but what was he going to do if he caught it anyway? |
Michael Ahern |
The idea, I think, regarding all the city-approved vivid murals and turning Aerosmith’s old apartment building into a national landmark, was to attract tourists toward Allston, to make it a destination. I’m unsure if his motive was an act of defiance against this, to leave Allston the land of outcasts, where boys and girls go to leave something behind, who were rejected by someone once, or needed to become something new. It was where they could leave their pasts in the shadows of the village, along with the over abundance of vermin.
This was the winter when the arsonist was at his peak. The summer before it had started with the ignition of trashcans, initially thought as unrelated events. They were just petty crimes Allston kids committed. As fall approached, these trash fires became frequent and on Halloween of that year, the first of many cars was lit. Months following, scattered infernos of vehicles appeared nearly on a weekly basis throughout the village. December roared in with the 66 bus ablaze on the corner of Cambridge and Beacon, lighting up Union Square. Embers danced near the colossal, still yet to be decorated Christmas tree. Following this bonfire was the scorching of subway tracks that ran through Allston and into Brighton. It was then determined these were, according to the chief of police, calculated by a single person; clever alliteration deemed him: the Allston Arsonist.
We all had this game between friends. We guessed, played detective amongst one another, formed alibis, defended ourselves. I am not the Allston Arsonist.
Harrison moved to Allston in September and for nearly four months I managed to avoid him despite his apartment being a block away from mine. I ignored phone calls and texts with day late excuses. I avoided the bars along the street and remained in corners of buses and subways.
I fear I’ll fail to justify these actions. I’ll fail to capture the dread of seeing or speaking to someone I spent a majority of my childhood with, inseparably. Until strange shifts in high school formed a crevice between us: his enamor for marijuana and my focus on athletics. He went to college in upstate New York. I moved to Boston to study.
Incessantly, Harrison attempted to have me smoke weed for the first time and repeatedly I refused. If caught, I would be kicked of the team and lose a hopeful scholarship. We had less to do, less to talk about.
During his junior year in college, while we were barely on speaking terms, Harrison broke into a professor’s office and was caught. When questioned by the university’s police, he expressed himself quite calmly and matter-of-factly.
“I want to be in Professor Crescenzo’s class,” he explained. “I knew he wasn’t taking anymore students, so I thought if I left a letter.”
Harrison was taken to health services and later admitted to a hospital. He was observed and questioned, then later diagnosed. The university asked him to take a year off and return afterwards to finish his studies.
I had just graduated a few months prior when I received a somewhat statically charged call from my childhood best friend. It was clearly Harrison, it was his voice, but something was laced between the words. Or it was a character actor, playing Harrison. I would later learn this was his third eye, his new-life discovery voice, the first sight of land.
“Hey Les,” began the voice mail, “so I’ve been diagnosed with bipolar disorder. It happened last week. I’m moving back home. I know we haven’t talked in a while but maybe we can catch up sometime soon. Okay, talk to you later.”
I didn’t call him back. At least, not right away.
Although the diagnosis was not so much a surprise, it was enigmatic. Throughout our childhood, Harrison’s personality often ruptured a sense of friendship. He was unpredictable, but not so much manic or depressive.
He loved video games. His parents, despite an average income, always purchased him the latest console. And as they were his only source to money, there were frequent, discomforting pleas for new games.
One summer, as I sat in the backseat with Harrison, his mother driving, each “please” he uttered became a little longer, strained and tangled with whimpers.
“It’s all I want,” he said. “I don’t want anything else.”
“Well maybe,” said Harrison’s mother, “you’ll get it for your birthday.”
“But I need to have it now. Lester and I really want to play it.”
And this was when I shrunk, being placed in this now familiar center. Harrison’s mother glanced at me in her rearview. My eyes were blank. And this is what she always did.
“Lester, do you need this game today? Do you really need to play it today?” She knew the answer but she did this anyway.
My response was always a shrug and downcast eyes.
“Mom, stop. We do,” said Harrison.
“You aren’t getting this game today,” she stated. “And that’s the final word.”
“No it’s not.”
“Oh, okay, it’s not.”
The easiest was to stare at your shoes. The details I discovered on my shoes, the way the laces twisted, the mesh that crossed over itself and the tiny slivers of color you were unaware of.
“I hate you,” Harrison said to his mother.
“Well, I’m sorry you feel that way.”
“I hate you so much.”
“This is not a tactic that’ll work in your favor.”
Harrison found a balance then, between crying and screaming now. In between his words, he huffed, a delicate evil in his voice when he spoke. I moved my eyes to the vent where the air conditioning emitted.
“If you don’t I’ll kill myself,” he said. “If you don’t let me get that game.”
“Don’t be so dramatic.”
“I’ll jump out of the car right now.”
“Maybe we should take away your video game privileges instead.”
The doors of the car were unlocked.
“I’m sorry Lester,” said his mother. “I don’t think you can stay over tonight.”
“Shut up!”
Harrison opened the passenger side door. The wind whistled suddenly for just a moment before he closed it. Just a threat, to show her he wasn’t kidding. We pulled over.
Three weeks following Harrison’s diagnosis announcement he called me again. I watched his name sit on the screen of my phone as a steady stream of guilt flooded my stomach and weighed it down.
“Les! Les!” he roared at the sound of my voice. “It’s so good to hear you. How are you? What’s up? I’ll be in Boston tonight. Are you free? Can you hang? What are you up to?”
I met him in Ringer Park, maybe three hundred feet away from my apartment. He was sitting in the middle of the tennis courts. It was just about nine o’clock and the sea-green park lights flushed out his skin.
He was rolling a joint messily on the top of his backpack. He didn’t greet me with a hug, which in a way was relieving. It was as though we had just seen one another the other day. As though all texts and calls that were ignored weren’t in existence.
“How’ve you been?” I asked out of reflex, to disperse a momentary silence.
“Good. Great, actually.”
He lit the end of his joint and inhaled.
“I’m moving to Allston at the end of August for a few months with a friend,” he announced. He handed the joint to me after taking it in a few more times.
“I shouldn’t. I have work in the morning.”
“Just once.”
It was the tone I knew, the old Harrison. I obliged, exhaled tightly and handed it back.
“I’m also seeing a psychiatrist.”
