You Could Feel The Sky
I've got scars I'm willing to show you. (Part 1/2)
"Good morning, Summerlin," says the man on the radio. He sounds bored, but distantly hopeful. He pauses for a minute, allowing the few people still desperately tuning in to cross their fingers, squint, wish. "Radiation levels today are unchanged," he continues, carrying the message with an inappropriate tone of cheerfulness. He finishes with, "Citizens are urged to please stay inside." He clears his throat. Radio silence ensues.
Ryan watches his mother's face for her reaction, but nothing much changes. Her eyes stare blankly at the living room window, long since covered with duct-tape and sealed off with insulation. Today the curtains are closed, but sometimes she pulls them open. She'll ask Ryan if he remembers what it's like to feel the sun.
He doesn't.
*
"What season is it?" Ryan asks, taking the canned foods down from the cabinet to stack them again. There are only seven left. Yesterday, there were eight. Most of the seven are vegetables.
"Does it matter?" his mother replies. Her voice has the scratchy quality of someone who's been crying. Ryan tries his best to ignore the fact that he knows. "I don't know, they don't tell us the season anymore," she says. "Maybe it's spring."
"Maybe it's summer." He says this mostly to himself. He stacks the broccoli on top of the cabbage, the carrots on top of the other broccoli. He thinks of sun and grass and no school, being hot all the time and not caring. He thinks of the beach with Spencer and Spencer in general. He wonders how Spencer is doing today. "What do you want for dinner?" he asks. His voice carries all the way to the living room where his mother is rearranging furniture, again.
"What's left?" she calls back.
Looking at the label on the back of the broccoli, Ryan's face twists up in disgust. Vegetables can eat shit, he thinks. To his mother, he says, "Does it matter?"
*
Since the big accident, it's just been Ryan and his mother in their two bedroom shack on 21st Street. It hasn't always been that way, though. The explosion took a lot more than Ryan's freedom.
It also took his dad.
*
Ryan sits on the couch, picking idly at the one string left on his guitar that hasn't snapped. His mother keeps pacing back and forth down the hallway, looking for things to mess with. She's already fluffed the pillows four times.
"Maybe you should take up a hobby," Ryan suggests, fretting and un-fretting the single note without looking. "Knitting would be cool."
"I'm only 45, Ryan," his mother snaps. She falls down beside him on the couch, looking tired and much older than 45. She tips her head down like a child and picks at the threads of her sweater. "I'll knit when I'm a Grandma."
So, never, Ryan thinks. He frets the note again.
*
"Radiation levels remain unchanged," says the man on the radio. Ryan hugs his knees and digs his nails into the carpet. His mother is already in the bathroom.
"Citizens are urged to remain inside," says the radio. Ryan listens to the static noiselessness fade out, and the house is filled with radio silence. The sound of a woman crying.
*
Sometimes, Ryan wonders what it would be like if the whole world just ignored the radiation.
He thinks there can't possibly be no other way.
*
There are five cans left in the cabinet. Both of the broccolis, one carrot, one creamed corn, one spinach. Ryan takes them down and stacks them according to calories. He re-stacks them according to color. He stacks them again according to expiration date. None of them are very far away.
His mother slept in today. She didn't even come out to hear the forecast. Ryan thinks that maybe she's finally given up, and maybe they can stop listening to it for good, now. At least then it would be easier to pretend that nothing had changed. Ryan could pretend it was a snow day. He could pretend his mother was sleeping because she needed the energy, not the escape. He could pretend Spencer would come knocking any minute, armed with trash can lids and thermoses of his mother's hot chocolate.
But pretending is hard, and Spencer never comes.
*
He thinks about packing a duffel bag, but then decides that that's a little stupid. What does he have that's so important? His guitar is useless, there's no food he has any desire to eat. It's not like where he's going there won't be resources. If he's hungry, he'll find a way. If he's tired, dead grass is better than no grass.
