Dream World (Pt 1)

That summer marked two years since the plague that had killed all of our parents – well, all the adults in America, we assumed, though it was difficult to know the extent of things now that there wasn’t any internet, or TV, or news.

I was walking through the parking lot of my old high school which had been shut down for over a decade now, anyway, so the concrete was getting all split up and overgrown with weeds, some of them so tall they might as well have been trees. I brushed past them and wondered what the parking lot would look like in another five years, as nature righted itself.  

I heard someone call my name and at first I thought I imagined it, because I didn’t know anybody was out there.  I’d only wandered toward the high school because it was on the way to the storage areas I was going to hit up, and hadn’t any intention of going inside – the thought of it creeped me out, and not just because there’d been rumors of corpses in there that nobody wanted to deal with, and that Milton – back when he’d been around, doing creepy shit – had arranged them in classrooms and locker rooms.

I looked up and saw someone in the window on the second floor. “Phillip,” he said again. I walked closer. “It’s Abe,” he said.

“Oh, wow,” I said. I stood right below the window, the high school looming up before me. The building was pretty intact; just a few broken windows. 

Abe. I hadn’t seen him for at least a year, and Natalee said he’d left. “Hey!”

“What are you doing over this way?” he said. The sun was shining on his face. 

“I’m just taking a day off from town stuff,” I said. We’d been felling dead trees all week, hardcore, in anticipation for the winter. “I was gonna hit up those storage spaces on Route 428.”  

“Oh yeah? I don’t think anyone’s been in those yet,” he said.

“Yeah,” I said, shielding my eyes to look up at him. “What are you doing in there?”

“I live here now!” he said. He seemed really proud and his smile was infectious. He wore a backwards baseball cap and his hair was longer than I’d ever seen it. He’d grown and he looked...well, I’d always been attracted to him. He looked tan, healthy, and handsome.

“No way,” I said, and even though I wanted to see him, I hesitated. I wasn’t ready to go inside that building.

“Are you going right now?” he said.

“Sure,” I said, shrugging.

“Can I come with you?” he said, and I realized I hadn’t heard that question in a while. We were all so close-knit back in our town; everyone did everything together. It seemed like Abe enjoyed being a loner.  

“Definitely,” I said. I watched the insects drift around the weeds as I waited for him to come down. There were more insects around than there'd even been last summer. He came out of the two big front doors and I had this memory of bursting out of them myself and into the freedom of a post-school day. Nobody will have that experience again, I thought. Leanne, Carli, Ben – all the younger kids in town, they’d never know what it was like to go to high school.

Abe still had that huge grin on his face. I noticed his arms, too – they were veiny and muscular. Really his whole body was, and I felt it when he pulled me into a hug that felt hungry on his part, and lasted longer than I expected it to. When we came apart it looked like his eyes had teared up. He turned away.  

“Damn, Abe, what’s going on with you?” I said, grabbing his shoulder and giving him a friendly shake. He kept his face turned to the ground.

“Nothing,” he said. He wiped his eyes with his wrist and looked up at me and said “Let’s go.” So we headed toward the road and I slung my arm around his shoulder, not even thinking about it, and felt him tense up. Physical affection was something we gave and got pretty freely, in town. But Abe was clearly not used to it so I took my arm away.

“Have you been living out here this whole time?” I said as we started down the tree-lined highway.  

“No. I went to my sister’s in Pittsburgh. But then she died,” he said. I started to ask about his sister, but I thought maybe that was something else I’d gotten used to from living in town. We had a scale, from one to ten, to indicate the level of trauma involved. It was good, cause it kept you sensitive to how everyone was doing without having to dredge stuff up. But I let the moment pass. “So I hiked back but I took my time. I guess I’ve been back in Groom for...I don’t know. Has it been a year?” he said.

“You never come around. To town, I mean,” I said. Abe didn’t say anything for a moment.  

“I didn’t want to be around people,” he said. “But then this winter was...well, I thought of coming to see you guys. I hadn’t gotten around to it. Yet.”  

“Do you have a stove in there?” I said, meaning at the school.

“I found this pellet stove and put in a stove pipe. It sort of worked,” he said, and laughed. 

We walked down the middle of the road. The sun was high; it was mid-afternoon. I said I was hungry; Abe knew a spot where there were some fruit trees, so we made a detour and ate apples and cherries. Some of them were good and some were just good enough. Then we kept walking. We didn't talk much.

The storage spaces were, indeed, untapped. We broke a window in the office and found a pair of bolt cutters, then we just went down the line and opened all of them and started rooting around. We found a couple propane tanks that seemed like they might still work, and a wheelbarrow. Abe grabbed some cans of paint. Then, in the last one, Abe came out with an armful of hardcover notebooks.  

“Journals,” he said. I looked at one and read an entry, from July 16, 2013: I love Evan even if he’s fracker, and it’s okay to hate on him a little, but he’s great because he does this thing where he reaches out to people...

“You like this kind of stuff?” Abe said.