“How is that?”
“It sucks.”
“Are you on medication?”
“Yeah.”
“Should you be smoking?”
“It helps.”
When he went to hand the joint over to me I felt as though it was penance. I owed him another hit for being absent in his life crisis. If I didn’t, I would be a dreadful friend.
It was eleven when I realized it was too late. Too late to end things with Harrison and also too late for me still to be out. A impending dread formed in my gut, which may have just been the weed. I couldn’t leave him in the streets of Allston.
That was a distinct, bothersome trait of Harrison’s. His presence was overbearing in the sense that he never knew what too much time meant. To him, if you were with your friend, time didn’t exist. Days after days of inseparable time did not phase him. He never grew tired of your company. He didn’t know how to say “see you tomorrow.”
It was another joint, wrapped clumsily amongst rats that had suddenly began to own the night, run rings around our bodies as we lit up.
“They’re planning something,” I said to him.
“Yeah, I know,” he responded. “The plague.”
This seemed to loosen my body, unclench what was compressed. I couldn’t stop laughing at these contriving rodents and the idea as though they were about to release the modern plague. I began to fantasize the horror of local and world news: the beginnings of the plague here in a small section of Boston. They would point out or highlight on a map where Allston was in relation to the rest of the city. They would list its demographics. They would interview Menino as her mumbled over a statement. What are the plans of action? And surely residents would flee, a mass exodus.
“Do you remember Immotoria?” Harrison asked, interrupting my dream with a silly question.
“What a silly question, of course I do.”
Harrison and I used to follow a river in our neighborhood that lead into the woods near our houses. In a small clearing we built the outline of a fort and dragged long pieces of wood; most rested in a pile. We had grandiose visions of its completion. We were going to camp out there.
Harrison gave the forest character. When we stepped into it, he said, it expanded behind us.
“To infinite distances in all directions.”
And he claimed, the only way to exit it would be to say the incantation, which was in a language he created himself. And that meant he was an elf. A woodland elf with immense ties to the land. I was an elf too, but a city elf, adorned with technology but no comprehension of the wood and its mysticism.
“The wood is where your ancestors are from, yet you do not know this.”
I followed him as my leader, in the depths of Immotoria until I came home with ticks my mother pulled from my scalp.
There was a single, colossal tree in the middle of this forest. It was the tallest, that, from the top you could see our entire neighborhood. Harrison could climb it, pull himself up the branches with ease.
“You can see everything from up there.”
I could make it halfway up, always reaching a split in the tree, where I’d crouch, afraid to rely on my upper body to pull me up to the next branch.
“Simpler times,” muttered Harrison between taking in the weed. But the way he said it, he still somehow believed in it. The map of Immotoria was underneath his mattress still with a deep hope that it would come to him in dreams. A twenty-something year old waiting for the expansion of the forest to engulf him, to be able to reach the peak of that tree and see what he couldn’t from the ground.
We had tumbled around Ringer Park, followed a dirt path behind a school and shuffled by the softball field fence. We finished another joint leaning near left field. As I took my third hit, I watched Harrison’s eyes gaze off behind me. And in them there was a flicker of light, disappearing and reappearing amongst his iris. I turned, the flicker of orange light now reflecting in mine.
From the hill in Ringer Park sat a children’s playground with ornate and vibrant equipment. Slides of every design and color, swings like rocket ships and horses. From that playground we saw a thick fire, a deep rustic red, illuminating the jungle gym, as though it was now an industrial plant or a coal factory. It grew vertically, burning and whipping in the sudden gusts. We couldn’t see what was caught.
“That’s fucking weird,” I muttered. Harrison said nothing. He fixated on the fire as it grew; it seemed as though it was attempting to grasp at greater heights, fueling itself. Somehow the sight allowed me to calmly end the evening with Harrison. He didn’t object as I announced my exhaustion. He didn’t offer another joint. I made a trek around the park to my apartment with my back to him, trying not to worry where he would find himself. Hoping he would just return to his bed.
In December, on the twenty-third, Harrison left another sudden voicemail. But instead of his manic tone, he was in a pit, calling up.
“Hey Les,” it began, “I don’t know if you’re still in Allston or if you went home for Christmas. But if you’re still here, I need a ride. The T obviously has stopped running and I don’t have enough money for a cab. But I need to get to North Station. There’s this guy. He’s in New Hampshire. We’ve been talking for a while and he just gets it. He just gets it. He knows exactly what I’m going through and I think I’m going to go up there. He’s very supportive. Very supportive. And I don’t want to go home for Christmas. So he lives in New Hampshire and I’m going to take the commuter rail up there. The last train leaves in a hour. So, please, if you’re here, can you give me a call? Thanks.”
Again rushed in an immense feeling of guilt, an anchor of obligation. This all sounded like a horrendous idea. He couldn’t get on that train.
As I made my way out the door, this changed. His speech, suddenly sounded contrived. Again, like an actor was playing Harrison, and poorly. A distress call, crying “wolf.”
In fifth grade I had my first girlfriend. We barely spoke at recess. She was mousey, quiet, and loved Jane Goodall and that is really all I remember.
It was near the end of the school year because the teachers had brought out boxes of Popsicles for all the kids to have. I never liked the texture of them so I kept a distance from the developing line of children waiting for their treat.
Over the sound of the echo of the basketball I was dribbling I heard a familiar howl. It happened very rapidly: Harrison off in the distance, standing defiant, hands clenched with a purple Popsicle, his shoulders at his forehead.
“I wanted a red one!” he cried, screeched, squared off against the teacher who had been passing them out. Everyone had turned, every fifth grader in awe. We all knew about Harrison’s anger but it was never on such a stage.
The teacher ignored him, continued with the line, forcibly smiling. As Harrison repeated his wail, the teacher addressed him calmly and condescendingly. I let the basketball roll away. Everyone knew we were best friends.
“I asked for a red one,” he continued without stage fright.
“You get what you get!” the teacher leaned towards him, eyes wide. “That’s it!”
I initially feared Harrison would hit her, assault her, or grab a box of popsicles and run with them.
“You’re a stupid bitch!” That may have been worse. “You’re a stupid bitch!”
I selfishly wanted to evaporate, run, shield myself. In my head, after people gained consciousness from what they were witnessing, I thought their immediate thought was, “Where is Les? Isn’t he his best friend?”
