A World Without You Read online

A World Without You

  Copyright 2015 by Roman Theodore Brandt

  Table of Contents

  Author's Note

  A World Without You

  About the Author

  Dedication

  Author's Note

  The following story is actually a very tight condensation of Meet Me at the End of the World. It was written not by adding words but by stripping them away. The piece went from over fifteen thousand words down to less than three thousand to make this piece. There are some new bits here and there to summarize the missing fat. The purpose of this retelling is to reveal something about the story that wasn't there before: how Joey's dad fits into the story in a present, modern sense. I've cut out the hand job scene and a few other bits for the sake of clarity, but they're certainly still implied. This is not a retelling for the squeamish. It's amazing how different a story can be when you fully replace one key character with another for a big reveal. That's all I'll say. After you read this, if you have not done so before, I recommend reading the original novella for a bit of clarity, because you're likely confused. If you have read the novella, I assume this will help clear up a part of the storyline that I left purposely fuzzy. This is a story I need to tell, and I need to tell it in reverse. By stripping away, I have created. I hope this destroys your world.

  Table of Contents

  A World Without You

  I have a dream sometimes, and my Dad’s in it. We’re sitting on a bench in the halogen glow of the truck stop parking lot. Far in the distance, at the edge of the lot, there's the pay phone. Beyond that, the sky is dark.

  “Why are we here?” I ask him.

  His hand is on mine, fingernails digging into my skin. “Wait for it,” he says. He's pointing toward the pay phone, his arm silhouetted in the dim light from the parking lot, reaching into the darkness.

  *

  Home is a word I don't use anymore. Home is an alien word with no meaning. It's a place far down the highway from anywhere I've ever been. It's a destination as silent and unknowable as the stars in the sky. It's been attached to so many temporary places: rental houses on dirty streets, my grandparent's farm nine miles out of town, and even the one night that we spent in a booth at the truck stop with our things in the parking lot. We've lived in apartments and basements and a mobile home across the street from a cemetery. We borrowed trucks from neighbors to move our beds, we carried lamps and tables down Walnut and Main and every other road in town, parading our beaten-up furniture for the world to see.

  When Dad was here, we moved once. It was because Justin was born and there wasn't enough room for four people in our house. After Dad left, we moved by eviction or Mom's belief that the next place would be better than the last. It's been a while since we last moved, though. I think I finally managed to convince Mom that there's nowhere left in the world for us to go.

  Far away, there's a car at the bottom of a lake, extraterrestrial headlights having burned out years ago. It's a watery grave, cold and invisible from the shore. I think when I'm older I might have a house on a lake somewhere, so I can remember why I left.

  *

  Dad used to take us on camping trips when Mom had to do overnights at the diner. We'd drive in his car to the state park miles and miles down the highway from town, where the mountains rose out of the hills like snowy giants. I could smell the pine and soil and water the second I opened the car door, fresh oxygen rushing in to replace our carbon dioxide. We had a spot we went back to every time, hidden on the other side of the lake from where most of the camp sites were. Over there, it seemed like no one existed in the world but the three of us.

  Dad was a haunted man after the sun went down. His eyes were like the water, deep and unknowable, more green than blue, and always hiding something. He spent most of the night staring out across the lake. I'd watch him long after he thought we were asleep. Sometimes, he'd get drunk and yell out at the water.

  During the day, we went hiking through the woods around the lake, laughing at the tree-branch cathedrals above our heads and tossing pebbles into the lake.

  Once, he took us to a cliff deep in the park, overlooking the water. He stood there with Justin on one side and me on the other for a while, and then he said, "Welcome to the end of the world."

  I looked down at the lake far below and wondered what it would feel like to fly.

  Dad laughed, almost a crazy laugh. "The end of the world," he said again. "That's definitely what we'll call this spot."

  "Have you been here before?" Justin asked him.

  "Every day of my life," he said quietly. We stood up there for at least an hour before heading back to the camp site.

  That night, I watched him cry in a ball next to the dying camp fire long after we were supposed to be asleep, after the ghost stories had been told and the s'mores had dried in clumps on the ground. Dad spent most of the night shaking and sobbing in his sleeping bag.

  In the morning, he drove us back to town, singing songs with us and finding license plates from the West coast, where he said the palm trees stared at the ocean.

  *

  I heard him talking on the phone at night when we were home, but I couldn't quite make out the conversation.

  "Dad, what's wrong?" I asked him once, and he looked at me, smiling but not happy.

  "Nothing I guess," he said.

  The next night, eating dinner, his fork froze mid-air. His eyes were far away, staring through us until Mom snapped her fingers in his face.

  "What’s wrong?" she asked.

  "Just homesick."

