WHILE WE WERE ARRANGING THE body and wiping fingerprints off the knife, the pope was busy pardoning Galileo. We were unimpressed. We doubted that the maggoty dust of Galileo’s four-hundred-year-old corpse much cared that the church had finally gotten a clue. But we tried to celebrate the triumph of reason, ventured into an empty field where we could see the stars, passed a bottle of wine back and forth, scanned the sky for the rings of Saturn and listened to the Indigo Girls sing his elegy. The night was hollow and cold, the grass damp. Wine no longer made us pleasantly blurry, no matter how much we drank.
Out there, in the unimaginable world beyond Battle Creek, the army of reason marched on. We knew it was true, because we saw it on TV. Up with the separation of church and state; down with supply-side economics. Up with sex and drugs and the saxophonic approximation of rock and roll; down with the death penalty and “gay cancer” and Dan “Potatoe” Quayle. Our Democrat took the White House, a hippie boomer with his finger on the button. We were all living in Satan’s America now, at least according to Pat Buchanan. We’d always liked Clinton, the man with the honeyed voice and the McDonald’s jowls who worshipped at the altar of indulgence. He was our kind, we thought once, but not anymore, because he still believed in a place called hope.
WE WENT TO THE FUNERAL, obviously. People stared. Nikki killed herself—everyone believed that—but she’d done it on Halloween, the devil’s night; she’d done it in a boxcar scribbled with Satanic symbols; she’d done in it the same season one of her fellow seniors had turned Satanist and cursed half the class. The devil’s fingerprints were all over. Only Nikki’s parents and brother didn’t stare. They sat in the front row with their heads down. Her father cried. We wanted to, but we didn’t.
MAYBE, DEEP DOWN, WE LIKED it. They were afraid of us, and there was always pleasure in that.
We saw that they liked it, too. You could hear it in the curbside sermons, the barely concealed pride of being proven right. If Battle Creek did have an underground cabal, it was a cabal of shameful joy, and these were its members: the ministers, the principal, the guy who kept writing all those editorials in the local paper, the cops, the experts brought in from Harrisburg to advise on cults, everyone who got to be on TV. We heard that after Geraldo came to town, Kaitlyn Dyer’s mother had a viewing party, with seven-layer dip, like it was the Fourth of July. We weren’t invited.
WE SHARED A BEDROOM, MARKING time till graduation, until we could leave without drawing suspicion. All of our parents had been accommodating; in the days after Nikki, no one liked the idea of a girl living on the streets. We slept side by side. We smelled of the same conditioner and toothpaste; we wore each other’s clothes. We couldn’t stand the sight of each other, but we had to stay in sight. We had to make sure our secrets would stay locked up, which meant watching each other, always. We dreamed with our eyes open, remembering the noise she’d made as the blood was spilling out of her, the whale song of pain.
We still drove, in those endless days. Never toward something. Always away. We would drive into emptiness, then set out a blanket, lie down in the middle of a dead sunflower field. A yellowing void we could scan from horizon to horizon, wizened stalks swaying in the breeze.
The buzz and chitter of insects. Our goose-bumped skin. Spring on its way, all too slowly. Seconds ticking by, measured and loud. Life inside a grandfather clock.
We talked about the devil, and whether there was such a thing. Once we had speculated that God and the devil were the same, that they were contained in the holy sound of Kurt’s voice, but we didn’t need them anymore, our god or our devil. We understood now what we were meant to be, a church of two, worshipping only each other.
WHEN THE TIME WAS RIGHT, we left. Exactly as we’d planned, in the dark of night, bags piled into the trunk, car pointed west. We didn’t go to Seattle. Seattle wasn’t ours anymore. But we paid attention, and we saw what became of it.
Seattle was a commercial. Seattle was a movie set and a Gap ad. Grunge was ascendant; the revolution was televised. Seattle took over the world, all its possibility and promise made manifest, and didn’t survive it.
Neither did Kurt. We didn’t cry. We wondered, for a moment, at the rumors about Courtney, because we knew how easy it was to make one thing look like another, to take a cold hand and curl it around a gun. But deep down, we knew: It was Kurt. His finger. His trigger. He owned his death, and it turned out the death of a god was like any other. It was not rage or sorrow or love; it was neither beautiful nor deep. It was the one thing Kurt had never been: pointless noise, pointless silence.