- XIV -

* * * * *
         The ache in his head where he just bumped his head against the ceiling is pulsing to the rhythm of the music, a gestating headache, his blood finding the beat of the music better than he apparently even will. Will. William. That's his name. That was it. The jolt must have knocked some of the thoughts out of his head, scattered them like small fish all over the floor, he can imagine them flopping around, trying to get back home, get back to where they belong. Maybe some will mistakenly crawl into someone else's head and they'll start thinking that they're someone else. Or, and he smiles when thinking of this, absentmindedly rubbing the top of his head, hand tracing the contours of his skull, maybe those thoughts have crawled into his head and he's standing here thinking that he's Will.
         "God, I'm getting weird," Will notes to himself, as if by stating the fact it might become more solid, more real, he can take it and file it away somewhere and maybe one day retrieve it. One day when it might come in handy. There's a cold can in his head, the condensation greasing the grooves in his palm. It's reassuringly heavy, there's a distant weight to it. Good. More for him. He tips it back, taking a sip, letting the beer cut a path down his throat, leading the parade right down into his stomach. The world blurs for a second and time shifts, slows down, and he blinks, eyes briefly watery. Sound slows, traffic jamming up against his ears, cotton plugging his brains.
         ". . . if this is freedom I don't understand, it seems like madness to me . . ."
         Will's forgotten. Forgotten what this felt like, what this even is. A papery warm feeling, the alcohol caking his insides, an armor against the world. His head feels light but there's solid ground beneath his feet and the party spreads below him. Will remembers walking across a bridge once, once at night, and something making him stop just for a second. And he looked out and there was the water and there was a city, all lights unfurling into the horizon, a thousand distant glittering points, flickering jewels burning as if trying to hold it all back. Hold back the water, hold back the dark. This is the party to him, in those moments when he gets philosophical about it. He really doesn't want to, but it's the beer clogging his brain, it drives you into patterns, tires your head out, so that you don't want to think new thoughts, you just want to fall right into the same ruts and just pretend that the infusion of liquor has given you new insight. It hasn't of course but there's not a force in the world that can stop you from lying to yourself.
         But Will knows he's not on the bridge anymore. There's no chill breeze here to tickle his hair and make the mucous run in his nose. He's on the stairs in his apartment, as it turns out, halfway up or halfway down, one arm draped on the gentle slope of the wide bannister. He's on the stairs and he's watching the dancers figure out how to make kinetic fireworks. Will wishes he could dance with something resembling grace, not that grace is any criteria for getting down there and letting loose, but the best he would manage right now would be a rubbery jaunty sort of jig. Not that he won't be down there anyway, but for the moment he'll just let prudence have some sway. For once.
         There's a trickling pressure behind him and he steps out of the way just in time to allow a small group to shuffle past. Someone comments to him that it's a great party but with the music directly below him spewing out sound the comment comes out more as an impression of sound, a slate of words that he has to fill the blanks in. Still, the sentiment is real enough. He can see it in their faces, especially in the last couple, who are holding hands even as they go down the stairs. The girl's hair is plastered to her head with slick wetness and she's got a smile on her face that could almost count as glowing. The guy isn't far behind, and Will stares at them a little harder, trying to see if he can recognize either of them. Nope. Ah well, he shrugs to himself, giving himself a minor thrill by watching the girl's receding back, those are the risks you run when planning a party like this. The more the merrier. So they say. He grins to himself again, raising a small toast to the departing group before taking another sip of his beer.
         The thought strikes him halfway through swallowing and it's only because his thoughts are heavy, slothlike things that it doesn't reach his mind until the beer is safely charging toward his intestines.
         "Oh my God," he comments, twisting a little to look back at the curling darkness that inhabits the top of the stairs, "they better not have been having sex on my bed." But he's laughing even as he says it, because it's such an absurdist thought that it's probably too damn true. He pictures his sheets all misshapen and wrinkled, vaguely defined bodies groping for each other in the dark. He holds that image in his mind for just a second, long enough to derive some small pleasure in it but not enough so that he feels like some kind of goddamned pervert. Well, he had wanted to lock the doors to the rooms, but as long as someone enjoyed themselves, hey, he can always wash the sheets later.
         "Well, that's awful neighborly of you to be that accommodating, Will," Will tells himself, leaning against the stairs so that he's facing the wall that intersects with the landing. A couple is nestled in a corner, but they're not doing anything. Neither are they doing nothing, come to think of it. It's a thin, slim line. The bizarre world of nonverbal communication. Turning someone on with just a look. Will remembers meeting eyes with someone across the room not too long ago, while he was attempting to convince people he could dance. They locked gazes and there was only the slightest tweaked curling of her lip upward, it might have only been the taunting play of light and shadow. Or it might have been real. Whatever it was, by the time she had turned away and melded again with the constantly shifting crowd, he had found that the room had grown much warmer. Hence his trip up here, to the heightened solitude of the stairs, though he had told himself that he was doing it so he could stand and drink and reflect a bit. Will doesn't think he reflects that well, actually, certainly not as well as a mirror, or even a polished shard of tin. The images are always clouded with steam and wrapped in distortion. So much the better, really, if he could see everything about himself clearly, it probably wouldn't be pretty.
         Will holds the can up at his eye level for a second, as if trying to find his own reflection in the pooled fun house images emanating from the curved aluminum. There's a million drops of perspiration from the can dotting it, each one probably holding his face huddled within it, mothers holding children tightly to their liquid breasts. The world through watery insect eyes. Splintered into rounded fragments, somehow all coming together i the end and making sense.
         "You know," he says, cocking his head to the side, as if just realizing the fact, "you, Will, are the host of this here party and yet here you are up here . . . standing by yourself and musing strange thoughts." His words are stumbling over each other in their explicit haste to escape from his throat, to give the others some room. "What gives, Will? Shouldn't you be down there mingling?" He taps the can against the hard wood of the bannister, almost fooling himself into thinking he can hear the clanking clash of solid wood and hollow metal. He can feel the beer sloshing around in the can, if that's any consolation. His hearing might be shot, but his other senses are more than ready to take up the slack. Good job, boys.
         "Oh, I'll be back down there eventually, Will," he answers himself, wondering if he really has gone crazy, "it's just that I need a couple moments of relative peace and quiet and a little something to fortify myself with before diving back into that mess down there."
         "Oh, I see," Will grins, nodding his head as if understanding has suddenly decided to take up residence in his head alone. "Well, then, Will, my good man, you just keep on doing what you're doing and feel free to join the party whenever you damn well feel like it."
         "That's mighty obliging of you, Will. I think I'll do just that."
         The conversation ended thus, he turns back to the party, trying to fixate himself on small details, the light refracting off the jangling motion of someone's earring, a couple dancing so fluidly that it almost seems like one person, a small kiss exchanged between friends, a longer kiss that could almost be mistaken for first aid, all those small things. The encouraging looks a girl gives a guy as he takes his first tentative steps into the world of aimless dancing. All of them, because that's the moments you find yourself remembering, in the end. The big picture you won't be able to fathom when the night's over, it's the equivalent of being exposed to the answers to everything, the brain can't retain it. Pick an area and memorize it.
         ". . . well my head was beating like a song from the Clash, it was writing cheques that my body couldn't cash, I got to my feet I was reeling and dizzy, I went to the phone but the line was busy . . ."
         His eyes trace the room like he's following the path of a wayward kite. Eventually and perhaps almost inevitably it rests in the area of the bar. They're all standing there, just like he thought they would. From the fogged distance they're almost blotches of color given vaguely human shape but he knows them all, he knows all his friends. The patented Will memory. Jina and Brian and Lena and even, though he still can't believe it, Joseph Brown. They appear to be engaged in some sort of conversation, trapping themselves in some warp where the party doesn't even exist. Lena's shaking her head at something and Will wonders why more people don't consider her prettier. He's one of those people as it turns out but it's late and there's alcohol coursing through his blood and it makes him vulnerable. Stray thoughts just keep finding those cracks and crawling right in and taking root. He wonders what they're talking about. Maybe Tristian.
         Another stray thought. Where the hell is Tristian? Will can't see him down there and he's got this sudden utterly irrational fear that Tristian is nowhere and everywhere, that he's left the party but left something behind. Something for all of them, in all of them. Will wishes very much he knew where Tristian was, and expects the man to suddenly emerge from the darkness like he's been hiding there the entire time, changing the colors on his body to match the scenery. Will finds his heart struggling to beat faster, though the beer is working against that, keeping it down. Tristian's nowhere in sight. Where the hell is he? Will feels more than hears the crinkling crunch of his can imploding slightly as he squeezes it, trying to feel something. Trying to blot out that one jarring memory of that one split second where you felt like you didn't exist. Maybe Tristian went to get some friends, some old friends of his. Special friends. Ha. That'd be funny, just the kick his party needs. Ha. Will really wants to know where Tristian is, he really wants to know because he's not sure why he invited Tristian because the man for some reason is his friend and yet he frightens the hell out of him and this really isn't stuff Will wants to think about but he can't, he can't help it because he feels like if Tristian is out of his sight he might do something crazy or something crazy might happen and and he can't let that happen, not again, not again, it's just something he can let himself go through.
