Flowering By Tom Bentley Copyright 1999, by Tom Bentley I had known things weren’t quite right with Mark from the moment Sly introduced him to me as my new roommate. Mark immediately told me this long, pointless story about the baboons he had watched for hours that day at the Woodland Park Zoo, "And they’d look at me and I really knew how they felt, and they knew about me..."—all the while this cockeyed grin glued to his face like a poorly placed decal. I mean, he gave me the creeps a little; you know, when you sense that someone’s a little off, and you can’t quite relax around them? So when Sly told me that he was heading right back to California to take care of his mom, who was recovering from surgery, and that Mark was going to live with me in Sly’s apartment, "...just until he gets his shit together. He’s got some emotional problems, some stuff with his parents, but he’s a good guy," I was a little uneasy. I had come to Seattle to forget my problems, not find any new ones. But it was the second time that Mark had brought some little tramp home, three weeks and a thousand confirmations that Mark was not my ideal roommate later, that I actually began to resent him a little. I was throwing some newspapers away in the kitchen and I heard them. The sounds were unmistakable—the thumping of the bedframe against the wall, her little bleating yelps, his staccato grunts (braying, really). I couldn’t believe it—how could she? I mean, those fingers of his, those tobacco-stained pudgy little stubs. And that hair. God. Those colorless wisps, like that angel’s hair crap you drape on Christmas trees. Jesus, couldn’t she even tell a little bit that he was nuts? She couldn’t have been over seventeen anyway. Hey, I hadn’t slept with anyone for over nine months; believe me, I could have named the day. It seemed like you had to be a freaking psychopath to get laid in this town. They were just finishing up, Mark with that baying, that bellow, a fog horn in pain, the same damn noise he woke me up with at night when he had one of his "episodes." Then, the door of the bedroom opened and out scampered (there’s no other word for it) this skinny red-headed girl, she might have been sixteen, she was wearing one of Mark’s rumpled old shirts (I don’t know if he even knew how to use an iron), and she gave me this blazing-noontime-sky of a smile, a million freckles, and scooted into the bathroom. She didn’t look like a moron, or as though he’d drugged her. I just didn’t get it. Then out came Mark, with that weird shuffle, that open-toed waddle he had, pulling a t-shirt over his puffy white belly, the inevitable hand-rolled cigarette in one of his stumpy hands. The cigarettes, Great God Almighty. The very first morning when he started in with the cigarettes I knew I was in trouble. He had the bedroom that night (we agreed to alternate, living room to bedroom, every night), and he stumbled out, one already lit, the tin of rolling tobacco in one hand and his little rolling machine in the other. I was laying on the floor staring at this glaringly white-skinned (he slept in the same BVDs every night, I’m certain of it) creature, the albino seal that he was, those perpetual dark circles under his eyes. He plopped down at the table and while I stared with my jaw dropped he proceeded to roll cigarettes like a madman, a crazed, living tobacco factory, for over an hour. The table was soon piled with these misshapen little sticks. I soon found out that this was how he began every morning. I also soon found out, because that damned eyedropper bladder of mine has me getting up at three or four a.m. to pee every night of my life, that he would put a cigarette in his mouth and light it the second, the very second he woke up, which is what he did the first night I had the bedroom and I woke him when I came out to pee. I nearly jumped through the roof when I stumbled out to the bathroom and this flare shot across the living room carpet. It was Mark, of course, plugging a cigarette into his mouth and whooshing it aflame with his BIC lighter, which he kept three inches from his head. I found these ugly, half-smoked cigarettes on the edge of the sink, on the saucers under plants, everywhere, soggy and brown, slimy little slugs, disgusting. But the cigarettes weren’t nearly as alarming as the first night he had one of his "attacks." I had the room that night, Jesus, I’d only known him four days, when about two a.m. I hear this howling, I mean howling, God, he’s giving birth, what is it? And I run out and there’s Mark thrashing around on the floor in that damned, miserable gunnysack he calls a sleeping bag, and it’s like he needs an exorcism or something and I don’t know what in God’s name to do and then he just stops and turns over and goes back to sleep. The next day I ask him about it and he says he has these terrible nightmares, has always had them and that there’s nothing to worry about. Two nights later he reared up and smacked the side of his head against the big chair in the living room, and the next day he had a shiner that put a splendid purple ring around one of the usual black rings under his eyes. My