Out of West

The California sun is blinding, bleaching out the city and gilding roofs in sharp edges of gold and most of all, it's giving Rodney a headache. He's been rubbing the spot between his eyes for two months now and people have started to ask about MRIs and mumbling about 60 Minutes segments on extended exposure to computers and corresponding tumors. Rodney feels that if he's been snapping more than usual it's because of staff incompetence rather than brain cancer.

Outside his living room window, San Jose is unrelentingly sunny, bright and upbeat like heaven in high definition, and Rodney scowls over his coffee and shoves aside the Mercury News and the equally unrelentingly discouraged business section. It's 2003 and Silicon Valley is still licking its wounds with all the gracelessness of a kid who found a money tree and broke the damn thing in half in his eagerness to buy a new ten speed.

So he winces through his coffee and palms three Advil, digs through the mountain of glossy magazines his housekeeper organizes in neat piles for him, pushing past Fortune and Wired and Time and settles on Newsweek because his fingers smooth over the words "Don't Ask, Don't Tell: A Decade in Review" on the front cover in big, blocky print.

On the third page of the spread, they pull a quote that leaves Rodney a little stupid and breathless:

"I stopped being furious about it," says John Sheppard, an associate professor and staff advisor to the Carnegie Mellon robotics team. He leans back in his seat and reaches for a battered model F-14 on his desk, spinning the propellers. "I just wanted to fly."

*

Rodney invented secure online banking or wrote an algorithm or something.

It's not clear anymore because it's been nine years and an incredibly stressful IPO that seriously took six years off his life that he really could have used--and anyway, now he spends more time sitting in his art deco office, clawing at his post-modern blotter than coding at half past four in the morning. He doesn't really miss it, but sometimes he feels like a bigger narc than the FCC; there's no question that he sold out.

Rodney came to Silicon Valley hungry and tired and pissed off, wanting something bigger and better than before. He had three hundred dollars in his pocket, what was technically a stolen car, and a fight to pick with the whole world. He won.

His keys jingle in his pocket and he steps out of his car to jog, huffing, to the elevator, shivers in the blasting AC, and presses his palms against the stainless steel walls of it, seeing ghostly handprints, steamy on the slick surfaces. His doctor says that by some miracle of nature Rodney's even more out of shape than he was six years ago when Rodney first started seeing the bastard, but Rodney blames that on society and buys whole milk anyway. He hasn't got anybody to impress, and the thought sits in his mind long enough to make him wince.

There's a chime when he reaches the fourth story and Rodney steps out onto the sunny floor of the open office and feels wary eyes from every corner of the room. There's a sudden shuffling out of the common areas and Rodney thinks, Fine, cowards .

The small blessing of nobody rushing up to him with news of major breakdown or with some sort of question about Apache or a phone call from Kavanagh is destroyed almost immediately when Rodney sees Radek approaching at Mach 1.

"You're late," says Radek, falling into step as Rodney stalks toward his office.

"I'm on time," Rodney says. He steals Norman's coffee as he walks by, but Norman's doing something that looks suspiciously like a playing a flight simulator game at work so Rodney figures it's fair punishment. "I'm the boss. yes">  This means I get to say what is on time."

"Actually, Kavanagh is boss," Radek argues, and slaps Rodney's hand away from Ashley's desk, where there is a lone cheese Danish, completely defenseless and begging to be thieved, lounging on a white napkin. "You're Chief Technology Officer--or something."

Rodney scowls at Radek, who has crazy brown hair and is the product of neo-hippie hemp farmers from Czechoslovakia who'd bemoaned his love of science and forced him to move to the valley--or something. "Is there a point to this, Radek? Or are you just padding the novel filled with reasons you should be fired?"

Radek hands Rodney a stack of messages and a couple of CDs in jewel cases, a FedEx overnight package and a new bottle of Advil. Suddenly, Rodney hates him a little less.

"You have meetings all afternoon and Kavanagh is in terrible mood," Radek warns. "Ashley is about to declare a fatwa if we ask her to host any more seminars--"

"That's her job," Rodney says, kicking a rolling chair out of the way and striding into his office, feeling the Berber carpet hard and knotted beneath his Vans. If it's one thing Silicon Valley got right, it was the dress code. "Her job is to fly where we tell her and to teach people how to use the program."

"You remember I have higher IQ than you?" Radek demands, his eyes are narrowed in a dangerously pretty way that Rodney promised himself about a million years ago not to find attractive. "You understand that I got degree with honors from MIT. You realize I'm your project manager and ad hoc assistant."

Rodney collapses with his pile at his desk, an ergonomic monstrosity that sprawls like a black, Formica monster across the office, backlit by a wall of glass where Rodney can look out at the big dipper of industrial buildings.

"I'm really not in the mood for this," Rodney snaps, fumbling with the CDs, squinting at the illegible labels. The sun's glinting off of their shiny surfaces and Rodney cusses under his breath, gets up and bangs around until he gets the vertical blinds closed, shuttering the room in blissful semi-darkness.

"She says she's going to burn down the office," Radek warns.

"I literally could not care less," Rodney barks. He waves his FedEx package threateningly. "You, get out!"

"Meetings," Radek reminds him. "Starting one o'clock. yes">  End indeterminate."

"Out!"

Radek rolls his eyes, and walks out, the midmorning light shimmering over the back of his head, the sandy-brown hair that looks gold at ten in the morning. Rodney blinks and shakes his head, starts tearing into the FedEx package.

He realizes it's an advance copy of the August's PC World . He flips through it until he finds an artsy photo of himself, standing still with a calm expression on his face as his entire staff blurs around him in the office. He already knows what it's going to say: survivor of the internet bubble fallout, changing the way ordinary people use the internet, devoted to work, traumatizing IPO, a cute anecdote about how when the reporter had showed up Rodney didn't, technically, have an office floor so much as an ocean of constantly reproducing tech specs.

The sick thing is that Rodney really doesn't have an office--he has a defective cube with glass walls and no door.

In 1998, flush with cash from excited venture capitalists and bolstered by market whispers that Kavanagh had started to listen to more than his own programmers, Kavanagh had hired Carjl "the Ôj' is silent" Browne to redo the large, echoing offices they'd dumped thousands of dollars of technology into nearly two years prior.

"There aren't any offices," Rodney had complained then, waving around the room.

"We're embracing an open design, for better flow of ideas," Carjl had contended.

"Who the fuck is we? " Rodney had demanded, but before he'd been able to properly organize a employee uprising, his staff had been seduced by the enormous papasans and the foosball table.

Rodney's "personal area" is not soundproof and there's no way to hide (not even under his desk, though for one spectacularly bad week in 2000, he'd tried very hard to disprove that) so that at twelve fifty-nine when Kavanagh shows up bitching and moaning about his mantel of leadership there's nothing Rodney can do but gather up his files and email himself his PowerPoint presentation and tell Kavanagh to shut the hell up as they walk over to the conference room.

*

Rodney is halfway convinced that the meeting existed in a pocket of spacetime stuck on infinite loop, because if they discussed changing the consumer-user interface one more time Rodney was going to launch the fatwa in Ashley's stead.

Nothing was accomplished and nobody had anything good to contribute and Kavanagh took a lot of antacids and whined about not being on the ground with his people anymore--about becoming a thirty-nine year old corporate whore. Ashley said she was going to burn down the office if they sent her to Florida, and Rodney had managed to rustle up a sympathetic expression for probably half a minute before he'd slid her travel packet across the table.

By the time Rodney finally escapes the meeting it's half past six and he has more files than he took into the meeting room, which means that either his suspicion that Georgia Pacific creates sentient paper products is correct or people are dumping things on him.

He debates getting pissed about it, but the fourth floor is cleared by the time he steps out at seven to take a look around. It's Friday and the sound of car horns honking is audible outside. Lights are off and screen savers are scrolling, casting ghostly lights on well-worn keyboards, the letter's N and E half worn off of Norman's keyboard.

Rodney goes back into his office and opens the blinds. He watches the summer sky melt into a bruised purple, red at the horizon, blue at the edges. He crosses his arms over his chest and manages to wait a whole ten minutes before he reaches into his laptop bag and grab the now-creased copy of Newsweek . He reads the article start to finish for the third time and picks out words like "lean" and "handsome" and "flinch."

He is being completely ridiculous, and he tells himself this over and over again as he drives home in the last dredges of rush hour, listening to the radio babble in the background over the sound of the car's air conditioning, struggling to kick out a lukewarm breeze.

Rodney owns a silver-gray Lexus, all sleek lines and nice curves that feel good against his palms, but he'd left it in the garage and taken the blue, boxy 1984 Volvo. yes">  The car is a piece of crap and Rodney only drives it when he's feeling really twitchy. But he's felt really twitchy all week and it's a fucking Volvo style='font-style: normal'>, Rodney figures it can take the punishment.

He drums his fingers on the wheel and listens to the upholstery make soft, soughing noises against his shoulders, the creak and groan of old engineering, the low, steady whine of the breaks. It's all low-decibel, should be hidden beneath the voices on the radio, but it builds into a cacophony and suddenly it's all Rodney can hear because it invokes words like "lean" and "handsome" and "flinch."

He growls under his breath and takes a left turn a little faster than they like in traffic school.

When he gets back to his apartment, Rodney manages to throw the magazine away, but then suddenly it's three in the morning and he's reading it on Newsweek's webpage, which really says a lot about how the internet is changing everybody's lives and how Rodney has, in a cruelly ironic way, always been about ruining his own.

yes"> "I went crazy for a while in the middle," Sheppard says gently. The F-14 is still cradled in his hands, with surprising care inside large brown palms. He sets it down and picks up a pencil, twirls it in his long fingers. "Which was fine, actually, because everybody is crazy in grad school."

Sheppard did his doctoral work at Carnegie Mellon from Ô92-96 in applied mathematics, in what he calls an obscure and ultimately pointless concentration--though you wouldn't know it from the way he's published over the years.

Sheppard's put energy into the field, new, creative ways of looking at problems most people don't know exist. He tours occasionally to speak, and he has a book due out next year, a lighthearted treatise on aerodynamics.

"And isn't that a paradox if you ever heard one," Sheppard laughs.

*

Rodney goes to bed irritable at five a.m. and wakes up annoyed at half past ten. The low-grade headache he's had for what feels like a hundred years now is back with a vengeance, and he goes through is apartment, snarling and shutting curtains, closing blinds, his prescription sunglasses sitting low on his nose. The Mercury News is filled with an insightful piece about Don't Ask, Don't Tell, and CNN, FOX, and CNBC are all running segments on it throughout the morning: thoughtful, provocative pieces with artful lighting and hard contrasts, stock footage of boot camps and blurry interviews. Halfway through the morning news, ABC throws up a promo for a Barbara Walters interview later that day with a former Marine who is crying under her soft-focus lens, talking about how he couldn't take the lying.

Rodney flicks off the television but the soft, rubbery buttons on the remote make the whole experience completely unsatisfying, so he slams some books around until he can no longer ignore the crushing truth that it's Saturday, and that he's going to read the article again.

The interview branches off into a long treatise on the background of Don't Ask, Don't Tell, expert commentary, people from various universities quoting their pompous opinions, people on the ground being a lot more sober. Apparently everybody hates it, whether they are a red or blue state alcoholic during Election Night drinking games; conservatives want to outlaw gays in the military altogether, liberals think it's just codifying cruelty.

Rodney desperately wants somebody to start talking about the environment or midwifery for all he cares, because the only thing he can think about as long as this is on the air is that John Sheppard was kicked out of the Air Force for being a queer and then Rodney stole his car.

*

In 1991, Desert Storm began, Pete Rose got banned from the Baseball Hall of Fame, the Soviet Union collapsed, and Rodney McKay was framed for academic fraud.

He was a near the end of his first year as a post-doctoral student when he got a solemn phone call from his department heads, and when he showed up to the meeting there was a lot of yelling. They showed him his work, they indicated the inconsistencies. They pointed out the signed affidavits. They shook their heads.

"You're out of your minds," Rodney shouted, so angry that he could barely see straight. "Why would I falsify lab data? It's all in the computers--there're logs! yes">  You can check the time tables on the sim labs! You can check the computers! style='font-style: normal'> This is completely ridiculous."

He looked at the documents--photocopies, he thought dully, because they couldn't trust him with the originals, and that had been a blow, one he should have recognized as the beginning of the end--and stared at the accusations, type-written neatly. yes">  It was signed; Rodney could see a few indistinct swirls of handwriting beneath a piece of paper they'd taped over the signature when they'd Xeroxed the page.

They said, "Rodney--we'd like to believe you. But you have to prove it ."

Rodney was a cocky shit, so high on himself and his genius he could barely be bothered to remember names of other people who used what he considered is his lab, despite the fact that they'd been sharing office space for a year. He was careless and didn't lock his office door, his study carrel was open nearly twenty-four hours a day; he left everything everywhere. yes"> 

He gestured wildly and talked until he was hoarse. In the beginning, people did want to believe him. Rodney was the jewel of Berkeley's engineering program; there was no reason to lie about it and Rodney knew it's true. He was confident until he realized, after a few days of shuffling around, that he was missing things, notebooks, papers, tape recorded notes when his hands had hurt from writing. His computer's memory was fragmented and there were entire file trees deleted. yes">  The recovery programs he ran came up empty-handed--and that's when Rodney knew it was sabotage.

But Rodney had no evidence to back up his loud and ardent claims of being framed, and nobody would speak for him. When his faculty advisor shrugged helplessly and said, "You never checked in, Rodney--the last figures I have from you are from November of last year. yes">  I can't--there nothing I can do ," Rodney had to excuse himself to go throw up.

He ranted and he raved and he said that it was impossible, that there was no way, that his simulations were groundbreaking and that he was a genius and that they didn't want to lose him because the world would never see a mind the likes of his again.

It didn't go down quickly and clean like the shining blade of a guillotine--it drew out, over the course of months, very effectively destroying Rodney's reputation. He realized with a sinking certainty that there was no way he could disprove it. Paranoia set in during the third month, when he was down to shouting as loudly as he could against a review board of old men with lined faces, mouths set in a permanent frown.

Rodney had never regretted the way he treated people before he did a quick survey and realized almost everybody hated him to one degree or another, and that even at his lowest, people seemed to doubt his human credentials.

"I'm a physicist ," Rodney insisted. "I lack people skills."

"You're virulent ," some Asian girl with thick glasses had said, frowning. "And look, McKay, I'm sorry about this, but I can't help you. Nobody saw anything."

And just the way she said it, the way she covered up her own work, let Rodney know that there was no way out of this.

By the time they officially stripped him of his funding and his fellowship, discredited him completely, threw out his twenty-seven years of scholarship, Rodney had been dead inside for the whole week of procedural garbage leading up to the big event.