         "Get a grip, Will," Will tells himself. There's a hoarse lack of passion in his voice. He leans harder on the bannister, feeling the unyielding pressure of the wood digging into his forearms, a dull crunching pain. He needs it. He needs it because it keeps him from trying to get over something he doesn't think he'll ever be able to get over. There are days when sleeping is a problem, when he fears that if he closes his eyes and lets the oblivion wash over him, the surroundings won't be the same when he opens his eyes again. Blink. Blink and you're somewhere else. None of you are really very necessary here. Was he just speaking your thoughts, Tristian? Is that what you really think of us, deep down inside?
         Then he sees Brown talking to someone basically offscreen, someone seemingly tucked in the corner. He sees a shadow splashed against the wall, moving, mimicking the invisible person's movements. Tristian. It has to be. It has to be him. Oh damn. Oh God damn. Will takes another long drink of his beer. He's going to have get back to this party soon, or he's going to drive himself nuts worrying. A little dancing and drinking will uncurl this tightened coil of anxiety nesting in his stomach. The feeling when your plane is about to touch the ground and for that one second you think something is wrong and that you're going to die right here and right then and there's not a damn thing you can do about it. That's life, when you come down to it. Will doesn't want to admit that but events have turned his head around, faced him in a different direction. Life disrupts fate's plans. Keeps putting you in wrong places at wrong times and you're expected to cope. When memory is just pushing against the inside of your head and all the beer can't reduce the swelling of the world. All the partying and flirting and sex and laughing and singing can't blot out one half second of nothing. Of nothing and everything.
         Will realizes soberly that he hasn't eaten in a restaurant since that night. None of them have. One of those unspoken things between everyone, messages cast in glances and looks, fretting motions of a hand, legs crossing and uncrossing, as if numb. One of those things you just know without speaking of it. If anything, if anything good came out of it, the damn incident brought them all closer together. Linked by events while driven apart by time. A little support group that only meets to get drunk and stare at their knees or their feet or the floor and does their level best to say absolutely nothing anymore. Because, in the end, what the hell do you say? Gosh gee, I sure thought something strange was going to go down that night, eh? Just one of those feelings you get, eh? Just one of those goddamned useless feelings. Useless useless useless.
         Will's thinking about Tristian. He doesn't want to. All he can see is the shadow of the ghost of his arm and even that's enough to send his thoughts spinning. The shadow seems to be clawing at Brown's face, draping over Jina's chest, pointing right at Lena. He's thinking about Tristian and staring at Joseph Brown, who is talking to Tristian like he's always been his best friend. Like it always has been that way. But it wasn't. He was there, he remembers, even an alcohol drenched haze can't alter the past. Not in any significant way at least. Brown and Tristian never talked to each other, their personalities are the exact opposites, they still are, Brown the talkative outgoing one and Tristian the slightly detached nerd, peering at everyone in that naive innocent way of his, seeming to take all your words at face value regardless of how stupid they sounded. When did they become friends? What happened in those lost years when Brown was gone? For some reason he finds himself feeling an abject jealously, Brown can connect with Tristian in a way that none of them seem to be able to want to do anymore.
         "Dammit, he's my friend, too . . ." Will nearly snarls to no one in particular, feeling the beer giving his words teeth, closing his other fist tightly enough that he can feel the blood straining against the thin membrane of his skin. "He's my-"
         And then Will stops. He's thinking about Tristian and he doesn't want to think about Tristian. And yet he can't stop, it's being chained down in a chair while some virus parades your memories in front of you like some deranged fashion show. Step right up, make love to the camera. The world loves to stare at you.
         "I got him to come here, that . . . that has to count for something," he whispers, he mutters, not sure who he's talking to, justifying himself to some force. Forces without names. It's not gravity or magnetism or fate or karma that guides the world, it's that separate nameless force that can't comprehend and can't describe. So you give names to tiny aspects and hope eventually that if you give enough names to enough aspects you'll have settled the entire picture. Doesn't work that way.
         "I mean he really is our friend and it's not like he did anything to us," and he pushes himself off from the bannister, backing up a step and then turning his entire body, watching the world slowly rotate to match his movements, blurring at the edges. Who's he trying to convince, he knows he did the right thing. It was the right thing to do. The stairs are creaking reassuringly under his feet, even as the darkness near the top of the stairs enfolds him like an old tattered cloak. There are lights in the hallway upstairs leaking down toward him, tentative fingers brushing the darkness away like so much dust.
         He's about to continue his exterior commentary further when there's a scraping of shadows at the top of the stairs. A body whirls into view, almost too fast for his light blurred eyes to even fixate on. Will stops, realizing a second later that it's a fellow party goer and he shifts his weight over to the side of the stairs, giving the other person enough room to let them past. His nostrils are fascinated by the abrupt sickly damp smell of alcohol.
         "Oh hey, Will!" someone with a girl's voice says and he feels someone grabbing his hands, the pressure tight but warm. "I've barely seen you all night, where have you been?"
         His vision resolves into a pleasantly attractive image of a girl, brown hair delicately framing a heartshaped face, eyes almost too big for that face, seeming to drink all the light in, a smile the signature completing the picture. She's smiling. At him. Her hands are oddly soft, almost wet, though he thinks maybe it's condensation from the can. There's no rhythm or reason to anything, regardless of what the music downstairs might tell you. It's all stumbling through a million different rooms, arms flailing, head down, not sure what the next open door will make you behold.
         A name pops into his head, he hopes it's the right one. There's so many people here tonight, he's not even sure who he's supposed to know, who he's supposed to introduce himself to. Hi. I'm Will. I'm the guy allowing you to get drunk off your ass and make a fool out of yourself and make out with at least five women but be unable to remember any of it the next day. Yup. That's me. Hold your applause until the end please.
         "Oh, geez . . . hi Dana, I haven't seen you all night either. How've been?" His words are misshapen clumsy things, a bag of marbles rattling around in his mouth. She doesn't seem to notice, her eyes are looking at him but there's no telling what she might be seeing. He gets the impression that she might be using him for balance as much as anything else. It's not a feeling that Will can say he really dislikes.
         "Oh me, I've . . . I've been great . . . Will, really great. This is a great party, you really know . . . how to put these things together, you know? Everyone seems to be having a good . . . time . . ." She tosses her hair, a quizzical expression as she throws some out of her face, as if wondering what this strangely foreign thing is doing attached to her head. Sweat from the flailing strands dot his face like a light spring rain. For the first time he starts to consciously note how close she's standing to him. Her chest is mere inches from his. There's almost no gap at all.
         "Yeah, well you know," he shrugs, flashing her a grin that reflects the light, "I try. Nobody else seems about to do this." Slowly he's brought her hands down, so there's nothing really between them. Will isn't thinking about Tristian right now, he's thinking about the girl a few inches from him, and how different she looks close up. Certainly better than admiring someone from afar, trying to stare across a crowded lecture hall, pretending to be watching the wall, the window, the sky, the ceiling, everything but her.
         "Right, right," she replies, nodding quickly. "But we needed this, we need to get out and just . . . just let loose once in a while. Right?" She's talking so fast, her mouth a blur. He wants to cover it with his hand, he could, he's standing so close. For some reason he can't stop thinking about that.
         "I'd say so," Will tells her and maybe he's imagining it but the gap between them might just close a lone solitary inch. Keep dividing the distance by half and you'll never reach her. Never thought you would. Those dancing days of eye contact, a flirting smiles, the odd exchange in passing. They both wound up in a diner one night, with groups of friends and they talked and when she talked to someone else he sat there and soaked it up, trying to find something to make an impression, trying to find out everything. What do you call those feelings? He's not sure.
         "So, ah . . . how are you doing, Will? Really?" She might have said that already, he's not sure, he doesn't remember. It's like it's always been this way. They're both drunk, he knows that, it's floating outside your body and watching a molecule of alcohol sitting in the control seat of your brain and calling the shots. The world turns into tunnel vision, a looping rushing tunnel of air and sound. The radio comes in as distant beats, someone banging endlessly on a wooden door.
         ". . . there's something in your eyes that is keeping my hope alive . . ."
         The past disfigures your memory, you tend to recollect the version of events that you want to see, where things turn out in your favor. And it's not just events, it's emotions, it's the feelings guiding history that are vastly more important. Change them and you change everything. Will remembers those fleeting glances, the longer glances, friendly smiles, the touch of a hand, a pat on the back, the curling tremors in a voice. Attraction is a puzzle extending into more than one dimension. Two people can put it together and not get the same thing.
         "Me? I'm doing just great," and he spins his words with enough of a flirt, gently squeezing her hands. His feel so cold compared to hers, all the heat in the apartment seems to have risen into this stairwell. It's giving him thoughts that he almost has to physically shake out of his head. This isn't how it should be. He doesn't know, how can he do anything if he doesn't know.
