why is donald trump talking about torre?
saw the rocks win the pennant the other day, which was the awesome. if you can believe, i had never been to a postseason baseball game (unlike my smelly brothers, one of whom saw the giants win the pennant and both of whom attended two world series games--one of them worked concessions and got PAID TO BE THERE), seeing as how i tended to be in college trying to avoid getting snipered and whatnot.
i have definitely hijacked the rockies' bandwagon, although really, when my fam moved to california, the a's and the giants promptly made the world series, and when my parents moved to boulder in april, the rockies promptly incinerated themselves into october. it is spooky. they're never allowed to be yankee fans (not that they would, of course).
so, espn is showing various clips of the yankees under torre's reign, and that anguished sound you hear from the direction of boulder, co, is me screaming at the television, "SLIDE, JEREMY, SLIDE."
If it’s in the second person, it must be Danny and Rich! And, okay, how about totally implausible soap opera plot devices? Everybody cool with that?
Tales from the Outback
You thought it was funny when Harden passed out on the diving board, so you leave him there while you pick up the cans and cups from the patio, setting the chairs back upright and tucking the boombox in the little boombox hutch that might have at one point been a doghouse.
It’s maybe two hours until dawn, and you really need to get to sleep. You spot Harden out of the corner of your eye occasionally, lanky drape of his body with one leg hanging off the side of the diving board, his heel a coin width from the surface of the water.
He looks perfect, frozen and untouchable, which is why you don’t really react when you see him shift and start to roll. The board dips and his heel breaks the plane of the water into dilated spreading rings, and then Harden slips too far and gravity grabs hold, jerks him off the board and he falls. His head cracks off the concrete lip of the pool with a fresh-wood sound, and he sinks fast into the water, a pink cloud swirling around his face, thickening and darkening.
It’s probably only two seconds before you move, before you shout and fling yourself into the pool, your shoes heavy and awkward. You wrap your arms around Harden’s waist, cold hands on the cut of his stomach, and kick towards the melt of yellow porchlight, the clear night air.
You haul Harden’s limp deadweight body out of the pool and lay him down on the cement, a dark island of water bleeding out around him, and priority one is the gash on his forehead, the short curtain of blood across his eye. You leave wet tracks as you run for a towel and then back, starting to shiver as the wind picks up.
Head wounds bleed a lot even if they’re not serious, which you know, but you’re drunk and a little high and very badly scared. You hold the towel to Harden’s head with one hand and call 911 with the other, and are baffled to find yourself on hold.
Harden’s good eye flutters and comes open, a shock of color in the grays and blacks of the scene, and he looks up at you curiously, licking his lips.
“My head hurts,” he says, naturally enough, his voice low and quiet and rough. You nod, your phone still pressed to your ear.
“You fell off the diving board and hit it on the side of the pool. I saved your life.” You throw in that last for no particular reason, lifting the towel to see that the bleeding has already mostly stopped. The call disconnects, anyway, and you close your phone, hoping for the best.
“Where am I?” Harden asks, testing his forehead gingerly with his fingertips and blinking when he sees them come away red.
“My house,” you tell him, and your hand is still on his face, sorta cupped over his temple with your thumb pulling through his hair absently.
He nods, looks hesitant. “And. Who are you?”
You sit back on your heels, and shove your soaked hair back with both hands. “Funny, man. Original too, is what I like about it.”
Harden stares at you like he’s forgotten he’s not alone, and your stomach overturns, your face heating. Alone for a hundred yards in every direction, is the thing about your house up here just below the line of the horizon, and there’s no fence, just a sudden explosion of wilderness beyond the pool.
Zito says that your house is good for committing murders and running a large-scale drug manufacturing operation, but you mostly like it because right now it’s very difficult to argue that you and Harden aren’t the only people left in the world.
“I’m sorry,” Harden says after a minute. He blinks fast, flash of white in red, his hands weaving nervously on his stomach. “I. I can’t remember my name. Or yours. Could you please. Help me.”
You laugh and it cuts off sharply when you notice something strange happening on Harden’s face, a clean slender path eaten through the blood. Tear track, you realize, and every muscle on Harden’s body is drawn taut, fighting off the shakes.
“You’re serious?” you ask in reflex, just buying time, and Harden moans a little bit, his eyes dodging and his hands fisted in his wet shirt. “Okay, um, you’re Rich. Harden. Is your last name. Rich Harden. And I’m Danny.”
If anything, Harden looks more panicked, his mouth hollowing, like the names aren’t even vaguely familiar, and you reach out and grab his shoulder, try to pin him to the deck.
“It’s okay. You just hit your head thirty seconds ago, you’ll be fine in a bit.”
Harden shakes his head, and his arm twists and whips around and he’s holding you now, sucking in a breath through his teeth. “I don’t know what year it is,” he admits, his voice breaking. “I don’t know anything.”
“It’s 2047,” you tell him, and you stop and consider why in the world you would say something like that, deciding it’s a little to do with you being drunk and a little to do with the empty look on Harden’s face, his grip burning around your arm. You might have been trying to make him laugh.
But he only asks the month and the day and you lie causelessly about that, too, picking December 14th out of the clear blue sky. You want to ask him how come he remembers general concepts like the structure of time and nomenclature, if he can’t remember specifics, but first you get another beer.
