Ethan Rutherford - The Peripatetic Coffin and Other Stories

Do the parents notice this? Do parents notice anything? Would they turn their head even if a planet, on a collision course, appeared suddenly above? Food is procured. Godzilla 1985 is rented, the clerk, who is Jeremy’s age, giving them the eyebrows, like, again? Down into the cool basement, the cassette is slipped into the player. The cartoon, the opening credits, the enormous man-lizard sweeping fire across the city, the fleeing Japanese hordes. The voices are dubbed, and the words don’t match the shape of the mouth that is making them, the emotional inflection one assumes was originally there in the performance turned up to a flat yell. And it is when the atomically awakened monster is wading back into the Japanese sea that one friend turns to the other and says that Jeremy had been over, and he had brought his movie, and they had watched it while his parents were gone.

A feeling of complete desolation washes over one of the boys. In his mouth, he tastes, jealously, the tang of exclusion, the finality of the reveal. He feels this way because, secretly, he always knew this would happen. Jeremy isn’t his cousin. This is not his house, after all. His father doesn’t talk like a cigarette dispenser. His mother doesn’t take him on junk food supermarket sweeps. It was never his poster to pin up and take down. He’s always been a visitor, a home-peeper—a pervert frosting the glass. He’s known it without knowing it, and now he feels exposed. They are lying, the two of them, on the L-shaped couch. In the corner, Ms. Pac-Man silently, automatically, perpetually munches pixels. Without me? the boy wants to shout. You did that without me? But he doesn’t shout, because he doesn’t know how to shout at his friend. He doesn’t know, even if he wants to. What he wants is fifth grade again. What he wants is June. What he wants is matching BMX bikes. The basement is suddenly cold, the television now playing a blue screen that bathes everything in the room in an aquarium murk. Maybe he should be shouting at himself.

But he looks at his friend, who has stood up to walk across the carpet to the television. He looks at his friend, who is wearing sweatpants markered with the number 44. He watches as his friend pulls, from the video case for Back to the Future, a new video, which is not Back to the Future, slips it into the VHS machine, and turns the sound on the television all the way down. He watches as the movie begins, and his throat catches, and he looks at his friend, who is sitting cross-legged in front of the screen, not three feet away from the television, like he’s done this before. Both of them know what they are watching, neither of them know whether they should be watching it. You have to get close, one says to the other. The tang of jealousy disappears, and is replaced by something else. They watch the screen, unhearing, until one of them turns the volume up two bars, and the sound fills the basement. They know they are supposed to like this, they know they should be popping boners, readjusting their pants; they know they should be thrilled by what they are seeing, that it should drive them out of their minds, that they should want to see the whole movie but this is happening for neither of them. They are just boys. It’s been a summer of black eyes, of scabbed knees, of haircuts, and now it’s the summer neither of them are sure they’re ready for, the summer that comes from the television, a summer that feels like overreaching. Each feels the sensation of swimming alone for the first time, each feels the orbital pull of planet-collision. It’s Jeremy’s video. Do you want me to go first, or do you want to go first, one of the friends, the boy who lives in the house in Laurelhurst, says to the other.

What is it like? I don’t know. Did you like it? I don’t know. Was it bad? It was weird. Why are you crying? I’m not crying. Did he like it? He said he did, one of them says. He said it’s what you do. One of them says. One of them. Always.

Upstairs, there are parents. Three miles away, there are parents. And the sound of all of this, it carries. Through the floorboards, through the chimney, through the branches of the guardian trees, up toward the dimming sky. The motorcycle man, the three-pack-a-dayer, who is sitting upstairs with his wife, watching television in the darkened living room, and who, perhaps, has been drinking, has a feeling he can’t identify and doesn’t question. He stands. Checks the doors to make sure they’re locked. Turns on the front light. Walks down the hall, and opens the basement door quietly, soft enough not to wake anyone sleeping, cracked enough to hear if there’s any sort of structural damage being done by the two boys in the basement. He opens the door, is about to yell down to them that it’s time to knock it off and turn in, and stops. Something trips a wire in the back of his head: a sound, a feeling, he isn’t sure. He is a picture, now, of fatherly concern. He is ready to be angry. He places one heavy, slippered foot on the first basement step. A second step follows.

But these friends, what do they hear? Not the movie, playing behind them. Not a father, coming down the stairs. They are hearing nothing but each other. There are no words, but they are talking, now, in the language of friends, in the language of the basement, in the language of hapless Japanese commuters aboard a miniature subway car that has, to their surprise, been picked up by a disinterested, atomic aberration and held high over a Tokyo street. It is, they would admit to each other if they could, thrilling to be left so alone. One friend is clumsily showing the other—the other, who knows nothing of himself, except that he wants to be included, and to show his gratitude that he has been. There is milky, hairless skin. There is the L-shaped couch, dominating the room, and the idea, for one of them, of an ice pack plunged deep into an orbital socket. There is a flaccid taste, the bending of limbs, and a strange, tongue-less kiss. It’s a time-out. It is outside of time. They’ve whistled themselves to the bench, to regroup, tenderly, before suiting up again, and for now, it is just the two of them in this room. The doors are shut. No one is allowed in. It’s the end of summer, and they are looking, again, for that old equilibrium, attempting to make sense out of nonsense, and it comes out physically, robotically, without inflection, and it needs to be dubbed. The question that one friend is asking the other is, Where were you? Where were you when this was happening to me? And the answer, a fractured, proffered gift, is the first lie one has ever told the other, though it will take him years to figure that out. The answer is: Right here. I was in this basement, where I belong. I was always in this basement, and I will be in this basement the rest of my life, if that’s what you need from me.

On the radio, they were calling it “snow-mageddon.” Joan had seen the storm on the news, as well, in a Doppler-radar swirl pulsing like a sick heart over the Cascade Mountains. The worst of it was supposed to hit tomorrow, midday, but already the snow had begun to fall in little eiderdown flakes, salting the bushes, promising cover. Her husband, Thomas, was upstairs. Earlier this morning he’d called weather prediction an inexact science. It comes, it goes, one never knows, he’d said. A little song. But this particular storm couldn’t arrive early. John—their son, the actor, the writer, the destructively depressed, self-proclaimed failure—was coming home for Christmas, driving up from Oregon with his girlfriend, and the thought of them stuck somewhere, the car they’d bought for him wedged in a snowdrift like a blunt splinter . . . It’d be on the evening news: the only people to freeze by the side of the road while everyone else got home safely, an accusation frosted on John’s features. Just like everything else, it would’ve been their fault.