and video games, stayed up all night and slept all day. Wesley and I took a truck from the abandoned U-Haul and spent a weekend emptying out Haskell Liquors and transferring the stock to Rickâs garage. Indian summer hit. We threw horseshoes and lazed in patio chairs, trying to drink enough to convince ourselves this was just an extended summer break.
The new reality kept interfering, however. Although the hot weather brought with it high, cloudless skies, a gray haze hung from fires that burned unchecked all over the valley, powdering our skin with soot. One by one the radio and TV stations blinked out of existence. Our stores of food and booze dwindled. Often the night sky flashed a literal electric blue as transformers exploded on telephone poles, and soon the power went out at Rickâs house. We lit candles, listened to the crickets exult in summerâs last gasp, and grew solemn over warm beers.
None more so than Rick. Normally cheerful and fearless (in high school heâd been designated beer buyer, and the only one besides Cole to ever dive from the dreaded sixty-foot cliff at the reservoir in Halowell), since burying his parents heâd stalked through the house, stiff and slow and silent. He drank until his legs gave way and slept wherever he fellâbeside the bathtub, on the concrete of the garage floor. He developed an obsession with cleaning, yet seemed afraid to disturb any object in the house; one morning I watched from the hallway as he lifted his fatherâs can of shaving gel to wipe the backsplash on the bathroom sink, then spent ten minutes replacing the can, moving it to the left an inch, then to the right, rotating it slightly, stepping back to examine the scene from several angles, then adjusting some more.
He went for days without speaking to anyone. Leo, who since we were kids had believed that others could be unhappy only through some fault of his, asked me what heâd done.
âItâs not you, Leo,â I said. âRickâs just sad. Everyoneâs sad, you know?â
But that wasnât all of it. Beyond mere sadness, we were starting to feel trapped in a perpetual now (as our past receded and any sort of meaningful future became a logical impossibility), a sort of purgatory where you drank and tanned and played Tetris with the same ten guys until the end of time. The walls were closing in, the SpaghettiOs were getting old, and soon Rick wasnât the only one tottering around like a mute, zombified version of himself.
Then the power went out.
A few days later we woke hungover and thirsty to find the sinks had gone dry. This was the last straw for Rick. He called us into the living room, popped open a Pabst tall boy, took a long swallow, and gazed around.
âIâve got a proposition,â he said.
We listened. It didnât seem too crazy, all things considered, and the more we drank, the better it sounded. We chewed it over for hours, until daylight faded. No one bothered to light the hurricane lamp that sat on the piano bench.
âWeâre not doing it unless everyone agrees,â Rick said. âAll of us together, just like always.â
We sat quietly, alone with our thoughts, for a while after that. I thought about my mother. I thought about my plans to become an architectural engineer (not a dream, strictly speaking, but an aspiration, one that had been fairly important to me). I thought about all the horrifying Mad Maxâtype scenarios that awaited us when we eventually ran out of food.
Then Rick called each of our names, and one by one we said yes. It was easy in the dark, somehow, shockingly easy, as if we were deciding nothing more weighty than which toppings to get on a pizza. We lit the lamp, sealed our agreement with a dull clink of near-empty beer cans, and went to bed.
It seemed like the best of a host of bad prospects.
Now, though, as I mopped up the remains of two guys Iâd met playing kickball in grade school,