He asks if it isn’t warm for winter, and you tell him without pausing, “We’re in Australia, dude. Southern hemisphere.” You’re maybe having too much fun with this.
He blinks some more and nods sorrowfully, sitting up. You’re still over by the cooler, and you fish out a half-melted ice cube, sit down next to him, offering him the ice cube on the flat of your hand.
“Clean your face.”
He complies, his hands dripping, clearing the blood off his eye and forehead, patting dry with his shirt collar. You wonder if stuff like how to clean blood off your face is self-explanatory, or just in Harden’s muscle memory.
“Am I from here? Am I talking with an accent and just not realizing it because it’s my accent?”
“How do you remember the concept of accents, I think is the more important question.”
“Danny.”
Now that sounds like the Richie you know and might occasionally want to see naked outside of the showers. Aggrieved and saying your name like it hurts, and you grin stupidly at him, drunk-warmth spreading out from the center of your chest.
“You’re from Canada. You speak fluent Canadian.”
Harden looks like he’s buying it for a second, but then his eyes narrow and he scoffs. He’s curved shallowly around his knees, his shirt plastered to his back and his hair just long enough to curl when wet, pressed down high on his forehead.
“What am I doing here, then?” he asks.
You take a slow drink, searching the sky for the Southern Cross and a mash-up of myths and epic poems that you only half-remember from some class you took in college. If it’s 2047, anything might be true.
“When you were fourteen, you ran away from home and hitchhiked around for a half-dozen years, doing every job imaginable. You ended up in Argentina and got involved in a gangland war somehow, and to avoid being killed you shipped out with some mercenary sailors. You’ve spent three years at sea.”
Harden takes this in without moving and when you glance over your eyes stick on a single drop of water skating down the side of his face, down his neck, vanishing instantly against the collar of his shirt.
Pirate, you think, a quick jitter of excitement running through you. Outlaw.
You watched too many movies as a kid, and Harden did too, but he probably doesn’t remember them, though perhaps the archetype of the antihero has survived. You hope he can still appreciate that you’ve given him the best possible history, every little boy’s dream.
“So I’m here with a. A ship?” Harden twists his hands together, studying them as if in search of rope burns, finding only pitcher calluses that he rubs the tip of his thumb across curiously.
“You’re on shore leave,” you say, beginning to feel incredibly clever. “You’ve been drunk for several days.”
That, at least, seems completely reasonable to Harden, as he nods, looking mournful and cradling his head. His forehead has begun to darken and swell, knotting around the cut, and you think distantly that he could probably use some aspirin or codeine or something, but you don’t want to leave him alone-the world’s too surreal right now. Harden doesn’t know his way around Australia.
“I’m not gonna know how to do sailor stuff,” Harden says, panic starting to build again, and you can imagine that it must be paralyzing, annihilating, nothing but white space to fill.
“You don’t have to worry about it tonight. You’ve got some time,” you tell him, seeing a pale rash of goosebumps rise on his arm. You rise to fetch him another towel, the first bloodied and crumpled and damp, and he wraps it around his shoulders, clutching it at his throat with both hands. It helps, Harden’s back relaxing slightly and his face losing a few lines. A kindergartner with his blanket, is the image that passes through your mind, and you snicker inwardly.
But stripped down like he is might be mistaken for regression anyway, two decades of experience gone in the time it took to fall from the diving board to the edge of the pool.
While you’re up, you get another beer. You’re really drunk enough, but drunk means no better judgment and without it, you can’t be held responsible. You hesitate, bent at the waist with your hand losing feeling in the cooler, and then grab a second beer, deciding that this lack of accountability is going to be the new guiding force in your life.
“Here,” you say, and offer the beer to Harden, who looks up at you in disbelief.
“Shouldn’t you be taking me to the hospital or something?”
“Hey, drinking got you into this. Drinking’ll get you out.”
His eyes slit like he’s scanning that for logic, and you’re frankly amazed when he apparently finds some, warily extending a towel-draped arm to take the beer. He doesn’t open it right away, steamrolling it between his palms and visibly holding himself together.
“Really really messed up,” he says, half under his breath, and you shift closer to him, knocking your knee into his, hoping that you’ll move off the fucking cement soon.
“I’m telling you, man, it’s, it’s no good to focus on the bad stuff. All you really need to know about your life is that you’re young and you’re totally free. What the fuck do you need a memory for? No regrets, no guilt. This is a fucking gift, is what it is.”
You’re talking out of your ass, but maybe you shouldn’t do that so much anymore, because Harden appears to have completely lost his bullshit gauge. He’s intent on everything you say, blue eyes gleaming.
“Is that really true?” Harden asks, a pretty skein cast over his face like he’s trying to process the feeling of hope for the first time. He just kills you, takes your breath away.
You regroup. “Of course. I’m your best friend, would I lie?”
“You’re my best friend?”
You pause. “Yes.” No, no you are not. You’re not even his best friend in a five mile radius, but it has come home to you that what you are doing here is reconstructing the universe, and you can fix the grievances and wrongs, set everything as it’s supposed to be. “We met a long time ago in California.”
Oddly, that’s no truer than anything else-you met him three months ago in Arizona. California’s the important part, though, and time’s still relative.