  She stabbed at the food on her plate, smiling at him. "This is home." Somehow, that made him sadder, and he spent the rest of the meal eating in silence. One time, he started talking about our grandparents on his side, back in Texas. "We'll have to go visit," he said. Then, he added: "We ought to move there."

  Mom used to tell us about how she met him at the truck stop her second week working there. They were both fresh out of high school. He was on a run to Milwaukee. He always came back after that, ordering the same thing: coffee and apple pie. I guess eventually, he married Mom and had to grow roots, sinking into the frozen ground and becoming one of the locals. The worst thing he ever did was try to assimilate. He stopped driving truck and picked up the night shift at the grocery downtown. He didn't talk like the rest of us, because he wasn't from here. He had different mannerisms. Sometimes, watching my father was like staring into a world I'd never know.

  *

  In another dream, I'm at the grocery store where Dad used to work.

  The whole store is as cold as the freezer section, bananas and cereal and pasta boxes frosted over and glittering behind sales tags. I can feel my skin getting thinner. The flickering, ticking florescent light makes everything bright and ugly, igniting new retinal constellations. I am a universe, and my planets are colliding in the frozen void.

  There’s someone in the aisle with me. I turn to see Dad mopping the floor at the end of the pasta section.

  “You feel any better?” he wants to know.

  “I guess so.” My skin is tingling. I want to leave, but I know I’d never be able to. He puts the mop back in the wringer and wrings it out, water rushing out into the bucket. He looks down at the floor as he mops, and I watch him do it.

  “I’m off in a few minutes,” He says, and he looks up finally. His eyes are blue again.

  “How was work?” I ask him.

  “Don’t do that,” he says, and his eyes are black. My heart is pounding, thundering in my ears. He smiles again. “No one cares how work was.”

  “I do,” I tell him.

  “You look sick.”

  “I’m just cold.”

  He looks down again as he dunks the mop b
ack into the bucket. “Well,” he says finally, “It’s definitely cold in here.”

  He puts the mop on the floor, and the water is red.

  The world is alive with the metallic mid-century shopping music buzzing overhead. The brass and strings and flutes echo and collide in my brain, and I can hear the cinder block walls cracking a little at a time. I hear the footsteps of every person in the store.

  I look out the windows above the cart corral. Snowing. Fuck, this shit just never stops.

  “Ready?”

  I turn to see Dad in his coat, ready to leave the building.

  “Yeah, let’s go.”

  The ground is sideways, then at an angle, then spinning.

  "I feel sick," I tell him.

  "I know," he says.

  "No, I mean really sick." I look down at my hands inside the gloves, and I can't move them. “I need to go to the hospital," I tell him.

  *

  Even after Mom and Dad split up, Dad still took us camping. I watched him at night, and his eyes were always so sad, looking out at the lake, staring down into the ravine. Sometimes, I'd see him smiling, but it was never a happy smile.

  One day, Dad left on a camping trip without any of us and never came back.

  *

  I remember when Mom got the phone call from our grandparents in Texas. She didn't say much into the phone. She just sat there, listening to the faraway voice on the line.

  Eventually, she said: "How did he do it?" She listened for a few more minutes, and then she said, with her voice more quiet and polite than I've ever heard before or since: "I'm so sorry."

  She hung up the phone and told us to go to bed.

  "I want to watch TV," Justin said.

  "Go to bed," she said, and the tone of her voice was death itself.

  We went down the hall to our bedrooms, and I stood at my bedroom door after Justin closed his behind him, watching her cry in the blue glow of the TV as the audience on the screen roared with laughter. She looked over and saw me watching her from the end of the hallway.

  "Go on, Joey," she said, wiping her eyes with her pajama sleeves and trying to sound normal. "I'm going to stay up for a while. You go to bed, and I'll come check on you later."

  "Mom?"

  "It's okay," she said, trying to smile. "I'll be there in a minute to tuck you in."

  It was after that phone call that Mom started drinking, and she hasn't stopped since.

  *

  The last thing my dad gave me was a bottle of soda. He picked it up at work and dropped it by on his way home. It's still in the fridge, unopened and frosting over. Mom always asks when I'm getting rid of it.

  "Never," I tell her. I'll never get rid of it. It'll stay in the fridge until we move, and then it'll be in a new fridge.

  *

  He comes back to stand in my closet sometimes, a shadow in the open door. He tells me stories. There was a boy. He lived at the lake, and he was Dad's friend.

  "What was his name?" I ask him.

  Dad doesn't look at me. He looks anywhere else, and finally he says, "Franklin."

  "What happened to him?"

  Dad looks down at me and smiles, his eyes the color of the lake at night, dark and bottomless. "I don’t know."

  "Come on, Dad. I want to know."