roommate, the wacko. Nothing to worry about. So here he was strolling out of the bedroom—my bedroom as much as his—with those godawful red lips of his stretched out in a sappy grin. Those lips, the only color in his face really, what with his reverse-raccoon eyes and ghoulish pallor, those lips, so big and red and somehow ripe; I thought maybe it was those lips that those girls liked. I thought of my own thin bird-lips and grimaced. "Hey, Ray, whaddya say?" he said, the goofy grin stretching and then resettling on his face. I pretended to be very interested in the newspaper; I glanced up briefly and only said, "Hey, Mark." I watched him out of the corner of my eye as he went into the kitchen and peered, bent at his ample waist, into the refrigerator. He extracted one of his soup cans and began spooning the cold soup into his mouth. I wondered if it was the minestrone or the pea soup; I couldn’t see the label. You see, the man I lived with opened cans of soup, put a spoon in them, and then left them in the refrigerator to be eaten later. The first time I saw him do this, I thought it was a joke. After I had seen him eat several cans over a period of time, I realized that the humor of it was beyond my understanding. When I asked him about it, he just shrugged, and in that maddeningly placid way of his, said that he "liked it." Try and understand how difficult it was to be sympathetic towards a man who commits an atrocity like that, no matter his history of "trouble." I was raised in the suburbs, you know; it seemed to be a crime against nature. Soon Little Miss Pumpkin Pate bounced out of the bathroom and pertly announced that she had to go back to the mall to buy some "schoolpaper." She might even have been fifteen, who knows, I could barely look at her awful cuteness, and they walked out, with Mark turning to me, completely, revoltingly sincere, and saying, "Have a nice day. I thought about pouring the other can of soup in his bed, but then I realized it was my bed that night, and then I realized it was my stained bed that night, and then I thought about pouring the soup into a pair of his shoes, but instead I just laid back on the couch and stared at that weird cottage-cheesy ceiling of our apartment, with the strange little sparkling chips, a small false sky with stars, and thought of nothing. I woke up a while later; I couldn’t see a clock, and the light, that dim, sodden Seattle light, told me nothing. We actually didn’t live in Seattle, we’re a little north, in Richmond Beach. It’s almost like a village, off the Sound, though there’s nothing particularly quaint or charming about it. A small community of clean neighborhoods and faceless shopping centers, one of many drab cousins of its more glamorous relative, Seattle. Seattle. What was I doing there anyway? I spent a year and a half kicking butt in the community college in L.A. to get my A.A. in Psychology, only to go to work selling stereos and TVs for a large discount department store. My first "real" job, away from my parents, on my own. Except that wearing a polyester tie and watching the head salesperson chisel poor people out of their dough lost its luster after about fifteen minutes. Being laid off there was like being led out of Egypt by Moses. Except there was no Moses, just me. I flushed my big-deal career out of my mind and followed my friend Sly up to Seattle. I made enough money from unemployment to buy food and chip in on the rent for the apartment. It’s a pretty strange place, very new, with a little fake stream running between the two banks of units, sixty in all, two stories, and lots of plants and trees, but with a real artificial look. It’s not all that bad, I guess. At least you can’t hear everything the neighbors say through the walls. But how could I not be pissed hearing Mark and that little Pop Tart through my own wall? I mean, I couldn’t figure out how he got those girls to go to bed with him. He was in his early thirties, ten years older than me, but he had that kind of a strange face that distorts a person’s age. Sometimes he looked like he was about nine, a roly-poly little brother; at other times he looked like an old man, haggard face and limp hair. Occasionally I caught myself just staring at him. Believe me, I stared at him plenty after he told me about the business with him and his parents. Two weeks after he moved in I just casually mentioned that Sly had spoken to me about some argument Mark had had with his parents. Seems that his parents had both set him down and told him it was about time he settled on a career path. The way Mark tells it, they were going after him pretty heavy, that his being a few years out of high school and working part-time in a gas station just didn’t make it, and so Mark jumped up and ran into the kitchen, grabbed a big knife and went after his father with it. He didn’t do much damage, really, just got it kind of tangled up in this big sweater of his father’s, but he did cut him a little. So they wrestle with the knife for a bit and then Mark runs away, straight through this big plate-glass window in the living room of their two-story house, and he’s down in