I wrote this because I wanted to bridge the distance between writing university essays and my own work; get me back in the swing. I also wrote it because I wanted to try and confront my own questions/feelings/confusion about grief - and the isolation it entails - in a way that was productive and meaninful. This angsty little number is the result. I know, this author's note does nothing to recommend it.
There's A Room In Which No Light Enters.
It was two months to the day, except no-body seemed to remember.
Two months and the blood had faded to an indecipherable stain on the asphalt.
Two months and the bed had been stripped and re-made, scourged of any trace of the dark figure who had lain there.
Two months. Two months.
Two-Bit tried to concentrate on the lesson being conducted around him. Tried to muster up the effort to seize upon that golden moment of opportunity which would allow him to transform his classmates day from drudgery to farce: the implicit demand of twenty-four sets of darting eyes. And usually he made the effort. But in all honesty he just didn't have the heart for it today. Besides, things hadn't really been funny for a while. Sixty-two days to be precise.
Truthfully he needed a cigarette – maybe the whole carton – because he could feel his nerves beginning to get the better of him again. Not the same kind of restless anticipation that came before a rumble, these were something else entirely. They bit like a blade, leaving him feeling sick and hot, trapped and impotent and tearing at his own throat in rage. The only things he'd found which stopped it were six-packs and cigarettes, but he'd ran out last night.
For a minute he considered going to find Steve or even Pony, who both maintained a meticulous supply. But right now he felt the same pressure of expectation from his friends as from his classmates: that he was required to be the light relief for everyone else's problems. And he just couldn't do it today.
Today brought the problems home to his own doorstep, and they hadn't bothered knocking for admission. He'd even been unable to face breakfast at the Curtis' that morning, something he knew would have ticked Darry right off when the older greaser was trying so hard to keep what was left of their outfit together.
If he were still here, Two-Bit could have bummed a Lucky Strike off Johnny. Johnny who would see the whole gang served in smokes before taking one for himself. But Johnny wasn't here, and that was part of the problem. When he'd needed the gang most they had failed to protect him.
Him and Dally both.
And maybe that was the reason why he wanted to claw out his own throat. What good were words against heaters and prejudices? What could they change when the candle had already burned out?
And while it was strange to think of someone like Dallas Winston as needed protection, maybe he did; just a little more than anyone else. Dally had been violent and reckless, but more than that, he'd been afraid. Afraid of life and, year by year, just how empty it was revealing itself.
Two-Bit hadn't been at the hospital the night Johnny died. But even then he'd seen enough in the interceding days to know that Johnny, so timid and oppressed in life, accepted the prospect of death with a quietude and courage that put them all to shame. Decided that sixteen years was going to be long enough; and that all the pain was worth just that one day to be a hero. Two-Bit had read the letter.
And he knew, even if Dallas had lived to be fifty, this sense of peace was something he could never have achieved. Instead he died still running from his fear, after the only thing he ever cared about in the world had abandoned him. That, ultimately, was worse than death itself.
And while they knew they could never have saved Johnny, maybe, could they have saved Dally? If they'd got there sooner? Shouted louder that the gun he was brandishing wasn't loaded? Part of him said no: that Dally was irredeemable without Johnny. But it was that part of him which didn't know that kept him up at night.
Two-Bit felt bile rise in his throat, and he knew he had to stop thinking about it. His t-shirt stuck to his skin beneath his statement leather coat, and his hands shook visibly from where they were folded on his desk. The people sitting closest pinned him with disgruntled looks, and he guessed he must have been causing quite the private spectacle since every one of them had instinctively drawn back. He didn't have enough energy for shame, their ignorance angered him too much. How could they not know what day it was?
"Are you listening, Mr. Mathews?" The omniscient voice drifted from the front.
With a herculean effort Two-Bit forced the world back into focus, lifting his gaze just high enough to meet with the teacher's. A blonde. He frowned:
"What?"
A few nervous, anticipatory titters rippled around the classroom, but most students sensed the discordance in the overwhelming atmosphere.
"I asked if you were listening, Mr. Mathews."
There's a supercilious assumption in her voice that he finds a little derogatory. Nevertheless he musters up a half-smile. Which looks more like a grimace:
"Oh. Sure."
He expects her to go back to conducting her lesson in earnest, but she doesn't give up that easily.
"Then I wonder if you could tell me the answer to the expression on the board?"
