Curfew MilesParnegg

This is the one where Ben throws his newly-rebuilt ’03 Supra into reverse and attempts to weave between medians on Eubank, spinning southbound to northbound, after Matty says to take Paseo instead of Osuna since it’s well after curfew, and Ben obliges, putting a hand on the back of Matty’s seat and looking over his shoulder, jacking the wheel to the left in a re-creation of a video game maneuver that couldn’t have been that hard to replicate, not on an empty street in early June on Albuquerque’s north side, tires drawing a figure eight into the pavement, but then misjudging the size of the gap between medians, mounting the curb at fifty-plus, catching the fender on an immovable yucca with its brittle drooping leaves, pirouetting the car thirty yards through the air, clipping the guardrail and sending them over into an arroyo, a slow suspended descent, Ben’s hand still gripping the headrest, CD cases sliding across the dash and onto Matty’s lap, the windshield panning up to catch the night sky, scattered stars, the winking wing light of a plane at thirty thousand feet, engine revving high in a kind of moan, and crumpling against the arroyo’s bank where the coupe’s hood accordions, as though collapsing into an earlier state, sending Ben—who isn’t wearing a seatbelt—through the windshield, Matty burying his face into the blinding white of the airbag whose instant deployment fractures his nose, the Supra paused momentarily upward on its front as though en pointe before falling back with a sinking, metallic gnash and sliding down to the arroyo’s basin, smearing tracks through the wet, livid earth, finally settling aslant on the arroyo’s embankment with vapor hissing from the hood. With the airbag in his face Matty feels as if he’s been wrested from sleep on a harsh, starchy pillow, fireworks bursting in his eyes the way they do when pressed against their lids until he realizes his eyes are open and a pulse beats in his head as though something is very urgently trying to get out of it. He inventories limbs, bare feet on the mats, the seatbelt cut into his neck like meat dressing. He pushes the airbag away from his face as though he were tangled in a sail, consumed by its strange but not unpleasant smell, like the inside of a bisected ping pong ball. Gone are the dusty spots on the windshield, arches of the wipers. The air comes at him unimpeded, where seconds ago there was a glass barrier. Mesh pouch of lavender seeds hanging from the rearview mirror sways, its knotted ribbon holding fast. He thrashes in the airbag, wanting to puncture and deflate it, free his skin from its coarse and tacky material, and then remembers that still there are simple movements to be done—unclicking the buckle, pulling the lock tab—the passenger side door swinging open easily, too easily, as though guided by a valet, stepping out into wet clay in the arroyo’s basin, cool earth enveloping his toes, forming impressions, sagebrush and chamisa quivering in the breeze that sweeps up the arroyo, taking steps with feet that don’t feel to be his own and seeing Ben struggling to stand twenty feet away, down on one knee as though having just sprinted and collapsed to fill his lungs, or knelt to genuflect with a hand on a mahogany pew, and when Matty gets to him he puts his hands on Ben’s neck because the impact from the airbag compressed his throat and vocal chords and he can’t speak, drawing breath but emitting no words. The car’s stereo plays, its volume unchanged. “Kate” by Ben Folds Five, from one of their mixtapes. He puts his hands on Ben’s back and shoulders and chest, patting him down, searching him, making sure the major parts are still in place. “You good?” he says to Ben, pressing the words out. “You good? Tell me you’re good.” Ben wheezes, makes a bucking, gasping arch of his spine—the wheeze of someone who’s had the wind knocked out of them, steering column to the solar plexus. Through Matty the sound of the fender’s snap on the guard rail reverberates, as though he were a tuning fork. The car hisses steadily, gushing steam from the crumpled radiator, wedged on the arroyo’s wall so that a wheel spins freely on its axel; the impact jolted the trunk open—that finicky latch—which makes the Supra appear as though it is raising its hand, beckoning. Matty feels his nose moving, freely sliding under its skin, that nauseating pinching in the eyes. He does not put his hand to it, check for blood; he knows somehow to keep moving, not to stop and try to make sense, orient himself. “We flew,” Ben says, regaining breath. He repeats this in the tone of someone waking from a dream, of adjusting to light sifting through blinds, and while Matty knows that this is shock, that this is Ben’s mind on delay, catching up with itself, he realizes that Ben thinks they are dead, has already begun to recount the story to himself as if from the other side. Matty looks up at the street, expecting to see a jagged maw torn through the guard rail, but it seems only shorn and