the flower bed, his cheek cut pretty bad, his father’s got this knife in his sweater, his mother’s shrieking and it’s pandemonium. Mark told me all this in that tranquil, modulated tone of his and I simply sat on the couch and stared at him. He was in a psycho ward for over two years after that and in some milder kind of institution for another three. He had been out for years; maybe you wouldn’t even have noticed that he was a queer fish if you had exchanged a few sentences with him, though he did have a bizarre look to him. He didn’t work anymore; he got some kind of federal or state check once a month, and his parents still gave him a little dough. They live just north, in Edmonds, a pretty little town, but Mark said he only saw them once a year or so. The money was enough to pay for food and gas and rent, what he needed, I guess—it’s not like Mark wore the latest clothes or anything. The money also paid for his medication. Mark had pills. More than you would think a body could hold. Mark put his pills on the top shelf of Sly’s closet, and it’s a shelf about six feet long and three feet deep and it was packed. Mark was still required to see a couple of doctors regularly, and he had a supply from years of chemical experimentation after his "incident." I’m not talking about aspirin here—these are serious psychoactive products: Thorazine, Librium, Tofranil, Lithium, bottles and bottles and bottles, and sometimes, I watched him, I swear, he mixed up a bunch without looking at the labels and took them all. But he hardly ever acted different from how he always acted: slow, agreeable, and odd. He told me the most peculiar things, almost always weirdly sexual. We were watching TV one night and he turns to me and says, "My teeth weren’t always like this." (He’s got these dark gray stains on all his teeth near the gums.) "My teeth were fine until a few years ago, but I ate out this nasty girl, she was just really nasty, and the next day they were like this." I turned to him to laugh and saw him smiling calmly at me, displaying the evidence of how he’d been wronged, and I said nothing. Mark never joked; his statements were always flatly declarative, and his views, when he had any, were fixed. I tried a few times to talk him out of some cockeyed statement, but always gave up in the face of his bland insistence. Another time he told me he had had an erection for 72 hours, and that ever since his sperm had been thin and milky when he masturbated. I told him that with all the pills he ate he was lucky that his sperm wasn’t green, but he insisted it was due to chemicals in processed foods, most likely breakfast cereals, he thought. I don’t know, I guess I had started to kind of like him, in some weird way—he was such a phenomenon. I even started going on his drives. Mark went for drives every day. Long drives, hours long. He didn’t go anywhere, actually, just around the Seattle area, the parks, the pretty places on the Sound, the wooded roads, and sometimes through the city. He had a big old Impala, pretty nice shape, and he just didn’t stop, unless he needed gas. The first couple of weeks we lived together he’d say he was going out for a drive, and I’d ask where and he’d say, "No place in particular." Every time, "No place in particular." The first time I went I was pretty antsy the first half-hour or so, wanting to stop, or have a destination, but after a while I calmed down and drove with him. Seattle in April is not much like Los Angeles. I could have counted on one hand the clear, sunshiny days since I’d been here. Most of the time it seems the air itself is brooding, damp and wary. There’s usually some kind of soft drizzle if it’s not actually raining, so in the car you’d hear the rhythmic click of the wipers, the tires sluicing through the damp streets, and that elevator music, that horrid robot piano and syrupy strings that Mark played on the radio when he drove. Somehow, after a while, I got kind of used to it; it almost seemed cozy. I’d begun to feel like I was the one on medication. Mark didn’t say much when he drove, sometimes pointing out some landmark familiar to him from his lifetime in the area, and sipping from his beer or his soft drink. Mark always drove with an open can of beer and an open soft drink, set on this table-like hump on the floor of his car. He said that if he’s ever pulled over by a cop, he’ll just reach for the soft drink and show it to the officer if he was questioned about his drinking something. It was a scenario that was a pleasure for him to relate; a couple of times he told me about how it would work. I figured that Mark picked up the redheaded girl while she was hitchhiking. He would always pick up hitchhiking women, no matter their age, appearance or disposition, no matter if they were going in the opposite direction. On one of our drives he picked up this hideous old crone, all teeth and jowls and drunk to the moon, and she was so pleased with Mark’s idiotic statements that she insisted we come over that night for a chicken dinner. Thank God she didn’t get our phone number. In the early evening of the day that Mark brought home the redhead, I