The hugeness of what happened fell away during the afternoon. By the time Rodney cleared out his office and turned in the keys to his study carrel and had his student ID cut up, it was nearly six. yes">  He was quiet when stepped into his apartment and closed the door, setting his box away. His other things were where they'd always been, messier than usual in the last three months' rush, and the sunlight still striped the floors orange and gray with shadows.

It was late winter, the creeping beginnings of spring like green leaves unfurling, and while the world woke up around him, Rodney crumbled to the floor of his apartment and folded up like a moth.

*

In 2003, the Bureau of Homeland Security officially opens for color-coded business, Rodney is quoted on CNBC three times during Squawk Box , the human genome project is completed, and members of the 82nd Airborne are deployed to help in Operation Warrior Sweep.

Rodney is cursed with an instantaneous interest in any news about the Air Force, and on July 29 he reads the Mercury News and scowls, thinks about Chinook helicopters, their spinning black blades, arcing into the blue sky.

The imagined image of them haunts him on his way to work Monday, as he rounds corners and moves down smooth, black asphalt, the Lexus purring beneath his hands, so that he thinks he can almost feel the vibration of the car in his chest. The Volvo, on the other hand, has three cross-country road-trips under its belt and it sputters and struggles, drags its feet a little, and Rodney has to coax it up steep hills, ease it out of park, like a rusty memory of which he's a little afraid and all too fond.

He should send the car to a junkyard, he decides, parking the Lexus at work. He should call somebody today, have it sent away.

And he's in the middle of flipping lazily through the Yellow Pages when Sandra from publicity knocks on his door, her bobbed, brown hair sticking to her face, cheeks red. yes">  Sandra likes to wear shortish skirts and open-toed shoes with chunky heels in earthy colors and always leaves Rodney notes to dress in bold colors or mute grays.

"Wired is here," she says. Sandra looks at him with mild distress. "Do you have any other clothes?"

"You said there wasn't going to be a photo session," Rodney complains, smoothing his green, button-up self-consciously. It's rolled up at the elbows and he's wearing old khakis. It's so bland it's almost fashionable, he thinks, but clearly Sandra disagrees. She ducks down to see him wearing worn, dusty Vans, and sighs.

"There isn't, but he'll write about what you're wearing," she says disagreeably, and before Rodney has an opportunity to argue that he can't see why anybody would write about what he's wearing, she says, "Do you want him in here or the conference room?"

"What do you suggest?" he asks sarcastically.

She rolls her eyes. "I'll send him right over," she says snippily, and pauses long enough to tell Rodney to tuck in his shirt before she speed-walks down the hall to reception. yes"> 

Rodney has about six things in his e-mail inbox from people who want him to point out this or that during the interview, a reminder from Kavanagh about emphasizing their continued dedication to a consumer-based market. Rodney sneers at all of it, because he remembers that when he came to California, service was the very last thing on his mind: he was furious and miserable and out to make a name for himself.

Rodney hears a hum of voices growing louder in the hallway and puts the Yellow Pages away, kicks them under a shelf and shuts down a few spreadsheets of sensitive fiscal data, scans the room to check for points of possible interest for technological espionage and spends twenty very uncool seconds trying to arrange himself in a cool way in his seat.

He settles for meeting Bob Haskins from Wired at the doorway of his office.

"You guys going to be hostile and standoffish today, Bob?" Rodney hears himself saying.

"Aw, you know me, Rodney, am I ever hostile and standoffish?" Bob says, and he's taking Rodney's hand, shaking it firmly.

"I remember the IPO," Rodney says, and waves Bob into the room.

Over the phone, earlier that week, when Bob had been calling around to the last survivors of the original boom, he'd said, "Are you gonna have your panties in a knot about the audit story forever? I'm a reporter, Rodney--I cover it, you hate me, I don't, you hate me anyway. yes">  Don't be a jerk and pencil me in Monday."

"And so does everybody else who has ever come into contact with you," Bob grumbles, good-natured. yes">  Bob is almost nice enough that Rodney would spend time with him if Bob wasn't an asshole who had put Swing Technologies on the front page with a red headline that said, SWING SINKS . Rodney doesn't know what pisses him off more, that Bob Haskins nearly sank his IPO, or that Rodney had been so busy having an apoplectic fit of rage over the news that he had walked into a street sweeper and ended up hobbling around on crutches for a month.

"As long as we're commencing with pleasantries," Rodney says, rolling his eyes and settling into his seat again and raising his eyebrows in question. "Fire away."

*

When Rodney was taking driver's ed in high school, the goon of a football coach had never said anything along the lines of, "Don't drive while having a mental breakdown. yes">  It does things to the mind." yes">  When Rodney had been in high school, he'd been thirty-five pounds overweight and wore Coke bottle glasses and he hadn't been the most brightly burning star of anybody's graduate program, so nobody really bothered to say anything to him period.

There had probably been some sort of pedantic warning about being focused and alert but relaxed while driving, not that Rodney had listened to it, and he was starting to regret his oversight around the time the light post in his windshield got big enough to be life size.

He woke up with a trickle of blood running into his eye and the feeling like he'd just compounded his problems, hissing in pain at the piercing beam of a flashlight.

"Ow, oh my God," he moaned, trying to move before he felt a meaty hand on his shoulder.

"I wouldn't do that, son," rumbled a deep, rolling voice, and Rodney winced and opened his eyes enough to see the blurry shape of a man in a completely ridiculous baseball cap. yes">  Over his shoulder, Rodney saw rain, like yellow static against the purple haze of sky.

"Name's Trooper Joe," the man said, feeling around Rodney's neck and shoulders in a way that was hugely invasive and totally uncomfortable. "You drove into a lightpost, kid. You'll be fine. We're just gonna gurney you to the hospital to be safe."

"Fantastic," Rodney slurred. "Great."

"Hey, good attitude," Trooper Joe said, only half-joking, and then straightened up to wave over the EMS workers, their jackets slick with rain.

An atrociously bumpy ambulance ride later, the EMS workers are a lot less polite about shoving him onto a bed in the ER.

Rodney thought it was incredibly unfair for health care workers to take issue with a patient suffering from a little not-unusual paranoia about their medical condition, especially given the reckless way that they were driving. On three occasions, the turn signal had been on barely a second before Rodney had been brutally jerked around in the back of the ambulance.

"You're strapped down," one of the medics had said to him sourly.

"Isn't that an indication that it's bad if I can still feel it?" Rodney had demanded.

"I don't think you actually have a concussion," the medic had said, frowning.

Eventually, a teenager pretending to be a doctor showed up to clean and stitch up Rodney's profusely-bleeding head wound, but between the paperwork and foul-ups and the exhausted ER staffers, by the time Rodney was ready to leave, nobody was ready for him to go.

"What's taking so long?" Rodney asked for the fourth time. "You guys have like, sixty people waiting--just get rid of me already!"

"This will just take a second, Mr. McKay," snapped the girl behind the desk. She looked twenty years old, tops, in cloth pants and a black sweater, hair red-gold and curling at her shoulders, nose dotted with brown freckles. She also looked like she was about to leap through the scarred plexiglass divider and kill Rodney with her bare hands.

"I'll just wait then," he said.

"That's very good," she agreed, and turned back to her hopelessly outdated computer, it's nauseating, alien-green DOS-based medical system.

When Rodney went and sat down in one of the creaky, uncomfortable waiting room chairs, it was next to a guy with a large, horrible cut at the corner of his mouth, a cut on his cheek, matted, messy, dark hair. His eyes were open and he was staring straight ahead. Rodney looked at his hands: one in a wrist cast, the other was clutching a white paper bag, which rattled and crackled when he shifted his legs. Pills, Rodney thought, and with a careful, cursory glance at the man's face again, revised that to pain pills.

"You done staring?" the man asked, suddenly turning around to cock one dark brow at Rodney.

His eyes were very, very green.

"I was justÉ" Rodney trailed off.

The man smiled, and it must have hurt like hell, the way it turned into a grimace. "Yeah."

Rodney straightened his back, feeling his heart racing. He looked at the plexiglass booth again, where somebody else was now pressed up against the counter, bending down to ask questions into the speaker as loudly as possible. The red-haired girl was waving a file and shouting something indistinct, her mouth wide. All around him, people were miserable and bleeding and smelled bad. There was a teenaged couple in the corner blushing six shades of red, though there was nothing outwardly wrong with them, and Rodney couldn't help but to have a mean chuckle at their expense.

"What're you in for?"

It took Rodney a whole thirty seconds to process who had said it, and when he did and turned around to catch those green, green eyes again, they weren't quite so green anymore, shuttered behind thick lashes and a bruised, tired face.

"I got into a car accident," Rodney said. "What about you?"

The man shrugged up. yes">  "I asked for it," he said quietly, and asked, "How're you getting home?"

Rodney hadn't actually thought about that yet. His car was, presumably, somewhere far away and completely useless to him. yes">  There had to be a bus stop somewhere, pay phone, taxi service.

"I was going to call a car, why?" Rodney asked.

"I'm John," the man said. "Sheppard. John Sheppard." He sounded like he was trying out the name for the first time, and then, in much more practiced English, said, "Anyway, I got this broken wrist and this car somebody dropped off at the hospital I'm not gonna be driving with it."

Rodney blinked at him. yes">  "You want me to drive you home?"

"Drive yourself," John invited. "As long as I can pass out in the side seat."

And then the red-haired girl called John over, flashed him a much more sympathetic smile than she'd been offering anybody else in the room, and waved him off. Rodney watched John's long legs, the slight limp, the way he was folded in on himself. Rodney was torn between getting the hell out of the hospital and the potential for being murdered on the side of the road by a whacko just off on parole.

When John shuffled back to his spot next to Rodney, though, Rodney looked at his messy hair and tired face and the way he held his wrist close to his chest and thought, I'm being an asshole.

So Rodney got his papers and he and John whipped up a couple of grade A lies about being best buds and giving one another rides so the redheaded Nazi running the desk would let them leave. Next thing Rodney knew, he was sitting in the driver's seat of a blue Ô84 Volvo sedan, watching John sleep in the passenger seat.

When he looked into the rearview window, he saw boxes filled with clothes, books, a toothbrush and a towel, all haphazardly packed and spilling out across the seat and it made something in his chest ache.

*

"They're great plans, Rodney," Bob Haskins says, his smile a little painful in the burning sun of a San Jose afternoon.

Kavanagh says it's petty, but Rodney has his desk backlit by the window for a reason. Ever since he realized that everybody was shark, Rodney had learned to take any advantage offered. If Bob Haskins is unfortunately blinded as a result, it's just collateral damage. He can't even fake that he's gotten over the IPO Incident.

"It can't all be standing on the shoulders of giants," Rodney says.

Haskins laughs, jots it down. He taps his pen--a cheap Bic, all bitten-up at the ends--and looks up with mild curiosity as he asks, "Oh, yeah, I've been fielding questions from Hollywood editorial, so feel free not to answer."

Haskins says it in a way that conveys all the distaste in just a few syllables, and Rodney admires that about him.

"Lay it on me," Rodney says generously.

"Apparently you're one of the most eligible bachelors in Silicon Valley," Haskins says sarcastically. "We looking at a potential Melinda to play to your Bill soon?"

Rodney stares for a long time, and cannot help but think of John's long fingers, the obnoxious, bright-yellow cast it'd taken Rodney nearly a week to register as obnoxiously bright-yellow, and night driving, the way highways fanned out across blue, blue nothing.

He says, "I drove into a light post, once."

Haskins stares at him for a good two minutes before he crosses something out on the pad and says, "We'll just pretend the interview ended about five minutes ago. How about that?"

"Sounds like a good idea," Rodney agrees. He and Haskin's go through the pleasantries of saying good bye, have fun, let's never do this again.

For lunch, he orders an extra-large mushroom and sausage pizza that he eats in his office, getting grease spots all over the tech specs for the new servers they're considering for their next upgrade. Black, unsexy boxes are now mottled with spots and smears of tomato red, and Rodney ignores the way that everybody in the office stops at the doorway to his broken cube and gives him a hang-dog expression. Sandra comes by to drop off some interesting articles, pats him on the arm, and says, "It's okay, Rodney. It's nice when men have some girth. Soft-contact and all."

Rodney glares at her until she leaves, and then forces himself to get through half of the pizza before he trashes the rest and starts a crusade for Tums.

He reaches to the back of his desk where the half-empty container of antacids is barricaded next to a dusty box of paperclips and pricks himself on a few stray tacks, throwbacks to an era where people had corkboards for more than desired interior-design themes. Rodney shakes out three tablets and mouths the pink and green and yellow discs, tasting a hideous, chalky fruit melee in his mouth as he pushes himself out of his seat, wanders around his office for a few minutes looking at things he's seen every day for three years now. Same gray couch, same glass table. Same style-conscious Silicon Valley chic.

Rodney always gets his (best) worst ideas when he's reevaluating his life, and he's studying some glass award he won when his brain suddenly reminds him that Newsweek still has a website.

The online version of Newsweek style='font-style: normal'>, not constrained by page number and layout, has a gallery of photographs in addition to the tiny, not-flattering upper-body shot in the print edition. Rodney doesn't know why they bothered to put up extra pictures of a math teacher until he clicks on the link for the high resolution images and finds that John is still as unbearably attractive as he was nearly a decade ago--in a completely different way.

The first time Rodney met John, he was all green eyes and fucked up vulnerability, hard to pin down and easy to imprint on; bruised in places Rodney couldn't see and didn't really want to. The John Sheppard in the photographs Newsweek has uploaded is smiling and golden from being outdoors, in comfortably wrinkled clothes. There's an absentminded feeling about him that's completely new, a softening of all of the military edges Rodney remembers so clearly.

It's amazing what a decade, fifteen pounds, and a couple of million dollars will do for your perspective, Rodney thinks ruefully, mousing over John's shoes, scuffed and dusty and utterly lacking in pretension.

Rodney knows it's irrational to obsess over this. There are nine years and three thousand miles between the person he is now and the scared kid he used to be, and there are some mistakes too huge to fix, their edges too broad and pressed so flat against the landscape of reality it's impossible to pull them up, scrape them from existence.

*

Rodney drove to his own apartment listening to John's thready breath in the passenger seat. yes">  At red lights he looked to his right, narrowed his eyes, traced the lines and bleeding yellows and greens of an aging bruise that haloed John's mouth, puffy and beaten red like an overripe fruit. In the pinking light of early morning, John looked tiny, curled up in the seat of the Volvo, hands fisted and unnaturally still in his lap, legs loose, body limber--he was sprawling and still took up no space at all.