“I was at the beach and you tackled me.” At Phoenix Municipal Stadium, Harden mistook you from behind and tackled you onto the grass. “You thought I was this guy who’d stolen your wallet.” Harden had thought you were Zito, though really you’d just stolen one of his caps, marked along the brim with obscure symbols in silver ink. “When you realized I wasn’t, you bought me a beer, because you’re generally a stand-up guy.”
Harden did not buy you a beer after ruining your first white home uniform with grass stains, but that was only because you had promos to film. He did let you have the last cherry Danish from the breakfast spread, though, and explained the team to you between takes, laying out their history.
“And you live here?”
“I came out here for a surfboarding competition,” you tell him, a pretty good backstory of your own. “And I was playing cards with these guys one night and ended up winning the deed to this place, so I stayed.”
“You moved to Australia because of a card game?”
“It was a free house, Richie. I didn’t bother to ask if he had one available in Los Angeles County.”
He drops his eyes and his mouth moves a few times. He’s repeating his own name to himself, you realize, trying to learn it almost silently.
You’re gonna have to steal his wallet after all, so he doesn’t see his California driver’s license and the baseball cards, and it’s kinda spooky, a self-fulfilling prophecy. God knows how long this power of yours will last.
Harden occupies himself for awhile drinking his beer, becoming more comfortable with every swallow, his throat working. You’re staring at him too obviously, the towel hanging off his shoulders so that you can see the definition of his chest under wet cotton, and you think that you’ve already misled him so badly, just a little more can’t hurt.
“So, hey,” you say, letting your voice go a bit soft. “You really don’t remember me at all?”
He folds both hands carefully around his beer, the towel just barely keeping contact with his body. Shame would probably be the best word for his expression, but that doesn’t make any kind of sense.
“I guess not. I. There’s some stuff, but I can’t quite. It won’t come together.”
“Like what?”
Harden shakes his head, biting his lip. “A lake frozen over with little pieces of wood in the ice. A remote-controlled car with these, these wings.” He spreads his fingers out abstractly to demonstrate. “I remember brushing my teeth and watching myself in the mirror. Something about lightning, like, silver lightning. A blue house with a bicycle on the roof.”
You start-you’ve seen pictures of that, Crosby’s got some on his computer.
“And grass,” Harden says. “Lots and lots of grass, all perfect and trimmed down. Every time I close my eyes, that’s what I see.”
It shouldn’t surprise, but it kind of does, leaves you thinking about what it must be like in Harden’s head right now, those huge white gashes and indistinct smears of life at sea, a deep underlay of green, an endless outfield.
“But not me,” you say, trying not to give anything away.
“Don’t feel bad. You’re actually the only person on earth I do remember, even though I just met you.”
He almost smiles reassuringly, and maybe it’s because he really doesn’t remind you of the Rich Harden that you know, but none of your reasons for not sleeping with him seem valid right now. The two of you are strangers in every way that matters, and you’re in a foreign country, drunk and far past midnight. No one could blame you.
“Let’s go inside,” you say to hide the fact that you are suffering an acute crisis of faith. Your demons have your better angels by the neck, dragging you to wonder how much he remembers about sex, how close to untouched he’d be.
Harden follows you gratefully off the deck, toeing off your waterlogged shoes and socks at the door, and you realize within milliseconds of your feet hitting carpet that this was a stunningly bad idea. Outside can be mistaken for Australia forty years in the future, but this is definitely your house in Oakland in May of 2005, your Eckersley bobblehead on the television, your lucky red cap jammed down between the couch and the wall, Harden’s hoodie laid out in an eerie dismembered head-and-torso shape on the chair.
You’re not Rich Harden’s best friend, and in an hour the sun will rise, in twelve you’ll have to go to the ballpark. You live in this world and nowhere else.
All the lights are off and Harden looks around, asks, “All this from surfing?”
“I’m very good,” you say, and go into the bathroom to trade Harden’s wet towel for a dry one, barely able to meet your own eyes in the mirror.
You don’t want to think about the consequences of what you’re doing. Harden’s gonna snap out of this soon, maybe after he gets some sleep, maybe after he sobers up, and he’s gonna remember that you lied to him and took advantage of a moment of extreme vulnerability, and if you make a pass at him (you can’t make a pass at him, you can’t think of anything you’d like to do more), he might actually kill you.
But none of that is for sure, you think, feeling heat curl low in your stomach. The two of you are out of place and out of time, and it occurs to you for the first time that you are drunk enough to black out yourself-there’s a possibility that neither of you will remember anything tomorrow, and that thought slams through you and makes you jerk, biting your tongue.
If neither of you remembers, then it won’t have ever happened.
You come back into the living room, trying not to look as single-minded as you feel. Harden stares up at you as you hand him the towel, and it’s already begun, because you can’t remember him ever looking better than he does right now.
“It’s weird because there’s a lot of stuff that only you and I know,” you tell him, hasten to add, “I mean, as best friends and all. If you stay like this, I won’t be able to get confirmation on anything that’s happened. You’re like my lone witness.”
Harden rubs the towel quickly over his hair, hard across his eyes, before winding it around his wrists, his eyes lowered. “You think I’ll probably stay like this, then.”
Fuck. “No, no, I’m saying hypothetically. You know. A what if kinda thing.”
