Forgive Me Leonard Peacock Read online

  So I finish the quote, playing Rick and say, “That’s so long ago, I don’t remember.”

  He says, “Will I see you tonight?”

  It sort of freaks me out, because no one will ever see me again after today, so the question seems weighty. I remind myself that he couldn’t possibly know my plan; he’s just playing the dumb Bogart game we always play. He’s clueless.

  I become Rick again and finish the quote: “I never make plans that far ahead.”

  Walt smiles, blows smoke at the ceiling, and says, “Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”

  I sit down on his couch and end the game the way we always do by saying, “Here’s looking at you, kid.”

  “Why aren’t you in school learning?” Walt says as the flame from his Zippo lights up his face and another cigarette sparks to life. But he doesn’t really care. I skip school all the time just to watch old Bogart films with him. He loves it when I skip school.

  He starts coughing and you can hear the terrible tobacco phlegm rattling.

  A two-pack-a-day sixty-year-habit smoker’s cough.

  Foul.

  I just stare at Walt for a long time, waiting for him to wipe his hand on his robe and catch his breath.

  I wish he were healthier, but it’s hard to imagine him without a cigarette in his hand. Like I bet even in his high school yearbook pictures he was smoking. That’s just who he is. Like Bogart too.

  Man, I’m going to miss Walt so much. Watching old smoky Bogart movies with him is one of the few things I’ll truly miss. It was always the highlight of my week.

  Walt says, “You okay, Leonard? You don’t look well.”

  I shake off the weirdness, wipe my eyes with my sleeve, and say, “Yeah, I’m fine.”

  He says, “You got all your hair tucked up into that fedora along with the tops of your ears?”15

  I nod.

  I don’t want to tell him I cut off all my hair, for some reason, maybe because Walt’s one of my best friends—he really cares about me, I swear to god—and he’d know something was wrong if he saw my fucked-up haircut. He’d get upset, and I want to exit on a good note—I want this to be a happy good-bye, something he can remember and actually feel good about after I’m gone.

  “Bought you a present,” I say, and then pull the turtle-looking wrap job from the top of my backpack.

  He says, “It’s not my birthday, you know.”

  I hope he guesses that it’s mine—or that he might figure it out, deduce it, so I wait a second as he fingers the present and tries to mentally guess what the hell it might be.

  He looks so happy to get a present.

  I kind of promise myself that I won’t kill Asher Beal, nor will I off myself, if only Walt just says “happy birthday” to me one time, as silly and trivial as that seems.

  He doesn’t, and that makes me sad, even though I probably never even told him when my birthday was and I know he would definitely say “happy birthday” if I had.

  But I really want him to say “happy birthday” to me without any prompting, and when he doesn’t, I get to feeling hollow as a dry-docked boat or something.

  “Why do I get pink paper? Do you think I’m a faggot?” he says, and then starts laughing really hard and coughing again.

  I say, “It’s the twenty-first century. Don’t be such a homophobe,” but I’m not really mad at him.

  Walt’s so old that you can’t hold his bigotry against him, because for almost all his life it was okay for him to say “faggot” among friends, and then suddenly it wasn’t.

  He also says things like nigger and kike and Polack and chink and light in the loafers and sand nigger and slant and spade and spook and camel jockey and smokes and porch monkey and just about a trillion other awful slurs.

  I hate bigotry, but I also love Walt.

  It’s like Herr Silverman teaches us about the Nazis. Maybe Walt was just unlucky being born at a time when everyone was prejudiced against homosexuals and minorities, and that’s just the way it was for his generation. I don’t know.

  I’m starting to get sad about all that, so I change the subject by pointing at his present and saying, “Well, aren’t you going to open it?”

  He nods once like a little kid and then tears into the pink paper with his yellow shaky fingers. Halfway in he says, “I think I know what this is!”

  When he has the Bogart hat unwrapped, he says, “Hot digitty dog!” all corny and nestles the hat down on his white hair.

  It’s a perfect fit, just like I knew it would be, because I measured his head once when he was passed out, drunk.

  He composes his face, gets all black-and-white-movie-star-looking, and says, “I’ve got a job to do too. Where I’m going you can’t follow. What I’ve got to do, you can’t be any part of. Leonard, I’m no good at being noble but it doesn’t take much to see that the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world. Someday you’ll understand that.”

  I smile because he switched my name in for Ilsa’s. He does that sometimes when doing lines from Casablanca.16

  He smiles back real nice and says, “Wow. My very own Bogart hat. I love it!”

  And then I just start lying and can’t stop myself no matter how hard I try.

  I don’t know why I do it.

  Maybe to keep myself from crying, because I can feel the tears coming on strong—like there’s a thunderstorm in my skull that’s about to break.

  So I tell him I got the hat off the Internet on a site that auctions old movie props. All proceeds go toward curing smoker’s cough and throat cancer, which killed good old unkillable Humphrey Bogart. I say the hat Walt’s wearing right at this very moment was the same hat Humphrey Bogart wore while playing Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon.