         "That's good to hear," and all he can hear is her voice, her voice and a roaring like waves smashing into a crumbling beach. All he can see is her face, it's so close it fills his entire vision, laying down on your back and watching the clouds go by when suddenly the world's largest zeppelin takes over the sky. You can't escape something that large. This large. This big.
         Sometimes events are just pieces of your life shoved down an icy slope, you reach a certain critical point on the banks and there's no choosing direction anymore. The heat's rising in his body, reflecting off hers and he's just not sure, he's just not sure, he can't know. Still, the gentle alcohol laced air from her breath is caressing his face, it's that close. He can almost hear time jamming up the gears, snarling to a halt. Does it always really take this long, it never did before.
         And yet he's trying to pull away.
         "I, Dana . . ." he's trying to say her name and his name and something between and it's just not coming. He can't stop it.
         "Yes?" but it's not her voice, just the ghost of what he thinks she might have said, an echo rebounding off an canyon. Is there a hint of something there, he's trying to find something in her voice, in her eyes, in her body language, but he's fallen out of the plane and descending for the ground as fast as he can, there's no stopping it now.
         He wants it to stop.
         He can't help wanting this.
         Her hand moves to his shoulder, his hand still cupping it.
         But I don't know-
         His other hand is around her back, feeling the moist trails of sweat and hormones, trying to find the tracings and only managing a plodding form of Braille. He can feel her hair against his face, tickling, teasing. Touching.
         She's drunk and I'm drunk and how do I know she really wants this I don't know and she-
         Will wants this and he doesn't want it. Because he can't tell if she wants it, if she's following her own script or she's caught in the same powerless flood of desire and proximity. There's a longing egging him on, but does she have the same feelings.
         Her lips brush his but he can't get the doubts from his head even as he can't keep himself from responding. There are dreams he's had like this but it's not right, not right at all. His back is to the wall and she's still pushing forward, pressing against him. There might be free will involved in this, there might not be.
         His head is light, spinning, newly intoxicated even as he falls into patterns driven into the ground a long time ago. It's not sex but it's a coupling as grimly intensive, he can barely keep track of his own hands, his lips, her face, her hands, her body. So close to him and yet he can't keep track of her. Part of him wants to sling her over his shoulder caveman style and fling her onto his bed and continue this there. The other part of his split head just can't stop thinking. There's a spark of hopeful intent in his eager movements, because he wants this to be real and not just some random stretch of making out, he wants it to mean something. Will's an optimist and he wants to think that you fight the good effort and it pays off in the end, that you go for the girl and just when you think you're not getting anywhere something like this gets sprung on you, that she's been waiting for this party, this moment, this meeting for them to do this. That she saw a kindred soul and it ignited her, and in the end she may not have been able to stop herself, much like him, but it was for the right reasons.
         It's not-
         She touches him and light flares in his head, her voice is a soft pressure in his ear, fanning any flames higher, he wants to clutch her tighter, he wants to lose himself totally in baseless fantasy but he can't. Reality's the devil at the door who keeps peeking in the window to make sure that you're still home. Reminding him that the play's the thing and it's all just chance. That interest and alcohol alone may have been enough to spark this, but in the end, the embers turn out to be ice.
         We're both drunk and I-
         I-
         just want it to mean-
         something-
         just want
         then it's over. The world fogs and then clears again, and he has the lingering taste of her on his mouth and the sight of her retreating from him in his vision, her steps miles apart, taking her farther away with every motion. He lifts his hand and stares at it, thinking he can see the glistening of her moisture on his palm, trying to keep the pressure from her skin there as long as he can. It's fading already though, evaporating, memory is just drifting away. His chest feels warm, on fire but there's a distinct chill in the center of it. He rubs his shirt, feeling it stick to his skin, the rough fabric chafing his chest. Slowly and deliberately he leans his head back until it touches the wall behind him, feeling it connect with a satisfying clunk. Closing his eyes tightly, he tries to make himself relax, letting out his breath in the way they used to teach in karate class.
         S.l.o.w.l.y.
         And then he opens his eyes sharply, still seeing only darkness, the room matching the void behind his eyelids.
         The grin that whips across his face can almost be called wolfish. "My conscience," he says quite simply to himself, accenting every word as if someone might be listening in, "is going to kill me."
         "Better that than your girlfriend, if you had one," a voice floats down from above. Will is in such a blissed out state that he doesn't even find himself feeling shocked or surprised. He tips his head further to see Jack leaning over the bannister on the second floor. For a second the two men are staring at each other, a slow motion contest to see who can blink first. There's no prize of course, other than the dubious satisfaction of knowing that you're so drunk that you can't even close your eyes properly anymore. Signals to the head just getting shafted, scattered into a million different tiny lightning bolts, feeding back into your body, giving you energy, that famed party second wind. Will remembers visiting a relative in the hospital and seeing the EEG, those jumpy lines and waves that show the earthquakes in your head, and he remembers thinking that his thoughts couldn't look like that, they wouldn't be such sharp jagged things, his thoughts were sublime, smooth structures, sculptures cast in ice, reaching for an endless sky.
         Now, his thoughts have become one flat wave, and yet he's still moving, still here, still partying. In spirit, if anything else. He's thinking back to the last few seconds and something tightens within him. It can happen to you and yet you still won't believe.
         "How much of that did you see?" Will asks Jack, turning his body to lean sideways against the wall, grinning up at the other fellow.
         "Just the tail end, alas," Jack admits, shrugging his shoulders. His curly hair seems dotted with glistening beads, jiggling in time with the motions of his head. He lays his glass down on the table like surface of the bannister, folding his hands together formally and looking between them at Will. "But I think I saw enough. Quite the show, that." His voice is coming to Will in ocean waves, there seems to be static on the line and Will's not sure which end the problem is on. But who is he kidding? There is no problem, no problem at all. Everything is just fine.
         "If I told you that I had spent all time planning that, would you believe me . . ." Will asks, a gleam in his eye. He crosses the rest of the steps so that he's level with Jack. The man's a bit shorter than him, but with beer acting as the lens he seems to have stepped into a funhouse mirror. Will licks dry lips and realizes that it's probably time to cut himself off, once the world becomes concave, another drink and he's going to wake up the next morning with a large simpering hole in his memory and a taste in his mouth like acid. Easy enough to do anyway, since he seems to have misplaced his drink. Figures. The good Lord works in mysterious ways.
         A sudden unwanted image of the smiling face of someone he thought he knew gallops across his mind, the face saying something but there's no sound coming out. No sound at all. And then the world dissolves into golden mist, the light of nothingness. For a split second, it was like he was dead, for a split second he didn't exist, no breathing, no living, no-
         ". . . think I believe that, then . . ." Jack's saying but Will isn't really listening, his ears are trying to catch fragments from a past that he wants to stuff into a hole and forget ever happened. Cover it with dirt and stamp your feet across it to smooth the pile over. Like it's not even there. Tristian, Tristian, what were you thinking?
         "What do you think of the party so far, Jack?" Will finds himself asking suddenly, also leaning against the ample surface of the bannister, feeling his chest constricting, like his body is physically trying to wriggle away from memories it doesn't want to touch, that it just wants to seal away in some corner and jettison. There's cold sweat bathing his torso, it's a clammy massage, pervert's hands without the pretense of friendliness. "Are you enjoying yourself? Having fun?"
         Jack gives him a sideways glance, blinking as he tries to process this. They're probably both teetering on the edge of being smashed, grabbing each other for support and laughing all the way down anyway. That's what you've got to do, in the end, grab hold of the person next to you and laugh at the darkness together. Show it that you can still be kicked down and can still care, that apathy can't be beaten into you. That a poignant pressing need can inflame you as much as anything else.
         "Sure, Will," Jack replies finally, in a gap that reaches across forever. "Sure I am." There's a sly grin on his face as he continues, his eyes are reading Will, blind Braille fingers running over his face. "But probably not as much fun as you were having just now."
         "Oh yeah," Will laughs, standing up and backing up a step, clapping his hands against the wall behind him, palms flat. "That was a show, wasn't it?" For some reason he finds this statement utterly hilarious and he spends more time than he probably should laughing about it. Eventually, almost breathless he leans his full weight against the wall, almost sliding down it. "God, I'm drunk, right? I must be drunk." It's a statement of purpose
         But Jack is laughing too and his face is red as he tries to get his breath back as well, nostrils flaring to grasp at the stray air that flutters right outside it. "Makes two of us, pal, makes two of us." Repetition seems the order of the day, served cold with a side salad. Good Lord he's so drunk. Did he really just make out with someone on the stairs. Thoughts keep hitting him with rubber thuds. "This is one hell of a party, my friend," Jack tells him, glancing at him owlishly. "You've outdone yourself."
         Will attempts to effect a mock bow, though moving his head sends the world spiraling off with a giggle. He aborts the effort before he winds up falling down the stairs. "Why thank you, but I'm only as good as the folks who decide to show up."