got the urge to go down to the park. I knew I probably should have filled out my unemployment form, it had to be postmarked the next day, but I didn’t think I should sweat it. Every two weeks I had to fill a sheet with addresses and phone numbers of businesses I went to, looking for work, and the outcome. Well, my fingers were in great shape from all the walking they’d done—why dress up like a dweeb just to get turned down by some clown for work you’d never want anyway? I never knew how valuable the phone book was. I had a lot of time on my hands, not working, Sly in California, I didn’t know a soul except Mark, and well, he was Mark, and I just couldn’t see spending all my time with him. I walked a lot, mostly in the rain, I didn’t hate it so much any more; it was quiet and nobody bothered me. I was kind of waiting—I’m not certain for what. I had been going down to the Richmond Beach County Park quite a bit; it’s nothing much, a little hilly, grassy area leading down to a rocky beach, all scrabbly rock and coarse sand. It does have something, though. It has the train. Every afternoon at five the train comes right square through the middle of the park, on its way up north to Everett and beyond. I’d never really gotten too close to any trains in L.A., didn’t care to, but towards the end of my first week I was down at the park near the tracks, and when that big, monstrous black beauty came into view (you can see down the tracks about 1/4 mile), I thought I’d get a closer look. I got real close, much closer than I had planned, and that behemoth just hurtled by, crushing the air, sucking at my clothes and face, and damn if I wasn’t sweaty and cold and tingling all at the same time when it finally passed. It was the first time since I got here that I had felt alive. I went to the park three or four evenings a week and just took it in, as close as I could; sometimes I couldn’t stop trembling afterward. That evening of Mark’s conquest of the redheaded girl it was real dark, though it hadn’t rained much. There was nobody around. I was almost too late coming down the hill above the tracks, I could hear the soft breathing of the beast, and I got this little warm dampness on the back of my neck. I scrambled down the hill and stood on the little grassy rise above the raised gravel and dirt bed of the tracks. There she was! I didn’t want the engineer to be startled; I waited until it was abreast of me before I slid down the little hill and nestled close. She came by, and pulled me and pounded me and shook me and then it was over, and I felt kind of used up, but good, too. I started to climb back up the hill when I saw someone staring down at me, up the hill, a ways off to my left. It was a woman, she was about my age, maybe a little younger, and I couldn’t make out her expression, but she was staring at me. I felt somewhat unnerved that she had been watching me. When I reached the path I was only about five feet from her and she was sort of glancing my way, not really looking at me, but sort of. I finally got a good look at her in the dim light; she was pretty; long, straight thick brown hair, medium height, very thin, almost slight even, a young boy’s body. She looked up sharply when I passed, looked away, looked back and then said, "Hi." I turned around and said "Hi" back, but she had already turned and was walking down to the shore of the Sound. She took a few steps toward the shore and then whirled around and almost shouted, "Hey! Were you trying to jump into that train?" "I wasn’t trying to jump into the train. I was just trying to get close. It’s uh, it’s very exciting. To be close and everything." I was suddenly nervous, almost stuttering. She stepped towards me and put out her hand. "My name is Liza," she said. Up close, I saw she had a lively face, with thick uplifted eyebrows, very white teeth, and red, red lips. "I’m up from Tacoma for a couple of months taking care of my brother’s apartment here while he’s overseas. You live in Richmond Beach?" "Yeah, with my friend, um, with my roommate, Mark. My name’s Ray. I’ve been here less than a month myself. I came up to get away from L.A., but I haven’t really decided what I want to do yet." She tossed back a handful of her hair and laughed. "Yeah, well, that’s a question I’ve got in the deep freeze myself. I’m just here with a part-time temporary job, and I don’t know anyone in this neck of the woods. Except for you, of course. And you try to jump into moving trains." She looked at me and laughed. I am rarely forward with women, but she was so friendly and open I couldn’t help myself. "Well, have you eaten dinner or anything, yet? I mean, I live just a couple of blocks away, and I was going to make spaghetti, nothing special, uh, I know you don’t really know me, but I make decent spaghetti...." I could feel a blush creeping up from my neck; I felt like running into the Sound without looking back. She looked hard at me for a moment and then said, "Sure, Ray. I have two days off in a row and no plans. Maybe some spaghetti will point out a direction for me." We headed back to the apartment. She was so relaxed and open—I felt