[garbage] wakes feeling groggy. He takes stock of his room, his aching muscles, and the trickles of dream evacuating from his mind, too fast to grasp at. He was looking for someone, for a long time, looking and never finding. He had failed. He whips the blanket from his thinning form and, like a firework bursting in his mind -raining bright trails of memory- he recalls the book that he put through hell to wring out answers, finding none. He wonders why he thought a book would answer him at all. The dim misshapen memory of a doorway catches his attention, until it, too, evaporates away.

Just more fucking side effects of (_____), he thinks, and ruminates not for the first time on how impossible it seems for anyone to keep hold of themselves on the stuff long enough to even ask for a second dose, let alone develop a full addiction. He rises from his bed and stumbles to the bathroom. As he’s urinating he remembers the book again. There was a reason he wanted answers from it. There was something. He finishes and makes his way out to the day room, where a smattering of other patients are already eating their breakfast.

Before he joins them a nurse is bothering him for vitals, so he lands in a chair and protrudes his skinny wrist and arm, to which a nurse attaches a red vinyl blood pressure cuff. The book was going to help him find Gus. It was going to lead him somehow. The pressure of the cuff squeezes his arm in a way that feels somehow friendly and also suffocating. A flash of pain lances through his neural web and carries with it dark and rank recollections of a massive slimy tongue pressing to his face, sealing away his air.

But as the cuff hisses mildly and deflates to a stretched long turtleneck, the memory, or vision, or whatever, deflates as well. He chalks it up to the dream he had last night and follows the nurse’s intoned directive to line up at the medication window. During the time that he spends in walking to the window, waiting in the rag tag line to get his pills, and tucking them deftly into the crease between his top lip and front teeth, to display to the distributing nurse the lie that he had swallowed them, during this time he was systematically going back over the last few days, trying to pick out what he had been doing, what hed been so important.

[swallow the meds.]

The command came so suddenly from such a camouflaged part of his mind, that it startled him into freezing, halfway from the med counter to the day room. He swallowed, dry, the two already partially dissolved pills and reached back into the fold of his mind from where the voice had come. His protector. He carried there a question, made of images and emotion, wordless but no less pointed for it. The book, the path to Gus, the dreams. Garbage squirmed in a way he never had before. It was hard to read his mood. He seemed almost sullen.

[It doesn’t matter]

[garbage] picked at his breakfast morosely. He came back stronger, demanding answers. The book! Gus! And Garbage rippled with frustration. In bursts of heat and pain, which seemed to issue forth from Garbage’s miniscule domain, he remembered clearly breaking through the ice, remembered the pain of death in the Through, then nothing more. Garbage turned his back.

[“Take your meds.] he said. [So we can just go home.]

And he was left alone, staring at the plate of too-round pancakes and the plastic cup of orange juice set above them, with its crinkled pulled-back foil lid. The half remembered haze of a fantasy world swirled in the cup of his mind, but Garbage usually knew better, at times like this. So he did as he was told.

Over the next several days, he took his meds and watched again as Garbage receded to the outskirts of his mind, still shut behind a wall and eventually so faint that he wasn’t much more than a secretive apparition, as good as imaginary, silent and still. He went to groups, where he witnessed no fewer than three outbursts from his fellow patients. Chairs thrown, screams hurtled across the paper checked tables from where text looked up and cheerily announced “Self Care” with outlined hearts meant to be filled in with bone dry safety markers and photocopied into post nuclear fallout degredation.

He took the chaos in stride, himself half muddled and comfortable to watch in contemplation until the staff directed him to wait in his room. He had meetings with his doctor every day, until, at last, he was told he’d be moved to the floor above. Where he might find some answers, since he couldn’t find any more from Garbage.

When he moved back up, to a different room from before this time, he merely dumped what passed for his belongings on the bed and made a bee line for the day room. He was hoping that he would find Coral there, who he vaguely remembered as being the one he preferred of the two people joining him in his fevered journeys through the ice.

Instead, he finds Don. He approaches him quickly, no preamble.

“Don,” He says. He hears a desperation in his voice and checks himself, taking a breath. “Don what happened? With the book, and with all that shit? And ice?” He feels his face redden, suddenly aware that he looks a fine occupant in that shabby sterile hospital rec room. Don waits for him to finish simply listing disparate elements, his face a picture of mild appraisal, lids half lidded, mouth slack and smooth.

“I should be asking you that, [garbage]. From what I hear, you threw off the beast entirely. It isn’t dead, but you must have injured it pretty severely for it to just abandon its hunt like that.”

“So it was real? The forest, the tents, the castle…” [garbage] rattles off a few more the fragments of memory he can scrounge from what Garbage had left him.