Not looking up, Harden picks at his wet jeans, and you think about the shadow-colored outline of his body that will be left on the fabric of the couch when he gets up, how it’ll fade away in the morning when the sun comes across, leaving a slight mist in the air.
“So what if,” he says quietly. “I’m crippled like this, you’ve got to see that. Start over from scratch at, at.” He stops, and his face breaks suddenly, fury and helplessness warring as he asks, “How old am I?”
You hold your breath for a moment, then you tell him the truth. You watch him try to process that and make it automatic as he’d done with his name and nationality, his mouth wrenched to the side, the opposite of his famous smirk. Same look he gets after giving up a run or two, awe-inspiring anger directed at both the world and himself
“See, I can’t even make it thirty seconds,” Harden says. “I’m actually so fucking scared right now, I can’t even tell you.”
He’s speaking without inflection, which makes it worse somehow, and you sit down next to him, latch onto the towel between his wrists and tug his hands up, draw his eyes.
“You’re gonna stay here until you remember. And you will, I’m absolutely sure about that. I personally think that it’s ‘cause you’re drunk and in some kind of weird reverse blackout, but whatever, if you don’t sleep it off you can stay here and, like, reconstruct. Even if it takes years.”
It’s not a lie if you believe it, and you’re just about far enough gone that you do, every word of it. You can promise years, though you only have twelve hours, because somewhere beyond the saber line of trees is the South Pacific.
Harden blinks very quickly a few times, and his knuckles stand out stony white as the tension between the two of you grows, the towel as taut as anchor rope. He scans your face over and over, half-desperate, manic spots of color on his cheekbones.
“Will that work?” he asks.
You’re not sure what he means by that, and anyway, you barely hear it because Harden’s licking his lips nervously and your heartrate keeps getting jacked up, electric blue and damp flushed skin and all that lovely hope clouding across his face again. You don’t think. You can’t think.
You just grab his wrist and lean in, press your lips to his. He makes a noise, a muffled half-shout, and you kiss him open-mouthed for a few seconds, the circle of your fingers so tight his pulse is indistinguishable from your own. He twists and shivers against you and you have to break away, catch your breath.
Cold skin of his cheek against yours, your mouth feeling burned and Richie’s chlorine and beer taste on your tongue, and he’s dumbstruck, grabbing the back of your neck and pulling your face up.
“What are you doing?” he whispers. You shake your head, run your tongue across your teeth. Goddamn, but you’re in trouble.
“We do this sometimes, sleep together,” you tell him, and you’d swear on your life that it’s true. “Nothing serious, just for fun, you know? And I thought maybe. You’d appreciate the distraction.”
“We have sex?” he asks in disbelief, and you swallow hard.
“What, you forgot how to be attracted to me?” you say with an ugly attempt at a smile, and his eyes widen, his grip hard on the back of your neck. You’re hyperaware of him, the bruised shape of his mouth and his shoulders so perfectly defined through thin wet cotton.
“I, I don’t know,” he says, blushing deeply, and you kinda can’t help yourself, coasting both your hands onto his stomach, feeling him gasp, try to twitch away.
“No, wait, just a second.” You don’t move until he relaxes slightly, and then you move slow, you brush your nose against his face and tell him in an unsteady voice, “We’ve done this a million times. You love this stuff.”
He draws in a sharp breath and you follow it with your palms, inching your thumbs under the edge of his shirt. His eyes are locked on you, and you show a lazy smile, your best look. You hear his throat click as he swallows, and you know you’ve got him then.
So you kiss him again and he tips his head back and lets you guide him into a good position with one hand on his jaw, the other tracing the ridge of his stomach through his shirt. He sorta moans into your mouth and his hand on your neck drags up into your hair, closing into a fist and it hurts enough that lights burst behind your eyes, sear right through you.
You end up between his legs, on your knees on the carpet with the coffee table shoved out of the way and Harden staring at you down the bare stretch of his chest, lidded strips of blue and his jagged breath. You hook your fingers in the pockets of his jeans and grin up at him.
“Do you remember any of this, Richie?”
He shakes his head, looking astonished and still not quite himself, though you’ve never seen him from this angle before.
“That’s okay. We can just pretend that it’s the first time.”
Harden’s head falls back onto the couch and he gasps your name at the ceiling, covering his eyes with his forearm, and you take his other hand and push it back into your hair as you bow your head. You’re more than a little confused yourself, because everything you do to him seems to be exactly what he wants, like you mastered this years ago.
After he finishes with a shocked cry, he pulls you into his lap and lets you rub yourself off against him, broad flat palms on your back, hoarse voice saying, yeah, c’mon, danny, attaboy, and you screw your eyes shut, wrapping your arms around his shoulders and trying to compress your body into his until there’s no distance left between you.
This is the future, you think in the white moments after you’ve come. None of this has happened yet and maybe now none of it ever will, because you’ve fucked with the fabric of time. You’re lying across the couch with Harden kinda sprawled against your side, and you can feel him shaking a bit. He might be crying-it’s hard to say.
You stroke your hand through his hair, watching the sunlight break over the clean skin of his back, the first dawn of the new world.
THE END
Endnotes: Danny is an evil and amoral boy whose actions are not sanctioned by this or any other governing body. When your friend gets amnesia, take them to the hospital (General Hospital, preferably).