He's having a hard enough time focusing on her never mind the blackboard, which seemed to be wavering somehow as if the whole room has been submerged in water. He doesn't even attempt to decipher the squiggles that are maybe-physics, maybe-geometry.
"Nope."
And what was the point, anyway? What did it matter when Johnny and Dallas were dead, and no-one seemed to remember? When no-one even acknowledged that there were two empty chairs in the classroom; two more people that should have been there, but weren't. None of it mattered. Not school. Not loyalty. Not Soc's. Not Greasers. None of it would bring them back. Didn't anyone understand that?
He could feel his heart-rate accelerating the way it did before a fight – except there was no busting a bottle top here and threatening whatever frightened you until it backed down. Welcome to the real world, kid. You could neither run from, nor fight against yourself. They'd found that out the hard way. His breath caught in his throat as if the air was laced with razors. He couldn't take it any more. If he didn't get out he was going to blow.
"It doesn't mean anything," he muttered fervently to himself.
"I wonder, Mr. Matthews," she was still pushing, "do you have the ambition to be in high-school all your life? Repeating the same lessons over and over again and still without learning anything? Isn't there just a little embarrassment for you in still being a junior at eighteen-and-a-half when all you compatriots are either working or in collage?"
Two-Bit felt rather than saw the series of eyebrows raise at the revolutionary idea that everybodies favourite wise-cracking Greaser was actually a figure of shame. No-one had ever asked Two-Bit before if he was ashamed which, no, for the record he was not. But society was a performance of assumption, and through one well-turned interrogative his reputation was in ruins. It didn't matter anyway, he was long done with school.
In the back of his mind he knew she was trying to goad him: turning the tables of an attack he had launched too many times. She succeeded too, but not in the way that she assumed. Her words, loaded with implications, opened up a void inside him that no light would ever be sufficiently bright enough to fill. The war between the Greasers and the Soc's would continue indefinitely, with both sides repeating the same mistakes, repeating history until everyone ended up like Johnny or Dallas. Or worse. That was their future: a dead end.
Without clearly knowing what he was doing, Two-Bit rose from behind his desk, muttering over and over again like a mantra: 'It doesn't mean anything. It doesn't mean anything.'
"Mr. Matthews?" There's worry in her tone now.
With all the defiance he can muster, he draws himself up to his full height, the bones creaking and cracking in his back as they unfolded from a lifetime habit of slouching. He looks her straight in the eye and tells her incontrovertibly:
"It doesn't mean anything."
Then he's moving between the rows like smoke, a roaring sound rising in his ears which may have been dissenting fists on desktops, or just his imagination.
"Mr. Mathews, please re-take your seat."
Not a chance.
"Mr. Mathews!"
He wrenches open the door.
"You're on your final warning, Mr. Mathews. Behaviour like this means expulsion!"
In the doorway he turns and cuts one final, real trade-mark grin, before cussing her out with such intensity as to make even Dallas Winston blush. Then he turns to the class at large and bows. The last three years had been a performance and this was his closing act. Let the curtain fall where it will.
Slam!
As soon as he's out of the classroom he's running. Running from everyone and everything that he can't bare to face. And he doesn't stop running until he reaches the nearest convenience store, because it's been two months, two fucking months, and inside he feels like he is dying.
While he regularly got rip-roaring drunk for kicks, he was sure he would have to drink himself comatose for sanity. So be it. He counted out the change for two six-packs and a carton of smokes with shaking hands, wondering if the look in his eyes was the same as had been in Dally's that night. Was the same look in every bodies when they felt their world collapsing in on top of them.
Outside on the side-walk he lit a cigarette and smoked it without tasting it, opened a can and drowned it in one continuous swallow. He repeated the process and by the third cycle was feeling calmer. Calm and self-destructive enough to swing by the park.
He couldn't miss Johnny from his hospital room or Dally from the confines of their neighbourhood, so he mourned for both of them at the side of the road. The rest of the gang went out their way to avoid the spot where Dally had been killed, but Two-Bit visited there daily. They didn't know it was the only way he could grieve for their friends.
Grief. It did strange things. In the last two months he had seen every member of the gang separately break down and cry, even the indomitable, impenetrable Darry. Darry who had remained dry-eyed even at his own parent's funeral. Darry who was the rock which held them all firm. Darry who, terrifyingly, had been the first to break. And Two-Bit wondered just how much the older Greaser distanced himself away from them, took on the unofficial role of custodian, so that the deaths of Jonny and Dally felt like the failure of a parent.