But I didn’t want to be. For the first time, I had imagined if I had befriended the other kids in the neighborhood, the ones that played football in their front yards and watched WWF and wore Patriots jerseys. Why did I want to play elves?
Harrison tossed his purple popsicle behind the teacher, intentionally near but just missing her, as if to scare her. Our principal, a tall, lanky, lesbian had emerged and grabbed Harrison’s arm.
“Don’t touch me!” He struggled against her. “Get your hands off of me!”
She pulled him away from the crowd and headed toward the school building.
“You’re hurting me! Let go!”
And then he was inside the building. Laughter amongst the kids ensued. Teachers were shaking their heads, eyes wide, with grins on their faces, some even snickering.
“Can you believe that?”
“Get a load of that kid?”
“In my ten years as an educator I have never seen such behavior!”
I vomited behind a tree near the fence of the baseball field where nobody could see. Later, at home, my girlfriend called me and broke up with me and I don’t remember her reason.
I parked next to a wall in which someone had painted a mural of a robot with a realistic heart encased in the middle of his body. It sat behind glass. Another, non-city-approved artist had graffitied his tag over the yellow background and the robots triangle shaped pelvis.
Harrison opened the car door with just a backpack and a “Hey, thanks.” He collapsed into the passenger side door. It had begun to flurry out, the first snow of the season.
“I don’t know how to get to North Station from here,” I admitted.
“I do. It’s easy, just head down Comm Ave.”
We drove against the snow that thickened in minutes. The traffic lights were a harsh crimson. Every light on Commonwealth Avenue was suggesting a discontinuation. I don’t understand why I felt such responsibility. Harrison was nothing to me. I didn’t commit to anything.
“How do you know this guy?”
“I met him online a couple weeks ago.”
A fog began to develop on the windows as we reached Brookline.
“And he’s okay with you just heading up there and staying with him?”
“Yeah, he suggested it. He just understands things. More than anyone else has. I felt like, with him, I was actually talking to myself. Everything he said made sense, like I had already thought his words before.”
“He’s a stranger though.”
“Everyone is a stranger to someone at one point or another.”
We saw the CITGO sign and it’s red, expanding, fluorescent triangle: an effect from a seventies movie taking us to another dimension.
The year before high school Harrison hadn’t dated anyone. He was fifteen. He was often remembered for his outbursts, threats, and rage. Soon the lunch tables had bets, a game in which they would decide when Harrison was going to shoot-up the school and under what pretense.
“If recess is cut short, he’ll definitely bring a gun.”
“Or he will if he can’t be line leader.”
“What if he doesn’t win the science fair? He’ll definitely go ballistic.”
He must have heard it when not said to his face directly. I was obligated to sit with him. And I did. I made no attempts in defending him, but I remained a lunchtime companion. Maybe out of fear that if I didn’t it would be the action to send him over the edge. Though, I knew his parents didn’t have a gun in the house.
One day at lunch, the year after the popsicle mishap, we were sitting at a table together. I had Doritios cheese stuck to the fingertips of my left hand, keeping it away from my shirt and pants, hoping not to rub the tiny pieces of metallic orange dirt on them.
“Can I ask you something?” Harrison said, leaning toward me across the oblong table.
I was licking the cheese from my fingertips, one at a time. “Yeah.”
“Don’t get freaked out, okay?”
“I won’t.” The cheese wasn’t coming off, just getting darker and more permanent on my fingers. My teeth were attempting to scrape it off with their edges.
“How big is your penis?”
I stopped sticking my fingers in my mouth. I rested my wrist on the edge of the lunch table.
“My penis?”
“Yeah, how big is it?”
“Why?”
“Because I think mine is small.”
The cheese was darkened on my finger tips, nearly a deep crimson in infinite specs, attached to my skin, scared to touch anything else.
“It’s probably not.”
“How big is yours?”
“I haven’t measured it.”
“Could you?”
At math period, I slipped my ruler, which protruded clearly, into my pocket and excused myself to use the bathroom. I jetted down the hall to the nearest boy’s room and locked myself in the stall.
Unbuttoned and unzippered, I removed my penis from its constraints and let it fall loosely into my hand. I positioned my feet near the toilet so that if anyone looked to see, it would appear as though I was peeing. My eighth grade penis recorded just under five inches.
On the bus ride home, Harrison brought it up again, asking if I had data on my endowment in an embarrassed whisper.
“Are you looking for hard or soft?” I murmured back.
“I don’t know, soft.”
“Well, how big is your’s?”
“Six,” he said. “It’s like six inches.”
“Yeah, so is mine. And that’s average.”
“I don’t know.”
We got off the bus at the end of our street and began our daily walk down. Harrison remained disheartened with his length, keeping his eyes downcast on the pavement.
“I think that’s small. Is yours really six inches?”
“Yeah, I measured when I went to the bathroom. It’s normal. It’s the average size, especially when its not aroused.”
“Yeah I guess.”
We eventually reached our neighborhood and before going home we entered Immotoria. It was just the beginning of fall and we could almost see our fort from the street because of the barren trees. It had rained for a couple days and the river was much higher than usual.
Although we had built a makeshift bridge using flat pieces of wood from the broken area of fence that surrounded Harrison’s house, we often leapt across the river anyway. Harrison left his backpack amongst the leaves as he pounced fearlessly across the engorged river, landed effortlessly on his feet.
The bridge was too thin, too unsteady. I dropped my backpack next to his and watched the river below.
“Just jump,” Harrison commanded, waiting for me on the other side.
The river ran between us, heightened, darker. It was sewage, leaves passing through it.
“I can’t,” I muttered. And then louder: “I can’t.” I grabbed my backpack from the forest floor and began to walk away as Harrison called to me.
“Don’t be a pussy,” he kept saying as I marched away. The entrance and exit to Immotoria was clear: I could make out the thin sidewalk, a dark pewter amongst the brown of the forest and the clearing where the pavement of our street was. I repeated the incantation Harrison taught me, just incase the opening vanished before my blurry, wet eyes.
Incandescent white lights were wrapped around the trees that lined the middle of Commonwealth Avenue. They, for a long moment, seemed endless and peaceful, like groups of stars in different galaxies, waiting in the distance for us. If only the street did extend infinitely. If only we could continue forward endlessly until – I don’t know what.