Every single time I have ever called 911, I have gotten myself put on hold. Which seems counterintuitive.
i have definitely hijacked the rockies' bandwagon, although really, when my fam moved to california, the a's and the giants promptly made the world series, and when my parents moved to boulder in april, the rockies promptly incinerated themselves into october. it is spooky. they're never allowed to be yankee fans (not that they would, of course).
so, espn is showing various clips of the yankees under torre's reign, and that anguished sound you hear from the direction of boulder, co, is me screaming at the television, "SLIDE, JEREMY, SLIDE."
If it’s in the second person, it must be Danny and Rich! And, okay, how about totally implausible soap opera plot devices? Everybody cool with that?
Tales from the Outback
You thought it was funny when Harden passed out on the diving board, so you leave him there while you pick up the cans and cups from the patio, setting the chairs back upright and tucking the boombox in the little boombox hutch that might have at one point been a doghouse.
It’s maybe two hours until dawn, and you really need to get to sleep. You spot Harden out of the corner of your eye occasionally, lanky drape of his body with one leg hanging off the side of the diving board, his heel a coin width from the surface of the water.
He looks perfect, frozen and untouchable, which is why you don’t really react when you see him shift and start to roll. The board dips and his heel breaks the plane of the water into dilated spreading rings, and then Harden slips too far and gravity grabs hold, jerks him off the board and he falls. His head cracks off the concrete lip of the pool with a fresh-wood sound, and he sinks fast into the water, a pink cloud swirling around his face, thickening and darkening.
It’s probably only two seconds before you move, before you shout and fling yourself into the pool, your shoes heavy and awkward. You wrap your arms around Harden’s waist, cold hands on the cut of his stomach, and kick towards the melt of yellow porchlight, the clear night air.
You haul Harden’s limp deadweight body out of the pool and lay him down on the cement, a dark island of water bleeding out around him, and priority one is the gash on his forehead, the short curtain of blood across his eye. You leave wet tracks as you run for a towel and then back, starting to shiver as the wind picks up.
Head wounds bleed a lot even if they’re not serious, which you know, but you’re drunk and a little high and very badly scared. You hold the towel to Harden’s head with one hand and call 911 with the other, and are baffled to find yourself on hold.
Harden’s good eye flutters and comes open, a shock of color in the grays and blacks of the scene, and he looks up at you curiously, licking his lips.
“My head hurts,” he says, naturally enough, his voice low and quiet and rough. You nod, your phone still pressed to your ear.
“You fell off the diving board and hit it on the side of the pool. I saved your life.” You throw in that last for no particular reason, lifting the towel to see that the bleeding has already mostly stopped. The call disconnects, anyway, and you close your phone, hoping for the best.
“Where am I?” Harden asks, testing his forehead gingerly with his fingertips and blinking when he sees them come away red.
“My house,” you tell him, and your hand is still on his face, sorta cupped over his temple with your thumb pulling through his hair absently.
He nods, looks hesitant. “And. Who are you?”
You sit back on your heels, and shove your soaked hair back with both hands. “Funny, man. Original too, is what I like about it.”
Harden stares at you like he’s forgotten he’s not alone, and your stomach overturns, your face heating. Alone for a hundred yards in every direction, is the thing about your house up here just below the line of the horizon, and there’s no fence, just a sudden explosion of wilderness beyond the pool.
Zito says that your house is good for committing murders and running a large-scale drug manufacturing operation, but you mostly like it because right now it’s very difficult to argue that you and Harden aren’t the only people left in the world.
“I’m sorry,” Harden says after a minute. He blinks fast, flash of white in red, his hands weaving nervously on his stomach. “I. I can’t remember my name. Or yours. Could you please. Help me.”
You laugh and it cuts off sharply when you notice something strange happening on Harden’s face, a clean slender path eaten through the blood. Tear track, you realize, and every muscle on Harden’s body is drawn taut, fighting off the shakes.
“You’re serious?” you ask in reflex, just buying time, and Harden moans a little bit, his eyes dodging and his hands fisted in his wet shirt. “Okay, um, you’re Rich. Harden. Is your last name. Rich Harden. And I’m Danny.”
If anything, Harden looks more panicked, his mouth hollowing, like the names aren’t even vaguely familiar, and you reach out and grab his shoulder, try to pin him to the deck.
“It’s okay. You just hit your head thirty seconds ago, you’ll be fine in a bit.”
Harden shakes his head, and his arm twists and whips around and he’s holding you now, sucking in a breath through his teeth. “I don’t know what year it is,” he admits, his voice breaking. “I don’t know anything.”
“It’s 2047,” you tell him, and you stop and consider why in the world you would say something like that, deciding it’s a little to do with you being drunk and a little to do with the empty look on Harden’s face, his grip burning around your arm. You might have been trying to make him laugh.
But he only asks the month and the day and you lie causelessly about that, too, picking December 14th out of the clear blue sky. You want to ask him how come he remembers general concepts like the structure of time and nomenclature, if he can’t remember specifics, but first you get another beer.
He asks if it isn’t warm for winter, and you tell him without pausing, “We’re in Australia, dude. Southern hemisphere.” You’re maybe having too much fun with this.