“Real is relative. Anyway, you’ll be happy to hear that Gus is safe. I think he was told who fought off the worm, too. So you’ve got someone to pick you up now. Mission accomplished, brother.” Don pats his shoulder with a heavy hand. “And here, take my number, in case you ever want to meet up, outside of here,” Don hands him a slip of paper, torn from one of the many worksheets constantly strewn about the ward. A phone number is scrawled across it in a vaguely calligraphic script, with a line of text truncated along its bottom reading “...ortant to alway be aware of your mood.”

[garbage] stashes it away in his pocket silently.

“I did it?” He asks. Don chuckles lightly, still watching [garbage] with a curious, studying gaze. “You or your friend there,” He replies, tapping his own temple with a wide forefinger. [garbage] reels. Somehow his protector had succeeded where he couldn’t, once again. With a glow of gratitude and a regret for having doubted Garbage, he settled in a chair for the beginning of a group, the topic of which he didn’t even bother learning. He merely bounced his legs with an eagerness and anticipation which belied the sedative effect of his medication.

Before the group finished, he looked up with surprise to find the Coral was sitting next to him once again. He wasn’t sure how he missed her iconic pink hair and dreamy smile. She was coloring in the edges of a soft tree on the sketchbook in her lap. [garbage] thought of the paper Don had given him, which was resting now, half crumpled, in his pocket.

“Good to see you again, Coral.” He said. She kept her eyes on her tree.

“Lovely to see you too, [garbage]. You’re kind of a celebrity now you know, in wonderland. “She glanced up at him wryly. “The hero that saved his maiden.” [garbage] had to laugh at that, a choked giggle.

“Gus is about as much a maiden as I am a hero.” He said. Coral tilted her head at that, like she was watching a raindrop slide down a windowpane. “Anyway I thought it might be nice if we hung out, you know, out there,” [garbage] vaguely indicated toward the windows, which opened out to a sloped lawn and a walkway behind the hospital. “I could give you my number if you want. Maybe we could go camping or something sometime.” Coral smiled, her face a glowing lava lamp, all color and smooth lines.

“That would be great.” She said. “I do love the forest.”

______________________________________________________________________________

“When I saw that something was going on, whatever it was, I had to find out the nature of Gus’s lies. I really just wanted everything to go back to normal, you know? For once things were working out in our relationship’s favor, and I wanted that back. When I had watched the straggling line of zombies enter the house, I decided to abandon decorum. I know, big surprise there. I turned the key back and let my engine die. I guess that’s my, what, my decision point, right?”

Madeline nods a prim agreement with the phrase [garbage] had pulled from one of the many worksheets.

“Yeah, maybe I could’ve made a better one at that point, but I did what I did. I pocketed my key and stepped out into the street. The house was one of those that seems really nice until you get right up to it. Like it was a big place, with all the fancy shutters, a nice cast iron railing leading to a huge double front door and a sprawl of bushes, a curved front drive as though expecting, like, valets to drop master off and park in a rear garage. But up close it was just peeling apart at the seams, everywhere you looked, paint flaking away, bushes overgrown, all that.

“Anyway I didn’t know what to expect in truth, even when every part of my subconscious, including a very surly Garbage, was growling “traphouse” into my inner ear. I guess I must’ve chosen willful ignorance over the ugly truth. But I was about to be met with the ugly truth whether I liked it or not. The doorbell was trashed. Like, just wires hanging out of the wall, so I lifted the gargoyle on a bend of metal and rapped it against the chewed-looking dark veneered wood door a couple of times. I never understood those knockers. They sound like a kind of tinny rapping, I always thought knuckles could do a better job. Maybe rich people knuckles are too fragile. It always seems like having something else do your work for you is an obsession of the rich, even if it’s an ugly little goblin whacking his ass against the door. Whatever.

“As you can imagine it took a bit of waiting before anyone figured out I was out there. Waiting and goblin ass-whacking. Finally a woman came to the door and cracked it open. She wasn’t the picture of good health that a wealthy homeowner might be expected to be. She had lank dandruffy gray hair that looked like it used to be curly but gave up all that work in favor of a more relaxed and split apart life. And her face looked exactly same. She might have been in her seventies, but from her teeth alone that could be moved up or down a couple decades, depending on whether they were dentures or peculiarly young for her age.

You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

“”How much.” she half croaked, through cracked lips and behind a blank suspicious gaze. She kept her body behind the door, but from her bare spotty shoulder it seemed she was at least shirtless, if not fully in the nude. I took a moment to consider privately whether it was just me or if “how much” really was a less than usual way to answer a door knock, and I decided she must think I was delivering something. I didn’t rule out that she may not have seen me and my conspicuous lack of bags of chinese food or pizza since, by all accounts and by her rheumy eyes, she may well be entirely blind. Especially since she seemed to gaze past me and down her drive instead of at me directly, or at me at all.