  "No you don't," he tells me, and he tucks me in. But this time, he doesn’t go away.

  "Dad, why did you go away?"

  "You're tired," he says, and I can't stay awake anymore. I wake up a couple times, and he's still sitting there, holding down the corner of my mattress.

  *

  Death is a home among the stars, rotating ice cold in the night. Death is a dead man in geosynchronous orbit, an angry space skeleton entering Orion. I might be there now, grazing satellites with my fingers. Maybe death is home.

  *

  When I open my eyes, the world exists behind a film. I wonder if this is what it's like to be dead. Suddenly, though, everything comes back into focus. Sound returns, filling my brain with stimuli. The constellations behind my eyes, star maps created by holidays and disasters and anger and pain come alive, electricity crackling in my veins.

  “There you are,” Dad says. All around me, I can hear the rumbling of the bus engine, and the seats bounce over the potholes and bumps below us.

  “Where are we going?”

  He smiles at me, his eyes a new color. He sighs and leans back in the seat “We're going away.”

  I squeeze my eyes shut, coughing, and when I pull my hand away from my mouth, it’s covered in bright red blood. In my mind, I see the pay phone at the truck stop with the broken handset swinging back and forth. I hear the dial tone buzzing far away. “Am I dying?” I ask him.

  He reaches out and takes my hand, my DNA smearing between our palms. For a minute, he says nothing. Then, he says: “Some people don't die.”

  In my mind, I can see a car now, a station wagon in a watery grave.

  "Do you see the car?"

  I start to laugh, closing my eyes to see it better. "It's empty," I tell him.

  "I told you it was."

  I hear him shuffling around in a bag at his side. "Here," he says. He puts something cold in my hand, and I look down at the bottle of soda he bought for me the last night I saw him. "I grabbed it on the way out."

  *

  My heart stops in Wyoming, but my eyes continue to watch the towns pass. The bus stops once in a while to let people on and off, and I move the fingers of my right hand.

  "That's right," Dad says. I move my eyes to look at him, cracking the protective ice coating. His face is unrecognizable through my frozen lenses. "Fight it," he tells me.

  My heartbeat is no longer pounding in my ears. It's not pulsing in my wrist, either. My capillaries are stalled, now, with red blood cells turning white from decay. There's a whole highway system inside me with traffic that's stopped forever in the dark night.

  "Move your fingers again," he says, and so I do.

  He's quiet for a while, and then he says, "We're getting out of here."

  *

  Home is a place far away. It's a point of light on the horizon, telephone wires crackling under bird claws and coffin lids slamming shut. This is what our parents built for us.

  Miles and miles down a distant highway, far from anywhere I've ever known, where the palm trees stare at the ocean, a pay phone is ringing.

  Table of Contents

  About the Author

  I was born in the wastelands of the American Midwest, and I still live there, much to everyone's regret. I started writing as a teenager as a side effect of what psychologists refer to as the "personal fable." I believed that I was unique, that my personal life story impacted the world, and that the world revolves around me. In my mid-twenties, I picked up writing again because I was sick of reading slosh and tired of having to go back fifty years to find books I actually want to read. I was especially over the only gay literature available in 2008 being soft core porn romance bullshit with jacked, oiled-up porn stars on the covers. I decided that if I wanted to read something that wasn't 500 pages of comma abuse and boners, I'd have to write it myself.

  And so I did. It may not be the best, but it's what I want to read. Thank you for the support, and I hope my writing means something to you as well.

  Visit my Goodreads page, where you can further abuse me by leaving me comments and questions and rating my worth as an author by a vague five star scale! Click click! Do it!

  Table of Contents

  Dedication

  This story is dedicated to my partners in writing, a very select group of people who are also writers. They are all extremely talented and they write things that I look forward to reading (a rare thing these days because, in my opinion, there's a lot of literary slosh in the world right now) and they have all at one point or another helped me shape one of my typo-riddled landmines into a finished book. Without the guidance of these awesome folks, I wouldn't have the courage to publish anything I've writ
ten. I'd like to say that I do everything myself, but without the help of these people and being constantly inspired by their ability to keep writing and creating new works, I'd have given up long ago. I am inspired almost every day by you guys, even by things so mundane and inconsequential as status updates on social media, so thank you.

  Gypsy Snow

  Chelsey Barker

  Millicent Rosethorn

  Joe Egly-Shaneyfelt

  Eli Verger

  If I forgot anyone, I'm sorry. I blame my advanced age.

  I want to extend a very special thank you to all of my readers for your support and encouragement during the 2013-2014 season. I'd like to extend it like the neck of a giraffe, but alas. I have no god-like abilities. You'll have to accept some kind of mechanized extension.

  Table of Contents