“I think you want to get onto to Storrow Drive,” Harrison said. “Or you can continue down Comm Ave.”
“Okay.”
“Do you want to smoke?”
“Not really.”
“Do you mind if I do?”
“No.”
Harrison pulled an already rolled joint from his pocket. I cracked his window open for him.
“I’m not trying to tell you what to do,” I said. “But don’t you think this is a bad idea?”
“Not really.”
“Well you’re going up to New Hampshire without any money. You have no way of getting back. You don’t know who this guy really is.”
“Les,” he exhaled. “One day you’ll get it. You are so uptight and worried all the time. You could implode at any second. You’ve always been like this. You have both of your hands wrapped around your own neck half the time. You spend so much time worrying you never connect with anyone. We are all on wavelengths. It’s how we interact, why we fall in love, I’ve seen it. Once I stopped with the medication, I got it. And this guy, he just is on…”
I waited and kept eyeing lights off in the distance.
“He’s an extension of me, really. And the medication, my God, how it just mutes you. It is just this hazy… It just ruined me. It just made me want to do nothing. I wasn’t productive. I didn’t write anything. I stopped. And the moment I stopped, I began writing again. Do you want to hear what I wrote today? I started writing more poetry.”
He reached into his backpack and removed a notebook from it. He flipped a couple pages.
“I wrote this today. Okay, here it is:
The lion chased its tail,
in circles,
until he was wobbly and could not see.
But what was he going to do,
if he caught it, anyway?”
He stared at me for a moment as I saw the lights of the Public Garden ahead.
“What do you think?”
“It’s good.”
I turned right at the end of Comm Ave and followed along the fences separating the Garden from the sidewalk.
“I just want you to be safe,” I said. “I don’t think this is safe.”
“I know. I get it.” He flicked the rest of his joint out of the window. “But it’s not good for me here. Everything I do, every time I express anything to anyone their reactions as always the same.”
“What are they?”
“They shrug and say, ‘Well, maybe that’s part of the disorder.’ Everything isn’t apart of the fucking disorder. Like, there’s more to me than just it.”
I drove down the side of the Boston Common, and followed until I reached the light that would lead us down Charles Street into Beacon Hill. We sat at the light in silence with only taxis passing by. And then we were given the go, and drove into Beacon Hill, its streets like crevices. Every window shone a room that seemed too large to be inside the building. White and pale yellow lights glistened from them amongst pine and holly. I suddenly felt lonely.
“I understand why you’re upset,” Harrison whispered as Charles Street curved against the river. “I get it.” I made a left for North Station; the top of the TD Garden glowed a brilliant gold.
“It just sounds like a bad idea.”
“Well, besides that. I know things between us have deteriorated. I know there’s shit I’ve done that you can’t forgive me for. I know that.”
I waited at another light and barely conjured up the words: “That’s not true.”
“It’s okay.”
Harrison then reached for my leg, his bony, once piano-trained fingers rested tensely on my thigh.
“You’ve stuck around the longest,” he added.
“Please get your hand off of me.”
He did so with a muttered sorry. We both then didn’t speak. We just followed the haze of the streetlights leading to North Station, looming in the distance. I could feel the sweat of his palm still on my thigh. Harrison was whimpering.
We had sleep over’s a lot. Especially in the summer and mostly at Harrison’s house. We’d lay our sleeping bags on the floor of his living room in front of the television and fall asleep in the soft cobalt radiance of the screen.
On Harrison’s thirteenth birthday we built a fort in his living room to sleep in. It enclosed us, our own house, the sheets extending from the tops of furniture. That night, inside the fort, I lay awake, tossing beside him for a majority of the night. I had drank two cans of Mountain Dew as we watched Fantasia (Harrison’s favorite movie at the time.) The red digital clock underneath the TV read 4:07, the colon between the two blinking.
I lay sprawled on my backside, deciding to take a stillness approach to sleep. That way, I would trick my body into sleep, I had thought.
Harrison was awake now, likely due to my restlessness. I continued to lie motionless beside him. He sat up on his elbow. I could feel his eyes staring at me. And then I felt his fingers; the spherical ends of them touched my cheek. They moved down it, very slowly and with a strange sense of examination. I remained still, pretending as though I wasn’t disturbed by it. I let him believe I was dreaming.
Then they glided across my lips, traversed to each corner and then they lifted and were gone.
But I remained still, paralyzed it seemed, and inhaling and exhaling deeply through my nose. Then his fingers appeared again at my waist, moving across the top of my pajama pants before gently grasping the band that clung to me.
A sensation ran up my stomach. I worried that I had trembled, a clear sign that I was awake. His fingers were beneath it, the nails resting against my skin.
Harrison grasped the waistband and lifted it from my body. A cool air rushed down. It was then pulled down just above my knees.
I felt nothing else. It was a brief moment we both separated ourselves from. A single flicker of light before Harrison pulled my waistband back up, covering me without further action. It was cold and calculated and never discussed.
An hour passed before I left the fort and went to the front door. I cut through Immotoria, which was now not infinite, and rattled on my parents’ door until they let their wordless, tweleve year old son inside.
We sat in front of North Station. Harrison had kept his whimpers to near silence. His train would be leaving in four minutes.
“Well,” I managed to say, “be careful. I think it’s a bad idea but I want you to do what you want.”
“Yeah,” he said, “I’m sorry.”
The words made me feel nauseous. I wished he hadn’t said them. He grabbed the handle of his door and opened it. He slung his backpack behind him as a winter wind raced its way into my car. The snow danced behind him and some flurries landed on the passenger seat before he shut the door. He walked down the sidewalk, hunched over to shield himself from the storm.
I didn’t wait to see him enter the station. I began my journey back toward my apartment as strings, tiny, thread-like strings seemed to shed off of me.
At a light on Comm Ave, just before making a left onto my street, a flicker of orange light appeared in my rearview mirror through the snow. Behind me was Union Square. The light was unidentifiable from the mirror but the moment I swung my head around I could tell what it was.