cheerful, almost giddy, a rare feeling for me. I was so eager I tripped twice going up the stairs. I could have died when I opened the door and Mark was sitting at the table in his underwear rolling cigarettes. He looked up calmly and smiled. I could have choked him. "Oh, hmmph, yeah, this is my roommate. This is Mark. Mark, this is Liza." She walked right up to him and shook his hand. She was beaming. "I love your outfit, Mark. Are you on your way to a formal engagement?" He laughed his little tuck-head turtle laugh. Somehow it wasn’t so embarrassing; I felt some strange kind of gratitude towards her. It wasn’t even so bad when Mark ate with us on the balcony. I was terrified that he would turn to her and say something about his balls or something like that, but it was almost like he was normal. I kept looking back and forth at them chatting, he with those intense red lips in his Phantom of the Opera face and she with those intense red lips and bright, lovely features. I must have eaten too much spaghetti; I felt slightly sick. She stuck around while I cleaned up. I heard them loudly laughing at something in the bedroom while I was at the sink, and I went to have a look. She was springing up and down on the bed, barefoot, pointing at the pills on the closet shelf and giggling. Mark sat at the foot of the bed, a big grin on his face. "Man, are you guys dealers? You have enough drugs here for an army!" She jumped off the bed and tapped me lightly on the head as she came down. I jerked my head around, glanced at Mark, and said, "Some of us have more problems than others." I went back to the sink. The laughter started up again after I left. When she was leaving I blurted out something about us going to the park tomorrow afternoon. She said yes. As I walked her down the stairs, she turned to me and said, "You guys are ok. Mark’s a riot. He’s the only man who has ever told me I have beautiful feet. He meant it, too." I shrugged and said, "Yeah, he’s different, all right." The next morning, a rare, lovely, sunshiny morning, I came back from the store with some groceries to find Mark in front of the television with the volume off and a very old, very scratched Seals and Croft record playing. But he wasn’t watching the TV, and it didn’t look like he was listening to the music. He was just sitting on the couch, staring blankly at the opposite wall, unmoving. He had the phone, hung up, in his lap and an open can of chili with a spoon in it on the end table. My first thought was gratitude that he hadn’t put it in the refrigerator first. My second was that he was having one of those minor epileptic fits, the kind where you just stare stuporously. That scared me, more than the night my first week there when I was wakened by some strange pounding in the living room and there’s Mark, in those damn BVDs, with a candle lit, no less, and he’s doing some very unusual dance, I don’t know, some bent-knee tribal squirming, indescribable, and I went back in my room and put the pillow over my head. Now, he’s only staring, but he turned to me when I walked up to him. "I just talked to my dad," he said in his soft voice. "He’s paying for my old apartment, you know, and since I haven’t been there for a month the landlord went inside to see if everything’s ok. Well, it’s a little messy, and I guess the landlord got pretty angry. So I have to go clean it out. Today. First time I’ve talked to my dad in eight months. He called me a bastard." He looked up at me and gave me that rubbery, red-lipped smile. Anybody would have thought he was sixty-five, seventy years old. I told him I’d go with him over to the apartment and help him get it cleaned up. I didn’t have anything to do anyway. It was only a few blocks away, but he had only been there once, to get some belongings, since Sly asked him if he wanted to stay here. Right when we were going down the stairs, up walked Liza. "Hey guys, what’s up? I thought I’d come over a little early, maybe see if you guys wanted to go eat lunch at this hip little cafe in Seattle, the Belltown, that my brother told me about." "Well," I said, "I was going to help Mark move some stuff out of his old apartment, but lunch sounds like a plan with more appeal." I was going to tell Mark I’d meet him later at his apartment when Liza intervened. "Well, three are better than two at the clean-up game. Let’s make lunch a reward for a job well done." I started to protest, but thought better of it. We headed to Mark’s apartment together. His building was a monument to mediocrity, drained of any identification, but when we got inside his studio, that was something else again. "You couldn’t do this with grenades," I said. There was stuff everywhere. A horrific half-eaten plate of macaroni and cheese was on a pillow on the bed. A huge can of nuts, bolts and screws was spilled over in the corner. Two partially disassembled TVs were in the middle of the room. A whole drawer of silverware was strewn across the kitchen floor. Clothes, clothes, clothes everywhere. A sock dangling in the dish cupboard, underwear in the bathroom sink, jackets on lamps. Coverless paperback books, a