The sky boxed in the fingerprinted glass behind John's head was pink and yellow and made Rodney think of grapefruit and sunshine--California citrus, tart and acid sweet on his tongue like sour candies from when Rodney was a kid, before the first shock of terror when his throat had closed around the sun-sweet burn of an orange. yes">  He tightened his hands on the steering wheel of the car and stared across the parking lot of his apartment building, at the dilapidated Hondas and gleaming luxury sports cars, at the jagged white of cheap paint lines on black and uneven asphalt and felt like his whole world was coming apart at the seams.

When Rodney had been younger, he'd actually passed out once in an effort to evade flesh-eating monsters. He'd been eight and cocooned so tightly in his sheets and blankets and layers of pilfered afghans and fleece throws from around his house that his shield against sharp teeth and gleaming, yellow eyes only compounded the suffocating heat and density of darkness trapping him. He remembered a single, dizzy moment before he'd fainted under the weight of his own paranoia: damning and black and lightless, like he was at the bottom of the Earth.

Years later and he was at the bottom of the Earth all over again, and even if the sky was melting into the colors of candy necklaces he remembered from his little sister's seventh birthday party, all he could feel was his chest heaving for breath and not finding any.

Rodney had always been able to see--differently than anybody else he'd ever known, in dimensions other people had trouble imagining. So the fantastic and impossible and unreal for most became math for him, numbers streaming through his mind and from his hands onto paper and chalkboards and into computer programs, resolving into graphical expressions, patterns, the absence of both. Ever since Rodney had been able to think he'd been able to see and that had made all the difference, made him exceptional.

And since Rodney had always been exceptional, he'd always had a plan, and sitting in a parking lot after being expelled for academic fraud with a beaten-up kid in the passenger seat had never been part of it.

He didn't know where to go or what to do and he'd always been bad at taking advice from anybody on any subject; on top of everything else, his car was likely in three pieces already at a junkyard. If it started raining Rodney would swear he'd stepped out of reality and into the set of a fucking after-school special on the dangers of hubris and not locking your office door.

The most agonizing part was how he couldn't compartmentalize, how if he tried to take one small step toward organizing his thoughts an avalanche of worries fell down instead, and he'd go still and shocked with desperation all over again, like that cold-sweat moment just before judgment had come before the panel at Berkeley.

Any and all of his attempts at rational thought between the hospital and his apartment parking lot had only resulted in more near-misses with inanimate objects littering the roadside and Rodney was fucking sick of the ER. At this rate, he'd be driving home with a toothless prostitute the next go-round.

In the absence of all other options, Rodney reached and started to shake John awake, which was exactly when John's eyes snapped open in naked horror and grabbed Rodney's wrist hard enough to snap it, eyes wild.

"Hi," Rodney said.

John stared at him.

"Oh God, you really are a recently-paroled psychopath," Rodney said, feeling doomed. "I always have that little voice in the back of my head and it always gives me such good advice and I just never listen to it style='font-style: normal'>."

John blinked, and his fingers, tight to bruising on Rodney's wrist started to loosen.

"Hi," John said, not letting go. "You were--"

"Touching your shoulder in a totally innocent way," Rodney said, looking into John's eyes, which were almost as green and bruised as his face.

"Okay," John said quietly, and pried his fingers off of Rodney's hand, like it took real effort.

"What the hell is wrong with you?" Rodney demanded, snatching his hand back to his chest, rubbing his wrist bone delicately and scowling. "What the hell was that?"

John fisted his hand and put it on his knee and curled in even tighter on himself, all but pulling his knees up to his chest in a perch on the seat.

"Sorry," John said feebly, and closed his eyes and looked so young Rodney's stomach lurched. "I didn't mean--sorry."

"Seriously, what--" Rodney started to ask, and stopped himself, because the way John looked it wasn't good and it couldn't be a good story, and honest to God, thanks for the ride in the car, but Rodney was too busy with his own life ending to care too much about anybody else.

"Um," Rodney started again, "I'm at my apartment, so."

"Thanks for the ride out of the hospital," John said after a brief silence, eyes still closed.

"Hey, no problem," Rodney said weirdly.

Rodney went inside and ate a sandwich, drank a pot of coffee and tried to sleep. He stormed around his apartment. He threw around his books, his research, a lifetime worth of effort that was better used as kindling now, and every time he walked past his window he saw the blue Volvo, still parked in front of his building and thought he could see John, slumped over in the passenger seat, holding his wrist close to his chest, eyes closed, with lashes throwing long, delicate shadows on his cheeks.

It made him feel even more helpless than before to be sitting in his dead, beige box and to know John was out there, too broken to drive and asleep, cold and still in the passenger seat. Rodney couldn't shake the thought that John looked the way Rodney felt--

Which didn't exactly explain how, a few minutes later, Rodney was sliding into the driver's seat of John's car again. Glancing at the rearview mirror, he caught the outline of his duffle bag and a stack of books in the backseat, cozy next to all of John's spilled-out possessions, littering the upholstery with science journals and physics texts and commingled, deserted lives.

An hour later, when John woke up from his dead sleep, Rodney was driving on a dark gray road along the beach, and the sun was warm against the back of his head.

"You're up," Rodney said matter-of-factly.

John blinked, twisted his head around. And Rodney saw the way John's face was pale and shining in the light, saw the sun flashing off of the uneven surface of the ocean, the hem of white beaches and the ramshackle line of blurring stores and people along the sides of the road just as John turned to stare at Rodney and say:

"You went inside," John said, face soft and confused.

"And then I came back out," Rodney said easily, drumming his fingers on the wheel, feeling something curl in his chest, impatient and wound tight--anticipating. He eyed John from the corner of his eyes, and asked, "You have anywhere you have to be?"

John stared at him for a moment before he opened his mouth and said, "No, not really."

Rodney squinted into the sun, leaned forward into the wheel, looked at the road stretched out ahead, dotted by signs and lights turning red, his foot easing down on the brake.

"You have anywhere to go?" Rodney asked, a little too bluntly, and he didn't get around to regretting it before John said, "No," and stared out of the windshield.

The thing was, Rodney knew, there was no reason to stay and he had no way to go and that he and John were in the same boat in this: wearing all their disappointments. yes"> He felt the engine roll over in the car, the purr of it, his palms damp on the steering wheel and Rodney had to be the worst carjacker ever--lonely enough to ask if John would come with him if he ran away.

"I was thinking," Rodney said, because caution was for people who had something to lose, "about movies." He waved his hand. yes">  "Heroes always ride off into the sunset at the end."

John looked at him for a moment before he cracked a smile, and it was small and tentative but very real, and the interior of the car brightened by degrees with it until John turned to look out of the driver's side window, at the ocean gilded by sun and licking against the white beach.

"Looks like we're out of west," he said, and he put his palm on his window and Rodney watched the sunlight fracture between his opened fingers, through the glass.

"Looks like it," Rodney admitted, and imagined that he heard the ocean, the waves pushing toward them, drowning blue and cold.

John's hand was steady when he reached, palm curving over the steering wheel, smoothing over Rodney's fingers, and flicking the turn signal--left.

"We're not exactly heroes anyway," John said.

The light turned green and Rodney grinned. "East it is," he murmured.

*

Rodney's apartment isn't really his own.

The dŽcor is an expensive designer original. He had the lighting created by some epileptic guy from what Rodney thinks was probably Sweden, but couldn't really tell. The paintings are all chosen by his housekeeper. He's almost never home and everything still has its new car feel; a little too glossy and nice. And the only things that look battered are his collection of Heinlein books from when he was in middle school and hated everybody, all the pieces of his life from before he started living this new one.

The point is, sometimes Rodney digs around his kitchen for what feels like hours before he finds a cheese grater or a bowl or God forbid he discover a fork amidst the melon ballers.

So it's half past eleven at night and Rodney cannot--find--a--corkscrew.

Last Christmas Swing had one of those obnoxious Christmas parties with a theme. Christmas in Napa Valley, which Rodney found abhorrent and unnatural on principle.

"It's Christmas, " he'd said. "You have to have cold--ice--snow, even, that's the whole point. "

"Some of us were not raised in Yukon," Radek had said snippily, and added an extra pieces of tinsel to the fake palm tree in the break area with such delicate, fairy-like grace that Rodney had wondered if all those earthy, unshaven women Radek dated were really just sublimated homosexual desires screaming for attention. yes">  "I like Christmas in California. yes">  It is artsy."

"So is Santa's village," Rodney had snapped, and as Maureen the receptionist had wandered past carrying fake elves with sunglasses on he'd moaned. "Please tell I hallucinated that."

"Elizabeth made those," Radek had said tightly.

"Look," Rodney had pleaded. "You've grown up with some gross perversion of Christmas that involves sunshine and fruits that aren't petrified in alcohol and I'm sorry but it's wrong . This is a cycle of abuse that cannot go on. I'll buy a tree, a real one, with needles and pine sap that gets everywhere and for added authenticity," Rodney had offered, "I'll get a snowblower--we'll make snowballs and I won't even put rocks in them. What do you say?"

By community vote, everybody said no and they'd had the revolting Napa Valley Christmas with Napa Valley wines in an artificially constructed vineyard in an old hangar. yes">  The final insult had been when the party planners had vastly overestimated how much programmers could drink and they'd ended up with four extra crates of wine, which Rodney had decided earlier that night to start hating on principle.

But he's all about breaking promises and destroying principle so he was attacking a bottle lifted out of a crate of sunny Chardonnays, a bottle that he--just--cannot--open.

Rodney also has a ridiculously expensive, genuine Swiss Army Knife. And he would totally use the corkscrew attachment on said ridiculously expensive genuine Swiss Army Knife if it weren't for the fact that it hurts his soft white hands. It really drives in the point that no matter how old he gets, he's always going to be that guy who ruined the senior class play because his weak wrists made him drop one of the sandbags during the final scene in Inherit the Wind .

"Ow, ow, ow," Rodney hisses and he flings it hatefully across the kitchen, glaring at where the knife and all its utterly useless attachments land.

"This is so ridiculous," Rodney mutters, and digs a dime out of a dish of change on the counter and pulls a pen out of his shirt pocket and takes the bottle onto his balcony.

Rodney's bio major roommates threw a Halloween party during their junior year of undergrad, and halfway through opening the first bottle of wine they'd managed to break the screwdriver. Apparently the only thing worse than applying too much force to a problem is applying ten guys from the engineering department--by the end of the night they had a fucking Goldberg Machine rigged that still no wine.

And then Rodney's then-fuckbuddy had rolled his eyes, pulled out a dime and a pen and wobbled outside on their doorstep where he put the dime on the cork and started banging the hell out of it with the pen, pressing downward until the head went under the glass mouth of the bottle.

"Oh, God, I'm too old for this," Rodney says to himself, and it's true--he is, but it says something that he hasn't moved past it.

So he spends twenty minutes popping the cork into the bottle and then he drinks and spits out all the little pieces of soft wood pulp that got mixed into the stuff for his efforts.

He wakes up the next morning with a roaring headache and a very bad idea.

"Tell me not to chase snipes," Rodney says into his car phone, wearing dark shades and wincing at the morning cacophony of honking on the freeway an hour later. "Tell me chasing adolescent dreams is a bad idea."

"Actually," Radek starts.

"Nevermind!" Rodney snaps and tightens his free hand around the wheel, clutching his fingers tightly around the cell phone at his ear. "Just tell me the progress we're making."

*

The answer to Rodney's question is: more than expected. Despite frequent forays into the generalized office space that reveal more employees engaged in fragging the hell out of the guys in the IT department and programmers on erotic fan fiction websites than those that reveal actual work, somehow, they are ahead of schedule on the updates to the new Swing payment system. It will be more streamlined, more secure, and hopefully more user-friendly. yes">  Or it will be, as soon as Dan stops writing all the commands on the buttons in 1337 to entertain himself and baffle the business administrators who wander by and ask stupid questions like, "What does PWN mean?"

"What does that even mean?" Rodney asks, confused. "Ahead of schedule?"

"I did not think it really existed," Radek says, awed.

"But what does it mean? " Rodney insists, and all of his employees leave in disgust.

When the conference room is empty and quiet and the only people left in the room are Rodney and Radek and the terribly ravished pastry tray between them on the table, Radek clears his throat and says, "I think that it means you have time for a vacation."

Rodney blinks. yes">  "What would I do on vacation?" he asks, and it's horrifying to realize he's only half-kidding when he expresses uncertainty as to what one does with free time.

Radek grins. yes">  "Maybe you should, you know--chase snipes, pursue adolescent dreams."

Rodney points at him. yes">  "Do not start with me," he says, though his head is already laying out a road map, of grid of streets like blue and red snakes wearing interstate signs, the topographic ridges and planes of the Southwest and Rocky Mountains, of tornado alley and the cradle of Creole and Zydeco music.

"There is also the added benefit of your no longer terrifying random staff members with your dyspeptic personality," Radek says diplomatically and smiles.

In a moment of unanticipated and uncomfortable honesty, Rodney says, "I've--aged past the point where I think indulging in adolescent fantasies is romantic." He pauses. "It's just kind of pathetic now."

Radek raises an eyebrow. "If you are waiting for me to talk you out of it you are out of luck."

"I'm going to ruin my life," Rodney complains. "All over again."

"You cannot ruin your life," Radek explains to him patiently. "Your life is wrapped up in Swing, which is bad commitment to make, anyway. You drive bland car and you do not date and there is persistent rumor about you and hookers--" Radek stares him in the eyes intensely and Rodney imagines if he hadn't made that rule about touching him, Radek might be gripping his shoulders "--you do not have life to ruin."

Rodney stares. yes">  "Is that supposed to make me feel better?"

"No," Radek says. yes">  "It is supposed to make you feel bad enough to do something different."

"My life is fine," Rodney protests feebly.

Radek sighs, beleaguered. "Rodney, we are really not good enough friends for us to do deep, emotional, go seek your dreams things for a very long time," he says.

"I should fire you," Rodney tells him.

Radek gathers up his files and shuffles them together. He gives Rodney one of those looks, thoughtful and far too smart, that make Rodney fidget in his seat, shuffle a few PR statements on the table in front of him, wish to be anywhere but empty-handed and middle-aged in the Swing conference room.

"What?" Rodney finally snaps. Radek looks like he's about to offer one of those unbearable truths. If this was a movie, the music would be breaking, crashing over the scene.

"No, really," Radek says instead. "Is thing about hookers true?"

Rodney says, "Okay, so I'm going to Pennsylvania."

Radek grins. yes">  "Good," he says, and leaves.

Rodney can't remember how he got to be so easily manipulated.

*

The Volvo was curving around the San Francisco Bay by the time Rodney had his first of what would be six separate panic attacks before they ever managed to get out of the state.

"Oh my God, what am I doing?" Rodney squeaked at the next red light. "I'm ruining my life ."

"You're in Oakland ," John said, bewildered.

"Oh my God, I'm in Oakland style='font-style: normal'>," Rodney wailed, his knuckles white on the steering wheel. "I'm in Oakland and I'm going to die ."

