the speed at which i travel, chapter thirty (draft one)
My only real friend in Elysium was Peter Porlucas. He was Italian, but he wasn’t, cause he was adopted. His mom was a one-woman assembly line of food, feeding us cheese-laden, breaded dishes bathed in olive oil with names that I couldn’t begin to pronounce, let alone spell. Tastes so different from anything I had ever put in my mouth, I was never sure they were supposed to be eaten. She had hair in places that you normally saw bare, and there was something around her eyes, a Mediterranean depth that belied any Midwest roots. Her ankles were as big as my father’s, but she had an olive beauty that you could make out beneath the surface. His Dad was stout and had a Boston accent, despite being from Missouri. He always sat by the TV with a pipe and nodded at us as we’d go in and out of the house, tapping his pipe loudly on the end table if we forgot to shut the door behind us. Peter had reddish hair and freckles, with a rabbit’s overbite and the build of someone who tried hard to be athletic, despite all that nature had held back. You could see in Peter’s body the things he tried hard to be, they reached out like arms grasping for something perpetually out of reach. It earned him the nickname “little Italy”.
Pete’s brother was eight years older than us and had changed is name to Aloise in his senior year of high school, after his favorite hockey player. He’d beat up on Peter every passing chance he got. There were always shouts from either parent, from somewhere in a different part of the house, “Aloise, leave your brother alone!”, but no one ever did anything about it. So it always kept happening, getting worse in slow gradation. We’d be walking around town or even in the country, and all of a sudden Aloise would screech out from nowhere in his SWAT van and kidnap us. It was terrifying, but it was also the most fun I’ve ever had.
One afternoon, behind a dead barn, Pete taught me how to masturbate. I pretended I didn’t know how. He made me promise we’d always stick together and never let the outside world get to us. We were both outcasts, me by choice, sort of, and him by defiance of his will. He tried so hard to fit in, that it made the chances of such a thing happening hopeless. I’m not sure if he settled for me or if there was some kind of magnetics that brought us together. Either way, he would shed tears in front of me, about his brother, about his height, about everything that he kept inside. He’d always end these confessionals by pretending it was all in jest. But there was a spark of knowing in his eyes, a silent pact he was making with me. When we were at school, though, and the kid’s would get bored and start picking on him, he’d turn on me. Every time.
“Hey, I saw Indiana taking a bath with his mom.”
Things that had no basis in fact, but would do the trick in re-routing the attention and ridicule from himself for a few minutes. For my part, I would take it in stride, either letting it wash over me, or in braver moments, murmuring back to the biggest kid who would ask me, in a mocking bellow so that everyone could here, “Is it true, you take baths with your mom?”
“No.” I remember answering one day, after my father had disappeared, “It was your mom.” That incident sent me to the nurses and then to Dr. Handler’s for stitches.
Peter would never disclose to the others any real confession I made to him. The ones he’d let loose were from out of nowhere. I wonder if they were, in part, things that were true about his own life, things he was embarrassed about. I figured he’d never let slip anything we had talked about, thinking it would maintain the bond of trust we had. Whenever we were alone, we’d never discuss it, why he’d turn on me and make up those lies. Partly because I think both of us knew why, but the words were not ready for our pre-adolescent lips.
One day we were playing war in the woods behind his house with his father’s old army gear, which we had snuck out from the garage. It had just rained the day before and everything was mushy, except the air, which was crisp. I had captured him and was standing over him, his arms pinned under my feet. He kept saying I could wear the gear next, but it would always be “five more minutes”. I held in my hands the hard metal helmet he had been wearing and we looked at each other. It was a dull, brown green and I held it over him, examining it like a spoil of war, as he looked up at me from the ground. I caught his eye and, both by accident and on purpose, I let go of it. The hard stained helmet came down on his face, catching his buck-rabbit teeth and making a clink that echoed like a bee-bee gun. I watched the sound escape through the branches of the trees above, like a bird fleeing. He let out a loud “Ahhhhhh” That rose in volume, as he got up and felt his lips, which were bleeding. I was frozen with shock, not quite believing what I had just done.
“I didn’t do that” is the first thing I said.
When he took his hands away from his mouth, I could see that both of his front teeth had been chipped.
“My mom’s gonna fucking kill you.” He lisped.
I watched a speck of blood fly out, as he spoke, and land on my soiled, white t-shirt. In between the dots of mud, it almost blended in. And I thought to myself, maybe no one will notice.
By the time they found the cancer in his stomach, it was the size of a baseball. He spent four weeks in the hospital and then died, the day after our eighth grade graduation party where I kissed Sally Potter, behind Ed Nance’s Gazebo. I never visited him in the hospital, not once. Not because I was scared or angry. Not because I didn’t love him. Things were just moving, in their own direction. And I didn’t know I had a choice, or maybe I didn’t want to know.
I saw his mom. She came to our graduation and wailed the whole time like the women in those spaghetti westerns or The Godfather would, dressed in black and huddled in the midst of consoling arms. Her olive was just a dull green now. I avoided her the whole time, like I had when she had come to our house, offering to take me to the hospital so I could see Peter. I was always gone, or hiding, when she came. My mom never pressured me, maybe because my father. Maybe for some other reason I don’t understand. I was coming out of the bathroom after the service, everyone had left and I was staying back to help clean up in exchange for a missing P.E. credit I had needed for graduation. She was there waiting. No one else was in the gym, where our ceremony had been. The silence ricocheted off the walls like the sound of basketballs dribbling.
I was cemented to the ground with the bathroom door swinging behind me. I wondered where all the women were that had been consoling her, propping her up. It hadn’t seemed that she could stand on her own before, she had looked like a black cloud being carried along. Now she stood squat, suspended by those ankles, girders propping up a leaning tower. And I wondered if it was evolutionary biology that gave her those ankles, knowing she would one day have to support herself under a weight that normal anatomy would never have allowed. She broke what seemed to be an infinite silence.
“He loved you. Gary. He loved you.”
She needed something from me, but I didn’t know what. I wish I could have cried, broken down right there and held her, or at least have her hold me. But I was silent. I couldn’t even move. After what felt like minutes, she left me standing there. And I continued to stand there for another half-hour, unmoving, unblinking, until my mother came in looking for me.
“Gary, I’ve been waiting outside for twenty minutes.”
“I’ll walk, Mom. Just go.”
As I watched her leave, I thought of how he’d turned on me, those moments on the playground. I wondered if somehow, some part of him, knew we’d need this balance. But it didn’t really seem like balance. It just seemed like air. A distance that was there, but that I couldn’t see.