         Jack waves a hand, wiping a pretend tear from his very unfocused eye. "Oh do stop, you do me too much justice."
         "Oh, what, I didn't mean you."
         Jack pauses for a second and then slowly looks up at Will again, holding his steady gaze for just a second before shaking his head and laughing again. "Bastard," he shuffles out.
         "Yeah, we both are, aren't we?" Will states, sighing a little, his voice almost philosophical. "Two big macho bastards looking for a good time."
         "Looking, nothing, you found yours buddy," Jack points out. He hefts the drink a little, draining some of it before setting it back down again. His hand wavers into a slight bout of unsteadiness. "Liquid courage this is, here's hoping that it works."
         "What the hell do you need courage for?" Will asks, narrowing his eyes. "You've got confidence to spare, last I checked." He points a hand that keeps lapsing into double vision at the recessed blackness of the stairs. "That should have been you over there a few minutes ago."
         "Oh, so you're saying that you were just an innocent bystander caught in the wrong place . . ." Jack smiles at him. "A drive by spray of hormones?"
         "Apt enough," Will admits after a second.
         "So you had no enjoyment from it whatsoever," Jack needles, "just two ships bumping, grinding, in the night then."
         "Hey, now I didn't say that. Let's not go too far." A warm feeling suffuses his body again, perhaps a delayed effect of claiming his body for the kingdom of intoxication and he rocks back of his heels, feeling the wall press into his back. "God, I can't believe that happened."
         "Think she'll remember who she did it with?" Jack slides the cup along the bannister, stirring up some dust.
         "Probably not," Will answers, revealing a bit of glumness there, alcohol holding a large megaphone up to his emotions. Almost instantly, he casts the feeling away and brightens visibly. "But that could be a good thing, you know."
         "Could be, could be . . ." Jack notes, looking down into his cup. His face is almost solemn, creased in what seems to be thought but probably just the very act of thinking, kick starting brain cells that have just gotten used to an extended vacation.
         "Okay, enough of this," Will finally says, taking a step forward. "Who is it?"
         "Who what?" Jack looks up suddenly, his voice tangling in upon itself.
         "You're got a thing for someone here, I know it," Will tells him. "You can barely hide it when you're sober and you sure as hell can't hide it when you're drunk. So go on, spill." A charming smile splits his face. "Who knows maybe I can help, I've been pretty lucky tonight, after all."
         "Yeah, thanks for reminding me," Jack points out, taking a longer swig of his drink.
         "It's someone down there," Will presses on, heedless of any danger ahead. It's driving down the road with your headlights off, waiting to see the bridge under repair sign leap out of the ink drawn darkness at you just before you descend laughing off the edge. "It's someone down there and that's why you're up here. Getting drunk off your ass . . . Jack, goddammit it's a party, any girl here could be yours."
         "For one night, sure," Jack replies, tracing out patterns in the dust on the bannister. His eyes aren't meeting Will's but Will's not sure if he's even seeing straight anymore.
         "And is that such a bad thing?" Will asks.
         "I want more than that."
         "More than what? Randomly making out with people . . . in case you haven't noticed, Jack, that sort of what this is all about."
         "Is that how you see it? Really? Is that all you do this for?" Jack's asking, and his voice is rising a bit, Will's touched a nerve but he's not alert enough to know the heat of his branding. If he were sober he might just back off but if Jack were sober he could possible be swinging at this point. There are positives and negatives to everything, alcohol spins a web around all of them, restraining them, cocooning them. It's harsh comfort for people with numbed skin. Numbed minds. Prodding the sensitive parts with a needle and getting ready to flinch back when they cry out.
         "We've all got to get this out of our systems somehow . . ." and Will's not even sure what he's talking about, what he's referring to. It's all nebulous, invisible threads brushing up against his face, reminding him that he's not really as in control as he thinks. To scare the world away, he cracks a smile, flashing his teeth. "Better among friends then strangers, right?"
         "It's all empty . . ." Jack murmurs, swishing his still liquid drenched cup around. "I went and danced and she . . ." He shakes his head, and he might just cry, he might just break down and sob like he's just lost a parent. That's the problem, the party, the beer, the company it all strips away your defenses, you're left raw and bare against any barbs that emotion might fling your way. And yet they do it anyway. Beats flailing at one's back with thorns, in the end. So they say. "Her eyes . . . for a second, I thought . . . I thought I saw . . . something in her eyes . . ." he turns liquid eyes onto Will, and Will is startled by the poignant sparkles there, stars weeping for a lost cousin maybe, "Why can't we ever just know," he asks Will, spitting out questions that there really aren't any answers to.
         "It's in the genes," Will pronounces, "we have to mess with each other . . . we can't help it" and Will doesn't think he's making any sense but that's not really the point right now. Is it? He doesn't know. He can't know. "Sometimes you just have to take the chance and go for it."
         "I did, I tried," Jack is almost whining, his voice reaching into that dangerous upper register when men start to lose respect for each other. Will has to forcefully remind himself that it's probably the beer. Probably the beer. Just keep telling yourself. He can't believe that she kissed him. On the stairs. He's had dreams like that.
         "When the hell did you try, I've barely seen you talking to anyone all night, other than . . . oh . . ." and he has a feeling that if this were a movie there'd be a choir of angels rising up singing praises behind him. Will isn't used to figuring things out, certainly not used to that final moment when the last piece clicks into place for him and the entire picture suddenly resolves from a random series of dots and splotches to a beautiful landscape framed by a setting sun.
         "It's Lena," he whispers and the starkness nearly staggers him. He's reaching, trying to find drama where there really is none, seeking to make it seem like he's stumbled upon a withering revelation when in reality he's just restating the obvious. Rediscovering a lost city when everyone there is just shaking their heads and wondering what all the fuss is about. He's not even sure if his words reached Jack over the gossamer trails of the music entwining themselves up the stairs. The slow dance songs have started, apparently. Will wants to be down there definitely now, there are certain benefits to dancing close to someone, benefits he hasn't experienced in a long time. The thought strikes him as decadent but he really can't fault himself. Will's not one to dwell upon his actions in an overly introspective fashion, he'd rather waste energy enjoying himself.
         And yet he can't pull away from Jack. Jack's blinked up at him following the uttering of the name, like Will has muttered some incantation. He stands up straight and backs up a step, nearly tripping on the ratty carpet. The floor seems to be vibrating, even the slow songs are blaring sirens, trying to lift the floor into the sky. It makes the lights flicker, not in any noticeable way, enough to give you that dimming headache, making your head pulse in time with a glow you can't comprehend.
         "Ah hell, Jack . . . of all the . . . Lena?" Will shakes his head, dropping down a step, giving him a tilted view of the world. The shadows of dancing people play games of tag against the dirty pale wall of the downstairs landing, melding games of kiss and tell. A slow melting. He wants to be down there.
         "We all have our own tastes," Jack replies in a somewhat lame fashion, trying to give an arrogant sniff at the end of the statement but winding up just snorting some mucus. "You can't fault someone's taste in women." It's not clear who he's trying to convince.
         "Like hell I can't," Will sputters out, leaping back to the second floor. He wants to argue the point more but knows that it's a futile path. Not that it's ever stopped him before but he's not in the mood. It's his party, he's not here to give someone relationship advice, not about to tell folks stuff that they don't want to hear. "And, you know, anyway, this isn't," he rubs his forehead, feeling sweat coating his palm, hair rendered stiff, "a party isn't the best place to engage in a relationship, you know. They don't start here." They end here but he doesn't say that. Will's not even sure if he believes that, but no doubt it's true enough. Lasting relationships don't begin at parties, maybe in the car outside the party later but he's no expert on that.
         "I know, I know," Jack says, Jack tells him, but Jack doesn't sound like he believes it either. It's the way of the world, tell yourself something long enough and you'll be convinced that you do indeed believe in it. "I know," Jack says again, "but . . . all I want is a sign . . . either way, you know, good or bad."
         "No news sometimes isn't good news, if you know what I mean."
         "She's not interested," Jack exclaims, though it's more of a dull roar of a statement, reduced to merely a grim summation of affairs. He shifts his weight on the bannister, holding his drink but not touching it, as if drinking it might plunge him further into delusion. His thoughts are newsprint stamped on his face. The party wasn't supposed to be like this. Jack had plans for this party, he had ideas, he had goals. The hurricane came and knocked them all down and you just stand in the wreckage trying not to wail and curse, because you won't give the world that kind of satisfaction. Hold it in even if you burst from the struggle. That's the way it has to be. "I really tried though. I really tried and she's still not interested . . . what do I do Will?" and he's got this lost look on his face. In the shaded lighting there's no nuances left, you can't dilute a look like that. You just can't.
         "Get interested in someone else," Will states bluntly. This isn't the kind of situation where you dance around lightly, scattering the ground with eggshells to make the going tougher. He's got no patience for that stuff.