He blinks some more and nods sorrowfully, sitting up. You’re still over by the cooler, and you fish out a half-melted ice cube, sit down next to him, offering him the ice cube on the flat of your hand.
“Clean your face.”
He complies, his hands dripping, clearing the blood off his eye and forehead, patting dry with his shirt collar. You wonder if stuff like how to clean blood off your face is self-explanatory, or just in Harden’s muscle memory.
“Am I from here? Am I talking with an accent and just not realizing it because it’s my accent?”
“How do you remember the concept of accents, I think is the more important question.”
“Danny.”
Now that sounds like the Richie you know and might occasionally want to see naked outside of the showers. Aggrieved and saying your name like it hurts, and you grin stupidly at him, drunk-warmth spreading out from the center of your chest.
“You’re from Canada. You speak fluent Canadian.”
Harden looks like he’s buying it for a second, but then his eyes narrow and he scoffs. He’s curved shallowly around his knees, his shirt plastered to his back and his hair just long enough to curl when wet, pressed down high on his forehead.
“What am I doing here, then?” he asks.
You take a slow drink, searching the sky for the Southern Cross and a mash-up of myths and epic poems that you only half-remember from some class you took in college. If it’s 2047, anything might be true.
“When you were fourteen, you ran away from home and hitchhiked around for a half-dozen years, doing every job imaginable. You ended up in Argentina and got involved in a gangland war somehow, and to avoid being killed you shipped out with some mercenary sailors. You’ve spent three years at sea.”
Harden takes this in without moving and when you glance over your eyes stick on a single drop of water skating down the side of his face, down his neck, vanishing instantly against the collar of his shirt.
Pirate, you think, a quick jitter of excitement running through you. Outlaw.
You watched too many movies as a kid, and Harden did too, but he probably doesn’t remember them, though perhaps the archetype of the antihero has survived. You hope he can still appreciate that you’ve given him the best possible history, every little boy’s dream.
“So I’m here with a. A ship?” Harden twists his hands together, studying them as if in search of rope burns, finding only pitcher calluses that he rubs the tip of his thumb across curiously.
“You’re on shore leave,” you say, beginning to feel incredibly clever. “You’ve been drunk for several days.”
That, at least, seems completely reasonable to Harden, as he nods, looking mournful and cradling his head. His forehead has begun to darken and swell, knotting around the cut, and you think distantly that he could probably use some aspirin or codeine or something, but you don’t want to leave him alone-the world’s too surreal right now. Harden doesn’t know his way around Australia.
“I’m not gonna know how to do sailor stuff,” Harden says, panic starting to build again, and you can imagine that it must be paralyzing, annihilating, nothing but white space to fill.
“You don’t have to worry about it tonight. You’ve got some time,” you tell him, seeing a pale rash of goosebumps rise on his arm. You rise to fetch him another towel, the first bloodied and crumpled and damp, and he wraps it around his shoulders, clutching it at his throat with both hands. It helps, Harden’s back relaxing slightly and his face losing a few lines. A kindergartner with his blanket, is the image that passes through your mind, and you snicker inwardly.
But stripped down like he is might be mistaken for regression anyway, two decades of experience gone in the time it took to fall from the diving board to the edge of the pool.
While you’re up, you get another beer. You’re really drunk enough, but drunk means no better judgment and without it, you can’t be held responsible. You hesitate, bent at the waist with your hand losing feeling in the cooler, and then grab a second beer, deciding that this lack of accountability is going to be the new guiding force in your life.
“Here,” you say, and offer the beer to Harden, who looks up at you in disbelief.
“Shouldn’t you be taking me to the hospital or something?”
“Hey, drinking got you into this. Drinking’ll get you out.”
His eyes slit like he’s scanning that for logic, and you’re frankly amazed when he apparently finds some, warily extending a towel-draped arm to take the beer. He doesn’t open it right away, steamrolling it between his palms and visibly holding himself together.
“Really really messed up,” he says, half under his breath, and you shift closer to him, knocking your knee into his, hoping that you’ll move off the fucking cement soon.
“I’m telling you, man, it’s, it’s no good to focus on the bad stuff. All you really need to know about your life is that you’re young and you’re totally free. What the fuck do you need a memory for? No regrets, no guilt. This is a fucking gift, is what it is.”
You’re talking out of your ass, but maybe you shouldn’t do that so much anymore, because Harden appears to have completely lost his bullshit gauge. He’s intent on everything you say, blue eyes gleaming.
“Is that really true?” Harden asks, a pretty skein cast over his face like he’s trying to process the feeling of hope for the first time. He just kills you, takes your breath away.
You regroup. “Of course. I’m your best friend, would I lie?”
“You’re my best friend?”
You pause. “Yes.” No, no you are not. You’re not even his best friend in a five mile radius, but it has come home to you that what you are doing here is reconstructing the universe, and you can fix the grievances and wrongs, set everything as it’s supposed to be. “We met a long time ago in California.”
Oddly, that’s no truer than anything else-you met him three months ago in Arizona. California’s the important part, though, and time’s still relative.
