They say, Vic believes in God now, but I don’t buy that shit. How could you? I’ve seen your face filled with ecstasy, the boundless kind, the sort that came from ripping through the dark out of our minds, lights on the overpass, a bright cobalt colour. I remember, back at the house, how the light in your room would hit your face, show that scar. I remember the light right before I found out about the crash, full gold colour coming through the windows. I watched it pass over my room, my body; I touched it on the back of my hand. You weren’t answering my calls.
Your dad was the one who came around to the house. When I saw him across the yard, I thought maybe you’d died. I opened the door before he got to it. I wasn’t wearing a shirt and I felt ugly standing there gripping the doorframe, embarrassed for the sun to be hitting my chest while he spoke.
You’d told your dad you just thought it’d be okay. You’d done it so many times far more drunk than this. You told the cops you were a safe driver, never had any trouble; alcohol didn’t go to your head or your limbs. You had been on a straight stretch, radio swarming, and yeah, there was a lack of attention to acceleration, but your hands were pressed tight on the wheel. You had control.
You called me later in a panic, back at your dad’s place before the trial, do you remember? Told me you’d just wanted to get home. You tried to spin it, said, Maybe they’d been drinking too, but what are the chances of two drunk drivers meeting on a road—two low-lidded, heavy-breathed people who thought they could handle traffic?
For the last year I’ve been keeping a map of crash sites. I know it’s a weird obsession, but I want to keep a record of the accidents, the damage caused. It’s not possible that any of these crashes had anything to do with you, but I have a compulsion to document.
It’s easy work. I drive out looking for memorials, pull over, unfold the map and make a small mark where I’ve found one. I don’t mark the site with a cross—that’d be too much. I try to get the location as exact as I can. When I get home, I cover the mark on the map with a small blue circle sticker.
In January I found a spot next to a football field, a site with three crosses. I pulled over to the grass, left wild a few metres from the road. Two of the markers were attached to the fence. The biggest one was well made; I could tell it’d been measured and marked up. The other was the size of my palm, nailed at an off angle. I put my hand over it.
I copied the inscriptions—the perfect cross—G BARTH 1967–2011. The second was harder to make out, written in marker and bleached over time—RIP JP 2007 x. The third cross was low down in gravel, propped in a pile of plastic flowers. It said, LOVE TO MARTHA 74–09, and underneath that, RIP r.i.p. I guess it was written twice as a mistake. An error of grief.
When I’m out there I do my best to keep a clear head, but sometimes I imagine your crash and the bodies you made. If I’d been with you, maybe my body would have pulsed open too; the passenger seat in your car was destroyed. Your dad said it was a miracle you survived.
Things I told you last time we spoke:
I’ll come see you as much as I can—I don’t trust you—You know all the good in you is gone.
*
When you were new to me—when we were first friends—we spent a lot of dead time in your car, waiting around for something to do, sixpack between us. One night we lay in the driveway at Al’s house, passing a bottle back and forth. You weren’t good at constellations so you made up the shapes. Knife, jam jar, serpent.
‘I see a heart with a gun near it.’
‘No you fucking can’t, Vic.’
‘You can’t tell me what to see.’
Once I came down so harsh I cried, curled cowrie-like at the end of your bed, and you sat there and watched. At parties, you’d always say, Willie, I’m all out. Out of smokes, out of speed, out of line. At Al’s twenty-first, I drank too much, got out of my shoes, stepped on broken bottles, didn’t feel it. You said, I’ll do it, and you picked the glass from my feet, used your nails, rubbed spit to move the blood and get a better look.
We don’t have that now. When they sentenced you I overheard someone say that seven years wasn’t too long. Your mum was chanting good behaviour like it was a blessing.
*
I keep a notebook where I write down the things people leave for those they’re missing: flowers, objects, messages. The notes they write make grief seem basic. Time passes, but not quick—even that throbs with repetition.
Last year I marked a place right off the highway where someone had nailed a row of small white crosses up a telegraph pole, with a bigger blue cross propped up beneath them in the grass, its paint peeling away.
I know it must be an intimate thing, to mark a death. I’ve thought about mounting a cross for you because you’re lost to me. I don’t know what it’d say—maybe REST IN CHAINS VIC. GOODBYE YOU, if I wanted to be blunt. I started writing you a letter, said, I never thought I’d be this far from, but I stopped because how could I write it at all. Call a cross a crucifix. You called it a mistake when you knew what you were doing.