"You're not going to die in Oakland."

Rodney couldn't know for sure, but it felt like John was smirking at him in an unambiguously shit-eating way.

"Look, this felt really cool and rebellious when I was in still in Berkeley, but now that I am a significant number of miles away, I am starting to think that not only was this poorly-planned this is poorly-executed," Rodney said, voice getting squeakier with every word. It wasn't just the mileage--though he watched that scroll by and felt his mouth getting drier with every passing number--it was the sinking realization he was going to die in Oakland in a Volvo .

"Okay, let's do this logically, then," John said, too-reasonably. "Why are you going to die in Oakland?"

"I've been expelled out of my Ph.D program! My life is over!" Rodney snaps, digging his nails into the steering wheel and darting a glare over at John from the corner of his eyes. "I'm one of the most brilliant minds of my generation and no university is ever going to want me ever again because some fuckhead at Berkeley fucked me over and I've been fucked incredibly hard ."

"But none of it means you'll die in Oakland," John said soothingly.

Rodney stewed in silence for a while. "Maybe it means I'll drive into a highway divider."

"I'm going to have to register a complaint if you do," John told him. "It's my car."

"You told me to drive," Rodney argued. "I should be able to drive into a divider if I want."

"I told you to drive because I can't. I'm told narcotic painkillers and cars don't mix well."

Rodney got the distinct impression that if John didn't have a broken wrist and they weren't in a moving vehicle, John would be prying his fingers from the steering wheel, like talking him down from a ledge.

"Of course you're happy," Rodney said bitterly. "You style='font-style: normal'> have a broken wrist. You probably have lots of broken things and so they gave you painkillers to mute the crush of reality. I wrapped my car around a light pole--oh my God , I wrapped my car around a light pole--and they gave me Motrin."

John winces in the passenger seat. "Is there any way we can continue this conversation when we're not in the middle of a highway?" he asked desperately.

Which was how they ended up at an Exxon station, parked near the air pump so Rodney could put his head against the steering wheel and moan pitifully. It wasn't really just that his entire career was over and could have no hope of being salvaged, and all things considered dying in Oakland could really be the least of his troubles. Eventually his landlord was going to find his abandoned apartment and unpaid rent and pawn everything worth money and burn the rest--it was only a passing comfort that most of Rodney's stuff would be burned. yes">  Beyond that, his name would be bandied about at conferences and meets where physicists all but masturbated in one another's general direction; Rodney had been a big enough loser in high school to accept private or overlooked humiliation, but he had a sinking feeling that large enough groups of people hated him to warrant some sort of panel on his debasement.

"Oh my God--they're going to put up slides ," Rodney said feebly into the wheel.

"Of your death in Oakland?" John said uncertainly.

"It's hopeless," Rodney said blandly. "He's going to burn everything I owned and then they're going to put up slides and undergraduates are going to whisper my name for years to come."

"If it makes you feel any better," John comforted him, "I got kicked out of the Air Force."

Rodney considered it for a while. "Enlisted?"

"No." John raised his eyebrows. "Isn't the whole point of the Air Force getting the fly the planes?"

"God," Rodney hisses. yes">  "God. What are we doing?"

It ended up being the question that kept them both silent and stunned at the air pump for another half hour before somebody honked up the fury of God behind them and they rolled out onto the street again. By then, the sky was coloring orange and pink again, clouds going thoughtful purple and the edges of sky the color of bruises, and Rodney watched the street lights come on one by one as they drove through Oakland, silently down familiar highways. And the vertigo of whatever the hell they were doing was so breathlessly terrifying Rodney couldn't bear to imagine what it'd be like when they left California--when Nevada was wide and red under the blue sky overhead and the desert rolled like a huge, stranger continent beneath the wheels of the car.

*

The first time Rodney ran away from home he was six, furious with his parents for denying him the latest G.I. Joe. He lasted all of twenty minutes before he got bored playing with the snow behind the house and came in for hot chocolate with marshmallows.

The second time, he was twenty-seven, and John had been asleep in the car, his face bruised and too-thin, and they'd crawled across highways and watched dozens and dozens of sunrises. Rodney had tossed his most valued possessions into the backseat of a car and gone, because there hadn't been any reason to stay and dealing with the fallout was always more frightening than starting over.

Now, he was nearer to forty than fourteen and he felt like he was listening to Zepplin on repeat, severe beats and ethereal melody, like a movie soundtrack as the car rolled over asphalt, down US1, into the dim, misty blue.

"This really is the most terrible idea ever in the history of terrible ideas," Rodney tells himself in the empty car, foot still on the gas.

He did a Google search before he left. John has won five (5) math awards and has a chili pepper next to his name on RateMyProfessor.com and about 46 billion college girls and 89 billion college boys commenting on how breathtakingly hot he is when he's explaining nonlinear algebra and how they would clean his chalkboards anytime. He is also a member of the faculty softball team--which, according to their stats page, sucks-- but it says something about how the advent of time doesn't change everything that Rodney still, still, still finds it painfully endearing.

It's as if now that he's broken his inertia he can't stop. He has a wallet full of credit cards and $8.97 cents in cash and a cell phone in his pocket and he's driving toward Pennsylvania. He's not even sure where Carnegie Mellon is, or what he'll say when he gets there, but all he can think is the first time he drove this way, away from the sunset and on to morning.

*

They stopped at the last rest station inside the California state line and had a brief period of negotiations, where John asked if Rodney wanted a paper bag or something and Rodney put his head between his knees and said he was fine.

"You don't look fine," John told him.

"I am completely okay," Rodney said, more to convince himself than anything else. His voice was muffled by the cloth of his pants stretched over his knees.

"Well, I'm reassured," John said sarcastically. "Look, we're not that far out--we can head back into Berkeley, if you want. yes">  We'll even figure out a way not to pass through Oakland so you won't drive my car into a median."

Rodney pushed himself back into a sitting position and snarled, "I'm never going back there."

John raised his eyebrows. "All right. So where do you want to go."

"I thought we decided on east," Rodney said feebly. He was trying not to think too hard about all of this, but it was harder than it should have been for somebody of his staggering intellect.

"East's kind of big," John said, indicating all of the possible east out there by motioning vaguely left, which made Rodney's stomach take an uncomfortably nauseated turn.

He'd planned out his entire life his entire life, and this sudden vertigo of wild, wide opportunity was horrifying, like the Earth dropping out beneath his feet--he hadn't even gotten around to processing the fact that this was forever, that no school would ever take him again, that for the rest of his life, he'd be a story they told overly-ambitious grad students, that he'd be smeared forever. He must have gone whiter than before because suddenly John was saying, "Okay, so head back at the knees," and was shoving Rodney's face down with his uninjured hand.

"So," Rodney said brightly, face still squashed into his knees. "Where east should we go?"

"You done freaking out?" John asked skeptically.

"No," Rodney said easily, and added, "But if we stay here and I keep staring at California all I'm going to think about is whether or not I can take parts from your car and make a rocket launcher to obliterate Berkeley off the face of the Earth."

"Well I've always been really fond of Savannah," John said quickly.

There was only one more freak out between the picnic tables and the car where Rodney made moaning noises about his blood sugar and their tragic deaths. John rolled his eyes--which seem, to Rodney, less green with every glance--and stuck his good hand into Rodney's pocket, pulling out three quarters to buy him a pack of Hostess Sno-Balls from the battered vending machines. "I'm deathly allergic to citrus," Rodney warned John as he passed over the crackling plastic-wrapped snack cakes. "Did you know that I'm deathly allergic to citrus?" And John had only made a face and said, "When was the last time you saw a pink lemon?" before Rodney had shouted, "Well this could be pink grapefruit flavored!"

Three hours out of California Rodney realized they were driving vaguely in the direction of Las Vegas and cursed under his breath. "Armpit of America," he muttered.

"I thought that was Jersey," John argued.

"You were misinformed," Rodney told him tersely.

"I still want to see it," John said.

"Well, we're not going!" Rodney snapped.

But then John hunched down in his seat and made a face that might have been a pout during better times and Rodney said, "Oh for fucks sake ," and "We've only known each other for like five hours and you're already--!" and "Fine, fine. "

And an hour later, he'd been glad he'd caved, because with every successive mile out of California John seemed to unwind, his shoulders loosening until he was nearly sprawled out in the passenger seat. Rodney figured if they were both runaways and rejects, at least one of them should be happy about it and as it certainly wasn't going to be him, he was glad to see John at least was getting over being backhanded by the U.S. Military. By the time they'd reached Nevada, John seemed almost happy.

It was late and Rodney's eyes were starting to cross, so he vetoed all of John's suggestions--gambling, drinking, going to see the pyramid--and checked them into a Motel 8 where they'd proceeded to fall asleep like it was going out of style. yes">  And John collapsed into his uncomfortable bed so easily that Rodney could hardly believe this was the same guy who'd nearly snapped his wrist yesterday when Rodney had touched his shoulder, to be sleeping so soft-faced and worry-free with only a scarred night table between them.

If Rodney woke up during the course of the night to see the bathroom light on and hear John throwing up violently, gasping for breath and making noises that sounded suspiciously like crying, he just closed his eyes and turned away because they were both guys here, and it wasn't like Rodney didn't know the rules of the game.

Later, they found themselves at Bar 911, which was smoky and seedy and really down market. yes">  Despite proximity and largely due to a lack of friends, Rodney hadn't ever been to Vegas, and the bright lights of America's playground had been a little overwhelming. John was still light-sensitive and it was as good an excuse as anything for them to drive down the strip and stare open-mouthed at the Bellagio, at the enormous pyramids, and then at one another before going elsewhere.

There was a game on the television and John was cheering for the guys in red, which meant a whole lot of nothing to Rodney. But it lifted the sense of inevitable doom from John's shoulders, so Rodney humored him and sank into his second beer of the evening, picking at the congealed cheese at the bottom of a basket of decimated cheese fries.

"Oh, shit! yes">  Rodney did you see that pass?" John asked, red-faced and bright-eyed. It was a good look on him, slightly glazed on a glass of cheap brew.

Rodney made a face at him and flicked some cold cheese at John's face.

"Nasty!" John laughed, nudged Rodney in the shoulder, and turned back to the game just as the ESPN commentators came back on with their blurred voices, dim over the noise of the crowd.

Rodney hadn't ever been to Vegas but it was hard to be knee-deep in academia and give bars a pass, so he knew the crowd like a template of disreputable figures. yes">  Near the jukebox were two mildly underaged females, stupid drunk and laughing their asses off at the alcoholic wonder of it all, hanging at the edges of the counter, still shy and waiting to be caught. At the other end there was a guy who looked like the bar stool had his ass-grooves on it; Rodney had more than one professor who'd held office hours at dives like these. There were the flamboyant drunks and the mean drunks and the lonely sports fans who did the same thing they'd do at home at a bar to feel less alone, and Rodney could help but smirk at John's shining face as he basked in the glow of the television. The only drawback of running away from home: no game access.

When they'd crossed the California-Nevada border, John had read the San Jose Mercury-News' science and technology section to Rodney, and as a compromise, Rodney had allowed him to explain football.

John talked about football like it was a holy thing, explaining in surprisingly lucid English why it was the best thing since and possibly surpassing sliced bread.

"Next you're going to tell me it was the only thing you and your father connected on and that it holds a special place in your heart because of Sunday afternoon catch," Rodney had snapped, though with less bite than he'd intended. It was pointless being mad at John; he didn't notice or didn't care and it always withered Rodney's enthusiasm for meanness.

John had laughed and dismissed it with a wave of his hand. "My dad and I agreed on everything, the football was just an excuse to teach me how to make thirty-foot flames shoot out of a portable grill."

"For the record," Rodney had said, mouth twitching, "I never, never want to hear that story."

"I promise to tell it the next time you forget to get Cheetoes at the gas station," John had said sweetly, and gone back to explaining the essential nature of the third-down.

That was a while back, miles of highway and yellow desert bleaching out Rodney's usually-exacting memory of the rules and regulations of American football, not to be confused with Canada's three-down system or Europe's obsession with soccer. In his ear, John's enthusiastic cheering was a warm buzz and Rodney tried not to think about how strangely nice it was to have something familiar nearby--someone familiar. It wasn't that he was a loner by nature, just that he'd learned early on not to grow too attached.

"I'm with my friend," was what John said finally, God knows how long later, to catch Rodney's attention. And when he managed to crawl out of his beer he saw a girl leaning into John, her square, fake nails clicking loudly against the surface of the counter.

Excellent bleach-job and golden skin, and a long, beautiful neck Rodney wanted to touch with his fingers, to study the perfectly exponential nature of that curve. yes">  She was wearing tight jeans and a black tube top, and the translucent curtain of her hair shined in the bar lights when she turned her head to glance at Rodney.

Over her shoulder, John looked panicked, like this was Malaysia and he was going to wake up the next morning in a bathtub filled with ice and missing a kidney if he took her to bed. But he was making pleading expressions and his shoulders were slumped so Rodney just sighed and took one for the team.

"We're a package deal," he said as lecherously as possible while the girl stared. "You get him, you gotta take me."

She blinked at him.

"He lost a bet," Rodney invented rapidly and blandly took another sip of beer.

John muffled a noise that was closer to laughter than entirely polite and the girl between them gave Rodney an appraising, up-down look before she shrugged, grinning, and said, "What the hell--it's Vegas, right?"

Rodney had choked on his beer and John had whimpered feebly but somehow or another they'd ended up in a motel with a freaky above-ground pool, with windows built into the sides so women and men in ugly swimsuits stared at them like human fish as they walked past. Anna, who didn't bother to tell them her last name, was in room 334, and her friends Tammi and Jude were out for the night. Rodney barely bit back the urge to ask if they, too, were engaging in mostly-anonymous threesomes with people they'd met at seedy bars.

"You guys in Vegas for business or pleasure?" Anna asked, kicking the door shut with one foot and tugging off her tube-top with the other.

Her stomach was flat and the same smooth, golden color, a little too perfect to be real. yes">  Rodney thought all of this felt a little bit off-center, unfocused, like old 35 mm film in a bad projector, and he couldn't help but to reach out and palm her side: she had mathematical curves, too perfect to exist in reality, flawless--disinteresting.

"Who the hell comes to Vegas for business?" Rodney asked, and smoothed his hand up her back, watching John watch them warily from where he was sitting on the bed. He cocked an eyebrow and said, "Hey, little help here?"

"You seem to have it well in hand," John croaked, and Anna laughed as she twisted in Rodney's hold.

"Come on, stud," she said, breathless and giggling, before she bent down and dragged him up, dragged his shirt over his head and Rodney felt a moment of fierce possession, seeing the faint fingerprints of green and purple bruises over John's body, faded over time.