broken, tipped-over unoccupied birdcage, a one-legged stool. This was an apartment in which it looked as though six or seven saber-tooth tigers on champagne headaches and electroshock had the very worst day of their lives. But worse yet were the kitchen curtains; it was strange how they affected me. They were just rags, tatters, Kleenex almost, hanging threadbare in front of spattered windows. I imagined getting up and looking through those curtains in the morning and I literally felt sick. I stood stunned in the middle of the carnage, but Mark headed right to this big vase on a shelf that had some ratty old plants in it. "Hey," he said, with obvious delight, "these were dogwoods, from the last time they bloomed. I remember when I picked them." It was classic Mark, in the midst of madness, praising a handful of weeds. We didn’t talk, we just picked up armfuls of stuff and took them to a dumpster outside. I marveled how competently cheerful Liza was in tackling the mess. Four-and-a-half hours later we had most of the objects removed, but the place still looked like the Mississippi spent its summers there. We couldn’t get out of there soon enough for me. It was too late for lunch in Seattle now, but on the drive home in the dimming light I could only think about Mark’s place. It was where he had lived after getting out of the last institution, up until moving in with Sly. How could he live like that? Did he ever bring anyone over? My God, did he ever have sex on that bed, that macaroni and cheese playground? His life seemed so out of kilter, so separate from things. I stared at our dim reflections from his dashboard as he drove back to our apartment, silent, the bland notes of canned music falling softly on both of us. Around four-thirty Liza and I headed down to the park. We were walking down the driveway of the complex when Mark came trotting out behind us. It was the first time I had seen him run and it wasn’t pretty. "Hey, do you guys mind if I come? I haven’t been to the old park in a long time." "Whatever," I said. It was weird to be walking, not driving, with Mark, in the sunshine, with a pretty woman. Despite Mark’s presence, I was eager, elated even. We all tossed rocks into the water for a bit, and then I heard it. It came around the bend, pushing hard. I scooted down to the graveled bed of the tracks and yelled for Liza to follow. She hung back a bit, but was still pretty close. The big engine pulsed by, a riot of sound and sensation. I was damp with sweat. Liza hopped down beside me. "Boy, the look on your face. That was as good as the train going by." Her eyes sparkled. She leaned over and kissed me on the cheek. Mark stood on the incline above. He stared at the train melting in the distance and then stared at me. "You’re crazy," he said, flatly. There it was—Mark, calling me crazy. But who cared? I was walking on air. The next day, a gloomy and dark one, Mark asked me if I wanted to go for a drive. I started to say no; I was going to meet Liza for lunch later, but I had nothing else to do. We drove around Green Lake and through Carkeek Park and then back towards Edmonds, the dull droplets of sound from the radio matching the dull droplets on the windshield. Neither of us had said a thing. Mark slowed the car to a stop on a dark, tree-lined street. He turned the car off and started talking. "Those are dogwoods. They’re my favorite tree." He gestured towards the big, leafy trees that almost made an awning over the street. "They’re almost ready to bloom—you shouldn’t miss it. There’s nothing like it." He pointed vaguely to his left, "We could walk to my parent’s house, my old house, in a couple of minutes from here. I went to high school only a few blocks away." He gripped the wheel and stared straight ahead. "The kids made fun of me a lot in school. I used to come and sit here after class or when my parents were mean. I still like it a lot." He started the car and drove home. I was looking at Mark, but something reminded me of Liza. I realized that I hardly knew her, but she just seemed so right. I’d only had two relationships, and both of them just dribbled into nothing. I never had any answers for my girlfriends’ questions. But I got this electric feeling around Liza. The next couple of days were good, very good. Liza and I spent a lot of time together, the more the better. I thought that I was getting close to her. I didn’t see that much of Mark; he was out driving, or off somewhere, I guess; I hadn’t paid that much attention to him. I hadn’t been to the park since the three of us had watched the train together. Yesterday morning I came in from a walk and I heard a commotion in the bedroom. I could hear Liza, sort of squealing, and some rhythmic kind of thumping. I went to the door and listened, I couldn’t believe it. Liza fucking Mark, I’ll kill him, I was snarling, I threw the door open—Liza and Mark were both sitting on the side of the bed, bouncing up and down. Mark’s shoes were all over the place; Liza had on one of his ugly dress shoes. They were giggling like insane people. Liza looked up at me and laughed. "Mark insisted that I try on every one of his shoes