Some markers:
STELLA, WITH GOD—SAFER SOUL NOW—PLEASE DRIVE SAFELY—MISSING YOU ALWAYS DAD, TAKEN TOO SOON—BLESSED TO HAVE HAD YOU—GOODBYE BABY BOY, WE LOVE YOU—THREE GOOD LIVES LOST—BORN TO ETERNAL LIFE—SWEETHEART, RMBRD NOT FRGTN
*
You know, we had good things going. You’d had your thing with Kit for a few years, and me with Nina. We’d all hang out at your dad’s place—sprawl in the yard with our shirts off, party in the garage in winter.
Remember when Nina wanted to fuck in there? You’d taken Kit down the street to get more beers. Nina said, I wanna be close, and I said, You wanna get caught, and then her hand was on my dick and we were pressed against the corrugated door. I had my face close to her neck; there was acne there, I could feel it with my mouth, but it wasn’t enough of a bother to stop, nothing was. But when I told you about it, you closed your eyes halfway and said, Don’t do that again there, it makes me uncomfortable.
We’d do whatever to make our blood run hotter. Get drunk at Coal Street, then walk two blocks over to Al’s house. You’d do that thing where you’d walk along pretending to put your elbow through windscreens and then one of us would finally give it up, fracture a window, take what was inside, cheap-seat thrills. No one left anything good in a car.
Under streetlights we said a lot of things. And, shit, I miss talking to you—the way we’d speak in absolutes or incompletes, hurl our bodies onto lawns and drift from conversation. One night at the King Street house I asked you, ‘Do you think you’ll ever leave here?’
‘Nah.’
‘Any reason?’
‘I’ve got it so good, wouldn’t leave you.’
Your eyes weren’t focused on anything.
‘I wouldn’t have anyone else good to talk to.’
We said I love you sometimes, in that drunk, noncommittal way. We’d still bloodied each other at times too, rounded out our nights with fists pounding into bellies and my stomach so close to yours after you’d knocked the air out, my breath caught. I’m always thinking about your temper, that trouble, those bad nights when you were completely wild and I couldn’t do a thing. We don’t have those nights anymore, and when I can’t sleep I replay them, drifting into them to calm down. I make myself say your name sometimes, because I don’t like saying it to anyone else.
*
I saw a crash site off the highway a few weeks ago, a new accident. Glass on the ground, the flowers with their heads still in bloom. A cross was up, neon-white when my torch beam hit, stuck in the soil at the edge of the road. A message that hadn’t faded: GOODBYE LEANDRA, JUNE 2019. A new guard rail, metal too clean and light.
I was making notes when a man turned up. Easy steps behind me. No one had ever stopped before. Turned out he knew her, wanted to visit. He said it happened two weeks ago. Fell asleep on her way back from night shift. Leandra in the left lane, then the right, then into the guard rail, no seatbelt, head connected with windscreen. A fast death.
‘All our friends, they keep coming and leaving shit. They want it to reflect her,’ he said.
‘Yeah, of course. You wanna honour her.’
‘She was such a… What are you meant to say?’
I was sweating.
‘She was beautiful.’
I watched him crouch to the flowers. He took a note from the others and read it, an intrusion. He didn’t ask how I knew her.
Things I won’t write to you:
Don’t be cold—Don’t be a burden—Don’t be like a knife to me
*
Nina and I aren’t together anymore. Last time she came round she put her hand on my shoulder out of habit, reflex, pity. She knows. I started thinking about the last time I fucked her. I don’t know what I was saying then; you know how easy it is to say I love you when someone’s trying to make you come.
‘You’ll go see him soon, right?’
Wanted to answer her, but I kept it quiet.
‘I can’t understand how you’re gonna leave it, Willie. He needs you and you won’t even write to him.’
She walked out the front door. I stayed where I was, felt out of my head. Then I looked at the map. Tracts of houses, factories, structures only outlined, all colourless, parkland highlighted in green. Saw the way industrial zones spread back from the river. Your crash marked with a red sticker. Tried to see a pattern, imagined that I’d call you and you’d ask if I’d been there yet.
What else did you see, Willie?
I saw the way the land was flat all around, saw one cross for all four of them, then small individual signs. Susanna, Ted, Saadia, Mal—VIOLENTLY TAKEN FROM US written in cursive right on the wood. I saw a black swan streak across the road with heavy wings pulled wide. I saw the cracks in the road filled with black resin, the rank smell of fertiliser in the air. I threw up.
I left a flower—king protea—for you. I smoked a joint then a cigarette, thought I could smell you. Your smoked-out, cut-up mouth. Always lit up. Sometimes even I was repulsed by your deep cigarette smell.