         Jack just stares at him, his eyes narrowing as the words are captured by his brain and sucked in to be processed. "Easy for you to say," he nearly snarls. The alcohol is up against his mouth again, pouring down his throat. The hand that puts it down is considerably less steady than the one that lifted the cup up.
         "Sure as hell is," Will comments, bracing himself against the back wall for reasons he's not too clear on, "but even if it weren't easy to say, I'd still say it. You're not doing yourself any favors, bud. Let it go."
         "It was in the restaurant that I knew," Jack says, looking down as if embarrassed to face the world. Will feels a stark chill run right down his chest, cold water poured into his brain.
         "You don't say," he notes neutrally, silently wishing for Jack to get off this subject, trying to will his legs to move and get him the hell out of here because he knows he doesn't want to hear it.
         "That's it, the restaurant . . . I was sitting across from her that night, you know," Jack laughs a little, remembering older times, times when the world seemed less strange, perhaps. His face falls, then, emotion sloughing right off the skin and reveling something else. "Tristian was right next to her, or whoever the hell it was."
         "It wasn't Tristian," Will whispers and there's a memory of blackness erupting in his brain like a tiny flower. He's staring at the light in the ceiling, trying to make it go away, trying to blot the blackness out. It never happened. You can't even prove it happened.
         "You know . . . you know when you like someone, and, right in the beginning, you're not sure if you really do, if you're really feeling that way . . . I was feeling it that night," Jack gives a sort of wistful small laugh. His eyes are screaming whatif. "And then that . . . that thing happened," and he can't even bring himself to say it, his voice stutters over the event like it was something shameful, "and the first goddamn thing I thought, the first goddamn thing, Will, and I'm not giving you any bull here." He stops, stares up at Will, seeming to peer at him to see if he's listening. In the end, he just shrugs, apparently not being able to tell in the light, it obscures faces, throwing textured blankets over features. In the end, he appears not to care at all. "The first thing I thought about was whether she was okay . . ." he clenches his fists suddenly, little white bursts of color under his knuckles. "It's that night, Will, that damn night . . . if it hadn't happened I wouldn't have known for sure and . . ." he rubs his face suddenly, as if tired. "Tristian, damn you." His voice is oddly slurred, "I was better off not knowing myself."
         "It's not his fault," Will says but he's not even really sure if he says it outloud. The moment is catching him and wrestling him down, fractured symmetry and mournful collusions, the restaurant's got a gravity they can't seem to escape. Even here, even in the glow of one of the happiest moments of his short life, Will feels it tugging at him, trying to draw him back. At his own damn party.
         "We all changed," Jack says, his lips barely moving. Will might as well not be here anymore but Jack needs an audience, he needs to think that someone is listening, that someone is out there. "Lena, she . . . she's become more guarded since then, do you remember the way, the way she was before . . . it, it happened . . ." Jack gives a laugh blooming with memory, "you always knew where you stood with her, she would tell you, and now . . ." now the laugh is a distant memory, caught and scattered, blown away, "I would have known by now," Jack remarks a bit sadly. "I would have known where I stood with her, what she thought of me . . . she didn't like when things were ambiguous, I know that. Now, now, I'm not so . . . ah, I was dancing with her before, Will, you know, like really dancing, like she didn't move away or anything and maybe because she thought I was really drunk but . . ." he slides his hand along the bannister, caressing the wood, squeezing the wood a bit, trying to ease the tension away from his body, "I think for a second her eyes, whatever shutters she keeps over her eyes, they pulled back and I thought I could see something but before I could see . . . she closed up tight again, shut herself right away."
         "She was hurt, the same as the rest of us . . ." Will says, not sure who he's defending, or even what the cause is. Hurt gleams off their bodies like water when caught on a body in the sunset, it coats and covers them, they're walking bags of hurt some days. That's it, that's the right attitude. "We all need time to recover."
         "Yeah, yeah," Jack mutters almost bitterly, his voice a hoarse sloppy thing. "Goddamn Tristian. Goddamn. He did this. To her. To all of us. I swear if I could get my hands on him-"
         Will surprises himself by slamming both hands down on the bannister, causing Jack to take a drunken shuffle back. Will can feel the stench of his own breath washing over him, meshing with the air. "It. Wasn't. His. Fault," he says quite clearly, he's pulling the words from somewhere, they come out as a near growl, a bloody ragged mess. The effort oddly drains him. Even defending Tristian seems to cost him. He can't win.
         Jack blinks, and a moment of silent punctuated only but by of the alternations of their jagged breathing. Two drunk guys having an argument over another guy. In another light it might just be utterly comical, here at this party, in this place it merely borders on pathetic. Jack takes another step back, nearly sliding down the wall as it pivots right into it. "Whoa," is all he says.
         Will wipes his hands on his pants, the dull ache he feels in his hands almost an anticlimax. Is that what it comes down to, just shouting at each other because they can't admit they can't understand it and they can't move on from it. "It wasn't him," Will states nearly breathlessly, it's like he's run the fastest goddamn mile in history. He secretly wishes he could get a focus on the world.
         "If he hadn't been there-"
         "His only crime . . . his only goddamn crime was being our friend . . . if we're going to blame someone . . ." and Will gives one of those lopsided smiles he wants to be famous for, "let's put the blame where it belongs, right?" He shakes his head, cobwebs hugging his brain like lovers. Descending another step, he looks up at Jack. "Come on, Jack, let's get back down there before they miss us."
         But Jack's not right in now, apparently. Hands in his pockets, he's leaning against the back wall, his head touching the surface just barely. His eyes are closed. "Ha," is what he says. "That's funny." It's all he says for a long time.
         Will's about to go back down, about to say the hell with Jack when he hears his friend speak again. "Will, you remember Tom?" His eyes still haven't opened, in that private darkness he must be floating, blocking out the world. Pretending it doesn't exist for just one second, in that void there's probably no love or loss or feeling or anything at all. No friends. No gods. A simpler lack of a world. Will understands the temptation, he's been there before, they all have. Set fire to all the bridges and hide on your own personal little island paradise, where nobody can ever bother you again. But that's not the point, that can't be the point, it can't be the only thing they ever learned from this. He knows it can't be. He wants to be believe that, more than anything else.
         "Sure, I remember Tom," Will says, his voice slowed down and strained, the alcohol warping time and stretching it out, his words rubber bands trembling at the critical point, ready to snap apart at any second, ends flailing in the darkness, looking for some purchase, looking for the security that was once there. Jack's question isn't penetrating into his brain, it's only words, he can't get his mind to subscribe any meaning to them. Collections of phonetics, that's all they are. "I take it you're got a point here."
         "Not a point," Jack replies, his eyes still closed. His clenched fist is pounding out a terse rhythm, lightly encapsulating the faraway beat.
         ". . . the chamber was in confusion, all the voices shouting out, I could only just hear a voice quite near say please help me through the crowd . . ."
         "Merely an observation," Jack finishes. He opens his eyes, and to Will they're sunken in holes, closing them has caused all the light to scatter and run and now his eyes have to start collecting light all over again. Figures. Will wishes he knew where this thoughts were coming from, this isn't him, he's at a party, he's supposed to be having fun, not backing a conversational truck over a body long dead. Rather hide the body in the bushes and hope no one ever finds it. Out of mind out of sight, if you stop thinking about it then maybe it will just go away on its own. But no, he's downstairs, at your party because you invited him. Couldn't let him just rot in his hole, could you, you had to dig him back up and remind everyone. And the least that will happen is that they'll never forgive you for it. The very least.
         "Are you going somewhere with this . . ." Will tries to ask, "because I've really had enough and-"
         "I ran into him the other day," Jack continues as if there had been no pause, as if Will hadn't said anything. Like he planned it that way, to keep Will interested. Jack might be staring at Will or he might be staring at the wall or his eyes might be piecing images from the Rorschach blot of shadows dotting the walls. "He's doing well." The comment is a baited trap. Will can see the springs trembling, ready to release and catch him.
         He sticks his head in anyway. "Oh. That's good. What's he been up to these days?" Innocent enough.
         "Taking his vows, it seems," Jack notes with a brief smile. There's a trap there too, Will forgets how conniving Jack can be, even drunk he can talk circles around Will, he can't keep up with the twisting flow of conversation, he needs something linear, straightforward. This isn't it.
         "Oh, he's marrying Donna?" Will answers, picking a name out of the air that seems to go with the name Tom. He remembers Tom, boisterous blond guy, not someone he talked to all that much but always enjoyed the conversations anyway, however rare they were. His girlfriend too, Donna, dark haired beauty that she was. Will easily admits to some envy in that case, but hell, he's only human. Just luck of the draw that Tom got to her first. Life can be funny like that.
         Jack's soft laughter breaks whatever spell the past is casting over him. Will gives his friend a sharp look, thinking that maybe he's tipped finally, the rest of the alcohol has finally hit his system and coherency will be a foreign country until morning at least. But then Jack just shakes his head, looking at Will and there's some sadness there, even as the laughter keeps dancing at the edges of his lips. Stop laughing you bastard, he wants to shout, and just tell me whatever the hell it is you want to tell me.