But the room was dark and the neon orange lights filtering in from outside the room made it hard to see unless you knew where to look, so Anna just pressed her perfectly arched spine against Rodney's chest, ground her round ass into his groin, and tugged John into her arms. His eyes were still bright and huge, but his large palms were on her hips now--so his fingertips just touched Rodney's, and Rodney wanted to say that was important for some reason, but the words weren't coming.

Rodney said, "Watch his ribs," but knew from the way Anna made a breathy noise as she tugged John down to her mouth she wasn't listening.

It took a lot of careful navigation on Rodney's part--since all of John's muscles had locked up and Anna was too busy trying to eat John's face--to negotiate all three of them onto the nearest double bed, where Anna shoved John to his back and straddled his waist, and Rodney had to bite back his urge to yell at her when he heard John hiss in pain.

"I said watch it," Rodney finally said, voice tight, and ignoring her muttered, breathy, "Who made you his keeper?" Rodney slid one hand up her back again, along that mathematical spine and snapped open the clasp of her strapless bra, a lace and padding number that fell away in a whisper of cloth as her breasts tipped out, average size with areolas the color of dark chocolate.

She made a deep, purring noise in her throat and ran her hands up John's chest, fingers knotting through the wiry hair there. And Rodney met John's eyes, huge and a little shocked as Rodney threw a leg to the other side of John's thighs, and closed his mouth over Anna's shoulder, hands reaching around to thumb her nipples--and when she sighed and leaned into the touch Rodney pressed his chest to her back, to feel the volcanic heat of her skin through his shirt.

It'd been years--second year of his master's program--since he'd done this and he thought if anybody, he style='font-style: normal'> ought to be the nervous one, even as John stared up at both of them, never breaking eye contact, looking like he was about to stop breathing.

And then she rolled her hips against his, hands slipping down John's chest and drifting toward the buttons of his button-fly jeans--Rodney was depressed, not dead: he'd noticed--and murmured, "And let's not forget about you."

"How do you want to do this?" Rodney asked, ostensibly into Anna's ear, though he watched John the whole time, trying to decode his expression--the disconnected arousal that was blurring the green of his eyes. Everything felt hot, tight, claustrophobic, too close.

"I think I've got that well in hand," Anna assured him, and Rodney didn't bother not to stare as she worked at the button of John's jeans and tugged at the zipper, as Rodney slipped one hand down to hers, fingers pressing lower until his fingers stroked her over the seam, deep, until her breath stuttered and she laughed a little, sighing.

Rodney tried not to think about the fact that he was about to have a threesome--first threesome, first threesome, first threesome, he kept not-chanting--and couldn't take his eyes off of John's progressively more panicked face, even as he sucked kisses along Anna's shoulder. He felt like he was waiting, like any minute now--and it was right as she was pulling John's dick out of his shorts when John grabbed her by the wrists and said, "I have to go," and Anna's face froze and she snapped out, "Excuse me?" and Rodney said, "Oh, shit, are you freaking out?"

John's face got pinched and so white he looked green, and he said, "Yeah, I think I am."

"Okay, what the fuck? " Anna growled, even as Rodney shoved away from her and started to remove her from John's lap, saying, "All right, you know you could have said something earlier, we could have avoided this entire pointless exercise."

It turned out to be exactly the wrong thing to say because Anna shoved them both out into the hallway of the motel, John with an armful of his shirt and a rosy-dark bruise on his collarbone, even as Rodney was calling helpfully out to the closing door, "It's not you, it's us!"

Rodney waited for John to get his shirt on and his pants buttoned up before they went outside and John sucked in deep, miserable gasps of air, sitting on the curb and covering his bruised face with his bruised hands, the yellow of his cast catching the light.

"Sorry," he finally said, barely a scratch of his words against his voice. Rodney wondered what the hell had happened to him and if driving out of Nevada would do the same thing that driving out of California had--before he'd listened to John's stupid suggestions and come out to Vegas. yes">  "Sorry."

"Not really," Rodney said, too casually, coaching himself over and over not to accidentally out himself during times of other peoples' crises. "You want to go back to the motel and sleep it off?"

John smiled at him gratefully and got off of the curb.

The next day, Rodney let himself get dragged around to the casinos, to look at the fountains, and somehow as they were walking past a row of slot machines, John said something about hot machines, and Rodney started off on his tear about Vegas and games of independent chance. It took nearly twenty minutes of good tirade before he realized John looked neither angry nor cowed, only terribly amused, the corners of his mouth twitching even as he said, "Well, what about roulette? That table looks due for a red pretty soon," which got Rodney going all over again.

*

Rodney's in Colorado by the time he starts phase two of freaking out, which is recrimination and reevaluation and trying to convince himself that John was the reason he left and that he wouldn't want Rodney to come back--even to return the hideous Volvo--and that really, Rodney should really just turn right around and head back to the cradling arms of California.

"Stop calling, you are interrupting the coup," Radek tells him unsympathetically and hangs up the phone with a resounding thud.

Rodney stares at the pay phone receiver, thinking of his rapidly-dwindling supply of quarters and his cell phone, batteries dead, in the backseat of the Volvo and feels so intensely stupid he has to find the nearest diner and eat a double order of hash browns half-drowned in ketchup to console himself.

"It's just that I left for a reason, I left for a very good reason," Rodney tells the waitress who ends up chainsmoking across from him in the booth, eyes wild. "And okay, yes, I have suffered fits of regret in the past--"

The waitress--JUDY, her nametag said--made a snorting noise.

"--but the idea of going back to try andÉhell, I don't know. I don't know. It never could have worked to begin with," Rodney moans, running his hands through his hair. "I'm turning into a Lifetime movie gone horribly wrong."

Snubbing out another Camel menthol, Judy exhales a cloud of smoke and says, "Let me get this straight: you stole your ex's car a decade ago as getaway vehicle to dump her. yes">  Then you saw an article about her and now you're driving cross-country to give it back to her and--what? yes">  Hope she takes you back?" yes">  She lights up another cigarette, taking a long drag. "Honey, the fact that you didn't get slapped with grand theft auto is amazing. "

Rodney put his face in his arms. "It is," he moans. yes">  "Oh my God, it is. I'm going to be arrested and then get traded for cigarettes and cheap porn in prison."

"And you'll deserve it," Judy tells him firmly. "Jackass," she adds for emphasis.

He peels his face off of the sticky, laminate table and glares. "Hey," he snaps, "I'm tipping you--couldn't you be on my side?"

"Honey, please," Judy says, tipping her cigarette at him. "You're the douchebag here."

Rodney slaps down a quarter. "Yeah, that's for you," he says bitterly.

"It's okay," Judy says forgivingly. "You should save your cash for your legal fees."

Rodney puts his head back down in his arms, and after a long pause, long after he thought Judy had already left, Rodney hears her say, "You said you had a reason to leave--was it good?"

"I thought I was a douchebag," Rodney muttered, voice muffled.

"That's still true," Judy assures him. But when Rodney looks up to throw the dredges of his coffee at her, she only smiles at him, crooked. "Like I asked: you said you had a reason--was it good?"

Rodney stares at her for a long moment, takes in the crow's feet around her eyes and the wrinkles around her mouth, the yellow pallor of her skin and the well-worn look of her heavily made-up face--imagines she's heard a thousand variations of the story he's lived in her years here, dishing up pancakes and pouring refills of coffee. yes">  He thinks about the hazy year after he left California, about their tiny walk-up apartment and John's part-time gig at the community college, teaching guys with GEDs accounting. He remembers being viciously pleased with their uniform mediocrity, their boring, uninspired lives that would lead them nowhere. He remembers thinking that if he's going to go down in undeserved obscurity, at least John will be there, too. And then he'd seen the letters from Carnegie Mellon.

"I thought it was," Rodney says finally. "At the time, it was important."

She raises her penciled-in eyebrows at him. "Yeah?"

Rodney frowns. yes">  "It's weird when somebody else starts living the dream you can't have."

"It must have been weird for her to wake up and be missing her boyfriend and her car," Judy shoots back, and snubs out her second cigarette, smoke snaking upward into the overheated air of the diner.

"Okay, we were getting deep and meaningful there for a second before you went and fucked it up again," Rodney growls.

"You were also getting weird and cryptic for a second there before I stopped caring," Judy tells him. yes"> 

She pats his arm and starts to stand, eyeing the thin lay of people in the diner--checking the status of their plates and cups and saucers, clinking in the quiet din of the restaurant. She turns back to Rodney as she reties her apron and says, "Pay your check and get back on the freaking road. If you really drove from San Jose all the way out here--it's been nineteen hours. You're not turning around. This is going to be one of those things you do no matter what."

"This blows," Rodney says morosely.

"Sure does," Judy agrees, and starts clearing his plates. "While you're at it, leave a real tip," she reminds him, and walks away, balancing Rodney's coffee mug and utensils, saying, "I'll be right there," to the group of truckers at the next booth.

Rodney pays his check, and on the receipt, under the tip (an extravagant 30 percent she clearly doesn't deserve, not after all the name-calling and second-hand smoke), he writes, "it was a he, not a she," and doesn't bother to wave when he walks out the door.

He checks himself into the Motel 8 next door to the diner, so tired he can barely stand straight despite all the coffee buzzing in his veins, blurring out the ceiling and ugly curtains and uglier duvet cover in his room. Rodney kicks off his shoes and pants and tugs off his shirt, lies on top of the bed and turns on the television, listens to the hum and white noise of the world filtered through a curving screen until he drifts, unsteadily, into fitful sleep--and he dreams about Oklahoma, the marshy thick of Alabama and Louisiana, the endless blacktop, and John's smile, brilliant against the blue of the sky, and how then it'd all stretched out like infinity, like it was all the physics he'd ever need.

*

After Vegas, and a series of phone calls ranging from frustrating to humiliating to straighten out the details of his abandoned apartment, his abandoned car, his entire abandoned life back in Berkeley, they'd hit the highways again and cut through the flat red of Arizona, the jagged desert of New Mexico--John staring out of windows at the stark contrast of the Earth orange and the blue of the sky.

"Don't you have anybody to call?" Rodney asked, breaking his gaze from the road stretched out ahead of them, meandering through the desert.

John glanced at him from the corner of his eyes. "No, not really."

John's bruises looked better, fading, turning into yellowing shadows on his cheeks and purpling at the corners of his mouth--but not quite so angry, and it was as if the red of the desert was coloring him in, filling him out, and he didn't look so sallow or pale anymore after three days on the road.

"Anything you have to finish up?" Rodney prompted again, frowning.

"No," John answered, darkly amused, the corner of his mouth curving up meanly. "I'm done."

Rodney gave him a look. "Like--holistically. yes">  You're just done."

"I'm done," John verified.

"This isn't going to end up with me finding your dead, body in a motel bathtub, is it?" Rodney demanded, scowling over.

John gave him a look that said Ôthat's stupid' but clearly meant Ômaybe,' and Rodney jerked his gaze back to the ribbon of asphalt that cut through the shimmer-bright desert, the crackling radio reception and air so dry Rodney thought it might catch on fire if he lit a match. He'd already accompanied this guy to and rescued him from an unwanted threesome--he refused to get any more invested. If Sheppard felt like killing himself melodramatically like some perennially underweight French woman with sagging breasts by slashing his wrists into lukewarm bathwater then it was not Rodney's problem .

"No, seriously," he finally said, unable to stop himself from seeing John's limp body draped over the molding edge of Best Western tub, the plastic sheet covered in arterial spray, the water dark and red and swirling around his white skin. yes">  "I'm not, am I?"

"No, Mom," John sighed, rolling his eyes hugely.

"Okay, good," Rodney said, trying to cover the enormous, irrational sense of relief that rolled over him. "Because I swear to God--sore wrist or not, you're driving tomorrow."

John laughed, and it was such a horrible noise Rodney nearly recoiled at it, yelling, "Oh my God, what the hell is that? What the hell is that? That's horrible! " which only got John laughing harder. It was braying and entirely inelegant and totally mismatching John's darkly handsome exterior, and Rodney boggled at John for a long moment until he realized that maybe the horrible laugh made more sense than any nice laugh would: John was a contradiction--none of him made sense anyway, why would his laugh be any different.

They spent the night in something called the Ronald Reagan Motor Lodge on the side of the highway about twenty miles outside of Albuquerque and somewhere in between the thirteenth and the twenty-sixth times Rodney went off on a tangent about how stupid style='font-style: normal'> American naming conventions were, John started to tell him random Ronald Reagan facts.

"Ronald Reagan is the only American president to have been divorced," John told him--muffled through the wood of the bathroom door--right after Rodney told him , "I'm taking the bathroom first--it's my right as the non-freaked-out one who's driven for the past six million days."

"He married his first wife at a cemetery, you know," John added just before Rodney turned on the shower, boggling, and stepped in underneath the pitiful spray, sound barely loud enough to cover the noise of his own breathing, much less John shouting, "It's really gotta be pretty bad karma to do that. Marry somebody where dead people live."

"You realize that makes absolutely no sense ," Rodney shouted back, fumbling for the cheap, plastic packets of shampoo, rubbing tiny bars of Ivory soap into his skin and feeling his whole body exhale at the water and steam--sluicing the desert off of him.

There was a brief respite while Rodney made himself comfortable, braced his forearm against the shower wall and circled his thumb and finger around the base of his dick, stroking nice and slow the way he liked it--a tease--which was exactly when John said:

"He was also the only president to be the head of a labor union."

Swearing, Rodney glared down at his undeterred erection and shouted through the water and door and his own haze of slightly crazy frustration, "I'm not kidding--I will kill you in your sleep."

John ignored him, keeping up a steady litany of presidential errata--"He once starred opposite his second wife in a movie, did you know that?" and "His favorite sport was horseback riding,"--while Rodney finished jerking off, worried out of his mind about his cock making some sort of horrible correlation between lame Americana and orgasms the entire time. And while Rodney toweled off and spent some time continuing to threaten John's life colorfully, and as Rodney started to brush his teeth bitterly, still concerned about what this entire insane experience was going to do to his sex life (if he ever got one again), John said, "You know why I liked him? yes">  Just after being shot, he used to tell people, ÔI forgot to duck.'"

When Rodney pulled open the door of the bathroom, he said darkly, "You know what? I hope you know how to duck."

"It was the first thing they taught us at Air Force school," John told him seriously. There was a plastic bag wrapped around his bright yellow cast.

"Really?" Rodney asked, blinking in surprise.

"No," John said, grinning, and peering over Rodney's shoulder, he asked, "My turn?"

yes"> 

As soon as the bathroom door closed again, Rodney racked his brain, searching for the most obnoxious physics trivia he knew, but just before he could ask if John knew that "laser" was actually LASER and stood for light amplification by the stimulated emission of radiation, he heard the water cut on, and John yelling over it, "Did you know Ronald Reagan saved seventy-seven people when he was a lifeguard?"