“I was at the beach and you tackled me.” At Phoenix Municipal Stadium, Harden mistook you from behind and tackled you onto the grass. “You thought I was this guy who’d stolen your wallet.” Harden had thought you were Zito, though really you’d just stolen one of his caps, marked along the brim with obscure symbols in silver ink. “When you realized I wasn’t, you bought me a beer, because you’re generally a stand-up guy.”
Harden did not buy you a beer after ruining your first white home uniform with grass stains, but that was only because you had promos to film. He did let you have the last cherry Danish from the breakfast spread, though, and explained the team to you between takes, laying out their history.
“And you live here?”
“I came out here for a surfboarding competition,” you tell him, a pretty good backstory of your own. “And I was playing cards with these guys one night and ended up winning the deed to this place, so I stayed.”
“You moved to Australia because of a card game?”
“It was a free house, Richie. I didn’t bother to ask if he had one available in Los Angeles County.”
He drops his eyes and his mouth moves a few times. He’s repeating his own name to himself, you realize, trying to learn it almost silently.
You’re gonna have to steal his wallet after all, so he doesn’t see his California driver’s license and the baseball cards, and it’s kinda spooky, a self-fulfilling prophecy. God knows how long this power of yours will last.
Harden occupies himself for awhile drinking his beer, becoming more comfortable with every swallow, his throat working. You’re staring at him too obviously, the towel hanging off his shoulders so that you can see the definition of his chest under wet cotton, and you think that you’ve already misled him so badly, just a little more can’t hurt.
“So, hey,” you say, letting your voice go a bit soft. “You really don’t remember me at all?”
He folds both hands carefully around his beer, the towel just barely keeping contact with his body. Shame would probably be the best word for his expression, but that doesn’t make any kind of sense.
“I guess not. I. There’s some stuff, but I can’t quite. It won’t come together.”
“Like what?”
Harden shakes his head, biting his lip. “A lake frozen over with little pieces of wood in the ice. A remote-controlled car with these, these wings.” He spreads his fingers out abstractly to demonstrate. “I remember brushing my teeth and watching myself in the mirror. Something about lightning, like, silver lightning. A blue house with a bicycle on the roof.”
You start-you’ve seen pictures of that, Crosby’s got some on his computer.
“And grass,” Harden says. “Lots and lots of grass, all perfect and trimmed down. Every time I close my eyes, that’s what I see.”
It shouldn’t surprise, but it kind of does, leaves you thinking about what it must be like in Harden’s head right now, those huge white gashes and indistinct smears of life at sea, a deep underlay of green, an endless outfield.
“But not me,” you say, trying not to give anything away.
“Don’t feel bad. You’re actually the only person on earth I do remember, even though I just met you.”
He almost smiles reassuringly, and maybe it’s because he really doesn’t remind you of the Rich Harden that you know, but none of your reasons for not sleeping with him seem valid right now. The two of you are strangers in every way that matters, and you’re in a foreign country, drunk and far past midnight. No one could blame you.
“Let’s go inside,” you say to hide the fact that you are suffering an acute crisis of faith. Your demons have your better angels by the neck, dragging you to wonder how much he remembers about sex, how close to untouched he’d be.
Harden follows you gratefully off the deck, toeing off your waterlogged shoes and socks at the door, and you realize within milliseconds of your feet hitting carpet that this was a stunningly bad idea. Outside can be mistaken for Australia forty years in the future, but this is definitely your house in Oakland in May of 2005, your Eckersley bobblehead on the television, your lucky red cap jammed down between the couch and the wall, Harden’s hoodie laid out in an eerie dismembered head-and-torso shape on the chair.
You’re not Rich Harden’s best friend, and in an hour the sun will rise, in twelve you’ll have to go to the ballpark. You live in this world and nowhere else.
All the lights are off and Harden looks around, asks, “All this from surfing?”
“I’m very good,” you say, and go into the bathroom to trade Harden’s wet towel for a dry one, barely able to meet your own eyes in the mirror.
You don’t want to think about the consequences of what you’re doing. Harden’s gonna snap out of this soon, maybe after he gets some sleep, maybe after he sobers up, and he’s gonna remember that you lied to him and took advantage of a moment of extreme vulnerability, and if you make a pass at him (you can’t make a pass at him, you can’t think of anything you’d like to do more), he might actually kill you.
But none of that is for sure, you think, feeling heat curl low in your stomach. The two of you are out of place and out of time, and it occurs to you for the first time that you are drunk enough to black out yourself-there’s a possibility that neither of you will remember anything tomorrow, and that thought slams through you and makes you jerk, biting your tongue.
If neither of you remembers, then it won’t have ever happened.
You come back into the living room, trying not to look as single-minded as you feel. Harden stares up at you as you hand him the towel, and it’s already begun, because you can’t remember him ever looking better than he does right now.
“It’s weird because there’s a lot of stuff that only you and I know,” you tell him, hasten to add, “I mean, as best friends and all. If you stay like this, I won’t be able to get confirmation on anything that’s happened. You’re like my lone witness.”
Harden rubs the towel quickly over his hair, hard across his eyes, before winding it around his wrists, his eyes lowered. “You think I’ll probably stay like this, then.”
Fuck. “No, no, I’m saying hypothetically. You know. A what if kinda thing.”
Not looking up, Harden picks at his wet jeans, and you think about the shadow-colored outline of his body that will be left on the fabric of the couch when he gets up, how it’ll fade away in the morning when the sun comes across, leaving a slight mist in the air.
