The Young World Read online

  EVEN THROUGH the temporal-spatial distortion of hyperspace, the death throes of the planet Alderaan strike the aged Jedi. He totters and sits. Luke asks him what’s wrong.

  “I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror, and were suddenly silenced. I fear something terrible has happened.”

  You said it.

  Brainbox won’t let me watch the movie and eat in peace. He’s dead set on some damn fool crusade.

  “That’s pretty far, dude,” I say.

  “What’s pretty far?” asks Donna, who returns from scrounging for extra scraps of pork under the guise of cleaning people’s plates for them.

  “The main branch,” says Brainbox.

  “Of what?”

  “The public library.”

  “With the lions?”

  “Yes.”

  Brainbox doesn’t meet Donna’s eyes. Instead, he does what he always does, which is turn the little crank on his plastic emergency radio and twiddle around between stations, which are nothing but static anyway, because everybody’s dead.

  “Have you read all the books at the Bobst already?” Donna asks.

  “Think about it, Donna,” says Brainbox. “How could I read all the books at the Bobst? They have over a million ti—”

  I crash in on Brainbox’s pedantry before it drowns us. “Brainbox found an abstract.”

  “Like, as opposed to a concrete?”

  “An abstract is a summary of a scientific paper,” says Brainbox.

  “Uh-huh. Awesome?”

  “Brainbox thinks it has something to do with What Happened,” I say.

  “Oh, that,” says Donna.

  “There’s only an abstract listing at the Bobst. And, of course, the computers are dead. So I need to go to the main branch to find out what the whole article says.”

  “Tell her what the abstract’s about,” I say.

  “It’s called ‘The Risk of Wexelblatt Effects in Enilikoskotonic Agents.’ ”

  Donna acts excited. “Why didn’t you say that in the first place!”

  Brainbox doesn’t know what to do with this. There’s really no point being ironic around him.

  “Two hours, there and back,” I say.

  “Uh, no thanks,” says Donna. “I heard the library was haunted.”

  “Where’d you hear that?”

  “I don’t know,” Donna says. “Around.”

  “There’s no such thing as ghosts,” I say.

  “Whatever.” Then she adds, “Just Google it, dude.” This is a popular catchphrase in the tribal lingo. You say it when you realize how little you know and how much you thought you knew before teh internetz up and died.

  “Tell her what enilikoskotonic means, BB.”

  “It means ‘adult-killing.’ ”

  “It killed the little kids, too.”

  Brainbox shrugs.

  Donna doesn’t say anything, but I can tell from her expression that it shakes her up a little. I’m kind of an expert in Donna’s facial expressions.

  She doesn’t know it, but I love looking at her.

  His point made, Brainbox goes back to playing with the windup radio. He turns the little crank, then floats the dial up and down. Static.

  Wash shows up. He’s wearing a tuxedo, and he must have gone to the trouble of boiling some water, because he’s had a shave.

  He intends to celebrate his eighteenth in style.

  There’s cheering, the guitar rolls into “Happy Birthday,” and everybody sings. But it’s kind of halfhearted. That song has a sting in its tail. Nobody has the bad taste to sing “and many more” at the end.

  The whole place goes dead at that, realizing that there probably won’t be any more.

  So I get up and I shout, “AND MANY MORE!”

  And the guitar gets strummed back to life, and the song starts up again. But people are singing it for real now, that same old crappy song, belting it out. And suddenly everybody is hugging. And people are crying. Peter is hugging Wash, and everybody is all around him, and he’s making sure he hugs them all, the ones he knows best, the ones he knows least, the ones he loves, the ones he doesn’t.

  He goes over to Donna and looks in her eyes, and it’s good-bye, I don’t want to be alone. I mean, he doesn’t say it, but I know. He hugs Brainbox, and I see good-bye, I’m sorry I can’t protect you anymore, and he comes to me, and I see good-bye, I know you don’t want it to be, but it’s good-bye, little brother, good-bye.