slightly bent. He loops his arms under Ben’s and pulls him up, Ben crying out as Matty heaves him off his knees. To get to the street feels essential, as though the arroyo could fill and pull them away at any second. They paw up the embankment to the street, sand in their hands, feet slipping, Ben taking long searching breaths. They step into the illumined half-circle of a streetlight, an orange glow that is at once bright and dull, moths whirring around the bulb. The street is empty; it’s Tuesday, early in the morning, meaning Wednesday. Rocks are scattered in the street, tire ruts drawn through the pink gravel. The yucca they hit stands impassively in the median, a minor dent in its base, dried leaves strewn amid the rocks. The night air is humid and thick, the carryover weight of the day’s thunderstorms. It has rained every afternoon this week, flash floods all over the city, fat, operatic clouds that sail in from the north. The soil is drinking. Mosquitos are out in numbers. They alight on Matty’s arms and neck in three-point stance as he tugs on the seams of his swim trunks, because where do they go, what do they do, they have to clean up, mend this guard rail, put everything back in its place. He keeps Ben up, the weight of his leaning body, a welcome solidity. That the street is deserted feels a small miracle, a window in which evidence can be erased, this record expunged. He thinks of himself as good in a crisis, calm and clear-eyed, not prone to panic. As he pulls on his swim trunks tiny shards of glass fall onto his feet like iridescent dandruff. Somehow his feet aren’t cut up, just pale in the streetlight, his toes still pruned. They had been hot-tubbing in Tanoan, snuck into the pool with Jane, at Jane’s behest in fact, parking at Smith’s and walking two blocks to evade the security guard in his white pickup, timing their leap of the fence when the truck turned into the townhouses, Ben helping Jane over while Matty carried the towels. Ben courting Jane for weeks, the two locked in a kind of arrested rondo while Matty plays both sides, nudging, passing info. Jane always carrying a box of cinnamon Tic Tacs, always eager for misrule, to steal traffic cones and improvise roadblocks; who mixes Red Bull and vodka and looks everyone levelly in the eye while asking what’s the worst thing they’ve ever done. Jane, who Matty envies—both for her spirit and for the way Ben’s face slackens when he glances at his phone and sees that she’s texted, how he curls his hair back behind his ear in a slow, deliberate tuck before bringing his thumb to the keypad. Matty was there tonight to round out the trio, because his absence would create an imbalance, although he can feel their set reconfiguring, plates beneath him shifting, subtlety, irrevocably. He can feel what has been a we becoming a them, the triangle simplifying. Tonight the night Ben finally kissing Jane when Matty pretended to have to pee and got out of the hot tub, saying something about how the water was too hot, walking wetly around the pool to the shrouded lifeguard office out of sight, instantly freezing in the air’s cool contrast, knowing that this was what it meant to wingman, that later he might even be thanked for reading the scene and clearing a path, but beneath the bubbling surface he could see Ben’s left foot pressing onto Jane’s right foot, and his stomach clamped as Ben gathered the bubbles about him as though he were immodest about showing skin, hiding what was happening beneath the surface, as though Matty didn’t know. The hiding was somehow worse, as though he had to be protected from the knowledge. When he came back some time later with his teeth rattling and arms across his chest, Ben had sunk up to his chin in the water while Jane was looking up into the night and saying something about bats, how you could hear their chirping, see their black wingbeats against the fainter-black of the night sky, smell of sulfur rising off the hot tub as he eased back into the water. “You can tell by how they move,” she said, her voice raspy and a little far-off, gesturing with her hand the sharp, mercurial cutting of the bats’ flight path. It was clear in the calculated distance, how they weren’t looking at each other, the shine on Ben’s lips, her lip balm leaving its waxy trace, streaks through his wet hair made not by the teeth of a comb but by her fingers; his cock, Matty knew, pressing against the sodden fabric of his swim trunks, elevated heartbeat sending tremors through the water’s surface. He knew without seeing. “There,” said Jane, her hand shooting out of the water and pointing. A sharp shape scything through the night, banking into the cottonwood trees and then piping earthward, lost in the shadows. Ben and Jane’s chins pointed up, their necks reaching out of the water, but Matty didn’t follow their gaze. He kept his eyes on Ben, eyebrows jeweled with condensed vapor, steam rising off his head, tendons in his neck taut as cables as he tried to make out black from black—