He wears his favorite green shirt and some jeans. He takes his My Chemical Romance hoodie and folds it under his arm. He slips into his old tennis shoes. He doesn't think he'll need much more than that.
For his mother, he leaves a note by the door. It apologizes for leaving and breaking the insulation. It promises that this is what he wants. It wishes her the best and invites her to join him if the need ever surfaces inside her.
Before he leaves, he lingers by his mother's bedroom door. He peaks inside and watches her sleep for a minute, memorizing her face. He doesn't think she'll ever be brave enough to join him.
*
Outside is...different.
The grass is all crunchy and brown and dead, but it really doesn't matter, because Ryan can't remember what it looked like when it was apparently green. He thinks it's just fine this way. The air doesn't feel dangerous, like he expected it to. It feels open and slightly warm, like Spring. He thinks his mother was probably right about the season. There are no flowers blooming and no animals, but the air just has that feeling.
Otherwise, not much has changed from Ryan's fleeting memories. The sky is dark and thick with unnatural looking clouds. Ryan thinks it's probably the radiation that makes them look like that, but he doesn't think about it for long. That wasn't the point of this. The point was to forget.
He stands in his front yard for a while, he doesn't know how long. But eventually that gets lonely, and he decides he'll have to keep on moving if he's not going to regret this decision.
*
In the morning, Ryan wakes up on the side of the road. There are houses all around him without lights. The windows are all boarded up or shaded in black--covered with something dark from the inside. The grass is all dead and the sky is not blue, but an odd mix of orange and pink. It's beautiful.
The sun is warm on Ryan's skin.
*
It doesn't take long for Ryan to remember how to get to the grocery store, which is about two miles up the road from his house, give or take a few right turns here and there. There are no lights there either, but the windows and doors are clear glass and refreshingly free of duct-tape and wood. The doors are unlocked, and Ryan spends his whole day moving up and down the aisles, touching foods and drinks he's forgotten even existed.
He's pretty sure he gains about ten pounds, but Spencer would have said it was good for him.
*
Two days in, he's sitting out on the curb in front of the grocery store. The parking lot is big and completely empty, so it isn't hard to spot the boy in the distance walking towards him. It takes a few meters for the boy to look up from his shoes and see Ryan, too, but when he does--the boy's smile is just as bright as the sun would be today if the clouds hadn't covered it up. Ryan can almost feel the warmth on his skin from however many feet away they're standing.
*
The boy's name is Brendon. He's sixteen, one year younger than Ryan, and he's been 'defying the government' for six days now. That's three days longer than Ryan. Brendon is very thankful for him. Ryan could tell even if he hadn't said it out loud.
"You just don't understand how cool it is to have a friend," Brendon says. "I've never had one of you before."
*
Ryan kept the radio.
He figures his mother won't miss it, and even if she does, he hopes he's done her a favor. Maybe now when she opens the curtains and pretends things aren't so different, she'll remember what the sun feels like.
When Ryan wakes up, he tunes in to the only channel that ever plays anymore. The man at the station is saying, "Radiation levels today are unchanged." Ryan fiddles with the dial and the man continues, this time more clearly. "Citizens are urged to--"
"Stop," Brendon says, turning the volume dial all the way down. He looks at Ryan, his playful brown eyes suddenly very serious. He touches Ryan's shoulder. "Stop," he repeats. "It doesn't matter."
"Nothing is going to change," he says. Ryan looks at his lap and bites his lip.
"It doesn't matter," Brendon repeats. He squeezes Ryan's shoulder.
*
They leave the radio in the grocery store parking lot. Brendon has a backpack that they fill with their favorite snacks, along with some wholesome foods to keep their energy up. Brendon is very carefree and easy-going, but Ryan can see hints of a strict childhood that still linger. He can see signs of a strong motherly influence that make Brendon remind him of Spencer, and his heart ache a little in his chest.