“”I’m here for Gus.” I said, concluding my reflections with the decision that I should simply be direct. She grunted in a way that couldn’t possibly be thought of as communicative, but as she withdrew she let the shabby door swing inward in a universal gesture of welcoming. What she revealed was exactly what Garbage and my mind had warned me of. It was a trash heap of a trap house. The carpets were the color of stain, there was a blue choking haze of cigarette smoke and the acrid smell of burning plastic woven through.

“I took a halting step in and the old woman spared no time in slamming the door shut behind me. She took a bolstering in-breath and yell-croaked Gus’s name into the rundown space of the front hall, which was piled high with shoes and coats of all sizes and paneled with lush carved stone tiles from floor to ceiling, themselves plastered with a criss cross mash of spray paint lines, some dripping black or red or silver from their menacing designs.

“I noted with dwindling surprise that my welcome party was indeed naked, save for a threadbare pair of panties doing less covering than simply squishing her steel wool bush of pubic hair against its nearly translucent fabric. Nobody ran to heed her call, so the woman grunted again, a vaguely acquiescent animal sound, and turned to regard me with her apparently still operational milky eyes. “You’re not a networker?” She asked, but waved a dismissing skeletal hand before I could answer. “Zach would’ve seen you,” She concluded. She started down a hallway on her left instead, issuing a grunt that possibly meant I should follow, or possibly wait there. She didn’t turn back to confirm either way. I decided I’d venture onward, and popped my shoes off by the door, since it seemed like the thing to do.

“The woman lead me down a much defiled corridor only half lit by those sconce lights that look all medieval, except for the ones that flickered ominously or hung from a thick white cord from the wall. Her walk was very slow, which gave me time to ruminate on the dangers that most probably waited wherever it was we were going. I made a plan of action, if you can call it that, and resolved to run at the first sight of hats dropping or guns being pulled from the backs of pants. This plan was more of a thought exercise than anything else, however, since it truth most signs of violence would just bring Garbage out, who could handle himself just fine and would probably talk down a shooter and make me a new best friend, if it did come to that.

“Anyway I really didn’t need to worry at all. When we arrived at the tall defaced oak door and she pushed it open with a saggy arm, realigning its room, I realized at once that I wouldn’t have trouble with violent offenders. The room was too big for its occupants and furniture, with everybody there sore of huddled together, up against a corner. A flat screen bigger than I thought they made them dominated the space, and loomed down over a mostly unconscious half dozen occupants, in various stages of repose on various pieces of furniture that looked to have aspirations at being called modern, but were so splashed with grime and torn apart that the only word suitable to describe them now was “trash”.

“Among the litter of glass eyed patrons strewn around the hulking low, wide table that sported an inlaid atlas of meticulous design, was Gus, himself engaged in the favorite activity among the party, the only activity really. He held a glass stopper filled with honey colored liquid over his mouth and seemed industriously occupied with meting some carefully prescribed amount of the stuff under his tongue in drops. He hadn’t noticed me, so I made an effort of announcing myself, half embarrassed for some reason, but a healthy half frustrated as well. I decided on a sardonic, cheerful “Hi there, Gus.” to bring him around. He kind of vaguely glanced in my direction but the boiling embarrassment I’d been hoping for never came. He placed the amber glass bottle down and sat back against the disgusting chair. “Hello [garbage],” He said.

“His tone was the same he’d use if I’d come into the kitchen of our own apartment while he was frying an egg in the morning. I felt a rage wipe over me like a coat of paint, and Garbage very nearly stepped in right there. But I wanted to deal with it myself, I didn’t care that I’d probably fuck it up. I should’ve let him handle it, looking back. I might never have ended up in this hospital. But I held my ground and funneled my anger into something else instead. I walked right up to him, took his bottle, and waved it in his slack face, as calmly as the adrenaline allowed. The people around us, those that were conscious anyway, all seemed as blissfully uncaring as Gus. One or two even smiling vaguely, like I was a rerun of a sitcom on their gargantuan TV. “Why’d you have to like about it Gus?” I asked. He wasn’t answering, which was fine, since it was a purely rhetorical anyway. “Why couldn’t you just admit you’re a human, like the rest of us?”