I parked my car in the middle of the street and exited into the storm. It bit me, the snow nearly blinding me, but in the distance I could see the orange haze, growing. A slow fire had begun, whiplashing against the wind, and was carrying itself up the branches effortlessly of the town’s Christmas tree, which had just been decorated. It rapidly grew, leaping from limb to limb until it became a single beacon cutting through the first winter storm.
This was the winter when the arsonist was at his peak. The summer before it had started with the ignition of trashcans, initially thought as unrelated events. They were just petty crimes Allston kids committed. As fall approached, these trash fires became frequent and on Halloween of that year, the first of many cars was lit. Months following, scattered infernos of vehicles appeared nearly on a weekly basis throughout the village. December roared in with the 66 bus ablaze on the corner of Cambridge and Beacon, lighting up Union Square. Embers danced near the colossal, still yet to be decorated Christmas tree. Following this bonfire was the scorching of subway tracks that ran through Allston and into Brighton. It was then determined these were, according to the chief of police, calculated by a single person; clever alliteration deemed him: the Allston Arsonist.
We all had this game between friends. We guessed, played detective amongst one another, formed alibis, defended ourselves. I am not the Allston Arsonist.
Harrison moved to Allston in September and for nearly four months I managed to avoid him despite his apartment being a block away from mine. I ignored phone calls and texts with day late excuses. I avoided the bars along the street and remained in corners of buses and subways.
I fear I’ll fail to justify these actions. I’ll fail to capture the dread of seeing or speaking to someone I spent a majority of my childhood with, inseparably. Until strange shifts in high school formed a crevice between us: his enamor for marijuana and my focus on athletics. He went to college in upstate New York. I moved to Boston to study.
Incessantly, Harrison attempted to have me smoke weed for the first time and repeatedly I refused. If caught, I would be kicked of the team and lose a hopeful scholarship. We had less to do, less to talk about.
During his junior year in college, while we were barely on speaking terms, Harrison broke into a professor’s office and was caught. When questioned by the university’s police, he expressed himself quite calmly and matter-of-factly.
“I want to be in Professor Crescenzo’s class,” he explained. “I knew he wasn’t taking anymore students, so I thought if I left a letter.”
Harrison was taken to health services and later admitted to a hospital. He was observed and questioned, then later diagnosed. The university asked him to take a year off and return afterwards to finish his studies.
I had just graduated a few months prior when I received a somewhat statically charged call from my childhood best friend. It was clearly Harrison, it was his voice, but something was laced between the words. Or it was a character actor, playing Harrison. I would later learn this was his third eye, his new-life discovery voice, the first sight of land.
“Hey Les,” began the voice mail, “so I’ve been diagnosed with bipolar disorder. It happened last week. I’m moving back home. I know we haven’t talked in a while but maybe we can catch up sometime soon. Okay, talk to you later.”
I didn’t call him back. At least, not right away.
Although the diagnosis was not so much a surprise, it was enigmatic. Throughout our childhood, Harrison’s personality often ruptured a sense of friendship. He was unpredictable, but not so much manic or depressive.
He loved video games. His parents, despite an average income, always purchased him the latest console. And as they were his only source to money, there were frequent, discomforting pleas for new games.
One summer, as I sat in the backseat with Harrison, his mother driving, each “please” he uttered became a little longer, strained and tangled with whimpers.
“It’s all I want,” he said. “I don’t want anything else.”
“Well maybe,” said Harrison’s mother, “you’ll get it for your birthday.”
“But I need to have it now. Lester and I really want to play it.”
And this was when I shrunk, being placed in this now familiar center. Harrison’s mother glanced at me in her rearview. My eyes were blank. And this is what she always did.
“Lester, do you need this game today? Do you really need to play it today?” She knew the answer but she did this anyway.
My response was always a shrug and downcast eyes.
“Mom, stop. We do,” said Harrison.
“You aren’t getting this game today,” she stated. “And that’s the final word.”
“No it’s not.”
“Oh, okay, it’s not.”
The easiest was to stare at your shoes. The details I discovered on my shoes, the way the laces twisted, the mesh that crossed over itself and the tiny slivers of color you were unaware of.
“I hate you,” Harrison said to his mother.
“Well, I’m sorry you feel that way.”
“I hate you so much.”
“This is not a tactic that’ll work in your favor.”
Harrison found a balance then, between crying and screaming now. In between his words, he huffed, a delicate evil in his voice when he spoke. I moved my eyes to the vent where the air conditioning emitted.
“If you don’t I’ll kill myself,” he said. “If you don’t let me get that game.”
“Don’t be so dramatic.”
“I’ll jump out of the car right now.”
“Maybe we should take away your video game privileges instead.”
The doors of the car were unlocked.
“I’m sorry Lester,” said his mother. “I don’t think you can stay over tonight.”
“Shut up!”
Harrison opened the passenger side door. The wind whistled suddenly for just a moment before he closed it. Just a threat, to show her he wasn’t kidding. We pulled over.
Three weeks following Harrison’s diagnosis announcement he called me again. I watched his name sit on the screen of my phone as a steady stream of guilt flooded my stomach and weighed it down.
“Les! Les!” he roared at the sound of my voice. “It’s so good to hear you. How are you? What’s up? I’ll be in Boston tonight. Are you free? Can you hang? What are you up to?”
I met him in Ringer Park, maybe three hundred feet away from my apartment. He was sitting in the middle of the tennis courts. It was just about nine o’clock and the sea-green park lights flushed out his skin.
He was rolling a joint messily on the top of his backpack. He didn’t greet me with a hug, which in a way was relieving. It was as though we had just seen one another the other day. As though all texts and calls that were ignored weren’t in existence.
“How’ve you been?” I asked out of reflex, to disperse a momentary silence.
“Good. Great, actually.”
He lit the end of his joint and inhaled.
“I’m moving to Allston at the end of August for a few months with a friend,” he announced. He handed the joint to me after taking it in a few more times.
“I shouldn’t. I have work in the morning.”
“Just once.”
It was the tone I knew, the old Harrison. I obliged, exhaled tightly and handed it back.
“I’m also seeing a psychiatrist.”
“How is that?”
“It sucks.”
“Are you on medication?”
“Yeah.”
“Should you be smoking?”
“It helps.”
When he went to hand the joint over to me I felt as though it was penance. I owed him another hit for being absent in his life crisis. If I didn’t, I would be a dreadful friend.