  And it’s good-bye, good-bye, good-bye. Good-bye, my friends, I love you; good-bye, I’m sorry I didn’t know you better; good-bye, I’m sorry you’ll die soon, too; good-bye, maybe there’s hope for you; good-bye, good-bye, good-bye.

  CHAPTER 4

  I WISH THAT I didn’t have to help Wash die.

  Don’t get me wrong. I’m not squeamish or anything. In the first place, I’m pretty much used to people buying the farm, and besides, I’ve seen the gnarliest stuff you can imagine with Mom at the ER.

  It’s that Washington and I had this thing.

  I sort of kind of thought I was in love with him for, like, ten minutes. And he sort of kind of was interested until I wouldn’t go all the way.

  Here’s when we get to the part that I haven’t mentioned yet? Because people get totally prejudiced by this? But I’m sort of kind of a virgin. Not, like, totally. Not, like, Goody Two-Shoes or anything. Like, I’ve done some stuff, but… yeah.

  It was just… when It Happened, suddenly everybody was hooking up all over the place. I mean, things were very NC-17 verging on X. When your life expectancy falls below the drinking age, you kind of have an incentive to live it up. Make hay while the sun shines. Car-pay the diem. Gather ye rosebuds while ye may. YOLO. Etc. Who cares about STDs? Who cares about rehab? Who cares about reputations? That’s for people with futures. And you can imagine what happened when people realized they couldn’t get pregnant. For a while it was total Sodom-and-Gomorrahville.

  So—doing it was the thing to do. Like, even more than Before. But I guess I’m just not much of a follower.

  I mean, basically I had lost everything. What did I have left to keep?

  Which is odd, because my parents were sooo not religious or anything. My mom told me more than I ever wanted to know about the birds and the bees and stuff. It was like, ugh, spare me the Latin names for everything. And it’s not like I felt I was keeping myself for anything or anyone. Just…

  So once Washington realized that he wasn’t getting any hot stuff, he lost interest, and I felt like a total moron. I was never able to tell Jefferson. I know he doesn’t have those kinds of feelings for me—I mean, I’m totally not his type—but all the same, for some reason, I felt like it would hurt our friendship. And that’s something else I have that I don’t want to lose.

  Anyway, the suckiest thing about being tribal doctor isn’t setting broken bones and hearing the muffled crunch-crunch through the flesh; it isn’t having to tell someone there’s no more pain medication because all the morphine and oxycodone and fentanyl have been hoovered up by junkies.

  It’s watching people you know die from the Sickness.

  Everybody thinks they know what dying looks like, because they’ve seen it on TV and in the movies. Like, some guy gets shot, and there’s just enough time for his buddies to say, “You’re gonna be fine! Stay with me! Chopper’s on the way!” And then the guy will say something really cool and poignant, and then he’ll log out.

  So not the deal.

  Generally, when somebody falls off a roof or gets shot or contracts cholera from some dirty water, they take a LONG time to die, and they’re screaming and moaning the whole time, and the smartest thing they can think of to say is, It hurts so much! over and over again. And you’re not thinking, Don’t you die on me! but God, I hope she kicks it soon. And they’re all, Help me! Help me! I don’t want to die! It hurts! Kill me! Which, yes, is contradictory, but, you know, as Walt Whitman said, “Do I contradict myself? So wha
t? Life is complicated as a mofo.”

  So—Washington starts showing symptoms, like, right on his birthday. This is odd, because the age thing is not some rule. Some people knock off around eighteen, some earlier, some later. You really never know. It has something to do with hormones. Something we have and little kids and adults don’t; that’s what protects you. But we must be hosts, because when you reach maturity, the stuff kicks in. Physical maturity, I mean. If you didn’t die until you reached emotional maturity, dudes would be living forever.

  Maybe Wash had been hanging on until his eighteenth, waiting for little bro Jefferson to grow up. But the day after the party, he starts coughing. And he knows the deal. Checks in to the infirmary. I give him his own room—a nice clean one overlooking the Square.

  Wash: “Go find Jefferson, will you?”

  Well, you can’t refuse a dying man, but I wish you could.

  Jefferson is at the north gate, talking to Brainbox about wiring something for sound. I don’t even have to say anything, thank God. When he sees my face, he knows.