"Have you ever wondered what it would be like to be the last person on Earth?" Brendon asks as they walk down the middle of some street Ryan doesn't know the name of. In the distance, he can see the tops of the buildings along the Las Vegas Strip. There aren't any lights, and the buildings loom sadly in the empty air. Ryan thinks they look even more intimidating than when they were full of people.
"No," Ryan says, watching the side of Brendon's face. Brendon's eyes are huge and round and dark, dark brown; the same color as his rumpled, soft-looking hair in its rounded, school-boy haircut. His cheeks are only slightly round, and his jaw is chiseled to support a brilliant smile hidden behind full red lips.
Brendon is sort of beautiful, but that could be the radiation talking.
"Well, now you don't have to," Brendon replies, smiling a little sadly. But all too quickly the smile turns genuine. "Come on," he says, wrapping his fingers around Ryan's boney wrist and tugging. "It's fun."
*
They walk all the way to the Strip, which is really even more intimidating and desolate-looking up close. Ryan wants to object, or something, but quickly realizes he doesn't have to. He's not really the same Ryan as he was before.
They run up and down the broken escalators at New York, New York. They play hide and seek in the Luxor, which quickly becomes more terrifying than fun with all the cadavers and fake skeletons, so they have to leave. They visit all five floors of the M&M factory, and are actually fairly disappointed to realize that there aren't any M&Ms in the big machine that personally engraves them. Ryan remembers out loud that even if there were, there wouldn't be any electricity to power it. Brendon realizes this as well and stops pouting, making Ryan feel weirdly relieved. He doesn't understand what made him so desperate to fix the broken parts of Brendon, or stop them from breaking at all.
It gets dark much faster than Ryan can remember. Brendon says, "Time flies when you're having fun." Ryan thinks that maybe it does. He can't remember the last time he had so much fun.
They decide to sleep at the Venetian, as opposed to Caesar's Palace. It was a tough call to make, but Brendon claims to be a sucker for all things Venetian, and Ryan is apparently a sucker for Brendon.
*
"What made you decide to leave home?" Ryan asks.
He knows it's the kind of question that's wordlessly agreed upon to be forbidden, but it's kind of been bugging him since that first day outside the grocery store when Brendon hugged him before he did anything else.
Brendon freezes--the kind of freeze people do when they've been caught completely off guard, or been told something they never expected to hear said out loud. Half of Ryan--the emotional half--immediately regrets saying anything. The other half patiently waits for an answer.
"I--" Brendon starts, cutting himself off to think about it for a moment. He turns around to face Ryan, and the sun reflects off the water in the Bellagio fountain and creates a heavenly outline around Brendon's body, his face. Ryan swallows.
"How do you feel about the Beatles?" Brendon asks.
Ryan lets himself be ignored.
*
Ryan loves the Beatles, seriously. His father had all their albums in every form imaginable. He had every Beatles' authentic autograph on two different kinds of paper and framed. He knew at least fourteen songs by heart on his guitar, and thinking about it all makes him miss the home he hasn't really lived in for months.
As it turns out, Brendon is also a big Beatles fan. Maybe not as big as Ryan, but he explains that his mother used to play him all the records while they cleaned and cooked. Sometimes she'd teach him the piano parts, if they had any. His favorite song to play is Hey Jude, on account of how it was the first one he ever learned.
Brendon takes Ryan to the Mirage. They weave through the fake tropical dome forest and all the slot machines in the lobby before they get to the Revolution Lounge. Through a back entrance, Brendon leads them into a stage door. On the other side is a huge arena. The stage has slats and grooves where it obviously shifts and changes shape especially for whatever act is being presented. There are secret passageways everywhere, and Brendon shows Ryan each one and explains their purposes. He says how this is the stage they used for the Cirque du Soleil show, The Beatles Love. Ryan's never heard of it or seen it, but Brendon admits to having seen it four times. Ryan vocalizes his jealousy.
