Page 85 of How to Hide in Plain Sight
We laugh until the hysterics die down, slow to a soft trickle, then flatten completely. We sigh. Then we look at each other. Manuel’s lips twitch up at the edges. So do mine. Our eyes widen. We try to push down the giggles bubbling up in our throats. Nobody makes another joke, but it doesn’t matter.
We lose it anyway.
The laughter that follows is the kind of laughter that makes a standing man weak at the knees. It rolls straight up the spine, tipping you over. I collapse onto my side. So does Manuel. My hip knocks into the brandy handle, sending it rolling out of the tarp and into the night. We writhe about, bumping into the tarp and the dirt-lined walls and each other. We’ve reached that delicious point at which your body is no longer your own, when you have no choice but to surrender it to the mercy of the joy forcing itself out from your insides. You can’t think. You can’t worry. You can’t stop to wonder if you look like an idiot. You wouldn’t even know if your body disappeared entirely. For all you know, your arms, your thighs, your skin, your hair—it could all be gone. Vanished. It feels so good. All of it. I can’t remember the last time we fell victim to an attack of this magnitude. As kids, it happened every other day—random moments in which we happily came apart at the seams, in which we became nothing before the power of total hysteria.
We give in. We give in and it feels so good, and now we’re riding those good feelings as far as we can. Because laughter is finite. Even at peak hilarity, when you lose control of your body and your anxieties and all those other horrible details that make you human, in the back of your mind you know that it cannot last. None of it. This beautiful terror will end, same as a heartbreaking movie or an outburst of anger or a particularly delicious bowl of ice cream.Everything ends. So our laughter shrinks within our bellies, turning from great cascading waves to nothing more than a ripple.
Released from hysteria, our bodies go limp. We lie face up on the floor. We sigh. This time, it’s a sigh of finality. A period instead of a semicolon. I lift one hand and slap Manny’s stomach, hard. He grabs it before it has a chance to escape. Our chests rise and fall. Then, like silk-lined cotton, stillness settles over our bodies.
Stillness and silence. By this point, we’ve weathered thousands of silences together. It isn’t stiff and awkward, the way silence feels with other people; it’s warm. I snuggle into its warmth.
“I had a thought the other day,” Manuel says.
“Oh?” I turn my neck to look at him.
“An answer. To the question you asked me at Karma’s wedding.”
Present Drunk Brain struggles to remember a conversation logged by Past Drunk Brain. “Which question? That was, like…four years ago.”
“You asked whether you need true love for happiness, or if all you need is a go-to. A Person.”
“Ohhhh.” I push myself up onto my elbows and nod emphatically. “Yes. Of course. One of my most profoundest moments.”
Manuel doesn’t laugh. He tugs up a fistful of grass poking its way into the Fort from beneath the tarp.
“Well?” I ask. “What did you decide?”
“I decided…” The grass slips through his fingers. Tumbles into a neat mess on the tarp. “Well…what if they’re the same?”
“What if what’s the same?”
“Your true love and your”—he clears his throat—“your Person. What if your true love and your Person are the same…the same…person?”
My lungs stop.
Manuel and I stare at each other.
We fall into another silence. This one isn’t like the others. It isn’t warm and comfortable and familiar. It’s weighted. It burns. It’s fire in my throat and at the base of my gut.
“Do you…?” Suddenly I’m dying for a different burn—the fire of liquor. I wish the bottle hadn’t rolled out of the Fort. I wish it was on my lap. I wish I could twist open its cap and pour another mouthful straight onto my tongue instead of answering. Maybe it would wash awaythisburn, the one at the center of my pelvis. The one I’ve ignored for so long. “Do you have a…specific person in mind?”
He looks down. “Yes.”
I become suddenly aware of how hot it is inside the Fort. The liquor and the laughter and the unabashed flailing of bodies—it turned this small space into a makeshift sauna. And the sauna is making me delirious. It’s making me want things that I know I can’t have. It’s even going so far as to make me believe that maybe, just maybe, Icanhave them, and that simply will not do. It won’t do at all. I need fresh air. I need out.
“Oh!” I say too loudly. “The brandy! I must have knocked it out!” I duck under the tarp and crawl outside. “Don’t worry, just a sec, hold on, I got it!”
Outside, summer is evaporating. Bright moonlight shines on a chilly clearing. I’m not wearing shoes or a jacket. I stoop over to search for the bottle. Cold air, cold moss, cold night. Cold air on my arms, cold moss under my toes, cold night in the sky. I know all that cold is supposed to hurt, but it doesn’t. It bounces off, as if my skin were made of rubber. As if every cell were pumped full of novocaine. That’s exactly how it feels, actually. Like when the dentist stuck a needle into my face last year. I couldn’t feel his drill, not even a bit. My brainknewit was supposed to be in pain; it just didn’t care. That’s what being drunk is like.
A voice laughs behind me. I spin around. Manuel stands outsidethe Fort, watching me stumble through the weeds. Only then do I realize I said all of that out loud.
I turn hurriedly back and keep searching. “It must be here somewhere. I saw it roll out of the flap earlier, and there’s no way it could have…”
“Eliot.”
I dig one fist into a patch of juniper. My knuckles cry as the needles split them open.
“Eliot.”