  He drops what he’s doing and walks up to me. I give him a hug. Give him a hug? He gives me a hug. We exchange one. We share one.

  Grief cuts you open. Our nerves are poking out of our flesh and twining around each other like fighting octopi.

  And for some reason, I remember a time in kindergarten. Jeff is holding my hand, and I say, “Yes, I will marry you. Let’s go play!”

  Well, that was then.

  He’s forcing himself not to cry during the walk to the infirmary, which, why? What the hell is it with boys? Their heads must be all backed up with tears. Dumbshits. I love me a good weep. Let those toxins out.

  When they see each other, it’s like, “Hey.”—“Hey.” Like they’re just hanging out. I try to leave, but Wash calls me back. Jefferson looks like he’s glad I’m there, too. Wash holds my hand, and then Jefferson takes my other hand, and it’s, like, awkward! But, oh well. I’m in for the ride.

  Wash is still in the coherent stage. Once they start babbling, the end is near. The sweats are just setting in. “Tell me a story, Jeff,” he says.

  Jefferson is kind of the resident storyteller. When we got this whole groovy commune/armed compound thing going, people started gathering near the fountain at night. Nobody could stand being on their own. They’d hang out, play music, and shoot the shit. Get baked. Talk a lot about movies and TV, in a pathetic, nostalgic kind of way, like the end of the entertainment industry was the worst thing to come out of all this.

  Jefferson usually sat reading a book with a windup flashlight, acting kind of asocial. Every page or so—zipzipzip!—he’d wind up his flashlight. Then Brainbox would have a go on his radio. It was the two of them, cranking away.

  One night somebody asked him to read aloud, and then it became kind of a thing, and then somebody asked him to tell the story of a movie—just to, kind of, dramatize it.

  And the thing was, he was good. Once he got going, he’d do different voices, he’d comment on parts of the story, he’d twist things around so you never totally knew what was going to happen. Eventually people asked him to make up his own stories. So every night, he would tell one. Kind of like the stories parents make up for their kids, but more grown-up. “The Dude Who Played Diablo With the Devil,” “The Phantom Subway Stop,” “The Garage That Ate Bands,” that sort of thing.

  Once I saw him looking all preoccupied, and I asked him what was up, and he said, “I’m working on tonight’s story.” Thing is, people were just fiending for anything familiar and non-end-of-the-world-ish. He didn’t have to try so hard. We were like four-year-olds at bedtime. But Jeff started to take some pride in it.

  Jeff: “I don’t have a story.”

  Wash: “Last chance.” And Jeff looks as if a wave of misery has smacked him in the face.

  He starts telling Wash a story about this guy Sid Arthur, who grows up super rich. His parents want to give him the perfect childhood, so they, like, keep him indoors and turn off the TV, and he’s not allowed to know about all the lame shit that goes on in the world.

  One day, he’s in the maid’s room and he sees TV for the first time. It’s some detective show, and a dude’s been murdered. He’s never even heard of death before, and it blows his mind.

  Sid decides to go out into the world and find out about all the stuff he’s been missing. This is a major downer, and after a while, Sid wishes he hadn’t seen all the homeless people and the beat-downs and the old folks in retirement homes and whatnot, but it’s too late. There’s no “undo” command for life. So he ends up sitting for days on end under a tree in the park, and he figures out that the reason everything is such a drag is that people are totally obsessed with hanging on to what they have—cool stuff and good feelings and youth and even life itself. Sid realizes that it’s all bullshit, and then for some reason, he gets totally blissed out.

  I have absolutely no idea what this means, but Wash nods and laughs. I have a sense that Jefferson is riffing on some story they already know. Maybe it comes from the Asian mojo side of them. They’re, like, half Japanese, which, by the way, is part of what made Wash so majorly hot. Best-of-both-worlds-type situation.

  Jefferson isn’t as much of a babe. I mean, he’s cute. I guess I just never think of him that way.

  The first convulsions hit, and it’s not gonna be long till the crazy talk starts and then the coma sets in. Wash knows what’s coming, and he tells Jeff it’s time to say bye, but Jefferson won’t leave.