It was eleven when I realized it was too late. Too late to end things with Harrison and also too late for me still to be out. A impending dread formed in my gut, which may have just been the weed. I couldn’t leave him in the streets of Allston.
That was a distinct, bothersome trait of Harrison’s. His presence was overbearing in the sense that he never knew what too much time meant. To him, if you were with your friend, time didn’t exist. Days after days of inseparable time did not phase him. He never grew tired of your company. He didn’t know how to say “see you tomorrow.”
It was another joint, wrapped clumsily amongst rats that had suddenly began to own the night, run rings around our bodies as we lit up.
“They’re planning something,” I said to him.
“Yeah, I know,” he responded. “The plague.”
This seemed to loosen my body, unclench what was compressed. I couldn’t stop laughing at these contriving rodents and the idea as though they were about to release the modern plague. I began to fantasize the horror of local and world news: the beginnings of the plague here in a small section of Boston. They would point out or highlight on a map where Allston was in relation to the rest of the city. They would list its demographics. They would interview Menino as her mumbled over a statement. What are the plans of action? And surely residents would flee, a mass exodus.
“Do you remember Immotoria?” Harrison asked, interrupting my dream with a silly question.
“What a silly question, of course I do.”
Harrison and I used to follow a river in our neighborhood that lead into the woods near our houses. In a small clearing we built the outline of a fort and dragged long pieces of wood; most rested in a pile. We had grandiose visions of its completion. We were going to camp out there.
Harrison gave the forest character. When we stepped into it, he said, it expanded behind us.
“To infinite distances in all directions.”
And he claimed, the only way to exit it would be to say the incantation, which was in a language he created himself. And that meant he was an elf. A woodland elf with immense ties to the land. I was an elf too, but a city elf, adorned with technology but no comprehension of the wood and its mysticism.
“The wood is where your ancestors are from, yet you do not know this.”
I followed him as my leader, in the depths of Immotoria until I came home with ticks my mother pulled from my scalp.
There was a single, colossal tree in the middle of this forest. It was the tallest, that, from the top you could see our entire neighborhood. Harrison could climb it, pull himself up the branches with ease.
“You can see everything from up there.”
I could make it halfway up, always reaching a split in the tree, where I’d crouch, afraid to rely on my upper body to pull me up to the next branch.
“Simpler times,” muttered Harrison between taking in the weed. But the way he said it, he still somehow believed in it. The map of Immotoria was underneath his mattress still with a deep hope that it would come to him in dreams. A twenty-something year old waiting for the expansion of the forest to engulf him, to be able to reach the peak of that tree and see what he couldn’t from the ground.
We had tumbled around Ringer Park, followed a dirt path behind a school and shuffled by the softball field fence. We finished another joint leaning near left field. As I took my third hit, I watched Harrison’s eyes gaze off behind me. And in them there was a flicker of light, disappearing and reappearing amongst his iris. I turned, the flicker of orange light now reflecting in mine.
From the hill in Ringer Park sat a children’s playground with ornate and vibrant equipment. Slides of every design and color, swings like rocket ships and horses. From that playground we saw a thick fire, a deep rustic red, illuminating the jungle gym, as though it was now an industrial plant or a coal factory. It grew vertically, burning and whipping in the sudden gusts. We couldn’t see what was caught.
“That’s fucking weird,” I muttered. Harrison said nothing. He fixated on the fire as it grew; it seemed as though it was attempting to grasp at greater heights, fueling itself. Somehow the sight allowed me to calmly end the evening with Harrison. He didn’t object as I announced my exhaustion. He didn’t offer another joint. I made a trek around the park to my apartment with my back to him, trying not to worry where he would find himself. Hoping he would just return to his bed.
In December, on the twenty-third, Harrison left another sudden voicemail. But instead of his manic tone, he was in a pit, calling up.
“Hey Les,” it began, “I don’t know if you’re still in Allston or if you went home for Christmas. But if you’re still here, I need a ride. The T obviously has stopped running and I don’t have enough money for a cab. But I need to get to North Station. There’s this guy. He’s in New Hampshire. We’ve been talking for a while and he just gets it. He just gets it. He knows exactly what I’m going through and I think I’m going to go up there. He’s very supportive. Very supportive. And I don’t want to go home for Christmas. So he lives in New Hampshire and I’m going to take the commuter rail up there. The last train leaves in a hour. So, please, if you’re here, can you give me a call? Thanks.”
Again rushed in an immense feeling of guilt, an anchor of obligation. This all sounded like a horrendous idea. He couldn’t get on that train.
As I made my way out the door, this changed. His speech, suddenly sounded contrived. Again, like an actor was playing Harrison, and poorly. A distress call, crying “wolf.”
In fifth grade I had my first girlfriend. We barely spoke at recess. She was mousey, quiet, and loved Jane Goodall and that is really all I remember.
It was near the end of the school year because the teachers had brought out boxes of Popsicles for all the kids to have. I never liked the texture of them so I kept a distance from the developing line of children waiting for their treat.
Over the sound of the echo of the basketball I was dribbling I heard a familiar howl. It happened very rapidly: Harrison off in the distance, standing defiant, hands clenched with a purple Popsicle, his shoulders at his forehead.
“I wanted a red one!” he cried, screeched, squared off against the teacher who had been passing them out. Everyone had turned, every fifth grader in awe. We all knew about Harrison’s anger but it was never on such a stage.
The teacher ignored him, continued with the line, forcibly smiling. As Harrison repeated his wail, the teacher addressed him calmly and condescendingly. I let the basketball roll away. Everyone knew we were best friends.
“I asked for a red one,” he continued without stage fright.
“You get what you get!” the teacher leaned towards him, eyes wide. “That’s it!”
I initially feared Harrison would hit her, assault her, or grab a box of popsicles and run with them.
“You’re a stupid bitch!” That may have been worse. “You’re a stupid bitch!”
I selfishly wanted to evaporate, run, shield myself. In my head, after people gained consciousness from what they were witnessing, I thought their immediate thought was, “Where is Les? Isn’t he his best friend?”
But I didn’t want to be. For the first time, I had imagined if I had befriended the other kids in the neighborhood, the ones that played football in their front yards and watched WWF and wore Patriots jerseys. Why did I want to play elves?