"Well," Brendon says, sounding to be in deep thought. He says, "If you really wanted, I could try to reenact it for you. I know where they keep all the costumes, and my singing isn't really that bad."
Ryan doesn't think he's ever smiled so big.
Ryan watches his mother's face for her reaction, but nothing much changes. Her eyes stare blankly at the living room window, long since covered with duct-tape and sealed off with insulation. Today the curtains are closed, but sometimes she pulls them open. She'll ask Ryan if he remembers what it's like to feel the sun.
He doesn't.
*
"What season is it?" Ryan asks, taking the canned foods down from the cabinet to stack them again. There are only seven left. Yesterday, there were eight. Most of the seven are vegetables.
"Does it matter?" his mother replies. Her voice has the scratchy quality of someone who's been crying. Ryan tries his best to ignore the fact that he knows. "I don't know, they don't tell us the season anymore," she says. "Maybe it's spring."
"Maybe it's summer." He says this mostly to himself. He stacks the broccoli on top of the cabbage, the carrots on top of the other broccoli. He thinks of sun and grass and no school, being hot all the time and not caring. He thinks of the beach with Spencer and Spencer in general. He wonders how Spencer is doing today. "What do you want for dinner?" he asks. His voice carries all the way to the living room where his mother is rearranging furniture, again.
"What's left?" she calls back.
Looking at the label on the back of the broccoli, Ryan's face twists up in disgust. Vegetables can eat shit, he thinks. To his mother, he says, "Does it matter?"
*
Since the big accident, it's just been Ryan and his mother in their two bedroom shack on 21st Street. It hasn't always been that way, though. The explosion took a lot more than Ryan's freedom.
It also took his dad.
*
Ryan sits on the couch, picking idly at the one string left on his guitar that hasn't snapped. His mother keeps pacing back and forth down the hallway, looking for things to mess with. She's already fluffed the pillows four times.
"Maybe you should take up a hobby," Ryan suggests, fretting and un-fretting the single note without looking. "Knitting would be cool."
"I'm only 45, Ryan," his mother snaps. She falls down beside him on the couch, looking tired and much older than 45. She tips her head down like a child and picks at the threads of her sweater. "I'll knit when I'm a Grandma."
So, never, Ryan thinks. He frets the note again.
*
"Radiation levels remain unchanged," says the man on the radio. Ryan hugs his knees and digs his nails into the carpet. His mother is already in the bathroom.
"Citizens are urged to remain inside," says the radio. Ryan listens to the static noiselessness fade out, and the house is filled with radio silence. The sound of a woman crying.
*
Sometimes, Ryan wonders what it would be like if the whole world just ignored the radiation.
He thinks there can't possibly be no other way.
*
There are five cans left in the cabinet. Both of the broccolis, one carrot, one creamed corn, one spinach. Ryan takes them down and stacks them according to calories. He re-stacks them according to color. He stacks them again according to expiration date. None of them are very far away.
His mother slept in today. She didn't even come out to hear the forecast. Ryan thinks that maybe she's finally given up, and maybe they can stop listening to it for good, now. At least then it would be easier to pretend that nothing had changed. Ryan could pretend it was a snow day. He could pretend his mother was sleeping because she needed the energy, not the escape. He could pretend Spencer would come knocking any minute, armed with trash can lids and thermoses of his mother's hot chocolate.
But pretending is hard, and Spencer never comes.
*
He thinks about packing a duffel bag, but then decides that that's a little stupid. What does he have that's so important? His guitar is useless, there's no food he has any desire to eat. It's not like where he's going there won't be resources. If he's hungry, he'll find a way. If he's tired, dead grass is better than no grass.
He wears his favorite green shirt and some jeans. He takes his My Chemical Romance hoodie and folds it under his arm. He slips into his old tennis shoes. He doesn't think he'll need much more than that.