  I go catch some sleep. I leave Jeff and Wash together. When I leave, I finally hear Jeff cry, those horrible I-can’t-breathe, little-kid tears.

  Wash didn’t want a funeral, but naturally people gather around the fountain that night. Everybody with their candles and their lanterns and their plastic rave blinkies. It’s kind of nice that people would use up their precious blinky batteries, crack those glow sticks and let them burn out. Everybody’s wearing their best gear. Dior dresses with combat boots, sharp suits with band patches on them, basketball shirts with Native American beads, sabers, handmade spears, bolt-action rifles with craft-knit slings. People have painted tears coming from their eyes. Black armbands and Wash graffiti on their jackets. Somebody has even unearthed a varsity jacket with a big purple W on it.

  I have to admit I kind of like us, I mean our tribe. Especially when you compare it with a bunch of creeps like the Uptowners. We definitely let our freak flags fly. It would have been cool if everybody had felt so free-spirited before the end of the world, but better late than never, I guess.

  We’ve been through the funeral routine before, of course. Somebody gets accepted into the big university in the sky every few weeks. Usually we try to just forget about it. Around here we try not to think about the future. And we try to delete the past.

  But Wash was different. Without him, we’d be a bunch of cliques and floaters. We’d be dead. So they sit around, they swap stories about him, they say “I can’t believe it.” The mood starts to feel like despair. I even hear somebody talking about heading out on their own. Wash would hate this. Wash would stop this.

  Jefferson seems like he gets the way people are feeling. He steps onto the edge of the fountain and calls for quiet.

  CHAPTER 5

  EVERYBODY’S LOOKING AT ME. I’m wearing Wash’s hand-me-down authority until they realize it doesn’t fit. “Listen,” I say. “I get the feeling that everybody’s thinking about what happens now. Maybe you’re scared. Well, I’m scared, too.”

  Okay, everybody’s listening. Now what? I’m not used to making speeches. So I decide to think about it like I’m just telling a story. Everybody likes a story.

  “Wash felt the same way about all of you as he did about me. You were his family.” Oh crap, don’t cry now.

  “Before he died, he said I should tell you all this: He wanted to make sure that we stuck together, no matter what. He wanted to make sure that we did everything we could to help each other. He was proud that we’d managed
to pull together a life on the edge of this… this chaos and darkness. He wanted me to tell you to love each other and protect each other.” I can’t think of anything else, so I just say, “That’s it.”

  I hop off the edge of the fountain. And the moment I do, I hear somebody say, “Jefferson for generalissimo!” That’s the title Wash chose when they voted him in. He thought it was funny.

  Everybody applauds; everybody joins in. Popular acclaim. My election is seconded and thirded and fourthed and down the line. A landslide for Wash’s little brother. Like the divine right of kings is back in style.

  This isn’t what I had in mind. Telling people what to do isn’t my thing. I don’t want to call the shots. All I wanted was to give people a little backbone, maybe make them think twice about bailing on the tribe. It wasn’t a political speech or anything. But then I realize there’s no difference between talking and politics when there are so few of us.

  See, direct democracy is kind of unavoidable when you’re all huddled together in a five-hundred-by-one-thousand-foot rectangle.

  Not that there’s much to vote about. People can kind of agree on everything important. Guard the gates. Get food. Dig latrines.

  Wash says this is—said this is—about “the Hierarchy of Needs.” He said we didn’t have time to argue about the usual crap, like whether it’s cool to gay-marry somebody or whatever, because we were too busy trying to eat. We’re from three different schools—the rich kids from the Learning Center, the poor Catholic kids from Loyola, and the gay kids from Stonewall—but we don’t give each other much hassle. Thank you, Hierarchy of Needs.

  What else is keeping us together? We don’t even have a constitution. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? We’re still working on the first one.

  Here’s our domestic policy: Just chill.

  Here’s our foreign policy: Go fuck yourself.

  So I don’t want to run the show. The show sucks. The show is gonna close. “New York, New York” is playing while people file out of the stadium.