THE FUTURENESS Ch3: The Weather in There

I called it Michelle-think. I had tried to limit its effect on me, but her pessimisms were contagious, and by that summer they had infected me. Apartment buildings were sweeping outside the cities. Soon, they would come upon us and ruin our medium-sized town. The Aventura was bad enough. We’d break more ground. Our property taxes would go up. Schools would become hard to get into. Taco Bell instead of Tulio’s Mex. It would be dangerous to bike around town with all the traffic.

“Where are you?” Michelle said over the phone.

“I was just following this guy. I’m at Exit 22, with the Costco.”

“Oh, I know where you are. You’re doing what?”

“Never mind,” I said.

“Which way are you going?”

“Easterly.”

“I’m home.”

“I know.”

“Text when you’re close.”

“I have to make a few calls first,” I said. “See what’s on my plate.”

“Put me on that plate.”

“Then Xavier’s coming.”

“Oh, shit. I forgot about that. He always fucks you up, Richard.”

The next day, my oldest but estranged friend was coming to Dayton. Michelle called Xavier’s effect on me enervating. I told him I would pick him up at the airport and not to make me look nervous.

I had never taken his threats to visit me seriously. This, then, was the reason Xavier was coming. I cleaned, I hid my sci-fi books and movies and bought music. I wondered if he would fly in a suit. I thought he might, having embraced his job as a futures trader chameleon-like, in an instant changing from a half-hearted punk to an adult in business, who was suddenly intolerant of science fiction among other things we loved together as kids. He would fit in with the small crowds of elderly visitors, who always dress up. Nobody comes to Dayton unless someone is dying or has already died. Over the holidays, it was the Aventura victims, their families and all the world’s media crew, their carry-ons bulging with video equipment. Now we have circled back to the old. They sit very still in their airplane chairs in the sky, land and search the bewildering airport for their families’ faces.

The last time I saw him was before Aventura, at a wedding of a mutual friend. He looked on me as a sad person but an easy problem to solve. Xavier pulled me to the grassy perimeter of the wedding reception tent and said, “Leave Dayton now.” And in a whisper, “And for fuck’s sake, leave Michelle behind.”

After we graduated from Arizona State, Xavier demanded that I follow him to Chicago, but I came back home to Dayton. I told him that it wouldn’t be for all time, that I just had to clear up some things: mostly, get my father off pain meds, and then I would move out. I don’t know how much of that I truly meant. Probably none of it at the time.

Two years later Michelle still disliked him, and I sometimes suspected she’d been standing or dancing close enough to hear what Xavier had said to me at the wedding. I had my own doubts about him. He wouldn’t understand the importance of the cowboy stealing the newspapers, which was missing between us.

I imagined I sat in my car at the Golden Apple, bathed by slanting sunlight. Xavier would sit in the passenger seat, bored and surly, and glare at the parking lot I’d come to know perfectly. In the daydream, we would watch a man steal what remained of all the newspapers in the world. Then my dad would take the last of the pain medications in the pharmacy.

“Still, come over,” Michelle said.

“I will if I can,” I said. I didn’t know how long the distraction of stalking the Winnebago was going to last. My panic felt far away, and I wanted that freedom from worry to remain.

“Gotta go.”

“Love you,” she said.

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