By: Harvey Huddleston

His mother let him smoke.  How could she not?  We’d go out to the backyard and share a cig.  Like kids again.  It was also the exercise, walking down the hall and through the living room and kitchen, then out the back door to the yard.  Azaleas and begonias.  We made this trek a lot and I became skilled at helping him negotiate it.  Towards the end it was the one physical thing he could do, the one thing he wanted to do.  He could do that and I could help him.  He liked his cigarettes.

The glioblastoma had reached deeper into his brain this time so there wouldn’t be any surgery and recovery like the first one five years earlier.  That first time I was ready to jump on a plane from New York but then news of his surgery and treatments was so positive I decided to wait until he was better.  I got here as he was leaving the hospital so I was able to help with that.

His skull was completely shaved with jagged black stitches running patchwork in all directions.  At first he kept his head covered but then one day something just clicked for him and he decided to go with it.  He began planning a new album with this new look as the cover art.  The shoot was done under a garish green light and Mark loved it.  To say the image was startling is an understatement.  It wasn’t that he liked looking that way but through the disease – or because of it – he became this new person.  And then the music for his new album came rushing out.  In torrents.  Some of it was good, and some was very good.

He had a girlfriend during this last time.  She came around his mother’s house at first but then less and less.  It was kind of weird, me being the old girlfriend and his friend for longer than that while she –   Nothing was said so who cares.

When I saw him this last time the massive amounts of radiation and chemo had done their work on him.  Still, the tumor couldn’t be stopped.  It kept growing as I sat next to his bed and watched.  Not the tumor but the changes it put him through and which then began to speed up until there came a day when he couldn’t go outside for a cigarette anymore, didn’t even want to.  We both knew his time was getting short but nothing was said.  By then we’d re-connected in a way we hadn’t as kids.  Sometimes we’d imagine a place and time where everything was right again.  Funny how if you imagine something hard enough it becomes a wish and then it begins to seem almost possible.  Until it’s not.  He needed those escapes while I was just happy to help relieve some of what he was going through.  Or distract from it.

We’d remember the mall.  That was our place.  Our whole adolescence and teenage years had been spent there.  Later on we tried to have a boy-girl relationship that eventually morphed into a fuck buddy thing.  We found out being together was impossible because those old days at the mall would always pull us back to who we were then and we were powerless to stop it.  We’d become those kids again, telling everyone to go fuck themselves.  And that would’ve been fine too except that it meant as long as we were together neither one of us could go forward with our lives.  We actually talked about this during those last days which would have been impossible as kids.

So then we weren’t teenagers anymore.  He had his band or bands – always a new one – while I went to school and then bumped around some before moving to New York.  We’d still text or email.  Or when I was in Memphis we might meet for a drink.  By then it was okay to remember the mall and those other kids.  Some were even crazier than us.

There were about fifty of us or even a hundred, depending on the day or who’d skipped or the time or if it was the weekend.  Friends of friends of friends, we’d hang out on the ledge at the edge of the fountain and plan our misadventures.  We learned how to cop and smoke, how to shoplift by distracting security while others stuffed new stuff under what they had on, the whole time looking totally innocent.  Some of us even had people outside who’d take anything new for cash on the spot.

Mark and I would hang at the fountain but it was the arcade where we had our real scam.  We were both really good at doubles on an early version of Space Invaders and we’d run up so many free games other kids had to pay us to play.  These were mostly kids with a parent or sitter who’d dumped them at the arcade with some money while they shopped.  So with money in their pocket and limited time these kids had to pay us instead of the machine.  And why not; what difference did it make, they still got their game for the same price.

The trick was taking their money without management catching on.  Sometimes fifteen or twenty kids in a row would play with each of them paying us.  All the managers knew was a bunch of kids were in the corner all day having a good time at the videos.  This went on for months until they finally caught on and kicked us out.

It was after Mark couldn’t go outside to smoke anymore that something began to bother me.  I had to say goodbye to him while he could still understand but that was the problem.  How to do it without conjuring up all the sadness he’d been trying to keep away so it wouldn’t come crashing down on top of him.  That’s what was on my mind the last night I went to see him.