“So what if,” he says quietly. “I’m crippled like this, you’ve got to see that. Start over from scratch at, at.” He stops, and his face breaks suddenly, fury and helplessness warring as he asks, “How old am I?”
You hold your breath for a moment, then you tell him the truth. You watch him try to process that and make it automatic as he’d done with his name and nationality, his mouth wrenched to the side, the opposite of his famous smirk. Same look he gets after giving up a run or two, awe-inspiring anger directed at both the world and himself
“See, I can’t even make it thirty seconds,” Harden says. “I’m actually so fucking scared right now, I can’t even tell you.”
He’s speaking without inflection, which makes it worse somehow, and you sit down next to him, latch onto the towel between his wrists and tug his hands up, draw his eyes.
“You’re gonna stay here until you remember. And you will, I’m absolutely sure about that. I personally think that it’s ‘cause you’re drunk and in some kind of weird reverse blackout, but whatever, if you don’t sleep it off you can stay here and, like, reconstruct. Even if it takes years.”
It’s not a lie if you believe it, and you’re just about far enough gone that you do, every word of it. You can promise years, though you only have twelve hours, because somewhere beyond the saber line of trees is the South Pacific.
Harden blinks very quickly a few times, and his knuckles stand out stony white as the tension between the two of you grows, the towel as taut as anchor rope. He scans your face over and over, half-desperate, manic spots of color on his cheekbones.
“Will that work?” he asks.
You’re not sure what he means by that, and anyway, you barely hear it because Harden’s licking his lips nervously and your heartrate keeps getting jacked up, electric blue and damp flushed skin and all that lovely hope clouding across his face again. You don’t think. You can’t think.
You just grab his wrist and lean in, press your lips to his. He makes a noise, a muffled half-shout, and you kiss him open-mouthed for a few seconds, the circle of your fingers so tight his pulse is indistinguishable from your own. He twists and shivers against you and you have to break away, catch your breath.
Cold skin of his cheek against yours, your mouth feeling burned and Richie’s chlorine and beer taste on your tongue, and he’s dumbstruck, grabbing the back of your neck and pulling your face up.
“What are you doing?” he whispers. You shake your head, run your tongue across your teeth. Goddamn, but you’re in trouble.
“We do this sometimes, sleep together,” you tell him, and you’d swear on your life that it’s true. “Nothing serious, just for fun, you know? And I thought maybe. You’d appreciate the distraction.”
“We have sex?” he asks in disbelief, and you swallow hard.
“What, you forgot how to be attracted to me?” you say with an ugly attempt at a smile, and his eyes widen, his grip hard on the back of your neck. You’re hyperaware of him, the bruised shape of his mouth and his shoulders so perfectly defined through thin wet cotton.
“I, I don’t know,” he says, blushing deeply, and you kinda can’t help yourself, coasting both your hands onto his stomach, feeling him gasp, try to twitch away.
“No, wait, just a second.” You don’t move until he relaxes slightly, and then you move slow, you brush your nose against his face and tell him in an unsteady voice, “We’ve done this a million times. You love this stuff.”
He draws in a sharp breath and you follow it with your palms, inching your thumbs under the edge of his shirt. His eyes are locked on you, and you show a lazy smile, your best look. You hear his throat click as he swallows, and you know you’ve got him then.
So you kiss him again and he tips his head back and lets you guide him into a good position with one hand on his jaw, the other tracing the ridge of his stomach through his shirt. He sorta moans into your mouth and his hand on your neck drags up into your hair, closing into a fist and it hurts enough that lights burst behind your eyes, sear right through you.
You end up between his legs, on your knees on the carpet with the coffee table shoved out of the way and Harden staring at you down the bare stretch of his chest, lidded strips of blue and his jagged breath. You hook your fingers in the pockets of his jeans and grin up at him.
“Do you remember any of this, Richie?”
He shakes his head, looking astonished and still not quite himself, though you’ve never seen him from this angle before.
“That’s okay. We can just pretend that it’s the first time.”
Harden’s head falls back onto the couch and he gasps your name at the ceiling, covering his eyes with his forearm, and you take his other hand and push it back into your hair as you bow your head. You’re more than a little confused yourself, because everything you do to him seems to be exactly what he wants, like you mastered this years ago.
After he finishes with a shocked cry, he pulls you into his lap and lets you rub yourself off against him, broad flat palms on your back, hoarse voice saying, yeah, c’mon, danny, attaboy, and you screw your eyes shut, wrapping your arms around his shoulders and trying to compress your body into his until there’s no distance left between you.
This is the future, you think in the white moments after you’ve come. None of this has happened yet and maybe now none of it ever will, because you’ve fucked with the fabric of time. You’re lying across the couch with Harden kinda sprawled against your side, and you can feel him shaking a bit. He might be crying-it’s hard to say.
You stroke your hand through his hair, watching the sunlight break over the clean skin of his back, the first dawn of the new world.
THE END
Endnotes: Danny is an evil and amoral boy whose actions are not sanctioned by this or any other governing body. When your friend gets amnesia, take them to the hospital (General Hospital, preferably).
Every single time I have ever called 911, I have gotten myself put on hold. Which seems counterintuitive.