There was a long, long moment of silence while Rodney tried to think up a response, because he felt a sudden shock of memory, something small and near-forgotten: his sister Jeannie's drawn-white face, how she used to wake him to take her to the bathroom at night, make him stand by the door, opened just a crack--a thin ribbon of yellow-orange light in the dark hall--and talk to her, tell her half-delirious stories Rodney mumbled while mostly asleep. Then, by rote, Rodney would take her hand and walk her back down the hall, to her room where she would say, "Thanks, Rodney," and rush away, shy.

So he opened and closed his mouth again before he said, "No, I didn't."

"Well, he did," John shouted over the water, and after a pause, he admitted, "I think I'm out."

"Really?" Rodney said sarcastically, leaning against the bathroom door and calling through it, "I thought you might be a bottomless well of information on this president of yours."

"He was your president, too." Rodney could hear John thumping around in the shower, reaching for shampoo and soap and things, and Rodney made a note to stop at a K-Mart or something in the next town over--they couldn't subsist on the kindness of shady motels forever.

"Actually," Rodney said, "he's only your president. I'm Canadian."

"I didn't know that," John said, voice blurred by water. "What's Canada like?"

"Cold, big," Rodney said, turning to stare out the window of the motel room, started at the enormous blackness of the night, the ghostly beams of headlights going past two by two, burning like fireflies in the distance--past the parking lot and into the highway. "I was supposed to go to McGill."

"Why didn't you?" John asked, voice dimming on the second word as the water cut off and his question suddenly became a shout. Rodney wondered what John was afraid of, if it was the same thing that had given him the bruises that had caught Rodney's interest to begin with, if their acquaintance--cursed from the beginning--would end on auspices as badly as those on which it'd started.

Rodney closed his eyes and swallowed hard around the memory of fights, of long and echoing arguments. yes">  "Too close to home," he said truthfully. "What about you? yes">  Where'd you go to school?"

The door to the bathroom was opened with a sudden jerk and Rodney found himself surprised, looking right into John's hazel eyes, steam curling around them, when John said, "I went to the Academy. yes">   I went to the Air Force Academy."

"Oh," Rodney said faintly and forced himself to look away, to tear his gaze from the last red ridges of bruises on John's arms and shoulders, the purple marks on his chest--too telling, all of them murmuring secrets Rodney didn't want to know.

*

Nebraska is one long, flat blur, so interminably boring and unbroken that Rodney freaks out somewhere near Lincoln and finds himself in a Best Buy, tearing through the electronics section for a car CD player.

He stops off at a hardware store for some supplies and ends up in a Wal-Mart parking lot next to an RV ripping out the mostly-broken radio of the Volvo and installing a new MP3 readable CD player, ignoring the baffled looks from the passers-by and trying to achieve some sort of zen state. Rodney wonders if this isn't some sign that he's starting to come to his senses about driving to Pittsburgh, but it turns out that upon deeper reflection he's just terrified of the idea of driving through Iowa without any distractions other than Iowa .

And then, after everything is hooked up and the clock is set, Rodney feels sane enough to go into the Wal-Mart and buy more than a $100 worth of CDs--from classical compilations to Miles Davis to John Coltrane to a Bjork CD, because listening to her music was always a combination of auto-accident gawking and appreciation.

He listens to a vanilla collection of Handel until he's reasonably certain his heart rate is back within acceptable limits, and then he starts attempting to exhale, to breathe out and in, to put his foot on the gas and keep going. This is the second most frightening thing that Rodney's ever done, and he tries not to think too much about how it's always going east that scares him the most--even though east is where he finds things he wants, things he never knew he needed.

When he crosses the state line into Iowa, he nearly doesn't notice it he's so deranged from hunger, from being road numb, half-blind from staring at asphalt. He turns off the CD player and puts the car in park and attacks the first snack machine at the first rest stop inside the Iowa border and eats three bags of stale Fritos and two Zero bars. And when he goes to the bathroom, he wishes intensely that John was there, that he had a list of random trivia about Iowa, too, the way he had about Reagan and deer and memorably in Amarillo, Texas, armadillos. yes"> 

It's weird to let himself miss John again--to miss anything about John--after so long living in a locked box inside his own head, in a life of self-imposed demarcations.

And because he's alone and he figures he can't possibly feel any more stupid than he already does, Rodney finds himself saying, quietly and under his breath, standing over the urinal holding his dick and feeling like a moron, "Did you know that although urinal cakes you see are usually pink, they also come in green, white, and even blue?"

Rodney sees an IHOP twenty miles further down the road and pulls into the parking lot so quickly he leaves black, smoking treads in on the street--a shriek of wheels so loud that the waitresses are staring at him in undisguised interest when he bolts in and seats himself, saying:

"Coffee. I desperately need coffee and pancakes and sausage and eggs."

"I can do you the coffee first, mister," one of the waitresses says, a woman in her late forties wearing a bad dye-job and too much concealer, so that Rodney has no idea what color her skin used to be before she fell into a vat of Cover Girl. She hands him a battered, fingerprinted menu, laminate surface scratched and slick from too many hands and too many highway miles. "But you're going to have to be a little more specific insofar as the food."

It turns out that everything looks good when you're going slightly insane, and Rodney orders the chocolate chip pancakes with extra whipped cream, a side of eggs over easy and hash browns and sausage, link-style, still sizzling when they come to him in a greasy plate. He almost gets something called the Rooty Tooty Fresh'n'Fruity but can't bring himself to say it out loud.

When the waitress sets it all down, refills his coffee cup for the fifth time--it's not good coffee, Rodney thinks abstractly, it tastes rushed and a little burned--she says, hesitating, "I don't mean to pry, honey, but are you all right?"

Blinking at her, Rodney said, "Excuse me?"

There's a murmur behind them, past the register, at the griddle where a small huddle of waitresses and cooks have gathered, their whispers blending into a low murmur, and Rodney forces himself to look away from them back to Betty when she says, "You look a little out of sorts is all."

"I'm fine," he snaps, fisting his hand around his fork, feeling the tension coil in his shoulders.

He's all kinds of adjectives but fine is not one of them. He's nauseated and nervous and frightened, out of his element and more than a little lost--the last time he drove this distance there was somebody in the passenger seat, and it was deserts, not the breadbasket, rolling past his field of vision from the car windows. This might be the most foolish thing he's ever done and given his history that's saying something. But it has to be done, there's no other way.

Betty gives him a skeptical look, mouth in a flat, uncompromising frown as she reaches over to flick his fingers, saying, "You're bending our fork, that's what you're doing," her voice disapproving.

"I'm fine ," Rodney repeats, feeling utterly ridiculous and hunted and the beginnings of a sugar coma, looking down at his decimated plates--the last crumbs of pancake and egg pushed around the cheap ceramic, the balled up white napkins and the laminate surface of the table.

There's a long pause before Betty calls out, over his head, toward the counter, "Abby, tell Bob I'm taking fifteen," and then avails herself to the seat across from Rodney, saying, "I have a flask--you want a shot?"

Rodney stares at her bewildered. "Excuse me? "

Betty reaches under the table and fumbles around for a bit before she reemerges, looking pleased with herself, and untwists the cap of a battered silver flask. She gives him one, two generous shots and adds some cream and sugar to Rodney's coffee before she slides it over to him again and says, "There--now it's Irish." She gives him a look. "Breathe. You're turning purple."

"I'm just really having trouble understanding why I inspire this sort of behavior in waitresses," Rodney manages to say, finally, closing his hands around the body of the mug and staring at it warily.

"It's whiskey, you moron," Betty says mildly, sounding affectionate. "And if you keep looking like you're about to bust into tears, it won't just be waitresses."

Rodney sits with her for a long time, letting the coffee and whiskey and its ghostly sweetness burn down his throat. He closes his eyes and takes deep breaths until he doesn't have to tell himself to do it, and when blinks his eyes open again, to look across the table at Betty's soft expression, he flushes and says, "Well, at least you don't smoke."

"I'll take that as a compliment," she tells him, and gets out of the booth, reaching for his empty pancake plate and stacking napkins on top. She tells him, "Just sit still. You'll be good to drive again in about thirty minutes," and bustles off to the back, the click of her low heels disappearing.

And by the time he gets back on the road, it's that time of night where everything is getting luminous, neon, a blur of lights outside his window, a dotted mosaic over the side of the overpass, and Rodney sees traffic lights like color through a Gaussian filter.

He drives until everything the neck down is numb, until he's refilled his gas tank and bought three maps of increasing degrees of uselessness, until he realizes it's his eyes blurring and not just the lights outside the window. When he stops at the next Holiday Inn, hands them his credit card, Rodney watches the sky go pink and blue and the soft yellow of Easter candies in pastel and thinks about candy necklaces and leaving Berkeley.

"You're in room 209, sir," the man at the counter says, handing Rodney a scarred plastic key, the laminate peeling and the cheap gold chip in the back coming slightly apart from its spot on the card. Rodney closes his fist around it and takes back his Visa. When he gets there--after a dull, concrete set of stairs, illuminated faint orange and dank with rain and sweat and floor cleaner, stained strangely in corners and along the walls--it takes three tries to open his door.

The curtains are pulled shut, and Rodney goes automatically to open them.

It's only lucky that his bed is right next to the windows--that as he's drawing back the cheap, scratchy fabric of them that he can trip and feel his knees give out, to fall down on top of the duvet and slip so seamlessly from barely-awake to not.

*

In the flat space of the Texas panhandle, between Lubbock and Amarillo, Rodney pulled over at a grocery store and they raided the shelves: snatching up bags of potato chips and Little Debbie snack cakes and a bag of apples, so green Rodney could taste the bright sourness of them through the plastic. John bought cheap gallon jugs of water that would taste like the plastic of the container and travel-size variety packs of breakfast cereal, and like a little kid, he scoops up bag after bag of gummi bears and sour gummi worms, blushing a little when he dumps them into the grocery cart and Rodney had to bite his tongue not to laugh at that.

"We should get onion dip," Rodney said longingly, staring at the beer and nuts and dip aisle, populated heavily by guys their age carrying six packs under an arm. "For the chips."

John puts his foot down, saying, "No two-step food in the car."

"Oh, like that Volvo is a collector's item anyway," Rodney retorted, but pushed the cart along, until he found an emptier part of the grocery store and finally saw John relax a little, fall back into an easy step. Rodney couldn't decide how he felt about John learning to hide better, like whatever it was that had happened would fade out with his bruises, with the look in his eyes when he'd told Rodney about the Air Force Academy. yes">  And perversely, Rodney wished the bruises would stay, that he could keep using them as a reminder, a measure of progress, to read John like a particularly difficult book.

"Come on," Rodney forced himself to say. "We need soap. And shampoo."

John raised an eyebrow.

"I am not smelling like the Ronald Reagan Motor Lodge for the rest of this trip," Rodney warned him, frowning and reaching for a three-pack of Ivory. "Do you think this is hypoallergenic?"

"I think I just remembered something else about Ronald Reagan," John answered instead and Rodney groaned as the cycle of pain began anew. John talked about jellybeans and reporters and helicopters; he talked about assassination attempts all through the checkout, all while the fourteen-year-old girl bagging their water and cereal and candy and fruit shook from silent laughter.

Oklahoma dragged by in a blur of Rodney reciting the military history of Canada, drilled into him by a multitude of history teachers through his primary education and just as useless now as it had been when he'd been a boy. He went off onto a tangent about rope-climbing and participACTION and the ensuing terrible groin pull he never wanted to talk about but always style='font-style: normal'>ended up talking about. yes">  Around Chickasha John started purposefully mispronouncing city names, which drove Rodney crazy until he realized that technically, he didn't know if John was actually mispronouncing them--which derailed entirely when they started seeing names like Roff and Wapanucka and Weleetka on road signs. The discussion turned left and then round and round again until they were having the "In America, we call them Native Americans," and "In Canada, we call them First Nations, because we're not filled with delusions of grandeur and won't happily force them to bear our name," conversation. John protested it wasn't his people who'd named the country and Rodney had skipped straight from "Amerigo Vespucci" and "discovery" and "Italy" to "Oh my God, I'm starving, let's go find stromboli."

When they did find stromboli, it looked day's old and warmed-over, so John made an executive decision to veto it and order pizza instead, which came out to them steaming hot and greasy, pools of translucent red oil gathering on the cheap mozzarella as it cooled. John picked off all of the olives.

"What are you doing?" Rodney demanded, horrified and waving his hand at the grease-stained napkin near John's paper plate, dotted with cheap black olive slices. "What are you doing? "

"I don't like the olives," John said, shrugging, unrepentant, and took another frustratingly small bite.

"Don't you know there're children starving in Africa?" Rodney snapped. "And also that it's disgusting?"

John gave him a toothy grin, and Rodney tried to remember how the first smile had been a surprise, how it'd seemed so foreign and now John's mouth, curving up, was as ordinary as napkins, as the creaking plastic seats in every diner in every town in every state in the country. "I bet you end up eating them by the time we leave," he said snottily.

"Dis-gus-sting ," Rodney emphasized, revolted. "Do you know what that means?"

Setting down the pizza, John leaned his head on his knuckles, propping himself up by the elbows and said, "Hey--knock knock."

Eighteen knock knock jokes and twenty-three death threats later, Rodney stopped in the middle of telling John exactly why knock knock jokes were stupid when he realized John was grinning, watching Rodney's hand reaching from his napkin filled with cold olive slices to his mouth--back and forth, and Rodney muttered, "Shit ," under his breath.

They slept, that night, after another four hours on the road, at the Paris Hotel Motel--and it was the fact that the last three letters in "hotel" are missing that had Rodney and John exchanging helplessly adolescent glances before losing it completely, turning into the parking lot and ignoring the Motel 8 next door. yes"> 

The double room they get had disreputable mattresses that creaked with every move and a sink that leaked incessantly. So Rodney pretended it was those twin noises that kept him up that night instead of John's thrashing nightmares, his voice, broken off mid-protest when he shot up into waking and Rodney snapped his eyes shut, held supernaturally still. yes">  He listened--too scared to move a single muscle--as John crept out of bed, closed the bathroom door quietly. yes">  Rodney listened to the sounds of John gasping and retching through the too-thin wall and listened, and it was nearly an hour later, his muscles protesting, when John finally climbed back into bed, lay back to sleep.

There were a thousand questions just on the tip of Rodney's tongue, things he wanted to ask, things he knew he ought to know--ought to know about if he was going to ride in a car with this guy, if they were going to head aimlessly along I-40 until they hit the Atlantic ocean. But every time Rodney imagined asking John, "What happened to you?" and "What made you so scared?" and "Were there bruises where I couldn't see?" he saw himself saying, "I wish it hadn't happened to you, that you weren't scared," and "Show me. Show me everything," instead.