  His eyes open really wide, and then Walt gets this sad look on his face, like he knows I’m lying when I don’t have to—like he loves the hat even if it’s not a movie prop, even if I found it on the street or something, and I know that too, that I don’t have to make shit up because what we have as friends is real and true already—but I just keep telling mistruths and he doesn’t want to call me on it; he doesn’t want to make me feel shameful and fuck up the good moment that is happening.

  That sad look on his face just makes me say things like “really” and “I swear to god” like I do sometimes when I am lying.

  I say, “It’s really really Bogart’s hat, I swear to god. Really. Just don’t tell my mom about this because I had to spend some serious money—like upwards of twenty-five grand I debited from her Visa card, which all goes to cancer research, all of it—and I had to get the hat just so that we might have a little piece of Bogie history, just so we might at least have that forever. Right?”

  I feel so awful, because the truth is that I bought the hat at the thrift store for four dollars and fifty cents.

  Walt’s eyes look all glazey and distant, like I shot him with the P-38.

  “So do you like it?” I ask. “Do you like owning Bogie’s hat? Does wearing it make you feel tough and capable of saving the day?”

  Walt smiles real sad, makes his Bogie face, and says, “What have you ever given me besides money? You ever given me any of your confidence, any of the truth? Haven’t you tried to buy my loyalty with money and nothing else?”

  I recognize the quote. It’s from The Maltese Falcon. So I finish it by saying, “What else is there I can buy you with?”

  We look at each other in our Bogart hats and it’s like we’re communicating, even though we’re completely silent.

  I’m trying to let him know what I’m about to do.

  I’m hoping he can save me, even though I realize he can’t.

  His Bogie hat is gray with a black band and really looks like Sam Spade’s. It was a lucky thrift store find. It really was. Like Walt was destined to have this very hat.

  I remember this other weirdly appropriate quote from The Maltese Falcon and so I say, “I haven’t lived a good life. I’ve been bad. Worse than you could know.”

  But Walt doesn’t play along this time. He gets real twitchy and nervous and then he starts asking me why I gave him the hat at this particular juncture—“Why today?”—and—“Why do you look so sad all of a sudden?”—and—“What’s wrong?”

  Then he starts asking me to take off my hat, asking if I cut my hair, and when I don’t answer he asks me if I’ve talked to my mother today—if she’s been around lately.

  I say, “I really have to go to school now. You’re a fantastic neighbor, Walt. Really. Almost like a father to me. No need to worry.”

  I’m fighting the big-time tears again, so I turn my back on him and walk out through the smoky hallway, under the crystal chandelier, out of Walt’s life forever.

  The whole time he yells, “Leonard. Leonard, wait! Let’s talk. I’m really worried about you. What’s going on? Why don’t you stay awhile? Please. Take a day off. We can watch a Bogie movie. Things will seem better. Bogart always—”

  I open the front door and pause long enough to hear him coughing and hacking as he tries to chase me, using his sad drugstore tennis-ball walker.

  He could die today, I think, he really could.

  And then I just stride out of his house knowing that it was the perfect way to say good-bye to Walt. My storming out right at that very moment was like the emotional climax of an old-school Bogart film. In my mind, I could even hear the stringed instruments building to a dramatic crescendo.

  “Good-bye, Walt,” I say as I stride toward my high school.

  SIX

  LETTER FROM THE FUTURE NUMBER 1

  Dear First Lieutenant Leonard,

  Billy Penn is doing his best Jesus imitation.

  That’s what you’ll say t
oday when you get here and report for duty.

  That’ll be in about twenty years and one hour from where you are in the present moment, roughly thirteen months after you decide to risk entering into the great, open, no-longer-civilized void.

  Like me, you’ll decide that life on crowded, premium dry land—where you have to elbow everyone out of the way just for a breath of fresh air—is not for you.

  And you would never live like a rodent in tube city, now would you?

  Inevitably, you’ll come join me in what we now call Outpost 37, Lighthouse 1—what you currently know as Philadelphia, the Comcast Center skyscraper.

  These days, tides rise and fall by hundreds of feet due to the increased speeds of weather patterns and the daily earthquakes that open and close gigantic underwater crevasses. Our planet is re-forming.

  Today the water is so low, we can see Billy Penn’s feet and just a few inches of the old City Hall building atop of which he is still perched. City Hall is under the sea so it looks like Billy Penn’s walking on water, hence your Jesus reference.

  Greetings from the future.

  The year is 2032.

  There’s been a nuclear holocaust, just like everyone feared there would be, and we’ve managed to melt the polar ice caps, which flooded the planet, covering a third of all known land with sea. Remember that movie your science teacher showed you? Well, Al Gore was right.

  The nukes wiped out a fourth of the world’s population, and a food shortage from lack of land and fresh water took care of another fourth, or so they say.

  Here in the North American Land Collective—we merged with Canada and Mexico several years ago—our overall losses weren’t as dramatic as in other parts of the world, but our land loss was just as great. This resulted in what has been compared to a migratory heart attack. Everyone was forced into the middle of our country, which caused chaos, of course, and required military law and a new sort of totalitarian government.

  They’ve started to build vertically. Sky is the new frontier, the hot real estate. It’s all elevators and skyscrapers and enclosed tubeways in the clouds. People mostly live their lives indoors, somewhere between the earth and outer space, hardly ever breathing unfiltered air or feeling direct sunlight on their bare skin. They’re like gerbils in plastic-tubing cage cities.