Harrison tossed his purple popsicle behind the teacher, intentionally near but just missing her, as if to scare her. Our principal, a tall, lanky, lesbian had emerged and grabbed Harrison’s arm.
“Don’t touch me!” He struggled against her. “Get your hands off of me!”
She pulled him away from the crowd and headed toward the school building.
“You’re hurting me! Let go!”
And then he was inside the building. Laughter amongst the kids ensued. Teachers were shaking their heads, eyes wide, with grins on their faces, some even snickering.
“Can you believe that?”
“Get a load of that kid?”
“In my ten years as an educator I have never seen such behavior!”
I vomited behind a tree near the fence of the baseball field where nobody could see. Later, at home, my girlfriend called me and broke up with me and I don’t remember her reason.
I parked next to a wall in which someone had painted a mural of a robot with a realistic heart encased in the middle of his body. It sat behind glass. Another, non-city-approved artist had graffitied his tag over the yellow background and the robots triangle shaped pelvis.
Harrison opened the car door with just a backpack and a “Hey, thanks.” He collapsed into the passenger side door. It had begun to flurry out, the first snow of the season.
“I don’t know how to get to North Station from here,” I admitted.
“I do. It’s easy, just head down Comm Ave.”
We drove against the snow that thickened in minutes. The traffic lights were a harsh crimson. Every light on Commonwealth Avenue was suggesting a discontinuation. I don’t understand why I felt such responsibility. Harrison was nothing to me. I didn’t commit to anything.
“How do you know this guy?”
“I met him online a couple weeks ago.”
A fog began to develop on the windows as we reached Brookline.
“And he’s okay with you just heading up there and staying with him?”
“Yeah, he suggested it. He just understands things. More than anyone else has. I felt like, with him, I was actually talking to myself. Everything he said made sense, like I had already thought his words before.”
“He’s a stranger though.”
“Everyone is a stranger to someone at one point or another.”
We saw the CITGO sign and it’s red, expanding, fluorescent triangle: an effect from a seventies movie taking us to another dimension.
The year before high school Harrison hadn’t dated anyone. He was fifteen. He was often remembered for his outbursts, threats, and rage. Soon the lunch tables had bets, a game in which they would decide when Harrison was going to shoot-up the school and under what pretense.
“If recess is cut short, he’ll definitely bring a gun.”
“Or he will if he can’t be line leader.”
“What if he doesn’t win the science fair? He’ll definitely go ballistic.”
He must have heard it when not said to his face directly. I was obligated to sit with him. And I did. I made no attempts in defending him, but I remained a lunchtime companion. Maybe out of fear that if I didn’t it would be the action to send him over the edge. Though, I knew his parents didn’t have a gun in the house.
One day at lunch, the year after the popsicle mishap, we were sitting at a table together. I had Doritios cheese stuck to the fingertips of my left hand, keeping it away from my shirt and pants, hoping not to rub the tiny pieces of metallic orange dirt on them.
“Can I ask you something?” Harrison said, leaning toward me across the oblong table.
I was licking the cheese from my fingertips, one at a time. “Yeah.”
“Don’t get freaked out, okay?”
“I won’t.” The cheese wasn’t coming off, just getting darker and more permanent on my fingers. My teeth were attempting to scrape it off with their edges.
“How big is your penis?”
I stopped sticking my fingers in my mouth. I rested my wrist on the edge of the lunch table.
“My penis?”
“Yeah, how big is it?”
“Why?”
“Because I think mine is small.”
The cheese was darkened on my finger tips, nearly a deep crimson in infinite specs, attached to my skin, scared to touch anything else.
“It’s probably not.”
“How big is yours?”
“I haven’t measured it.”
“Could you?”
At math period, I slipped my ruler, which protruded clearly, into my pocket and excused myself to use the bathroom. I jetted down the hall to the nearest boy’s room and locked myself in the stall.
Unbuttoned and unzippered, I removed my penis from its constraints and let it fall loosely into my hand. I positioned my feet near the toilet so that if anyone looked to see, it would appear as though I was peeing. My eighth grade penis recorded just under five inches.
On the bus ride home, Harrison brought it up again, asking if I had data on my endowment in an embarrassed whisper.
“Are you looking for hard or soft?” I murmured back.
“I don’t know, soft.”
“Well, how big is your’s?”
“Six,” he said. “It’s like six inches.”
“Yeah, so is mine. And that’s average.”
“I don’t know.”
We got off the bus at the end of our street and began our daily walk down. Harrison remained disheartened with his length, keeping his eyes downcast on the pavement.
“I think that’s small. Is yours really six inches?”
“Yeah, I measured when I went to the bathroom. It’s normal. It’s the average size, especially when its not aroused.”
“Yeah I guess.”
We eventually reached our neighborhood and before going home we entered Immotoria. It was just the beginning of fall and we could almost see our fort from the street because of the barren trees. It had rained for a couple days and the river was much higher than usual.
Although we had built a makeshift bridge using flat pieces of wood from the broken area of fence that surrounded Harrison’s house, we often leapt across the river anyway. Harrison left his backpack amongst the leaves as he pounced fearlessly across the engorged river, landed effortlessly on his feet.
The bridge was too thin, too unsteady. I dropped my backpack next to his and watched the river below.
“Just jump,” Harrison commanded, waiting for me on the other side.
The river ran between us, heightened, darker. It was sewage, leaves passing through it.
“I can’t,” I muttered. And then louder: “I can’t.” I grabbed my backpack from the forest floor and began to walk away as Harrison called to me.
“Don’t be a pussy,” he kept saying as I marched away. The entrance and exit to Immotoria was clear: I could make out the thin sidewalk, a dark pewter amongst the brown of the forest and the clearing where the pavement of our street was. I repeated the incantation Harrison taught me, just incase the opening vanished before my blurry, wet eyes.
Incandescent white lights were wrapped around the trees that lined the middle of Commonwealth Avenue. They, for a long moment, seemed endless and peaceful, like groups of stars in different galaxies, waiting in the distance for us. If only the street did extend infinitely. If only we could continue forward endlessly until – I don’t know what.
“I think you want to get onto to Storrow Drive,” Harrison said. “Or you can continue down Comm Ave.”