*

In Chicago Rodney treats himself to a night at the Drake Hotel, wanders in feeling much deader than he looks, everything hair down numb now, and staggers past the doorman, through the rotating doors, up the steps, clinging to the brass handrail. yes">  All he remembers about checking in is the garish gold plumes on the rug, so soft it crushes beneath the toe of his shoe--the last time he was here it was on business, he had stayed in the Gold Coast penthouse with a small army of lawyers and shouted a lot.

The concierge must remember him, or at least his money, because very soon, Rodney's being escorted into the elevator and to the King Drake Executive Plus Room, informed that the Ôdo not disturb' sign's been hung--and the concierge promises he'll see to it that breakfast (citrus free) is sent to his room the next morning. yes">  The bellhop says, "Have a good night, Mr. McKay," and Rodney realizes with a start that it's the first time this entire time he's been on the road that somebody recognized.

He sits on the foot of the king-sized bed, warm and deep and luxurious with comforters and hotel pillows and stares out his window toward the Lake Michigan--at the light glimmering off the surface of the water.

Rodney's come a long way from being disgraced at Berkeley, from running away from home and then running away from a person who made a place home. He's one of the wealthiest men in the country, an innovator and a visionary and he's invited to make commencement speeches at colleges, asked to give keynote talks at panels and conferences--and each time he makes certain to vilify Berkeley, and then afterward to ignore the frantic phone calls from the university's development office.

It's too late to take any of it back, Rodney knows--perhaps better than he knows anything else.

He's never imagined being able to casually claim an executive room at the Drake, never thought about being conspicuously wealthy and on the covers of magazines, of having personal assistants and riding in limos and thinking nothing of it.

Rodney thought, at first, that his life would be university labs and computer simulations; and later, when that had fallen so spectacularly apart, he thought it might be wherever John wanted to go--whichever house or walk-up or apartment John wanted. yes">  Back then, he couldn't imagine ever wanting to leave their cupboards and books, their rag rugs and John's burgeoning collection of model airplanes.

He shakes the memory out of his head and picks up the phone, dials Zelenka's office at Swing by rote and waits for it to ring four times before the God damn Audix answering system he's hated since day one picks up. It tells him, "The person you have called--" and here Zelenka cuts in "Radek Zelenka--is not here right now, to leave a message, press one, or, wait for the tone. If you need to speak with someone immediately, please dial Ôzero' for the oper--"

Rodney hangs up mid-word and turns on the television, switches it automatically to CNNMoney.

He calls down to room service for dinner and a fifth of Jack Daniels and when it arrives, Rodney feels the silver cover of his plate, warm to the touch and the papery crispness of the twenty dollar bill sliding from his hand to the attendant's. By then it feels a little like he's climbing back into his own skin. Climbing into some kind of skin, anyway, a compromise between the past and the present, colored in with memory, filling in all the gray parts he's worn for more than a decade now.

He eats his steak in the bathtub, listening to the television blaring, the sound turned all the way up. He leaves his Jack and Coke sitting on the marble floor of the bathroom when he has to express his frustration with Jim Cramer by shaking both fists in fury, drops his fork into his bathwater and fishes it out, tossing it out next to his drink.

He slumps all the way into the heat of the water, feels it bubbling up around his shoulders, fingers of heat curling around his neck, thinks that the last time he did this John's hands were on his shoulders, rubbing his thumbs along the back of Rodney's spine, his voice a laughing murmur in Rodney's ear. He'd said, "Did you know, that West Allegheny is officially Pittsburgh's smallest neighborhood?" and Rodney had moaned in agony, begged him to for God's sake cut it the fuck out.

Rodney puts a hand on his face, inhaling the steam and water and occasional gasp of cool air from the opened bathroom door, and tries not to think about the what ifs, how possibilities branch, to put away the idea of infinite universes where he'd made another decision. He doesn't think about how things might have been better, or worse, or if they'd have stayed that way forever, if right now, he could be sitting in a claw-footed tub in an apartment that leaks in bad storms, John's thigh warm against his hip and John's mouth against his shoulder, saying, "And also, did you know?"

He stays in the tub too long, so long that when he tries to stand up he's dizzy, knees creaking, fingers and toes white and wrinkled from water, and he has to clutch the counters, the towel rack to grab up one of the soft, white robes to wrap around himself. yes"> 

When he sleeps that night, he dreams about the T and the triangular shape of the city, the buildings of the Allegheny County Community College, and how John had looked, sitting on a bench in the late afternoon sun reading a book--waiting for Rodney to come pick him up, unhurried.

*

I-40 took them through Memphis and John took Rodney to barbeque.

"Did you purposefully look for restaurants condemned by the health department?" Rodney hissed in horror, following John down an alley--picking his way around corrugated cardboard boxes filled with refuse and dumpsters, skittering animals, pools of stagnant water.

"Rendezvous is a legend," John told him easily, turning around so Rodney could see the smile in his eyes. "Come on McKay--we're in Memphis: we have to eat barbeque."

""I am perfectly in favor of eating barbeque," Rodney argued, giving a wide berth to an oily-looking puddle. "I'm calling into question your choice of restaurant since my experience has taught me anything located this close to a trash heap is probably serving things they're pulling out of it."

When John had told Rodney to find street parking near the Peabody Hotel, Rodney had been momentarily relieved that John hadn't chosen anywhere with a "personality" or "quirks," which generally translated into "food lice" or "prequel to botulism." yes">  And then John had said, "Okay, come on--it's behind the hotel, down the alley," and Rodney had said, "God damn it."

Laughing, John reached over to close his hand around Rodney's wrist--soft this time, nothing like the first time John had taken his hand--and pulled him along. He said, green eyes shining:

"Rendezvous is open Tuesday through Thursday between 4:30 and 10:30 p.m.--the fact that we got into Memphis just in time means God wants us to eat here."

Rodney glanced over his shoulder--toward the ass of the Peabody Hotel, the parking structure, the dumpsters--and said morosely, "There is no God."

"Sure there is," John said, and his fingers slipped--almost by accident--down until they locked in with Rodney's, and he tugged lightly, saying as he pointed with his free hand, "Look."

Rendezvous had an iron cage for a door and a garish sign that looked like it belonged in a beer garden, a line that trailed out of the double doors in the entryway and down the side of the alleyway, people laughing and chattering and voices rising to a din, noise in the darkening evening. And knee-jerk, Rodney tightened his fingers around John's, about to ask if they should leave, if they should go somewhere without a crowd--but instead, he saw John grin, tug him forward again, heard John say, "Come on, let's get in line."

Half an hour later, marveling at the sheer amount of kitschy shit collected on shelves and nailed to the walls in the basement restaurant--Civil War memorabilia, swords, yellowing glass bottles that used to be filled with booze, model ships--Rodney wondered if it had something to do with distance. yes">  He wondered if John's relief was logarithmic--like every mile east they drove was another million miles away from whatever he was leaving behind.

But then he was assaulted by the smells, the sizzle of ribs on the enormous, open black pit of the barbeque, where all eyes in the restaurant were focused, trying to see through the clouds of steam.

"Oh my God," Rodney moaned, slumping down into his chair and closing his eyes. "This smells amazing ."

Smug, John said, "Well, you know, it's amazing what some spices can do for fished-out trash."

"I wouldn't even care if it really was trash at this point."

yes"> 

"All right, ya'll," their server said--she was blonde and sweat beaded on her freckled nose, but the smile was real and Rodney liked her instantly--wandering up to their table and tugging out an order pad, "welcome to Rendezvous: home of the world's best ribs. Can I start ya'll with anything to drink?"

"Coke--no lemon anywhere near the glass," Rodney told her exactingly. "I'm allergic."

"Right, allergic," she said without a hitch, and turned to smile at John, who told her, "Iced tea, thanks. And can I go ahead and order? We'll have a full order of the ribs."

"Good choice, sir," she laughed and jotted something down on her pad, saying, "Okay you two, my name is Jenny--feel free to holler if you need me for anything."

"You didn't even look at the menu," Rodney accused, frowning at John as she left their table, meandering around the hoards of people, the moving bodies and enormous trays. yes">  "What if what you ordered has one of the many things I'm allergic to?"

John raised an eyebrow. "Are you allergic to pork?"

Rodney scowled. yes">  "No."

"What about paprika?" John asked.

"That's not even the point--how do you don't there isn't anything in the sauce that--" Rodney started to protest, only to have John cut him off with a wave of his hand, saying:

"Stop right there: they only serve dry ribs here."

Against Rodney's better judgment, he asked, "I'm going to regret this, but: what is a dry rib?" yes"> 

Even worse, he asked it just as Jenny returned with their drinks, setting down sweating glasses of fizz-popping Coke with crushed ice frozen together at the bottom and iced tea--large, deadly slices of lemon floating in the amber liquid.

"Did you just ask what a dry rib is?" Jenny demanded, and Rodney gave John a desperate look.

"It's too late to say no, isn't it?" Rodney said finally, feeling doomed.

Jenny gave him a serious look. "I'm glad you let me know you didn't know," she told him firmly. "I'd feel terrible if you left Memphis and still didn't know any better." Hands free now, she held them both up, and Rodney looked at the lines of her palm, condensation against the white of her skin. "Hold up here for a second--I'm getting you a brochure."

An informational mini-lecture from Jenny, two of her friends, and one of the chefs who was taking a break later, John had tears in his eyes he'd been laughing so hard and Rodney was saying, "I just really have to say that I feel very strongly that of all the conflicts in the world, this battle between wet and dry ribs is probably one of the least stupid." He turned to John, who was scrubbing at his eyes with a sleep, still shaking in laughter. "I think we need to go sample the competition after this--just to be fair."

"You haven't even had the dry ribs yet," John teased, letting Jenny fill up his glass of sweet tea again.

Rodney gave him an intense look. "I can smell the dry ribs."

And when Jenny finally did arrive, resting part of the enormous platter on her shoulder, saying, "All right, you two--here we go," Rodney had a tiny heart attack, a spasm of joy in his chest so intense that all he saw was a vision of sizzling-hot ribs, crusted over with deep red and slightly blackened spices, steam rising off of the surface. He'd never seen anything so beautiful, and he said as much, burning most of his fingers and not caring at all as he dived in, tugging off a rib and seeing the meat--cooked to perfection--separating in strands as he pulled.

"Way to have an inappropriate relationship with an animal that's already dead," John laughed, and Rodney would have tossed back a searing comment but he wasn't entirely sure his love of this stuff wasn't sexual. He thought that on his own, he'd never have found this oasis in a desert of country music and Southern drawls, and gave John a look dangerously akin to love as he asked around the rib:

"How did you even know this was here?"

Sighing, John said, "Don't talk with your mouth full, Rodney." And when Rodney gave him the finger, which he felt was the only response necessary, John went on:

"We moved a lot when I was a kid, moved around bases, and every time we had to cross through Tennessee, anytime we were within two hours of Memphis, we'd drive over." yes">  Grinning, John said, "That's how I know the hours--we came by so many times to find the restaurant closed or not opened yet or something else. By the time I was seventeen my family had the schedule memorized."

"God bless you," Rodney moaned, licking his fingers.

"I thought there was no God." John made an innocent face, taking another sip of his tea.

"He'll come into spontaneous existence," Rodney said with complete confidence, reaching for another. "For these ribs, he'll do it."

John admitted ignorance as to the best sources of wet ribs in Memphis, but they both figured it'd be less than wise to ask at Rendezvous, a mecca for dry rub fanatics, so they spent the night at the Holiday Inn next door and spent the rest of the weekend driving around Memphis looking for something that, to quote Rodney, "looked like it might be the Church of the Holy Wet Rib." He knew he'd lost it completely--that all the asphalt had driven him totally nuts--when he heard himself saying, "That place doesn't look dirty enough, are you sure it's going to be good?"

"You've brain damaged me," Rodney accused darkly, trailing John into Jim Neely's Interstate Barbecue. "I'm looking for dirt in restaurants."

"You're growing as a person," John corrected.

Grumbling, Rodney took in the thin, early lunch crowd of elderly women and men, the occasional couple huddled together over their tables; he gave it all a discriminating eye before he decided, "I have a good feeling about this place."

"Yeah, the guy at the Holiday Inn had a good feeling about it, too, which is why he told us to come here," John laughed.

They couldn't seem to leave Memphis, stagnated and burning through their cash, drinking Dr. Pepper and enjoying the late winter light, the warmth seeping into the air in Tennessee. yes">  And Rodney started to entertain the insane idea of staying there, of finding an apartment and looking for some kind of job when they stepped out of their hotel one morning to see a group of AFROTC kids walking up the street in their dress clothes--all pressed blue shirts and perfectly creased slacks, their laugher overlapping.

Rodney's knuckles were white as they burned rubber out of Memphis, out of Tennessee, cutting through Kentucky--but it wasn't until they were passing through Bowling Green that John spoke again, and when he did, he said, "Did you know that if you look at a map of the U.S., you can see the Chef MIMAL holding a plate of Kentucky Fried Chicken?"

*

From Chicago to Pittsburgh is seven hours of highway driving, and the concierge sends Rodney on his way with best wishes, a few extra pillow mints and an invitation to return to the Drake Hotel soon. If he has Thoughts about the fact that Rodney's driving probably the most disreputable Volvo seen outside of a junkyard in all of America, he doesn't say anything. Rodney suddenly misses Jenny, who though she lectured him on barbeque culture, did it out of love; he misses Memphis, he misses dry ribs and wet ribs and driving into Pittsburgh from the south instead of along 76, through Indiana and Ohio.

The radio was bad to begin with and now it's all static, but Rodney can't listen to Ella Fitzgerald anymore, the sweet, golden mournfulness of her voice fills up the car and spills out the cracked-open windows. So he switches the CD player to FM and dials around, looking for a station that isn't talk, news, sports, or country, something not contemporary Billboard top 40s pop music from hell and ends up listening to the Volvo rattle along with classic rock--Bruce Springsteen talking about escaping from New Jersey.

The car won't go any faster than 70 mph, and any speed over 65 makes it shake like a change purse, so Rodney stays almost at 64 exactly and ignores the thousands of cars that pass him, stays in the slow lane and grits his teeth.

He doesn't remember, now, why they'd gone to Pittsburgh, why they'd gone up from Kentucky or what had driven them along the East Coast and into Pennsylvania. He thinks it might have had something to do with an comment about the Hershey chocolate factory.

But it's been a long time, and Rodney can't be sure of anything other than the fact that the first time John kissed him was their first day in Pennsylvania--and maybe that was why he'd wanted to stay: so he could feel the corners and curves of John's mouth again, to taste his smile, too-sweet from American chocolate.