Your dad is living with your uncle now. They tell me they have an extra beer for your sake every night. They miss you. When I go over, your dad says, Do you miss him, Willie? He’s been asking, and I try my best not to lose it. I say, Yeah, of course I do. But I don’t say that I miss your body next to mine on the street, that I stay out of cars that aren’t mine. I don’t say I wear that nylon jacket of yours or that it’s got one of your lighters in the pocket, that I make the flame tall when I’m thinking of you.
What did you see that night? Headlights beaming off the road, the moon heavy, an overpass, block letters, silver road reflectors. I drive past there all the time and it’s eaten into my brain: blood blood blood, gravel rash on a body, spit from mouths. It’s the seatbelt bruise across your chest in the observation bay at the hospital, the flash photograph of it in the courtroom. It’s how your shock dulled all sounds, lights blurred, only your pulse, only that.
*
Your last letter started: I’m on a real losing streak, Willie, come visit me you’re my best friend and I love you. Makes me think of when you’d say, Willie, come on, come now, the territorial way you’d ask me to come hang out with you when I was busy. Psychic pressure. You’d hiss my name until I gave in.
Last year, I asked you to drive me to see my dad in the country. He was unhappy about my visit, didn’t want me in the house. His big lesson was always, Those are a woman’s feelings, grow up and then those become a man’s feelings. You knew I was hurting, you said, Let’s make the most of that drive. Let’s go somewhere nicer than this motherfucker’s yard.
We drove to the national park in the central part of the state. I still remember the cut of the colour of your jacket between the trees. You darted around me, all game. I wanted to hold out for you, I wanted you to see I was all right. We drove two hours out of the way to a lake. Remember how it turned hot? We had that sweat sheen. You were first in, half your body out of the water. I thought you looked like a saint, water streaming over your eyes, over your chest. You called out, I want you to look at me.
We shared a bed at that motel because it was too far to drive home.
I listed all the ways you’d say oh:
Oh for bad news—oh for when oxy hit you—oh for the police at a party—oh when you rolled close to me in the middle of the night—oh when I touched you.
*
You were an unmatched breath in a dark room. I couldn’t find your face, but then pressed my palm to your mouth. Like this. Pressed again. You held down the details, held down my arms. Who said, Come here? Who said it first? Who had the hottest mouth, you and then me. Dark-blue curtains, pine dresser, spill on the carpet, cream colour. You had me against the door, can’t remember, the wall, the filter of low light, out for a smoke one at a time, then together. Got dark real fast. Rose stitched on the towels in white. Ask me anything I’ll tell you anything.
We never talked about it. I’m still not sure it was real. Did we come out of our bodies? I saw you thumbing at a bruise on your arm in the morning, steam from the shower inside the room. You looked wired, and I wanted to sit up and reach for you but I didn’t. We had to go home.
The night after, we went down to the pines, sat on the top of your car. I listened to you say it was hard to look at me knowing what I knew. I said, That’s fucked; you said, I know. The air was dry, I drank too much and I was sick. You didn’t come round for two weeks. When you showed up, I wanted to put my hand inside the collar of your shirt. We sat on the ground in the yard and I pulled a flat weed from the grass. You asked if it was a nettle, I said, It can’t be, it doesn’t sting. We talked about acts of aggression, your attitude towards other men. You pulled your shirt collar over your mouth.
I think it did happen. I think you started it because I know I couldn’t have found that bravery—that was what you were good for. I have to stem that thought.
My body remembers:
My father twisting my ear for trouble—Slipping my hands into a woman for the first time—The momentum of kicking someone hard—My stomach going rigid in a fight—Your hands pulling me up from grass, feeling my body for cuts, feeling for a lighter I wouldn’t give up—My mother wiping food from my face, I was seventeen, ‘I know you’re not a baby but let me do this for you, Willie, I still care about you so much’—Nina in my big shirt and blue socks, crossing her legs on the bed, I could still see the lip of her pussy, ‘Don’t you want me, look at how I look’—A dried out tongue from too many smokes—Stopping after that big run down Grandview, away from cop cars, me, you and Al before he moved, the wild laughter, fuck fuck fuck as we ran, feet felt bruised but my body felt incredible, pulse of joy—The fire we lit by the side of the road, how it was small flamed, we left it unattended and went to the motel to fuck, no soil kicked over, I don’t know how it went out.
*
I wish I could come see you. I know it’s not far, but it’s a different kind of distance. If I come, you’ll think I’ve forgiven you. I’d have to pretend I’ve forgiven you.