“Definitely,” I said. I’d been collecting old diaries, life stories, though I had to be in the right mood to read them.  

“Me too,” Abe said, flipping through another one. “Some people are all about tapping the big box stores, you know?”

“Oh I know,” I said. “This one guy in our town just hoards stupid new shit he can’t even use.”

“Yeah,” Abe said, shutting the notebook. “I like used stuff better. When it has a personal shine to it.” He tossed the notebooks in the wheelbarrow. “There’s some good stuff at the high school. People’s essays. Notes from the principal. It’s fun to look through.”

“It’s like you bring them back to life, in a way,” I said.  

We’d been there long enough that the sun was getting low, so we went down the row again and shut all the doors, and then started back down the road. The trees were high over us and they rustled in the breeze. I got this feeling, noticing that sound and looking at the storage spaces with their bright orange doors. At Abe’s forearms, golden tan in the late-afternoon sunlight. Maybe it was that sunlight, a dying day in midsummer. I thought of our old lives but also the lives I’d never lead. It was a heavy feeling and I stood with it.

Abe was walking away with the wheelbarrow so I caught up with him and we got back on the highway. The day was cooling off and the trees were giving off this musky smell.

“You gotta come see it,” Abe said when we got back to the high school. There was still a little sunlight, copper-colored along the horizon. I helped Abe roll the wheelbarrow inside the front of the school. Up until then I’d been hesitant about coming inside, but I tamped down my fear and did my little ritual: closed my eyes, held out my hands, spoke to the building and told it I was there in respect. Abe looked at me while I did it, so I explained: I get scared going into unoccupied spaces, even now after all this time. I hate that feeling of being somewhere I’m not supposed to be.  

“But you used to go to school here,” Abe said, grabbing the paint cans off the wheelbarrow and setting them on the floor. I looked beyond the second set of doors into the dark hallways beyond.  

“That just makes it scarier,” I said. “The ghosts know me.” Abe laughed. I didn’t tell him how I wouldn’t go near my old house, where my parents and my two older brothers had died; how I would walk several extra blocks just to avoid the sight of it.  

Abe went through the doors and I followed. We were in the hallway, with the office to the left and my old math class just across the hall. It was dusty and the paint was peeling off the walls and ceiling. I thought of the shop room in the basement – I’d always hated that room – and got this dizzy feeling.

“You okay?” Abe said, turning toward me.

“Yeah,” I said. Then he looked down and took my hand in his. He smiled up at me, uncertainly. But I smiled back and gripped his hand tighter. Then I closed my eyes and repeated the ritual: respect for the past, devotion to the present.  

“Come on, I want to show you what I’ve been working on,” Abe said. Hand-in-hand we walked upstairs. I had this memory of rushing up and down those steps to get to my next class. Then we got to the top and turned the corner into the upstairs hallway, and suddenly my brain was scrambled.

“Weren’t there lockers here?” I said, confused about where I was. The entire hall, unlike the bottom floor, was cleaned up, and in the dying evening light I could see the insane patterns and colors that Abe had painted it, a design that went up the walls and across the ceiling, all the way down the vast hallway.

“I took them out,” he said, looking proud. “I’m gonna do the whole school, eventually.”

I got closer to the wall. The designs were intricate, geometric but not perfect. It all made sense, but it was disorienting in the most beautiful way.

“This is incredible,” I said.

“Thanks,” Abe said. I turned back to look at him. A shaft of red sunlight, surely the last of the day, had found its way from the open classroom across from us; it shined into his eye and made it look like a red marble. “I never...you’re the first person I’ve showed it to," he said. "I guess I didn’t want anyone to think it was stupid...or to think anything of it. I just wanted it to be mine, you know?” A tear ran down his cheek. I stepped closer. He rubbed his eyes with the back of his hand. “But I’m glad you’re seeing it.”

I took his hand and Abe grabbed it back, harder this time. I gave him a hug. Something had broken in him and he began to sob on my shoulder. I just held him. I understood why someone would want to hide away. I’d done it too, before. When you kept to yourself you could avoid the enormity of it. You could build yourself a dream world, like Abe had, from the bones of our old lives.  

My shoulder was wet and when Abe finally settled down I realized the light was no more, and just the merest hint of twilight illuminated the scuffed, paint-splattered hall floor.  

Abe wiped his eyes. “Thanks,” he said. He switched his head to my dry shoulder, sighing, and his lower body pressed close to mine. Then it started to feel different, and when we looked at one another the feeling solidified. He went to kiss me and my heart pounded. His mouth was tender and tasted like smoky, earthy - like incense. His solid arms wrapped around my lower back and our crotches pressed together. We were both hard.  

This was unexpected. Abe was, as far as I knew, straight. I’d only become his friend because he dated Erica sophomore year. But there wasn’t any hesitance about it, and when we broke apart he gave me the most bashful, sly grin. I’m sure I was grinning like a fool right back.

“You gotta see my bedroom,” he said.  

To be continued...