Their first week they spent in Philadelphia and John had harassed Rodney out for walks along the historic districts, begged with pouts and by rubbing his thumb along Rodney's wrist--frustratingly on target for Rodney's many and sundry weaknesses. yes">  They wandered around clouds of schoolchildren in parochial uniforms, nuns calling them into brick-faced facades for morning prayers or morning classes, and the smile on John's face had been unreserved and real. John saw the Liberty Bell and went to museums and they ate at BYOBs because to get a liquor license in Philly you apparently had to first find and then kill and eat a unicorn, bring it's horn before a sacred fire and test your luck in getting an okay from the commission. John ran out of stupid trivia to distract him from being in the bathroom by himself so Rodney had taught John prime-not-prime--which had led, eventually, to Rodney figuring out that John had a master's in applied mathematics--and they played through the sound of running water, through a bathroom door.

"We should find a place," Rodney had said finally, during their second week, feeling so nervous he thought he'd throw up in his breakfast, into his pancakes. He'd been thinking about the exactly fourteen kisses they'd shared, how John always pulled away, and tried not to think that he might be a rebound, some sort of terrible reaction to being kicked out of the Air Force--for being gay, for liking dick, for getting caught, Rodney had guessed by then, filled in all the blanks and wondered how many guys had jumped him, if they'd used just their fists, or had they kicked, too.

But John had only said, "We should probably also get jobs."

Rodney stops to pee and freak out once he crosses the Pennsylvania state line, locking himself into the last stall in the rest stop bathroom and putting his head between his legs. The floor is ugly laminate made to look like pebbles, with a regular pattern of white and gray and black asymmetrical blobs that somebody in a materials company thought looked like natural stone. Rodney disagrees, but he also recognizes that he'd do anything to keep from thinking about where he's going and what he's about to do at this point.

He keeps trying to tell himself that whatever happens can't be any worse than it had been all those years ago, that however angry John is with him--for leaving, Rodney thinks abstractly, for being selfish --it must have faded a little by now.

After all, he's not in jail for stealing the car, and that's a good sign, Rodney tells himself, and blinks hard when he realizes where he is--what streets he's driving on, where he's steered himself, like his hands and his body still remember and still know where Rodney's always wanted to be, even when it was the last place he could stand.

The walk-up apartment was small and nothing special, prone to creaks and leaks and a type of mutant cockroach that always made John scream bloody murder, as if Rodney was the one with combat training and an extensive education in killing stuff with guns. yes">  The walls were old and the tiles were old and the tub was even older, but it was situated between Rodney's office--where he monitored for proper system usage and tried to stem the influx of pornography into the fifth floor office of a company whose name he can't remember--and John's job teaching algebra to non-traditional students.

Rodney circles the building twice, checking the street address: the apartment's been repainted, given a facelift, new shutters and new wrought-iron railings, and someone has planted flowers in the window box John put in after their first year there.

It's somebody else's life now.

It's dark again by the time Rodney checks himself into the Omni William Penn, and he wishes he'd remembered that not everywhere was San Jose because Rodney's freezing and he doesn't even have a coat. He's been wearing the same clothes for days, sending them away to be laundered while he's been passed out in hotels and motels across the continental U.S. yes">  He thinks about going shopping, about getting a nice shirt and some pants that don't look slept in, but mostly he thinks about getting up to his room so he can continue the freak-out he started in the rest stop.

The last time he was in Pittsburgh--and Rodney does mean the last time--it'd been eighteen months of numbness, of pretending Berkeley never happened, like since he'd gotten far enough away, the past had been erased like John's bruises had slowly disappeared, like the cast had been cut away. And Rodney had thought, sometimes, lying awake at night and staring at the ceiling, listening to John's breathing next to him--no nightmares, Rodney remembered, none after that first year--that it might be enough.

But if Rodney was honest with himself--and he had to be, now, there was nowhere else to hide, he was back in fucking Pittsburgh--he would be honest enough to say that he'd never been all there, that while he'd meant it when he'd kissed John back, that only parts of him had been awake.

And it'd startled him, then, how much he'd loved John anyway, with as much of himself as he could.

Insofar as freaking out goes, his hotel room is pretty shitty for it: clean and shadowed by the city lights and comfortable. But Rodney does his best, curling up in the space between the entertainment center and the desk and putting his hands over his face and thinking about Memphis, about John's hand in his own, and how he should have then that he'd been tipping over into something he hadn't anticipated.

*

In Cincinnati, John conned Rodney into going to the American Sign Museum, which turned out to be even tackier than Rodney had initially anticipated.

"Are you kidding me?" Rodney demanded, balking at the Ôrecommended' $5 donation slash entrance fee, and managed to hold out for an entire forty seconds under the power of John's plaintive expression. There'd been a shift in the air between them since Memphis, since Rodney had ignored his better instincts and followed John behind a hotel and down an alley, where they'd been more likely to be mugged or killed or mugged then killed than to find barbecue. It apparently meant that now Rodney was physically incapable of saying "no" to John about anything--ranging from where to eat to the fucking American Sign Museum.

They ended up on the 90 minute tour, which Rodney murmured repeatedly into John's ear made him want to kill himself, and wandered around, following the guide as he talked about the great value of Americana, about preserving a slice of America's industrial and merchant past.

"Oh my God," Rodney said in a hush, walking past a giant kid in striped pants holding a hamburger, "this is hell with a three-prong outlet."

As a peacekeeping gesture, John let Rodney pick the afternoon's activity, which was harder than Rodney anticipated. He considered the aquarium or possibly going completely insane and asking if John just wanted to go back to their motel room and have sex, since it seemed to be the direction they were going in anyway. Then he'd gotten distracted by the Cincinnati Music Hall.

They snagged a pair of standby tickets and when Rodney bullied John back to the motel, it wasn't to break in the mattress so much as shove him into a shower and into a change of clothes.

"You're not disgracing me at a concert," Rodney told him, searching around his own bags for something respectable to wear. "Cincinnati's symphony orchestra has an excellent reputation and I haven't been to a concert in long enough that if you talk to me, I'll probably punch you in the arm."

It was a slow night, a weeknight performance and half of their row was empty. The audience was mostly older men in tweed jackets and women in dark coats, their voices a low murmur, and Rodney flashed to images from his childhood piano recitals--once he'd graduated from his teacher's house and into actual venues, how he'd always been trapped in the line-up between the two overachieving Asian kids who wore Coke bottle glasses. He didn't remember what he'd played at his last recital, but it was a very long time ago--and his thought was interrupted when John put his on Rodney's wrist, when he leaned in and admitted:

"I have to warn you, I know almost nothing about classical music."

"It's okay," Rodney whispered back as the house lights dimmed once, twice, "I'll explain it to you."

He could feel John's smile through the dark. "I thought I wasn't allowed to talk."

"Shut up or I'll reestablish the rule," Rodney murmured, grinning.

The orchestra played Symphony No. 4 by Persichetti, Chopin's Piano Concerto No. 2 in F Minor and Mendelssohn's 4th Symphony in A Minor. There was a guest pianist, and Rodney listened for every minor flaw, picked at it, closed his eyes to feel the music better, to ignore the obvious distraction of John so nearby in the dark.

"I used to play the piano," Rodney told John inanely, in the brief hush between movements.

"Yeah?" John asked, voice soft. "How long?"

The conductor raised his arms and the orchestra went tense, prepared, and it was the heady rush, that half-beat before the melody started that Rodney missed so badly it ached sometimes, missed almost as badly as he wasn't letting himself miss Berkeley. yes">  "I quit when I was twelve."

John stroked his thumb over Rodney's wrist, like he could hear the rest of that sentence, the unspoken disappointment there.

"We should go to Pennsylvania," John whispered, like the notes of a bass clarinet underneath the shimmer of violins. "I hear they have a chocolate factory there."

And when Rodney turned to look at John, he turned his palm up, so their fingers slid together again, a secret in the dark. Rodney knew a million reasons this would never work, that he shouldn't even try, that it was just another kind of running away, but John's hand was warm and smooth and large in his own, and it felt like an anchor.

"Chocolate factory, huh," Rodney said, distant.

John nodded, a grin on his face, lined in the glow from the orchestra shell, the lights that burned down onto the stage. He said, "Nobody's sad at a chocolate factory."

*

Rodney hadn't even known that John had been looking at doctoral programs.

He'd been busy trying to tamp down his growing sense of revulsion at his nine to five job, trying to ignore the fact that he felt kind of like a fraud, that he after the adrenaline rush of getting away had faded there was nothing left but being away, and it was nothing like he'd anticipated--neither science nor romance, but a lot of listening to the doubts and fury and bitterness in his own head. It had been easy to fall in love while burning highway, while riding the endorphins from getting out, from the skin-rush of John's smile and the endless blue of the sky that had framed the desert--the towns--all the cities they'd driven through, edged the roads. But the thing was, Rodney realized, holding an acceptance package from Carnegie Mellon, eyes skimming the words "doctoral program" and "enormous potential" and felt the world dropped out from beneath his feet.

He hadn't even known he'd been picking a fight about it until he was in the middle of it--and if he'd known what he was doing, he wouldn't have done it, he would have kept his mouth shut and made it turn up in the corners. So it wasn't really until he realized he was clutching the papers, yelling about keeping secrets and how furious he was feeling jealousy so and grief so huge in his chest he thought he would explode that he really heard style='font-style: normal'> what John was saying, listened to him as he said:

"Just--stop! yes">  Stop! Rodney, I won't go! Look--I won't go! Just--don't leave. I won't go, okay?"

*

He'd never wanted that, whatever it had been that had put that look of naked desperation on John's face--he'd never thought he could do that to another person. So after he'd made his apologies, spent hours and hours murmuring sorry into John's skin--preemptive sorries, sorry for what he was going to do--he'd climbed out of bed at three that morning and packed the same duffle he'd run off with. He'd left a note on the kitchen counter, but he didn't really remember what it said beyond congratulating John on his acceptance into the doctoral program and how he hoped that the next time they came face to face, Rodney would be able to look him in the eye.

It had been remarkably easy to leave then, because--as it turned out--the only thing Rodney hated more than not having what he'd wanted and worked toward for so long was the person he'd somehow become when he wasn't paying attention.

*

He's been on the Carnegie Mellon campus for less than five minutes before he's waylaid by a group of deranged computer science students--wearing t-shirts advertising their association with Science Olympiad and math club. They ask him about Silicon Valley and what it's like to make it, ask if he's hiring, and Rodney tells them the truth: that going corporate sucks balls and that if they're good enough, then yeah, Rodney's always hiring. "Okay," he says, interrupting the most hyper of the quartet, "but more importantly--do you guys know where the math department is?"

He gets pointed to Wean Hall, which turns out to be about as helpful as being told the ocean is "that way" because along with math, Wean houses physics, the robotics institute, material science, something about metals, and--unfortunately for him--the computer science department.

The students follow him, talking constantly, and Rodney nods occasionally and wonders if explaining he's here to return a car he stole from his gay, ex-military ex-lover would drive them away, but he doubts it. He finally loses them in the math department's administrative office, where the undergrad at the desk says, "Dr. Sheppard? He's in the middle of an intro math, but the class is almost over--look, it's right down in this building," and draws Rodney a map on a Post-It note.

It's a morning intro calculus class--sleepy with early sun, streaming golden through the windows, so that Rodney sees all the specs of dust floating up into the air above the heads of students, shifting in their seats, notebooks and pens rustling. He stands in the doorway at the back of the room and watches, astonished he's actually here--he didn't really think he'd come, that he'd ever reach a place in his life where he could look John in the eye again.

But the most remarkable thing is John at the front of the lecture hall, in a gray t-shirt and jeans and a dark blue hoodie, looking older and wiser but still exactly the same, gesturing at something cast against the white board--the projection of a curve pressing intimately against the x-axis of a Cartesian plane.

John's talking about asymptotes, about math that's infinitely close but never reaching, and Rodney thinks that the after everything, after all of it, it's this last few yards that feels the hardest--that this moment is the space between.

Rodney thinks about turning on his heel right now and escaping, dumping the car in the faculty lot and buying a plane back to San Jose--to leave, undetected, but thinks that might be like living a parallel life on parallel coasts, and he'll always wonder.

So he waits until there's a sudden rush of noise, of students standing up and putting away their desks and bolting from the room, a stream of bodies making their way up the slanted side-aisles--waits until they've mostly cleared a path--before he lets out one last, shuddering breath, and takes his first step toward the front of the room.

And Rodney's almost at the steps of the raised lecture platform before John turns around, an armful of notes and a battered calculus textbook, before he lifts his head from his papers and freezes in place--his eyes as supernaturally green as the first time Rodney saw him.

"Oh," John says, eyes huge in shock, perfectly still.

Rodney digs in his pocket, feeling stupid and clumsy and why had he done this? What was wrong with him? This was the worst idea in the history of ever. He comes up with the Volvo's keys, still attached to a keyring with his house keys and his office keys and securepass for remote access to Swing and tries not to think about the underlying message there--that's he's offering what is essentially his whole life now, holding it up and near feverish with hope.

"I--" Rodney says, trying to talk in fits and starts. "These are the keys. To the Volvo."

John blinks at him and it's strange--it's all so strange, too surreal.

"I bought another car," John tells him carefully, frowning. "Rodney, what are you--?"

"I just thought you might want it back," Rodney rushes to say. He can hear his voice shaking. Everything's shaking. His hands are shaking and the keys are jingling. "I just thought that--I'm sorry about the grand theft auto, and this waitress, this waitress out--somewhere, this waitress named Judy told me I should be glad you didn't call the cops and--"

And that's that gets John to finally move, to put the papers and books down, to step down off of the platform and say, "Hey, hey, Rodney. Calm down--you're going to have stroke. It's okay, okay?"

"--and have me thrown in jail and no it is not okay!" Rodney snaps, lightheaded. "This is--going completely wrong! I'm far too rich and successful to be this verbally incontinent!"

"It's okay," John promises, and when he says it like that, Rodney almost believes it. yes">  "Rodney, it's been a long time, all right? I get it. It's okay."

Rodney forces his jaw shut and nods, tries to collect himself, and watches as John watches him, a fond smile creeping over his face.

"Hey, so I see you on the news sometimes," John says.

"I saw you in Newsweek ," Rodney answers, too quickly.

John raises his eyebrows. "I see."

"The car is yours," Rodney insists, because he has to stay focused. He offers John the keys again, holds them out and hopes John will figure out what it means. "You should take it back."

"That's not just my car key," John points out.

"You can have the rest of it, too," Rodney breathes. "They're--you can have them, too."

The moment stretches out like a voice in a hallway, lingering, until John reaches over, hesitant, and closes his hand over Rodney's, closing loosely over the keys.

And after a long beat, John tightens his fingers around Rodney's, finally stilling the sound of metal clinking together, stilling Rodney's hand. There's a smile on his face when John tells him:

"Let me take you for coffee. We should talk."

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