You have over six years left and you’ll still be a young man when you’re out. One day they’ll give you back your licence and you’ll speed to a woman’s home in the still bit of the night.
Your dad’s been asking me to come to church with your family. He says they light candles for you, that you ask them to complete the ritual, that all you think about is coming home. At the end of your letters, you ask me to pray for you. I used to do that—pray for us—but I’m still godless; I won’t do it again. When we were kids, you tattooed my arm with your initials and I did mine on you. There’s still part of me that thinks if I saw you again I’d feel equal parts terror and longing. My breath is hotter, my pulse is faster, all the pinpoints of light and distance.
*
I thought everything was going to be all right. We’d all had a full winter, did some burnouts under the bridge, did a lot of speed, cloistered in Al’s room on the slow nights watching lifeless comedies. You were outta work. You were kind of in trouble, but you were happy.
Before the crash, we went out. Everyone was out of control that night. A loose party over the river at the water tower. I wanted to drink so much I couldn’t feel my limbs.
I can still place this—walking through long grass to take a piss, my hand on a girl’s back in a comforting gesture, Al with his hands outstretched to me and you, More drinks, boys, Al giving us a line. You said, I feel like fire, and then it was ash into beer can, ash into pocket, you wiped ash from your face.
I lost track of you. Al said you were looking for me, but I couldn’t find you. I figured, feeling bitter, that you’d found someone to fuck. You said you were in the mood.
*
Vic, let me tell you that I loved the flex of your body, how you’d climb into the car, felt hot when you’d say certain words. When I see certain light, I see you. I see the trouble, I see my name too easy on a marker. I never told you because I thought you’d tell me one day.
*
The rest of that last letter says how it happened—the best you can remember it. A description of the condition of the road, slick asphalt, how you woke in a smoked daze in your car, lights outside. The cops had already started to arrive; they were kind at first, they helped you walk. I’ve seen how cop car lights tint your face so I know how you’d have looked, that cold colour, turning hot in the red light. You said they asked your name, Where’s it hurt?—overheard someone go, It’s a pretty fucking bad one.
They told you to look away, but you couldn’t do that; there was more blood than you thought. They pulled a man from the passenger seat and his whole leg was cut, thigh open.
He was still with it and you heard him put everything into a scream. More ambulances, double siren. You learned the violence of resuscitation. You had a breathalyser fit into your mouth while the paramedics rushed to stem blood and drag other bodies from car to ground to ambulance. You said you knew you were fucked when a cop went to his car and came back with a sheet draped across both his arms, and then the paramedic got off his knees where he’d been leaning over the youngest girl, but her eyes were open and her lips were parted, and you knew that she had died.
*
When I’m like this I shift back to the last good night we had. I’d said, Let’s go out, routine trouble, party in someone’s yard. The night is split in two. We were out of it at the house. You were smoking all-white cigarettes, fixed in a slump on a chair, losing your grip on the smoke and sliding to the floor. Someone changed the TV to music videos and I saw Billy Joel dressed as Buddy Holly dressed as a man in a cowboy outfit pressing his palms outward from within the screen. When I looked over to you again, I saw the cigarette doing a slow burn on the carpet, your body making the shape of a crescent, a horseshoe, an incomplete embrace, and still I didn’t move. I waited until someone else got up and stomped it out.
You and Al had an argument, he swung into your mouth and split your lip. You got him back. Then both of you on the ground outside, concrete grind on skin. You had blood all over your teeth, had your mouth hung open like an animal, had a rough-breathed body. We pulled you apart, you laughed, I won and, Let’s split. You wanted to walk, remember?
‘You right?’ I said. ‘Does it hurt?’
‘No.’
‘Your mouth?’
‘No.’
We walked to the highway so we could watch the traffic clot in the dark, didn’t think anyone would pay much attention to two boys in the night. On the overpass we felt like we could hurl our bodies onto the cars below us, the wind cutting through our hair. You threw one rock at a truck before you decided it was a bad idea. I threw an arm around you, a young and imperfect movement, and you let the weight of your shoulder jolt into mine. We hadn’t had a smoke in a while so you pressed firm on my wrist because you didn’t have to ask anymore, the filters spilled out of my hand and onto the ground. We looked down at highway markings that had been burned off enough to show the asphalt underneath. You pointed at the sky. Two planes passed up there and the stutter of their red lights made magma pinpricks in your eyes—at least I thought so at the time, I thought I didn’t make it up.
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