Now Ben is looking at the Supra in the arroyo and crying, holding the hair up out of his eyes as though trying to lift himself by his bangs, the kind of crying that registers more in the tremor of his shoulders than by tears in his eyes. While Ben looks at the car Matty looks out at the city.

The night shimmers in front of him; he can’t move his neck, as though the muscles there have been frozen, so he pans to see the lights smeared, more brushstroke than pixel, down Eubank to Paseo, across the valley to Nine Mile Hill extending westward to Flagstaff, Barstow, Los Angeles, lit up by the ruby taillights of eighteen wheelers. He’s never seen the city like this, as though it were painted, distinctions between things fallen away. It is a beauty that loosens his knees and nearly makes him sick. He turns back to Ben. “Come here,” he says. “Your face.” He sees Ben straight on for the first time in the streetlight, and it looks as though he’s been paper-cut fifty times on his cheeks and forehead and chin, blood that seems as if it has yet decided to run. He pulls Ben’s face to his shoulder, hand on the nape of his neck, and takes in the familiar scent—chlorine and cigarettes, the loud, non-floral cologne underneath—but comes away with his fingers slick. The blood shines on his skin like molasses, and instinct pulls the finger toward his mouth, to suck the wound the way you do, and he wonders if all blood tastes the same or is as particular to the person as scent, and his nausea is mixed with the urge to taste the blood, to taste Ben in this way, but then his vision shimmers at its edges and he moves Ben to the curb and sits down, cradling Ben’s head in his lap and brushing the hair out of his eyes, his bangs that aren’t bangs but will always be his most identifying feature, and the blood seeps into Matty’s swim trunks. He pulls his t-shirt over his head, keeping his neck still, wadding it under Ben’s head to staunch the bleeding.

“Look at me,” he says to Ben, whose eyes wander, seem to move in separate directions, his pupils so dilated his irises shrunk to mere outlines. “Describe to me what you see.” He feels that he can tether Ben to the moment this way, by noticing, constant noticing. See the rain-soaked walls of the subdivision across the arroyo, hear the cicadas colliding with screened doors, see the white cross on the steeple of the Episcopal church up the street. Glimpse the bat flashing through the light, picking off insects with each pass. He bobs his knee under Ben’s head, first as a kind of nudging, to get him to speak, and then because the movement itself takes over, an impulse suffused in him from all the times he’d lain his head in his mother’s lap, imprint of the inseam of her jeans on his cheek, her hand in his hair, the coolness of her rings on his scalp, to calm him during his night terrors, when he had the flu and couldn’t sleep from the aches.

“Bugs in the light,” Ben says, and his voice is so small that Matty has to dip to hear him, feel his breath on his ear, heat that prickles the hair around the cartilage and down his neck and spine. “Your nose. It’s odd.” He reaches to touch Matty’s nose, but he takes Ben’s wrist and returns it to his side. “I miscalculated,” Ben says.

Matty looks for the femur puncturing skin, shard of windshield piercing the abdomen. All that’s there, though, is the drawstring of Ben’s swim trunks, the knot that’s come undone, and the acne scars on his jawline, tiny craters, the oil on which shines dully like brass. He knows this is not a good sign, that the worst things happen always on the inside, failures only machines can divine, and he reaches under Ben’s shirt, runs his hand over Ben’s torso, a flat palm on the skin, trying to feel something awry, some pulse that betrays a collapsing organ or hemorrhage, and he is certain that Ben’s body will tell him, some signal will shoot up and shock his hand like static. He feels he’s earned fluency in Ben’s body, seen the ease with which he takes stairs two by two, the sweat that sheens his forearms while pulling weeds in the driveway. How tonight he pressed himself over the fence in one liquid motion, sat astride the metal beam and reached back for Jane, the hair on his arms backlit and looking as soft as suede. And the panic that rises like bile in Matty is not for Ben’s dimming eyelids or the blood that is blanching his shirt but the sense that this certainty is unfounded, that this language eludes him, that his understanding of Ben’s body is so skewed as to render him forever incommunicable, a stranger, indelibly separate. He runs his hand faster, over the curve of oblique muscles, the hair under Ben’s belly button that does not come to attention but stays soft and downy and unresponsive, and Matty’s knee bobs faster, propelled by a shiver that runs through his whole body, as though stepping into a freezing shower, and he is pulling on Ben’s skin now, feeling the blemishes and divots and grooves and preternaturally soft spaces, his throat closed, nearly shaking Ben, pleading with his fingertips to say something, look at him, divulge and empty himself—but all that comes are footsteps on the sidewalk which echo off the stucco walls and the blurring lights of a police cruiser cresting the low undulating hills of the arroyos and now cars passing them in the opposite lane, cars where there were none, but Matty does not look up as the lights swell in his eyes and he is filled by the high consuming pulse in his ears, his fingernails digging into Ben’s chest, seeing the unlined skin of his eyelids while Matty bites the inside of his lip trying to draw blood, to match Ben, and as Ben’s voice gets fainter Matty’s knee moves faster, nearly rattling at the back of his skull—until in a sudden sweep Ben reaches his hand up, fingers curled, delicate and precise and pruned, trying, it seems, to trace Matty’s eyebrows and close his eyes, or find the point at which the bone has broken, and as Ben touches his nose Matty exhales sharply, a gasp that pierces the night as Ben’s skin collides with his—and then the pain is there in a cool metal flush between his eyes and the whole scene goes out like a light.