And a hundred times Two-Bit had tried to re-learn the trick of squeezing salt-water from his eyes; tried to engage in an act of catharsis and found himself unable to release. To the gang he was still pretending that the loss of a switchblade was the limits of his world, pretending that he was the buoy in a rising sea that they could all cling to to prevent themselves from drowning. He couldn't pretend any more.
He needed help, only he didn't know how to ask for it. And they'd all assumed Pony would be the one to blow up in school. Geez.
The fifth can slipped down nicely, chased by two more cigarettes, and he began to feel that familiar and homely unsteadiness on his feet. He couldn't remember the last time he had eaten and the effects were quicker than he'd anticipated, but it didn't matter. He could walk this route in his sleep.
And there was another question that was bothering him: how were you supposed to grieve for two distinctly different people when missing either one of them felt like an act of betrayal? Who, when the gang cried, did they cry for? The hood or the hero? And, ultimately, who was which?
He'd heard Darry say it a thousand times: you don't stop living just because somebody dies. But what if you did? What if they took some integral part of you with them, and now you were slowly suffocating in its absence? You could make a joke out of life, but life always had the last laugh at your expense.
The sight of those familiar trees filled him with a sense of relief as if here, at the epicentre of violence, was the only place on earth he could breath. And the scent of pine still tinged the air in the exact same way it had two months previous: the same way it leached into his dreams, and seasoned everything he tried to eat. Being around it made him feel half mad. Staying away made him worse.
He drained the sixth can in the twenty strides it took from the edge of the park to Dally's grave. A point marked by a symmetrical, rust-coloured stain that was now practically indecipherable from its surrounding. It was poetical really: how the body of a no-good hood left behind a physical stain on society. And the hood was the reason why no-one remembered that it was two months today. No-one ever mourned juvenile delinquents dying. Not even when they were turned heroes.
He was definitely drunk now, and his chest ached from smoking a whole pack in under an hour. Clumsily he lowered himself to the floor and lay with his cheek pressed against the hard ground. A small grin tugged at his lips and he whispered:
"Hey Johnnycake. Hey Dal."
He kept drinking steadily, wondering if this time, in this place, it might just be enough to bring them back. Because time's fame as life's great healer was a career built on a lie. The only thing time was capable of was destruction: it broke down the fabric of images and memories until faces you once thought you knew so well became harder and harder to recall. Two-Bit couldn't let Johnny and Dallas go out that way. He'd die himself first, before losing them again.
As he lay he wondered distantly if the rumours of his performance have circulated the school. He knew it was only a matter of time before the gang was out looking for him. And maybe by the time they'd exhausted everywhere else he might just actually want to be found: broken and exposed, so they would know he'd lied when he'd said everything was okay.
"How did y'all do it?" He asked, "You know, when things got bad?"
The answer came down with a supercilious edge.
With the help of the gang, stupid.
Oh. Right.
But the gang wasn't the gang any more, it was a reminder of everything they had lost. The gang was in ruins. We couldn't get along without you. They were the exact words Two-Bit had told Johnny only hours before he had killed the Soc. And they were true. Any attempts at normalcy they'd made since were laughable.
And Two-Bit didn't belong to the gang anyway, not in the way that everyone else did. Darry, Soda and Pony were brothers: a nucleus of family at the centre of everything, and Steve had been Soda's best friend since grade school. Where then did that leave Two-Bit? Two-Bit who had no special allegiances or decade-old claims?
Drunk, cold and lying in the middle of the road. That's where it left Two-Bit.
"Any room for one more up there?"
Not you're time, man. Not your time.
Shame.
At some indefinite point the darkness closed ranks around him and Two-Bit began to fade in and out of consciousness. When he was lucid enough to swallow he drank away his grief, and when his vision clouded he searched for them. Always without success.
It began to rain, and Two-Bit shivered under the half-protection his leather jacket provided. He had neither the will nor sense of self-preservation to find shelter. Instead he just wanted lie here in the company of his friend. Lie here and forget that the world, somehow, still turned without them.
He felt the beat of the gangs footsteps, running hard, long before they approached. Heard them calling his name this time instead of Dally's: one more person they were running against the night to try and save.
No-one had a match or trigger this time, but that didn't mean the weapon wasn't loaded and aimed.
Thank you for reading. Your words are always appreciated if you have time to spare them.
One Wish Magic.