For his mother, he leaves a note by the door. It apologizes for leaving and breaking the insulation. It promises that this is what he wants. It wishes her the best and invites her to join him if the need ever surfaces inside her.
Before he leaves, he lingers by his mother's bedroom door. He peaks inside and watches her sleep for a minute, memorizing her face. He doesn't think she'll ever be brave enough to join him.
*
Outside is...different.
The grass is all crunchy and brown and dead, but it really doesn't matter, because Ryan can't remember what it looked like when it was apparently green. He thinks it's just fine this way. The air doesn't feel dangerous, like he expected it to. It feels open and slightly warm, like Spring. He thinks his mother was probably right about the season. There are no flowers blooming and no animals, but the air just has that feeling.
Otherwise, not much has changed from Ryan's fleeting memories. The sky is dark and thick with unnatural looking clouds. Ryan thinks it's probably the radiation that makes them look like that, but he doesn't think about it for long. That wasn't the point of this. The point was to forget.
He stands in his front yard for a while, he doesn't know how long. But eventually that gets lonely, and he decides he'll have to keep on moving if he's not going to regret this decision.
*
In the morning, Ryan wakes up on the side of the road. There are houses all around him without lights. The windows are all boarded up or shaded in black--covered with something dark from the inside. The grass is all dead and the sky is not blue, but an odd mix of orange and pink. It's beautiful.
The sun is warm on Ryan's skin.
*
It doesn't take long for Ryan to remember how to get to the grocery store, which is about two miles up the road from his house, give or take a few right turns here and there. There are no lights there either, but the windows and doors are clear glass and refreshingly free of duct-tape and wood. The doors are unlocked, and Ryan spends his whole day moving up and down the aisles, touching foods and drinks he's forgotten even existed.
He's pretty sure he gains about ten pounds, but Spencer would have said it was good for him.
*
Two days in, he's sitting out on the curb in front of the grocery store. The parking lot is big and completely empty, so it isn't hard to spot the boy in the distance walking towards him. It takes a few meters for the boy to look up from his shoes and see Ryan, too, but when he does--the boy's smile is just as bright as the sun would be today if the clouds hadn't covered it up. Ryan can almost feel the warmth on his skin from however many feet away they're standing.
*
The boy's name is Brendon. He's sixteen, one year younger than Ryan, and he's been 'defying the government' for six days now. That's three days longer than Ryan. Brendon is very thankful for him. Ryan could tell even if he hadn't said it out loud.
"You just don't understand how cool it is to have a friend," Brendon says. "I've never had one of you before."
*
Ryan kept the radio.
He figures his mother won't miss it, and even if she does, he hopes he's done her a favor. Maybe now when she opens the curtains and pretends things aren't so different, she'll remember what the sun feels like.
When Ryan wakes up, he tunes in to the only channel that ever plays anymore. The man at the station is saying, "Radiation levels today are unchanged." Ryan fiddles with the dial and the man continues, this time more clearly. "Citizens are urged to--"
"Stop," Brendon says, turning the volume dial all the way down. He looks at Ryan, his playful brown eyes suddenly very serious. He touches Ryan's shoulder. "Stop," he repeats. "It doesn't matter."
"Nothing is going to change," he says. Ryan looks at his lap and bites his lip.
"It doesn't matter," Brendon repeats. He squeezes Ryan's shoulder.
*
They leave the radio in the grocery store parking lot. Brendon has a backpack that they fill with their favorite snacks, along with some wholesome foods to keep their energy up. Brendon is very carefree and easy-going, but Ryan can see hints of a strict childhood that still linger. He can see signs of a strong motherly influence that make Brendon remind him of Spencer, and his heart ache a little in his chest.
"Have you ever wondered what it would be like to be the last person on Earth?" Brendon asks as they walk down the middle of some street Ryan doesn't know the name of. In the distance, he can see the tops of the buildings along the Las Vegas Strip. There aren't any lights, and the buildings loom sadly in the empty air. Ryan thinks they look even more intimidating than when they were full of people.
