III Howard and Emily

The western sky had a few creamy translucent bands of dull-colored light perched on its horizon: a vaguely opalescent blend of a deep-pink-but-now-very-dim sunset, the glow-might of Seattle and Everett, and the moonlight painting the roof of low clouds over the Pacific.
Five-halves-score and eight eyes watched wide in wonder. Five-halves-dozen mouths sagged. Twenty-nine selves were sated well beyond satisfaction, on food, drink, love and smoke. A bright bonfire crackled and made sharp sausage-greasy sticks sparkle. Bloated, ashy corpses of sacrificial marshmallows, intended and impromptu, shimmered in the margins of cooling coals.
The selves had reveled in each others’ company, new friends and old friends meeting, playing drums, telling stories and poems, howling the moon up over Spokane. It had been a noisy, joyous evening that had mellowed into a sublimely beautiful night. Howard’s happy, reedy voice had just finished an informative monologue on the proper manufacture of an Oreo loogie, to be hucked as high as ever possible onto a school wall, and the hilarity died pleasantly down to a moment of perfect comfortable quiet, and the eyes had settled on the lovely western sky. Then, as if on some cosmic cue, a shooting star appeared, soaring over their heads like a fiery softball batted out of the Wenatchee High School athletic field at supersonic velocities and only now succumbing to gravity. Its tail traced several degrees of whitish-green arc behind it, so bright it left flashing slashes in the blinks of the eyes that followed it. And now they gaped in ape-awe. The meteor had been the perfect punctuation, an exclamation mark that made them all exclaim. Even blind Brendan felt the thrill.
Then the moment was broken by a shift of wind. The group was on an exposed ledge on Blewett Pass, in the high steppe of the Eastern Cascades, and it was chilly. The wind pushed the smoke from the bonfire straight into the faces of everyone sitting on the West side. They became instantly frantic, waving their hands and leaping up as their lungs creaked on hot carbon dioxide. This sudden motion knocked several empty bottles together, an alarmingly-loud clinking and chinkering that promised broken glass and cut feet. But the good spirit who protects hedonists from themselves was thankfully present, and alarum was joined with laughter, and the moment passed.
Emily Epsom sat on a double-chair under a blanket with Melanie Wealden. Melanie had made the blanket as a going-away present, stitching for untold hours. It was Navajo wool with a black-and-oxblood border around a rectangle of rich green. Melanie, a botanist, had embroidered one hundred and sixty-three plants overlapping each other like a rampant jungle garden. Trees, shrubs, and grasses were all drawn at like scale, so tiny arctic poppies were the same size as sequoias. One for each week they had been together. “I had to think a while whether I should tear seventeen of them off, because I finished it before we, uh, had our talk,” said Melanie, her voice hoarse with emotion. She arrived only a couple hours ago after ignoring all invitations, and presented Emily with the blanket and a warm heart to take with her into space. Then there had been tears and hugs, followed by apologies, acknowledgement of wrongs done on both sides, then more hugs and laughs and genuine elation at being in each others’ arms again.
It had been a hard year for both of them, with regards to each other. The announcement of the trip in February had resulted in a discussion that had maundered painfully for days while the two of them wrangled about who loved the other more, who would give up more for the other, and hundreds of increasingly-theoretical hypothetical situations and what-ifs. The sad hardness was that Emily wanted to go, and Melanie wanted her to stay. There was an inevitable sense of betrayal, which calved glacial chills in the emotional weather in their house, that in their turn coalesced into an exploding firestorm, the eruption of Mount Melanie, an outpouring of hot bitterness and acid accusation that would have made Haphaestos shade his face.
The catalyst of this colossal reaction was Howard, who in his innocent cheerful friendliness had been telling ridiculous stories to make Emily laugh. No slouch of a storyteller herself, Emily had emended the end of a story to great humorous effect, and the two of them had shared a long, paralytic, wheezing-giggling laugh that was greatly satisfying to both of them. Then they had locked eyes, cheeks flushed, and shared a smile of such brightness and spirit that it seemed to warm them both to the marrow. Melanie had come into the laboratory through the rear door and observed the end of the episode.
There was already tension about Howard because he had become good friends with Emily during the last year, and they had shared experiences that Melanie was quite naturally envious of. Howard was Going, and Melanie was Staying Here. Real or imagined, the signs had grown in Melanie’s mind, tumors of pre-aggrievance, and she had convinced herself that Something Was Going On by virtue of the strength of her own emotions. How could she feel this strongly if there wasn’t Something Going On?
Howard noticed her first, in the lab that evening, after the long laugh and sweet smile. He was looking straight into Emily’s eyes, when suddenly he felt a frost emanating from the back of the lab, a cold burning on the back of his neck that made his kidneys shiver. He turned and saw Melanie, a pillar of fiery frigidity, like a statue made of dry ice.
He began to stammer out a greeting, but she cut him off with a gesture that telegraphed her willingness to try to chop him in two with the edge of her bare palm. Then her eyes flicked a grim saccade over to Emily, whose smile had wilted somewhat. Howard slithered toward the door and hovered there, unsure of his expected role in the gathering storm. He soon decided there were safer rooms to be in.