         "Oh, not quite," Jack finally states, his voice a siblant husk. "Not quite those kind of vows."
         "Then . . . Jesus Christ, Jack, why the hell are you playing this goddamn game with me . . . if you've got something to say then just spit it the hell out . . ." The beer has rendered his patience almost nonexistent, Will always gets a bit edgy, a bit horny when he's drunk, he's not one of those people that goes around telling the world how much they love everyone. He finds that his hands are shaking and he very much wants to grab Jack by the shoulders and shake him until his eyeballs tumble from his head. Only whatever small bit of his sober rationality that is left is stopping him. He hopes it holds out before someone gets thrown down a flight of stairs.
         "Interesting choice of words," Jack murmurs, not bothered at all by Will's apparent mental conflict, perhaps the knife edged hint of violence coloring the air tonight isn't affecting him, or perhaps he's just beyond caring. Maybe they all are, wrapping cars around trees just in some weird attempt to feel something, to feel anything other than a degrading numbness. Will finds suddenly that he can't remember what Dana smelled like right up close to him. That fast. There and gone. "Jesus Christ, that's just an . . . an interesting choice of words, Will."
         "What, did he become a goddamn priest or something?" Will finally blurts out, about to turn and stagger his way down the stairs, to the dancefloor, to the bar, to get a drink, to get some, just to get himself the hell away from Jack. Lena's right to string him along, if that's what she's doing, he's not worth any effort on her part at all. Bastard. Goddamn-
         "As a matter of fact," Jack smiles again that maddening smile that he must have learned from television and convinced himself that it looked cool, "that's just what he did."
         "What?" Will responds, his voice barely a whisper caressing his lips. "What did you say?"
         "Ran into him a week or so ago, I guess," Jack explains, leaning his head back against the wall again, letting out some deep breath, as if trying to expel all the air from his lungs and become so thin that he might turn sideways and disappear. "Made the mistake of asking about Donna." Stuttering sort of laugh. "Turns out he's marrying the good Lord now."
         "But . . . what . . . why?"
         Jack turns to stare right at Will, his eyes seeming to glitter in the darkness, pinning Will right in place, but it's not his eyes, it's the story, it's the tale itself, he's trying to slip his mind around it, into it and he can't he just can't. Trying to picture Tom in a priest's collar, trying to picture him without Donna. But there's another picture pushing through the static, a picture becoming clearer by the second, one that might explain everything, but Will's trying to keep it down, his memory keeps trying to shove a finger down the throat of his mind and bring it up but he's forcing it away, forcing it back.
         "Because he wanted answers."
         "Answers?"
         "Yeah, answers," Jack replies simply. He sighs again, like the story is this great weight on his back that he's frantically trying to give to someone else. But after a while the weight gets comfortable, that's the problem, you get used to walking with bent back and twisted posture. And it's not right, it's just not right. He shakes his head, warding off the vapors of the party, of the past. "You didn't, Will, you didn't see his face . . . his eyes . . . he didn't care, he doesn't . . ."
         "What about Donna? What happened to her?"
         "I . . ." and he holds out a hand, waving it weakly into the air, trying to trace out the figure of the story, but how do you draw a three dimensional map of plot, of life, of drama and suspense. You can't. There aren't enough dimensions to hold it. "I, Will, he just . . . he dumped her. She meant everything to him and he just dumped her, just like . . . just like that." His hand clenches around his palm, catching air, trying to keep a grip on it. But the wind won't be caged, they say. They say. His arm drops, a limp rag at his side. His voice is equally limp as he adds, "It's what, this is what he wants to do, apparently. What his life was meant for." Jack's voice is dull, still not really believing it.
         "I . . . why, did he say why he was doing it . . ." and even as Will is saying it Jack is giving him that knowing look. "Whoa, wait a minute, wait just a minute," Will counters, "you're not saying this has anything to do with Tristian are you?" The waves are starting to break, there's a frame with a picture inside of it rising over the horizon. The tide going's out.
         "I didn't say it," Jack shrugs. "He did." For the moment he just leaves it at that.
         "But what the hell does Tristian have to do with it, how . . ." Will feels a headache coming along, a grim dull ache racing along the crest of his head. There's water splashing the inside of his head and the answer is creeping to the surface. You know all the details, you know them. "There's something I'm missing here, Jack. I really am." Will gives a laugh, a shaky bitter thing. Dana's face is a receding blur in his mind and Will's not sure who to blame for it. He has to get back, he has to get back to his own party. But the past has tentacles and he's over the event horizon, just his waning image a warning for anyone else daring to come this way. "How can you blame this on Tristian?"
         "I said I didn't blame him," Jack nearly snarls, turning his whole body this time and leaning back on the bannister. His face is closer to Will's than before and his eyes are nearly bloodshot things, cracked blood vessels. A drunk man clutched at Will one time when he was walking down the street and he had eyes just like that. His voice was a babble and his skin was a sickly yellow and his body smelled like urine and old aftershave but his eyes, they were just like that. Funny how you get reminded of some things sometimes.
         "Tom told me, that's what he said," Jack continues, blinking and ducking his head down, tearing his gaze away. "He said that the restaurant had opened a door in his mind, that he realized he had been asking the wrong questions all his life." His stare snaps back to Will and there's iron there, ramrod stiff and sheathed. It hurts to look at it for too long. "You remember. He was the first one. The first one he sent away."
         "I remember," Will whispers and he tries to fight the chill that runs a race right down his spine but he can't. The shiver almost sends him staggering back against the wall, the picture giving a wail and rising to the surface. The . . . thing, the thing that wasn't Tristian, before it had sent the rest of them away, it sent somewhere first. That night. Someone went first, someone always has to go first.
         Tom. Tom lunged at the thing and it said something in a voice both bored and ancient beyond their wildest dreams and waved a hand and sent him away. Golden glitter. Will remembers not knowing what had happened and thinking quite seriously that he wasn't ready to die at all. Not then. Not now. Faced with something three times removed from even the unknown, his mind wanted to shut down and it was all he could do to keep from running and screaming. Because it had to be a dream, he kept telling himself, there's no reason why it couldn't just be some dream. A dream they're all still trapped in, half asleep, walking dead. A dream they can't wake up from.
         "Tom . . . he thought it was an angel . . ." and Will can't even find anything remotely funny in that statement but as far as he knows it might just be true . . . what other words do you use to describe the impossible, "and it was sent . . . by . . . God, to choose . . . choose someone."
         "Did Tom think he was chosen because he got sent away first . . ." Will spits back, realizing the utter absurdity of this conversation, how crazy they must be sounding, how crazy the swirling world around them is. "Dammit, he lunged at the bastard first, he ran right at it, what did he expect to happen."
         "Not that, I'm sure," Jack says with a small laugh, the kind that you use when someone has told an utterly dirty joke that offends you but you want to laugh because it's the polite thing to do. "And anyway, he thinks we were all chosen, he's just the only one following the call. He's the only one doing something about it."
         "Bull, that's just bull, Jack, we were both there, that wasn't . . . it wasn't an angel . . ." but Will knows that there aren't any other terms for it, for what they touched, for the cold bucket of ice water that was thrown right in their faces to show them that the world wasn't a neat and ordered place. Oh, you say you know that the world hinges totally on chaos but you never believe it and when someone finally shows you for good, you've got no choice but to either accept it. Or crack. Or both. "It was . . ." and helplessly he knows there aren't any other words, even if he combed the language of every person on this planet, this small spinning orb decked out against the curtain of stars, "I don't know," he finishes softly.
         A sudden thought strikes him and he looks up at Jack. "What about Tristian, didn't he ask Tristian, he could have set him straight, told him the truth . . ." and Will knows the outcome of that situation just be reading Jack's face.
         "Will, he talked to Tristian already. He thought . . . he thought Tristian was some kind of . . . prophet and I think, I think Tristian talked him out of it, barely." Will smiles at that thought, the very concept must have horrified Tristian to the bone. "So he figures that Tristian is like a . . . a holy warrior or something, I don't even know, he's Tom . . . but he's not making any sense, Will. I don't know him anymore, I was talking to some stranger."
         "That's because he's gone crazy," Will murmurs. "Out of his goddamn mind."
         "Or he's just dealing with it in his own way," Jack comments and his voice is lashing out at something, something across from him or perhaps something situated downstairs. "Isn't that what you said, what everyone has said so far, that we have to deal with this on our own, in our own time. Right?" Jack's voice seems to be getting louder with each word but Will's hearing is so dulled by the endless onslaught of sound tonight that it all sounds the same to him, just one rumbling mumble. "Right? Well this is how he's dealing with it, Will, he's tried to take something that makes absolutely no sense at all and trying to turn it into something that he can deal with." He slaps his hand down on the bannister but there's no violence there, it's all for effect. "And if something gets lost in the translation, well then, are we going to claim we know it any better, that our interpretation is any more valid?" Jack's talking too well for a drunk guy, or else Will is just turning his slurred words into something more than coherent than they actually are.
