to you, then?” Julia asked.
I suddenly stopped thinking about anything that I used to keep protected.
Things started to be freed, and the prison gates swung open.
Something was being rendered out of my heart in the knackery of this night.
I said, “A dead horse fell out of the sky and landed on me. It broke my back. It’s why I blank out, have seizures. Cade calls it ‘doing my thing.’ That’s the truth—that’s what really happened, okay?”
“A dead horse?”
“Yes.”
I looked directly into her eyes. “It fell out of a truck that was hauling it to a knackery—a rendering plant—where they turn dead things into all kinds of shit you never thought contained dead things.”
“Well, I think whatever it is looks amazing. Like you actually came from another world. And you had no idea I was sitting there, trying to get you to say something?”
“No.”
“That must be cool,” Julia decided.
“I guess it is.”
I shrugged.
“I wonder what it must be like.”
“It’s like emptying everything out of your head, but you can still see and hear and feel. And you don’t care at all about who you are, or about anything, actually. It’s, um, beautiful.”
A car horn honked from the front of my house.
Cade Hernandez yelled, “Come! On! Fucker!”
I took a deep breath.
I said, “What? It’s been, like, fifteen seconds.”
Then Julia said, “I bet your girlfriend would be jealous if she knew I was driving you around, that I asked you to take off your shirt for me.”
“Oh, sure.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You’re messing with me again.”
“I promise I’m not.”
Twenty miles.
Twenty miles.
“Okay. Like I’d ever have a girlfriend,” I said.
“Why?” Julia laughed. “Are you gay or something?”
She was beautifully exasperating.
I turned away from her and walked toward the front yard.
I said, “No.”
Julia followed after me.
“Hey, wait. I’m sorry, Finn. I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings.”
“I’m fine, Julia.”
She grabbed my hand as I rounded the corner, heading toward her car. Cade was in the front seat of Julia’s Mustang, fumbling around to find the trunk release, no doubt to get to his locked-up beer.
I stopped, and Julia Bishop kissed me on the lips.
I smelled flowers. It was only her hair.
It was a short kiss, and to be honest my first reaction was to pull away from her. I had never kissed anyone on the mouth before. It startled and amazed me. Maybe that did make me gay or something. But my atoms were so confused. I felt like I could vaporize on the spot.
“What was that about?” I said.
“I’m sorry you’re having such a sucky night, Finn.”
“Nights like this come around only once every sixty billion miles,” I said.
And it wasn’t so bad after all.
BLAKE GRUNWALD’S SHITTY PARTY
“I’m not feeling so good,” Cade said.
I wouldn’t have expected anything to the contrary. Cade Hernandez had finished off at least ten beers that night, and as soon as we got to Blake Grunwald’s ridiculously bad party, he started drinking gin, too.
Cade’s skin, which was unblemished and usually glowed a radiant, healthy pink-peach, looked like slowly boiled pork fat.
I had a feeling there was a simmering stew of atoms inside Cade Hernandez’s digestive tract that needed to be freed.
And as it later turned out, I was correct.
“I’m going to go find somewhere to lay down,” Cade said.
“Maybe we should just leave,” I offered.
“I don’t think I should ride in Julia’s car, dude.”
Cade stood up, wobbling like a tightrope walker in a hurricane.
We had been sitting on a couch in Blake Grunwald’s parents’ living room—Cade, Monica, me, and Julia. The party was terrible. In the living room, about half of the baseball team were taking drunken turns at playing an NFL video game on Blake’s parents’ wide-screen television. A few girls were in there too, but most of them looked to be in junior high school, so between football plays the boys kept leering at Monica and Julia, and fidgeting conspicuously with their penises.
Most of the party took place outside, in Blake’s parents’ backyard, where scores of boys from Burnt Mill Creek gathered around gleaming kegs of beer, whooping and hollering over the dumbest and most inane masculine challenges, touching each other—which is something drunk boys at parties tend to do a bit too much—and smoking lots and lots of marijuana.
And every last boy at
the party, even the seventh- and eighth-graders, somehow managed to stroll past our place on the couch, raise an eyebrow, and say the exact same thing, which was this: “Hey, Monica.”
Monica Fassbinder’s ambidextrous generosity was legendary in Burnt Mill Creek, but as far as I knew, it began and ended at Cade Hernandez.
“I better help you, dude.”
I got up and put my arm around Cade’s shoulders.
Blake Grunwald’s parents’ home was what real estate agents in California called seventies ranch style—which meant it was long and narrow, dark on the interior, and built on one level. I led Cade down a hallway behind the living room, assuming we’d find someplace where a boy could pass out and not be noticed.
It wouldn’t be too much of a challenge, I thought. After seeing the mix of kids who’d come out to Blake Grunwald’s crappy party, I was confident this would be a no-sex event.
Across from a bathroom done entirely in the same shade of pale green you’d expect to see inside the examining room at a fertility clinic, the last doorway in the hall opened onto a darkened bedroom. I didn’t even need to turn on the light to know this was Blake’s room.
Catchers’ gear emits a particular damp-crotch boy smell. In the case of Blake Grunwald’s catchers’ gear, the scent produced a counteracting effect to how fertile I felt after glancing into the pastel green bathroom across the hall.
“Here,” I said. “Lie down on Blake’s bed. There’s a bathroom just outside the door.”
“Okay.”
I deposited Cade Hernandez onto our backup catcher’s nicely made bed. I picked up Cade’s legs and put them on top of Blake’s bedspread.
“Do you want some water or anything?” I asked.
“No. I’ll be okay in a few minutes. Thanks, dude.”
“Do you want me to take off your shoes?”
“Why the fuck are you wearing my shoes?”
“Uh . . .”
I pulled Cade’s shoes from his feet. He was burning hot. I could feel the soggy heat rising from his body like he was a wet tea bag that had just been lifted from boiling water. So I pulled his damp socks off, tucked them into his shoes, which I placed on the floor at the foot of Blake’s bed, and shut the door very quietly.
• • •
When I got back to the couch in Blake Grunwald’s parents’ living room, Monica Fassbinder and Julia Bishop were gone.