“Okay.”
“Do you want to smoke?”
“Not really.”
“Do you mind if I do?”
“No.”
Harrison pulled an already rolled joint from his pocket. I cracked his window open for him.
“I’m not trying to tell you what to do,” I said. “But don’t you think this is a bad idea?”
“Not really.”
“Well you’re going up to New Hampshire without any money. You have no way of getting back. You don’t know who this guy really is.”
“Les,” he exhaled. “One day you’ll get it. You are so uptight and worried all the time. You could implode at any second. You’ve always been like this. You have both of your hands wrapped around your own neck half the time. You spend so much time worrying you never connect with anyone. We are all on wavelengths. It’s how we interact, why we fall in love, I’ve seen it. Once I stopped with the medication, I got it. And this guy, he just is on…”
I waited and kept eyeing lights off in the distance.
“He’s an extension of me, really. And the medication, my God, how it just mutes you. It is just this hazy… It just ruined me. It just made me want to do nothing. I wasn’t productive. I didn’t write anything. I stopped. And the moment I stopped, I began writing again. Do you want to hear what I wrote today? I started writing more poetry.”
He reached into his backpack and removed a notebook from it. He flipped a couple pages.
“I wrote this today. Okay, here it is:
The lion chased its tail,
in circles,
until he was wobbly and could not see.
But what was he going to do,
if he caught it, anyway?”
He stared at me for a moment as I saw the lights of the Public Garden ahead.
“What do you think?”
“It’s good.”
I turned right at the end of Comm Ave and followed along the fences separating the Garden from the sidewalk.
“I just want you to be safe,” I said. “I don’t think this is safe.”
“I know. I get it.” He flicked the rest of his joint out of the window. “But it’s not good for me here. Everything I do, every time I express anything to anyone their reactions as always the same.”
“What are they?”
“They shrug and say, ‘Well, maybe that’s part of the disorder.’ Everything isn’t apart of the fucking disorder. Like, there’s more to me than just it.”
I drove down the side of the Boston Common, and followed until I reached the light that would lead us down Charles Street into Beacon Hill. We sat at the light in silence with only taxis passing by. And then we were given the go, and drove into Beacon Hill, its streets like crevices. Every window shone a room that seemed too large to be inside the building. White and pale yellow lights glistened from them amongst pine and holly. I suddenly felt lonely.
“I understand why you’re upset,” Harrison whispered as Charles Street curved against the river. “I get it.” I made a left for North Station; the top of the TD Garden glowed a brilliant gold.
“It just sounds like a bad idea.”
“Well, besides that. I know things between us have deteriorated. I know there’s shit I’ve done that you can’t forgive me for. I know that.”
I waited at another light and barely conjured up the words: “That’s not true.”
“It’s okay.”
Harrison then reached for my leg, his bony, once piano-trained fingers rested tensely on my thigh.
“You’ve stuck around the longest,” he added.
“Please get your hand off of me.”
He did so with a muttered sorry. We both then didn’t speak. We just followed the haze of the streetlights leading to North Station, looming in the distance. I could feel the sweat of his palm still on my thigh. Harrison was whimpering.
We had sleep over’s a lot. Especially in the summer and mostly at Harrison’s house. We’d lay our sleeping bags on the floor of his living room in front of the television and fall asleep in the soft cobalt radiance of the screen.
On Harrison’s thirteenth birthday we built a fort in his living room to sleep in. It enclosed us, our own house, the sheets extending from the tops of furniture. That night, inside the fort, I lay awake, tossing beside him for a majority of the night. I had drank two cans of Mountain Dew as we watched Fantasia (Harrison’s favorite movie at the time.) The red digital clock underneath the TV read 4:07, the colon between the two blinking.
I lay sprawled on my backside, deciding to take a stillness approach to sleep. That way, I would trick my body into sleep, I had thought.
Harrison was awake now, likely due to my restlessness. I continued to lie motionless beside him. He sat up on his elbow. I could feel his eyes staring at me. And then I felt his fingers; the spherical ends of them touched my cheek. They moved down it, very slowly and with a strange sense of examination. I remained still, pretending as though I wasn’t disturbed by it. I let him believe I was dreaming.
Then they glided across my lips, traversed to each corner and then they lifted and were gone.
But I remained still, paralyzed it seemed, and inhaling and exhaling deeply through my nose. Then his fingers appeared again at my waist, moving across the top of my pajama pants before gently grasping the band that clung to me.
A sensation ran up my stomach. I worried that I had trembled, a clear sign that I was awake. His fingers were beneath it, the nails resting against my skin.
Harrison grasped the waistband and lifted it from my body. A cool air rushed down. It was then pulled down just above my knees.
I felt nothing else. It was a brief moment we both separated ourselves from. A single flicker of light before Harrison pulled my waistband back up, covering me without further action. It was cold and calculated and never discussed.
An hour passed before I left the fort and went to the front door. I cut through Immotoria, which was now not infinite, and rattled on my parents’ door until they let their wordless, tweleve year old son inside.
We sat in front of North Station. Harrison had kept his whimpers to near silence. His train would be leaving in four minutes.
“Well,” I managed to say, “be careful. I think it’s a bad idea but I want you to do what you want.”
“Yeah,” he said, “I’m sorry.”
The words made me feel nauseous. I wished he hadn’t said them. He grabbed the handle of his door and opened it. He slung his backpack behind him as a winter wind raced its way into my car. The snow danced behind him and some flurries landed on the passenger seat before he shut the door. He walked down the sidewalk, hunched over to shield himself from the storm.
I didn’t wait to see him enter the station. I began my journey back toward my apartment as strings, tiny, thread-like strings seemed to shed off of me.
At a light on Comm Ave, just before making a left onto my street, a flicker of orange light appeared in my rearview mirror through the snow. Behind me was Union Square. The light was unidentifiable from the mirror but the moment I swung my head around I could tell what it was.
I parked my car in the middle of the street and exited into the storm. It bit me, the snow nearly blinding me, but in the distance I could see the orange haze, growing. A slow fire had begun, whiplashing against the wind, and was carrying itself up the branches effortlessly of the town’s Christmas tree, which had just been decorated. It rapidly grew, leaping from limb to limb until it became a single beacon cutting through the first winter storm.