         "But Tristian," he tries again, "if Tom talked to him, he must have . . . he would have told Tom . . ."
         "He probably just nodded and said anything to get Tom out of his way . . ." and this time Jack does shout, a ragged slab of frustration, a five ton weight hanging over their heads. "Don't you realize that, Will? Don't you see? You keep saying that Tristian's our friend, that he feels bad about this, but so what? Feeling bad never helped us, never helped anyone."
         "It nearly crushed him," Will is fighting for the surface, trying not let the argument drag him under. His head is pounding a drum solo against the inside of his brain. "You saw his face that night, when we confronted him . . ."
         "Yeah I did," Jack nearly sneers and Will knows for certain now that his friend is drunk. And Will finds he doesn't give a good goddamn about that. "And you saw what I saw, the same goddamn thing I'm seeing now." His hand sweeps out, conveying some gesture that Will is too tired to even attempt to assimilate. "He's moving away from us, he started that night and he's doing it now, you go down and look at him, you won't be seeing the friend we went to high school with, you'll be seeing someone else. Someone worse than a stranger, because at least I knew who Tom was, when I look at Tristian I'm not even sure who I'm seeing any more."
         "No," Will mutters and the beer inside of him is welling up behind his eyes, that's what he tells himself at least. Funny how a night can change from bliss to madness in just a few minutes, in just a small amount of time. "It's not true, he's just, he's hurt like the rest of us . . ."
         "He's moving away from us," Jack pronounces, "receding as we speak, going with them," and he's got no idea who them might be, perhaps the same concept that Tom thought he saw reflected in a flurry of golden sparkles and a moment of nonexistence. "That's where he wants to be, he comes around with us and it's like he's visiting some foreign country where he doesn't even know the language or the customs, like he just wants to hole up somewhere and pass the time until the vacation is over."
         "We're going to lose him, is that what you're saying," and the thought fills Will with a sensation, a dark yawning fear that he really can't quite explain. Why does the party feel so far away? Why can't he remember the way it felt when Dana touched him. It's like when you mention Tristian's name, all the happiness flees in fear. "That's what you're saying, isn't it? That he's going to leave."
         "Watch him when he stares out the window, at the sky," Jack says, his voice oddly quiet and somewhat thick. The emotion of the night is affecting him too, affecting them all in strange ways. Up here, the party has stopped. "You'll see then, you'll see what I mean. That's where he wants to be. Out there. With them. Where we can't go." Jack's voice sounds utterly sad, a man, who having proved his point, finds that he wants to give everything not to have been right.
         Will turns and leans his head against the wall, feeling the cool roughness of the plaster digging dull needles into his face. Trying to block out Jack's voice, trying to block out the world. He's my friend, dammit. It's not supposed to end like this. We're all supposed to grow old together, watch the sunsets from our porches and drink beer in our rocking chairs. Not to have to sit there and watch someone fade away like some old photograph, drifting away like smoke caught in the wind, tearing, inevitable, scattered so you can never gather all the pieces in together again.
         "There must be something we can do," he says, more to himself than anyone else. He has a sudden desire not to talk to anyone.
         "Go down there," Jack's voice floats to him from the bowels of eternity. "Look at him. Just go look at him, Will. You'll see. It's started, it's started already. Before we even realized it. He's falling away and there's not a damn thing we can do about it." And it's a credit to Jack that as much as he dislikes Tristian now, as much as he blames Tristian for taking their heads and screwing them off and putting them back on in reverse, that there's actual honest regret in his voice, in his words. A bitter slow regret, like watching someone die of cancer and realizing that it shouldn't be this way. It doesn't have to be this way. But you don't know what else to do.
         Will takes the liberty of waiting a moment before speaking, a moment to gather himself in before letting all the words go, throwing them all like doves into the breeze. "I don't . . ." and he can't seem to get the words out, it's not that easy you see. It's just not that easy. Swallowing helps. Try that. "I don't want to go look at him, Jack. I don't." He finds that he doesn't feel drunk or buzzed or much of anything anymore, this conversation has been a time travel trip to a moment where the world threatened to spin and shatter like fine china. His eyes are meeting Jack's and there's no hesitation there. "You know why, because it's my goddamn party and we're supposed to be having fun here . . . we're supposed to be trying to get drunk off our asses or dancing or trying to get laid . . ." Jack blinks a moment at that and there's something less than pure in his eyes, "not talking about our friend like he's some kind of freak." His voice is stronger now, firmer, but he can hear the raggedness to it, too much time shouting over voices that can't hear him anyway.
         "I wasn't saying that," Jack starts to say, his voice stammering a bit, but he's still holding his position, he knows he hasn't said anything wrong, nothing that others haven't been thinking, it's just not the right venue, the right time. A lifetime may never be the right time. Might still be too soon. "That's not what I was saying, I was just saying . . ."
         "I know what you were saying, Jack," Will says very slowly, rubbing the bridge of his nose, the world blurring into primary colors and then resolving itself again. "And I don't care. Not tonight." He opens eyes that he doesn't remember tightly closing and stares off into a distance that's growing closer every second. The future is a black wall that recedes all too quickly, revealing the present before you have a chance to plan, to get prepared. And you try to outrun it, to get ahead, to get some forewarning, but you're never fast enough. The past is the weight that drags you back and the future is the carrot they keep dangling in front of you to keep you going.
         "Right now I'm just going back to my party," Will states quite clearly. Feeling the music shift into something else. They're still doing the slow songs down there. Good. He has some people he needs to find. "You're welcome to join me."
         "What?" a new voice calls out boisterously. "Is it something I said?"
         Will turns to see a familiar figure coming up the stairs, the shadows falling off him as he gets near the light like someone throwing off a cloak. "Hey, Brad," he says, noting that Brad is swaying a bit as he comes up the stairs and his voice is a looping blur of a thing. Just the right party attitude.
         ". . . shine a light into the darkness, find an answer every day, how I wish that you were with me, now I know that come what may . . ."
         "Hey," Jack calls out a bit meekly. Will forgets what Jack thinks of Brad, but right now it's really not important. It's his party and everyone is going to get along. It's perhaps his first stern thought so far tonight.
         "Hey girls," Brad grins, hopping up the last few steps and slipping past Will. He stands there for a second, his eyes darting from one to the other. "I just came up here because they've got that slow crap on down there. The hell if I want to dance in slow motion," and he gives a laugh that straddles the hallway, "bring on the stuff that makes me break out into a sweat." He shrugs, as if his rapid thoughts were merely tossoffs subject to change at any second. They might be different now anyway. "So I just came up here to use the can, figured it was a good time." He cocks his head at them, as if seeing Will and Jack for the first time. "But what the hell are you two doing up here, rejection send you up here crying?"
         "Go to hell, Brad," Jack laughs, but he did flinch, if only for a second at what Brad had said. Even dulled, some nerves can still be hit. "Hit the bathroom before you piss yourself and we've got to clean it up."
         "Boy, you guys are mopey tonight," Brad says even as Jack is finishing his sentence. Then he breaks out into a silly grin. "You must be talking about Tristian . . . everyone keeps getting that same look everytime he walks past, like he's a goddamn leper or something. Like he can't sense it." His face shifts gears, downgrades itself to anger, however blunted. "People just piss me off sometimes, you know? Like he didn't feel bad enough."
         Will doesn't want to get involved in this conversation, he really wants to cut the strings and get the hell out of there. But curiosity won't let him go, he wants to see what happens next, he wants to back time up to right before the accident so he can see the head bursting itself open against the windshield. There's subtle horror in words, in gestures, in the fact that a man can stab his girlfriend seventeen times with a screwdriver because a neurochemical went to the wrong receptor and his upbringing wasn't stable enough and the dog barked three times this morning instead of two. We look for it in the big things, we look for the vampires and the werewolves and the rippers, for blood and screaming and the steaming intestines hitting the floor like a sack of flour. But it's when you shake the hand of someone you think is your friend not realizing that it's something that can dissolve you into mist just by thinking about it. And why it didn't you have no goddamn idea. It's just us the whole time, when the outside world tries to get in and we won't let it because we can't face it. And when it does get in, that's horror. That's terror. When the explanations are just window dressing for the fact that you can never know.
         "You don't say," but Jack's playing the cool game, not saying a word, bottling his feelings back up again. Will still thinks that's the problem that they won't talk about it, that they can't sit down and admit that they experienced something that blows their imaginations all to hell. They go through life and party and get drunk and have sex and it's still waiting there, the truth, right in the back of their heads.
         "I do say," Brad nearly bellows, throwing his hands out. "You know, everyone is treating Tristian like something horrible to him, right? You know what I mean?"
         "He doesn't seem too happy with it himself," Jack points out, his expression showing that he's not even sure why he's bothering. He's stopped leaning on the bannister and he's getting ready to slip down the stairs. Jack'll be quitting the scene soon.