  But not us.

  We have volunteered to man Outpost 37, Lighthouse 1, and we spend most of our days boating around the tops of what was once the Philadelphia skyline. Including you, there are only four of us here.

  It is our job to provide light for any vessels that might accidentally find their way into our sector, so they will not crash into the exposed tops of underwater skyscrapers. We are to aid in military operations, of course, but we have not seen another human or a single boat of any kind in more than a year. We have not been officially contacted by the North American Land Collective government in ninety-seven days, nor have we been able to make our satellite links, which leads us to believe that all global communications have been shut down.

  Why?

  We don’t know.

  But here’s the kicker: We do not care.

  We are happy.

  We are self-sufficient, stocked with twenty more years’ worth of poly-frozen food packets.

  Scientists have proved that being exposed to so much unfiltered air, being closer to the great nuclear fallout clouds that drift aimlessly across Global Common Area Two, or what you call the Atlantic Ocean, will definitely shorten our lives quicker than smoking two packs of cigarettes a day, and yet we are at peace with our position and feel as though we have escaped—or maybe like we have finally arrived home.

  We’re living in the moment.

  Sometimes we feel guilty knowing that so many people have suffered through the horrors that put us here, but as we had no control over those things, we simply try to enjoy our good fortune.

  Our life is strange.

  We spend our days in the boats searching the tops of skyscrapers for anything interesting, entering apartments and offices and stores as amateur archaeologists. These are the Egyptian pyramids of our time—“our underwater Machu Picchu,” you like to say.

  You excavate more with the others, “reconstructing the lives of strangers.” It’s like a game. “Our greatest form of entertainment.” The three of you love to play Who Lived Here? and your answers are full of heroes and heroines who once did brave and noble deeds back before the sea swallowed up their entire civilization.

  There are a trillion stories to be found beneath us. “Outpost 37 is perhaps the greatest interactive fiction library man has ever known.”

  You said that, by the way.

  I’m always quoting the future you.

  You’re quite quotable.

  You also love spotting dolphins. There is a large school of them here. They’ve begun to mutate due to the nuclear fallout and are slightly larger than they used to be. You often ride on their backs and call them buses. “I’m going to catch a bus,” you’ll say to S and she’ll clap and laugh as you hop onto one, holding the fin, being sprayed by the creature’s breath. We treat them like pets, swim with them often, and cut off the red squidlike parasites whenever the dolphins roll and offer up their smooth white bellies.

  One youngster swims alongside your boat every morning when you make rounds. You named him Horatio, because he’s so loyal. We joke about him being your best friend and call you Hamlet, a play you are still reading nightly after all these years. “It gives and gives,” you say. Just like your high school English teacher told you.

  But your favorite thing to do is scuba diving down into the city, exploring the watery streets that are still full of cars and hot dog stands and monuments and park benches and petrified trees and sports complexes and so many other things from our past, your present.

  We only have so many bottles of oxygen in storage, so you don’t get to go as often as you’d like, because you are saving a few for the future. Rationing. You believe in the future now. It’s easy for you, because you love the present. Also, because you have S now.

  You still get melancholy sometimes, especially when you think about the past, but mostly you are happy.

  It’s a good, weird life.

  We are a happy little family.

  I understand that you are going through a tough time, Leonard. We’ve talked about it in detail during our late nights manning the great beam of light.

  Your past—what you are currently experiencing—would be hard for anyone to endure. You’ve been so strong, making it this far. I admire your courage, and hope you can hold out a little longer. Twenty years seems like a long time to you, I bet, but it will pass quicker than you can ever imagine.

  I know you really want to kill that certain someone. That you feel abandoned by your parents. Let down by your school.

  Alone.

  Peerless.

  Trapped.

  Afraid.

  I know that you really just want everything to end—that you can’t see anything good in your future, that the world looks dark and terrible, and maybe you’re right—the world can definitely be a dreadful place.

  I know you’re just barely holding it together.

  But please hold on a little longer.

  For us.

  For yourself.

  You are going to absolutely love Outpost 37.

  You’re going to be the keeper of the light.

  My first lieutenant.

  Our beam is quite impressive, even if no one ever sees it but us—we send it out every night religiously. And when we turn out the lighthouse to conserve power, you will see stars like you’ve never seen before. Mind-boggling stars, the depths of which you will never map.

  A strange, beautiful new world awaits, Leonard.

  We’ve found an oasis in their ruins. We really have.

  You want to see it, so just hold on, okay?

  With much hope for the future (and from a man who knows for certain!),

  Commander E

  SEVEN

  My school is shaped like an empty box with no lid.

  There’s this very beautiful courtyard in the center, with four squares of grass, benches, cobblestone sidewalks that make a huge +, with White House–looking columns at the far end, and a cupola tower that overlooks the whole thing.

  Before school or during lunch periods it’s crawling with students—like an awful cockroach infestation of teenagers. But during classes it’s serene, and I can never resist sitting down on a bench and watching clouds and birds fly by overhead.