Whether Melanie actually believed her suspicions were confirmed was irrelevant, because her heart had needed to relieve this pressure for a long time, and she flayed Emily with her feelings. Unkind words were spoken on both sides. All the flaws that they had been willing to overlook in each other for the sake of the relationship were highlighted in the most unflattering ways. This kind of hot ventilation made a breakup seem more correct, more inevitable. Finally, at crux and climax, Emily wanted to go into space more than she wanted to stay on Earth, even if Earth meant Melanie. So that was that. There was grief and loss, and eventually personal resolution for both of them, but they hadn’t communicated much at all since then. Tonight they were close again – not as close as before, of course, but definitely not alienated and distant.
Howard and Emily had decided to have their going-away party together – not as any declaration of emotional solidarity, but merely because they had a lot of mutual friends. Howard made friends easily, and maintained good connections with people even when he didn’t see them for months or years. Some of his oldest friends were there tonight, on account of Blewett Pass being quite close to his hometown of Wenatchee.
Howard had endured a spectacularly painful breakup the year before he met Emily, and had only been able to maintain sporadic and saltatory relationships since. The breakup had cost him in spirit and innocence, and he was now very wary about forming such bonds. Tonight, however, he was in such high spirits that he would have gladly flirted with a sulphurous harpy, had she presented herself. He celebrated with abandon even when there was little reason to celebrate, but tonight he had cause to pull out all the stops.
His various friends had come bearing food and intoxicating substances, and Howard eagerly set himself to both. A gentleman from Seattle named Dave brought a bag of butcher-paper bundles which contained unspecified cuts of “discount meat.” A woman from Tacoma named Charlotte had a colossal salad-bowl filled with guacamole, and great grips of chips. Chris from Wenatchee carried three milk-crates full of homebrew in mismatched bottles. Erica from Olympia dug buckets of geoducks, and Jason from Leavenworth had decocted, especially for this occasion, absinthe laudanum. Heidi from Bellingham harvested a great tussocky marijuana plant out of her herbal garden, and brought a cavernous narghile to help process it.
Howard had thrown himself into the party, as if possessed by the spirit of the occasion. He was genuinely happy to see each person who arrived, and no offer of intoxicant or nourishment was refused. Howard’s gift of impromptu grandiosity was in generous flower, and his relentless cheerful energy had elevated a simple campfire gathering into something very great and memorable indeed.
By now, just after the shooting star, the bright sparky energy of the evening had collapsed into something more akin to warm coals. Howard felt a strange panic setting in, the realization that this was his last night on Earth for an unspecified amount of time, eighteen months at the very least. The thought that he might never return barely intruded into his reality. He tried to push himself to keep it up, to drink one more beer, to pull one more lungful of sweet skunky smoke through the gurgling culvert-like waterpipe. He recognized that his friends were already beyond their capacity for added enjoyment, and he felt the black-mittened fingers of stupefaction stroking his brain stem. He tried to move around the circle and cajole everyone like a teammate, giving Blind Brendan a brisk shoulder-rub, offering to fetch Heidi a refill. His feet clinked against empty bottles and clamshells, and he nearly lost his balance, swaying dangerously close to the fire. Several pairs of reassuring hands gripped him and guided him back to his chair. His eyes swam for a moment and then he focused on the face of Reid, a very old friend from home.
“Hey Reid,” he said, “remember that time we tried to drink a whole hogshead of beer? We invited EVERYBODY, even the jocks and the dicks, and tried to put that thing away.”
“Our efforts were feeble,” Reid said, laughing. “And the bar wanted the kegs back on Monday, so we had to rally and fill every available container with stale, flat beer. My favorite was the giant cafeteria mustard-dispenser.”
“Hey Erica,” said Howard, “remember when we tried to distill that cough syrup with lighter fluid?”
“To this day, I have still never felt sicker,” Erica said with a flicked dreadlock.
“Hey Emily,” Howard continued, but a spear of ice from Melanie’s eyes managed to penetrate his sodden awareness, and he found himself at a loss for coherency. Two of his oldest friends, Jason and Reid, stepped up to save him from himself.
“Howard,” said Jason, offering him a mug, “how would you like another drink of this absinthe laudanum?”
“Thank you Jason,” said Howard, drawing himself up with uncanny dignity and accepting the mug. “I’d like that very much.” After that, Howard was more easily susceptible to the suggestion that he call it a night, and accepted Reid’s assistance in finding his tent in the darkness. Nobody wanted to see Howard hurt or embarrass himself.
The greater part of the party followed Howard into slumberland, but a few of the women stayed up. Emily and her friends had not indulged as deeply as the others, and so they fed the fire and warmed themselves with good companionship until the sky began to pale in the East.
“Well,” said Melanie finally, “I’m afraid I’m a normal Earth girl with an Earth job, so I better get rolling.” Emily walked her to the car. They embraced with a mix of tenderness and ferocity, faith and love and wounds unhealed. They looked into each others’ eyes for a long moment. They’d already said all they could say to each other. The moment might have been longer if the morning was of more clement element, but they both noticed the bitter chill of the morning now that they were away from the fire, and they both began to shiver. Melanie leaned forward and gave Emily a kiss, then she got into her car and drove away. Emily watched her go West, pursued by the slanting orange fingers of the rising sun.