Chris McCormick: Desert Boys

“No,” I said. “What about you, Lloyd? You writing anything?”

Lloyd was one of those young gay men whose outlandish flamboyance and energy, inextricably linked, seemed to exhaust and straighten other gay men who came into contact with him. He was wearing a white bandanna over his forehead, and a tuft of dyed-green hair sprouted like a small artichoke from his chin. He stopped fussing with the books, happy to hear the question. “Just my novel,” he said, shifting the bandanna. “It just keeps growing and growing — it’s up to, like, twelve hundred pages now. My ideas keep feeding off each other.”

At this point — maybe he noticed my boredom — he pulled from the shelf a book whose cover showed the burning Twin Towers. “Can you believe this September will be ten, as in one-zero, years?”

I did the math; we’d been in high school for less than a month.

“I didn’t even know what the World Trade Center was, ” he said, laughing. “I spent most of that morning asking people why it was such a big deal. It wasn’t like Britney Spears died or anything. Needless to say, I was not a bright kid.”

I actually felt relieved. To this day, I cringe when I think about how nonchalant I’d been, how casually I’d treated the news. I told Lloyd so.

“Well,” Lloyd said, getting back to the books. “We were just kids, you know? We were children. On the other side of the country, no less. What can you do?”

Choosing a few slim books at random, I stacked them on my arm. I felt a strange, patriotic obligation to buy something.

“You should come in more often,” he said. Again he adjusted his bandanna, which I guessed was a nervous tic.

I wished him luck on his novel. “Let me know when it’s ready for another pair of eyes,” I said.

You could see how long he’d been waiting for someone to say that.

* * *

They were only kids, sure, but some of them dealt with the circumstances with more gravity than others. While Watts and Kush, happy to be out of class early, joked about how terrorist attacks should happen more often, Karinger focused on the long-term consequences.

“Maybe we’ll get a world war,” he said.

Since school had started up again, they’d gone out to the paintball field only on the weekends, and went that Saturday after the attacks. The mood was different this time — no one seemed to be having any fun. At one point during the game, Karinger, who’d Scotch-taped a miniature American flag between the eyes of the mask under his arm, started walking, without urgency and without aiming his gun, directly at Kush. Kush was so confused by Karinger’s nonchalance that he hesitated to shoot. And then Karinger did what he’d never done before: he put on the mask. The gas-masked figure kept approaching at this slow, haunted pace, and Kush began to doubt the person behind the mask was Karinger at all. By the time Kush lifted his gun, he felt the sharp blast of a paintball against his right biceps. He dropped his gun to grab at the wound with his left hand, where a second tremendous pain began to grow. Karinger continued to shoot from a few yards away. He wouldn’t stop firing. Kush dropped into a ball on the dirt, at which point, the popping sounds of released carbon dioxide and ammunition stopped, at least for a moment.

Watts came over, yelling at Karinger. Kush tried, and failed, to hide his crying. After a while, Watts offered his hand to help him off the ground.

Karinger said, “Why the hell didn’t you shoot me, Kush?”

Watts said he’d had enough for the day. He was going home, and Kush wanted to join him. But as Watts got on his bike to leave, Karinger told Kush to stay for one more game.

“You’re going to win,” Kush said. “Why would I even play?”

“You’ve got to start thinking different,” Karinger said. He’d taken off his mask now and was jabbing his fingers into the side of his head. He had the bright blond hair of an albino, and he’d recently had it shaved to military length. Sometimes Kush imagined Karinger with blue eyes, but now that Karinger was staring directly at him, lecturing him, they were clearly hazel. “Stop saying everything that goes through your head, Kush. The first step in being tough is convincing people you’re tough. Including yourself. You’ve got to pretend you’re tougher than you are, keep some shit to yourself. This is what not being a pussy is all about.”

He went on to explain the rules of this new two-person game: essentially, chicken. They’d each get one shot at the other person from a certain distance before taking a long step closer. Then they’d shoot again, and step closer. And so on. The first person to quit the game lost.

“Thanks for the pep talk,” Kush said. “But I’m going to pass.”

“Fine,” Karinger said. “You can get two shots for every one of mine. You want to get me back, don’t you?”

Gingerly, Kush rubbed the welt on his hand and thought of how gratified he’d feel to give a matching one to Karinger. So he walked to his spot in the desert, thirty feet from where Karinger stood. Then he hollered, “Are there any rules?”

“You shoot twice, I shoot once. No need for masks”—he tossed his aside—“because there’s no face shots. And no ball shots. Cool?”

“I won’t aim for your face, but you should probably wear your mask. I can’t promise anything.”

“No masks,” Karinger called out. “It’ll force you to focus your aim.”

Kush tried to swallow, but his mouth was dry. The heat had the back of his tongue scaly. He aimed his gun and shot, missing wide left. His second shot missed high.

Karinger’s first shot hit Kush on the left wrist.

“Shit!” Kush said, grabbing the pain.

They stepped closer. This round, Kush’s first shot missed again, but his second hit Karinger in the right shin.

“Good,” Karinger called out, shaking his leg.

By the time they were standing ten feet away from each other, Kush had stopped feeling the pain. He found himself laughing wildly every time he was hit, just as Karinger did. As they stepped closer together, Kush imagined their bodies merging. The silly idea had an odd heaviness in his mind, and allowed him to feel a tickling pinch where the pain ought to have been.

When they got within point-blank range, they aimed at each other’s chests.

“It’s a draw,” Karinger said, still laughing. “See, man? It’s a draw.”

Their laughter quieted down. For three, four seconds, their eyes met. Then, at the same time, they pulled their triggers.

There it is, Kush thought, doubled over in the desert. There’s the pain again.

They hadn’t merged after all.

* * *

I still hadn’t responded to Jackie (Connolly) Karinger. Her email stayed open on my computer — I must have read it thirty times. Looking around the room, I saw on the edge of the coffee table the three books I’d impulsively purchased from Lloyd Alcero. In an effort to buy more time, I went over to inspect them: Understanding the War on Terror, After 9/11: America’s Global War, The Muslim One: A Memoir.

I turned the third book over. The author’s black-and-white photograph: a young woman wearing a hijab. Chin down, she looked up at the camera. Her thin eyebrows tensed, giving her face the severe expression of a distraught mother, but she couldn’t have been much older than I was. Seeing her photograph reminded me of someone I’d known (“known” is a strong word) in high school. For all I knew, she could have been the same woman. Upon checking the bio, however, I learned that the author was raised not in California, but in Florida, where she’d foiled her uncle’s plot to set off a car bomb at an amusement park. Still, I couldn’t shake the feeling — due, I suspected, to the timing of it all — that this author happened to be someone whose life was perpendicular to mine, and that, if I were to read her book, I’d learn something about myself at that intersection.