         "That's just it, that's just the thing," Brad says, spinning toward Will, trying to recruit him into whatever absurdist argument he's attempting to spin. "Why the hell isn't everyone enjoying it more . . . isn't that what we've always wanted, something new, something exciting. Isn't that why we're always doing this," his hands waves at the stairs, at the darkness and the merging forms shambling to a leaden sludge of a song, "because we want something new and different. Right?"
         "If you say so, Brad," is all Jack says. He's not letting himself be drawn in, he's smart. Will plants his foot on the next step down, ready to flee, ready to perform the jackknife maneuver that gets him back into his own party.
         "Ah, you guys," Brad sighs, shaking his head and taking a step back, staring at both of them with thinly disguised disgust. "What the hell do you guys know . . . I think it's the coolest thing that's happened to Tristian, I mean, we've got our very own hero for a friend, how the hell cool is that?" He steps back into a fighting stance, hands clenched, one sitting on top of the other, arms stiff and angled down, close together. "Hell, right, he's got a sword, like something out of goddamn Star Wars." He waves his arms, making noises that might have come from that movie, slicing at the aliens in his imagination. "I'd give anything for a sword like that, for something kickass like that, can you even imagine the stuff he must see . . . holy crap . . ." he shakes his head again. "And yet you guys are sitting here feeling sorry for yourselves. And for him. I'll never understand it."
         "Neither will I," says another new voice. Everyone starts, it's coming from close by, from one of the two bedrooms that occupy the top floor. But there's only darkness in the room.
         "I mean," Tristian says as he steps out of the far room, his hands in his pockets, "the things I've seen, they must blow your minds, right." Will suddenly realizes even as his mind tries to crawl out of his head that even in his smoldering heat Tristian is still wearing his jacket. He takes a step toward all of them, his look utterly casual, taking his hand out of his pocket and smoothing his shirt like he's about to enter cocktail hour. But there's something else there, water fluttering under a coating of ice. Drifting. Will can see it.
         Suddenly Tristian unbuckles something black and stubby from his belt, holds it stiffly out from his body. His finger seems to be on some sort of button and Will tenses, ready to really run now, but the morbid part of him really wonders if he'll turn the damn thing on, if he'll actually do it.
         "This thing here," Tristian says, as if he's talking just to himself, like they're just harmless ghosts gibbering silently at his mundane monologues, ". . . I had to a kill a family once with it. Oh, I mean, it was an alien family so it wasn't as bad, a bunch of Slashtirs, I had to infiltrate a village and one spotted me." Tristian's shoulders are hunched, tense tight girders, and his voice is light, almost joking in its tone but there's that undercurrent of ice. Ice and something else. Something dark. "He spotted me and I cut him down where he stood." A paused beat, but he doesn't even look up to gauge reactions, they're not his audience, just his hit and run victims, sprawled on the curb, bleeding into the streets and wondering when their luck went so horribly wrong. "But it's not that hard really," he adds. He looks up and swings the hilt of the sword at them, to Will's surprise they're too utterly frozen in fear to jump back, "This thing cuts through anything." He says it like he's not sure he believes it himself.
         "Anything?" Brad whispers, like he's given up his day job to become a professional echo. The echo sounds sick, hollow.
         "Yup, that's right," Tristian says too cheerfully. "Any goddamn thing I want . . ." he shakes it at Brad, "that's even better than those things in Star Wars, right? Right?" It's his eyes, there's something in his eyes, a trapped unpredictability, a sense of standing there and honestly not knowing which way you're going to jump.
         "I guess," Brad mutters, trying to avoid looking at Tristian, like he might get sucked in. His hands are shaking. So are Will's. He wants them to stop but it gives him something to focus on, so he tells himself that he's letting it continue.
         "So I cut that bastard alien down . . . because all aliens are bastards right, might as well just kill them all, right?" He sighs and looks toward the ceiling, as if recollecting something extremely pleasant. His voice tells a different story but it's hidden in the details, if Will closes his eyes he can see them. All the pictures of wars, the red rivers and the sundered lives. It's all in his voice, every single body, every single life. "And his family heard it . . . they came after me and I had to kill them." He narrows his eyebrows, as if realizing something for the first time. "Because it was them or me, when you come down to it." He hefts the sword suddenly, biting his lip a little. "Yes sir, me and this sword have seen quite a bit . . ." he grins at them banally, "sometimes I think the damn thing is just full of blood, it's so heavy . . . here want to hold it . . ." as he shoves it toward Brad.
         Brad gives something that might have been a shriek if he were sober and tries to jump through the wall behind him, only partially succeeding. Something flashes in Tristian's eyes then, something that reminds Will for a second of the man that was his friend, that he went to high school with and went over homework problems and did projects and talked about girls with. That man is buried so deep down that he's forgotten he ever existed. Maybe that's the point, Will realizes bitterly. Maybe that's just the goddamn point.
         And then Tristian blinks and Will's reminded of what Jack said, of how Tristian is more than just a stranger, he's someone they'll never ever meet.
         "That's right," he whispers, "it's my responsibility." He looks at it in his hand again, like it's some ugly toad that someone glued there. Total innocence gleaming in his face he looks at Brad again and says, "Sure you don't want to hold it though, it's really not that heavy, I was just kidding, it's actually surprisingly light."
         "No . . ." Brad responds in a weak voice, a voice that barely registers over the roar of Tristian's presence, of the lapping waves of song misting up to them from the ocean below. Brad shakes his head vigorously, as if seeing Tristian for the first time. Again. He's suddenly very pale. "No, I'd rather not, if it's the same to you, Tristian . . ." and even as he's saying so he's brushing past Tristian without even so much as an excuse me, crossing into the bathroom and shutting the door with a click that seems to quiver in fear. From the bathroom there's the sound of coughing.
         "If you say so, Brad . . ." Tristian whispers, but he's not facing Brad again, he's staring at the sword in his hand. Will can only imagine what he's thinking, or that's what he tells himself. Once he probably could have guessed, but right now he's watching someone carved from a language he can never hope to understand. And while Tristian's face is passively bland, his body is trembling ever so slightly, his coat seeming to vibrate from the stored tension.
         "Ah well," he finally murmurs. Then his gaze passes over the rest of them. "Oh, anyone else want to see it closer?" Will thinks about shaking his head but isn't really sure if he does so or not. "You guys sure?" Tristian gives a weak smile but his heart obviously isn't in the joke anymore, if it ever was, "Because it might be your last chance." The layers of meaning to that could have you slicing onions for days, trying to find the center. Everything cycles back to one question, everything can come down to one thing. They just don't what it is.
         "Okay, your choice," he says finally, his voice a ringing sigh as he slips the thing back into his belt. "I think I'll go back downstairs now, though, you know, back to the party." He takes a few steps, crosses past Will and Jack, starting to descend back down into the party. "Are you guys coming eventually . . ." he gives a broad grin, "I think there were some girls down there missing you, better strike while the iron's hot, right?"
         "We'll be down in a bit," Jack says but there's a weariness to his voice. If Tristian hears it he gives no sign, only shrugs and slides his way back downstairs.
         "Good God," Will says after a second, his voice too soft for anyone but himself to hear. Eyes closed, he finds himself shuddering, as if ejecting a particularly bad virus from his system.
         "Will," Jack calls out softly. Will opens his eyes to see his friend staring right at him, his expression unreadable.
         "Yeah, Jack?"
         Jack licks apparently dry lips. "How about I treat you to a drink? For old time's sake, you know."
         "Sounds good, Jack," Will finds himself smiling, "but only if you let me do the same."
         "It's a deal." Jack comes to stand near him, and they get ready to go down the stairs.
         From the bathroom comes more coughing and a sudden splashing, as if someone dropped a pile of something into a toilet. It's a small splattering of drips first and then the bottom seems to drop out and it's a giant liquid patter slamming into water.
         Will glances at the bathroom door. "Think we should wait for him."
         "Hm, nah . . ." Jack replies, his voice carefully calculating. "I think he might be awhile."
         They start to go down the stairs. The music is back to sloppy and fast, just the way Will likes it. Just like the way life should be, one run through and you've got that one chance to make it right, so give it everything you got. And if you hit a missed note or skip a beat, well there's always time to recover and try something different. And if not, well at least you could claim you tried.
         ". . . would you talk to me, honestly, because I've never heard a word you said and now you're just being mean . . ."
         "Will?"
         "Yeah?"
         "Should we drink until we pass out, or stop before we fall down?"
         "Hm, good question, Jack. I'm leaning toward the passing out thing, myself, being it's so late and everything, and I'll probably have trouble getting to sleep anyway."
         "That's what I was thinking, why suffer right. When you can get yourself good and hammered, right?
         "Hell, sounds like a plan to me."
         "Well if it sounds good to you, then it sounds good to me."
         "I like the way that sounds. Now, let's go get smashed, shall we?"
         "Yes, let's."