"No," Ryan says, watching the side of Brendon's face. Brendon's eyes are huge and round and dark, dark brown; the same color as his rumpled, soft-looking hair in its rounded, school-boy haircut. His cheeks are only slightly round, and his jaw is chiseled to support a brilliant smile hidden behind full red lips.
Brendon is sort of beautiful, but that could be the radiation talking.
"Well, now you don't have to," Brendon replies, smiling a little sadly. But all too quickly the smile turns genuine. "Come on," he says, wrapping his fingers around Ryan's boney wrist and tugging. "It's fun."
*
They walk all the way to the Strip, which is really even more intimidating and desolate-looking up close. Ryan wants to object, or something, but quickly realizes he doesn't have to. He's not really the same Ryan as he was before.
They run up and down the broken escalators at New York, New York. They play hide and seek in the Luxor, which quickly becomes more terrifying than fun with all the cadavers and fake skeletons, so they have to leave. They visit all five floors of the M&M factory, and are actually fairly disappointed to realize that there aren't any M&Ms in the big machine that personally engraves them. Ryan remembers out loud that even if there were, there wouldn't be any electricity to power it. Brendon realizes this as well and stops pouting, making Ryan feel weirdly relieved. He doesn't understand what made him so desperate to fix the broken parts of Brendon, or stop them from breaking at all.
It gets dark much faster than Ryan can remember. Brendon says, "Time flies when you're having fun." Ryan thinks that maybe it does. He can't remember the last time he had so much fun.
They decide to sleep at the Venetian, as opposed to Caesar's Palace. It was a tough call to make, but Brendon claims to be a sucker for all things Venetian, and Ryan is apparently a sucker for Brendon.
*
"What made you decide to leave home?" Ryan asks.
He knows it's the kind of question that's wordlessly agreed upon to be forbidden, but it's kind of been bugging him since that first day outside the grocery store when Brendon hugged him before he did anything else.
Brendon freezes--the kind of freeze people do when they've been caught completely off guard, or been told something they never expected to hear said out loud. Half of Ryan--the emotional half--immediately regrets saying anything. The other half patiently waits for an answer.
"I--" Brendon starts, cutting himself off to think about it for a moment. He turns around to face Ryan, and the sun reflects off the water in the Bellagio fountain and creates a heavenly outline around Brendon's body, his face. Ryan swallows.
"How do you feel about the Beatles?" Brendon asks.
Ryan lets himself be ignored.
*
Ryan loves the Beatles, seriously. His father had all their albums in every form imaginable. He had every Beatles' authentic autograph on two different kinds of paper and framed. He knew at least fourteen songs by heart on his guitar, and thinking about it all makes him miss the home he hasn't really lived in for months.
As it turns out, Brendon is also a big Beatles fan. Maybe not as big as Ryan, but he explains that his mother used to play him all the records while they cleaned and cooked. Sometimes she'd teach him the piano parts, if they had any. His favorite song to play is Hey Jude, on account of how it was the first one he ever learned.
Brendon takes Ryan to the Mirage. They weave through the fake tropical dome forest and all the slot machines in the lobby before they get to the Revolution Lounge. Through a back entrance, Brendon leads them into a stage door. On the other side is a huge arena. The stage has slats and grooves where it obviously shifts and changes shape especially for whatever act is being presented. There are secret passageways everywhere, and Brendon shows Ryan each one and explains their purposes. He says how this is the stage they used for the Cirque du Soleil show, The Beatles Love. Ryan's never heard of it or seen it, but Brendon admits to having seen it four times. Ryan vocalizes his jealousy.
"Well," Brendon says, sounding to be in deep thought. He says, "If you really wanted, I could try to reenact it for you. I know where they keep all the costumes, and my singing isn't really that bad."
Ryan doesn't think he's ever smiled so big.