It had to be before the Dilaudid which lately had been knocking him right out.  His mother would come in at nine to give him the shot so there I was next to his bed at eight forty five knowing I had to do it now but still with no clue how.  He’d barely smiled when I got there and it made me wonder if he was in more pain than usual.  The last thing I wanted was to add to it.  His eyes were closed but I only had to say his name for him to open them and I was just getting ready to do that when I became aware of something else.  I’d noticed earlier my balance had been off and now a feeling of vertigo came over me so strong I thought I might fall.  My heart was racing and then I realized I might be sick myself.  But how could that be?  I sat on the edge of the bed to steady myself.

It was so stupid – beyond comprehension really!   Here I was with my friend who was dying, trying to say goodbye, and then to get sick just when I’m ready to do it?  It didn’t make sense.  I mean how fucked up is that?  Do I need to have a sickness of my own before I can deal with his?  Am I that fucking self-involved?  Is my body telling me NO?  This can’t be about him!  Even now it has to be about me!  ME!

But then I realized that no matter what it was I was getting colder by the second and had to do something.  I lay back in the bed and pulled the spread up over me, trying not to disturb Mark.  But just then he turned towards me as if he hadn’t been asleep at all.  We stared into each other’s eyes and I felt his hand take mine.  Then he mouthed very slowly, “I love you.”  At that moment I realized he thought I’d gotten into bed to be with him again so I gripped his hand back and whispered, “I love you too,” and saw that smile I’d been looking for.

Then I said in the same whisper, “Remember telling me how you’ve tried so hard to stay alive and that you’ve been doing it for so long, you’re not sure you’ll know how not to when the time comes.  Remember telling me that?”  He nodded.  “So maybe now you don’t have to try so hard anymore.”  And then with that smile still on his face, he closed his eyes and fell asleep.  I was able to get out of bed without waking him.

In the living room I said goodbye to his mother but she just looked at me funny.  Then I went out the door to my car parked in front.  The car door was hard to open but then I saw his mother in her doorway watching me.  Finally in the driver’s seat I thought everything would be fine but when I looked at the dashboard all I saw was stars.  I opened the car door and the street came up to meet me.

Two days later I woke up in the hospital and found out what happened.  An ovarian cyst I didn’t know was there had ruptured and the poison had spread throughout my body.  They’d had to go in to remove it and flush out the infection.  The doctor said I would’ve died from sepsis right there in the street if Mark’s mother hadn’t seen me fall out of the car.  She called 911 and, being a retired nurse, took care of me until they got there.

At some point they told me Mark was gone and then I was in the hospital for another week getting pumped full of antibiotics and regaining my strength.  By the time I was discharged they’d already had Mark’s funeral but his mother told me about it.  How so many of his friends came to say goodbye.  “Hundreds of them,” she said.  Most were musicians, a lot of whom I knew.  I was sorry to have missed it but I knew I’d already said goodbye to him in the best way I could.

One more thing about that.  A few people have said it’s hard for them to believe I got sick at the exact moment I was trying to say goodbye to him.  I mean what a coincidence, huh?  And it’s strange for me too even though I thought of that even when it was happening.  Here’s how I see it now.

During those last days we talked a lot about the steeple we could see as kids from our neighborhood.  Neither of us had ever brought it up to each other before – not even back then – but we both remembered it exactly the same.  How white it was and how high it rose, its thinness and elegance, reaching so far up into that crystalline blue sky that you knew even God Himself had to be impressed by it.  We’d shared our vision of the steeple with God before we shared it with each other so that meant He’d been with us even back then.  And had been ever since.

I hadn’t slept in days.  I had no clue how much stress I was under or what it was doing to me.  I needed help that day and then something came along in the form of a ruptured cyst to put me there in the bed next to him, exactly where I needed to be.  And then we said goodbye in our own way and there was no sadness or regret or pain in it at all.  Only joy.

Mark and I learned that we’re all connected in ways deeper and stronger and more meaningful than anything we can imagine and to try to deny that is just stupid.  I told you what happened.  Whether you believe it or not is up to you.

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Harvey Huddleston’s short fiction has appeared in Mystery Tribune, Literary Yard and The RavensPerch, among many others.