on my beautiful feet. I don’t think this one quite suits me either, do you?" She swung her foot upward and shot the shoe against the opposite wall. That was the thumping I had heard. They both bounced on the bed and laughed. I gripped the doorknob fiercely, I wanted to slam it and break it to bits, but I just sputtered some broken words at them, no sense, just drippings of resentment. I went into the living room and sat on the couch. Liza came out in a few minutes. She gave me a long look and said she would come over later in the afternoon. I grunted something at her and she left. Mark came out wearing some long, baggy Hawaiian shorts, preposterous colors—he looked like an Alice in Wonderland character. I wanted to hate him, but I could only gape, amazed. "Wanna go for a drive, Ray?" he asked. He looked at me, serene, artless, the gray pall of the sky through the big window playing off the gray of his skin. "No, Mark, I’m gonna go downtown and hang out at Pike’s Place. The Market’s always good on a Saturday. Have fun." I stayed at the Market much longer than I expected. It hadn’t actually started raining, and the street musicians and crazies and tourists were out in full force. I was too busy watching to think about much else. When I got home, Mark was sitting on the couch staring into a hand mirror. He looked up at me when I came in; his eyes were very bloodshot; he had been crying. "Do you think I look like a crazy person, Ray? I don’t. Something crazy happened today, though. I picked up this girl hitchhiking and I just started telling her about blowjobs, how good they feel, you know; I didn’t touch her or anything. But I guess she took my license and called the cops. They got my record, they called my parents—they’re still my legal guardians, you know—and guess what? I have to go back in, they’re putting me back in, Harborview, I might never get out this time. I’m supposed to get my stuff together, my parents are gonna be here at six to take me over." He looked back into the mirror. "I don’t think I look crazy." I sat down next to him on the couch. I started to say something a couple of times, but it just sounded like I was clearing my throat. We sat in silence. About ten minutes later, Liza walked in. "Hey, is this a wake or something? Up and at ‘em, boys! It’s about a quarter of five—let’s go down to the park and go for a train ride." I started to say no, I wanted to tell her about Mark, she’d know what to say, but Mark jumped up and agreed. We walked down to the park while Liza and Mark talked about the differences between Tacoma and Seattle. It was amazing how calm he was. The train was a little early; we could hear it when we were beginning the descent down the hill. We all ran down laughing. For some reason I didn’t feel much like getting real close. Liza and I stood on the little ledge up above the tracks. Mark was somewhere behind us. Very close, though, because even when the big engine came loudly pounding through, I could hear his tennis shoes on the gravel when he ran down the hill and jumped. He might have even brushed my shirt, I don’t know. I realized later that Liza had screamed and screamed, but her cries had blended with the ebbing sound of the big machine as it streamed away. The engineer said later that he hadn’t seen a thing. Liza did everything. She called the ambulance and the police and walked me home. I had been kneeling by the tracks, I don’t know for how long; I’d been squeezing some gravel so hard my hands were all cut up. She spent the night. We lay awake almost until dawn, not talking much; she told me things would be ok. We held each other; the night was quiet and soft. All I had been thinking about was getting her to sleep with me, but now my body was dead. I had a sense of slowly swimming; I felt cocooned, enveloped. When I woke up today it was almost noon. Liza was gone, but she had left a note on my pillow. It read: Ray, my brother won’t be home for a while, but I’ve taken off. I didn’t tell you, I’m not sure why, but I have a sweetie in Tacoma. He’s been in Oregon building a house. He’ll be back in three days, and I’ll be back with him. So much has happened in this short time, but it seems best that I leave now before we become more deeply involved. I care about you a lot—I know you’ll find your way. Love, Liza I set the note back on the pillow and got dressed. I saw Mark’s car keys sitting in a little pile of rolled cigarettes. The first couple of puffs were sharp, almost rancid, but I didn’t mind it so much after a bit. The beer helped. I drove for an hour or so, the familiar spots, the drone of the wipers, the narcotic music.... I didn’t even mean to go down the street with all the trees, but that is what I did. The dogwoods were in flower. The broad white petals hung in showers, a cascade of light, irreproachable, stainless. A big shudder kind of woke me up. I’d been crying for a while, almost without noticing. I started the car and began to drive. At first I thought I might just drive north, see where that train goes, maybe just keep on going, but somehow that didn’t seem right. I decided just to drive, no place in particular.