“My hands were trembling and the open glass bottle spilled a drop onto the carpet. That woke them up. Gus sat up a little, and held a cautioning hand out, a semblance of human expression flickering over his face. “Oh the fucking drugs are worth your time,” I tilted the bottle, a threat to wake him up. “I’m not fuck all, but the bottle is so important, huh?” Gus seemed to be working out what lie would put me at ease, but the thing is, I didn’t want to hear a thing from him, not sorry, not fuck you, not anything. In fact, I wanted to hear silence out of him. The same silence I had to give him when his lies cornered me into watching him fuck himself over. I wanted him to worry.

“I guess that’s why I did it. I wanted to shit on him the same way he’d been shitting on me for months. After that I don’t remember much, like I said. I got to see Gus’s eyes grow big and scared and then, when the (_____) kicked in, it all goes black. You said the cops found me in a walmart, acting stupid and stealing food. I don’t remember that. Just drinking that whole fucking bottle back, and Gus’s face, when he saw it. The first emotion I saw in his eyes for months.”

Madaline waited for a while in silence. When it was clear that [garbage] had nothing more, she clicked her pen and attached it to the plastic box of a clipboard.

“Alright [garbage] thank you for being honesty. It sounds like you’ve been through a lot these past few weeks. But in my opinion, I can agree with your doctor’s assessment that this was an isolated incident. I can recommend your discharge as soon as tomorrow, if you have a number we can call to arrange your transportation home. Remember, a taxi, an uber, anybody who can drive you home will do just fine.” She had a passifying expression and one hand outstretched, as if in some magic spell to still the waters before her. [garbage] was picking at his thumbnail, his eyes tight. He sighted.

“Yeah I can give you Gus’s number. He should be able to do it.”

______________________________________________________________________________

As the hole above him closed off, and he stared up at his friends, standing gawking down at him, he couldn't help but let loose a strained laugh. Coral smiled with him and even issued her own little airy giggle. The relief of the beast being finally dead, of an expanding horizon stretching out into his and Gus’s future, overtook him. Don lost interest quickly and folded his leg over the other knee, sitting back to confer with his phone while the episode swept over his prone friend on the hospital floor. Soon the waves of relief and anticipation swept up together with the emotions he hadn’t even been aware of.

The personality that he had considered so different from his own, he now felt alive in him, unhindered. Tears flowed liberally from his eyes and down across his temples to fall to the hard shiny tiles of the floor. Gus stood from his bed and, dragging the tubes and cords restraining him, went to crouch by his hysterical love and take his hand up to stroke it, soothing and slow.

“Evan, did everything go ok? What happened to Garbage?” That name, Evan, reverberated with dripping sunlit afternoons spent petting cats and laughing, sharing dog-eared copies of favorite books, eating simple meals on the lawn of their favorite park and feeling Gus’s long square hand against his back. That name, he’d heard a thousand times, shaped lovingly or angrily or plainly by those Roman statue lips, which drew the name into themselves and wore it down until it was a shape, familiar and intimate, just for him. So thoroughly stolen from him by himself, at once the most natural and the most alien thing he could ever expect to hear. His name. In Gus's voice.

“Garbage is dead. The worm is dead.” He said. Gus’s eyes widened a fraction, a bold dare to hope for the impossible within them. He squeezed Evan’s hand, that warmth and loving blanket back again.

“Good,” He whispered. Evan watched him and perceived a deep relief, much like the one he felt within. Coral was watching too, watching Gus as Evan did, a kind of curiosity slowly flickering within her, but when was there not, with Coral. Evan folded up from his flat posture, into a seat, with one hand still in Gus’s, one arm wrapped around his knee. The sudden abrasive hollow scratch of the plastic curtain being whisked away announced the same tired nurse, his eyes dark and alert, who had led them to Gus's partitioned bed.

“Everything alright in here?” He strode into the room and Gus quickly stood and made his way back to the bed. Evan hauled his aching frame away from the floor and joined Coral and Don in the chairs against the wall.

“Just fine,” Said Gus. The nurse spared Evan a fleeting glance that spoke at once of idle curiosity and professional discretion, then started in on Gus’s various ties and monitors, pulling them apart with brisk efficiency and speaking as he did.

“Well Gus, it looks like the doc has cleared you for discharge. Everything is stable and looking good. I assume this is your ride home?” He gestured with a wave that took in the friends lined up against the wall.

“That’s right,” Said Gus, but simultaneously cast a worried expression in Evan’s direction, who himself was still riding the crest of his cathartic relief. Evan nodded to his medically extricated lover and wiped the cold tears from across his face.

“Okay then! You are good to go. Just. Stay off the junk man.” The nurse was finishing winding the tubes and cords and offered a significant look to all of the rooms four occupants.

“I will,” Said Gus. He hopped from the bed and together the friends and lovers exited that space, for what Evan fervently prayed was the last time.

When the door hissed open to admit their departure, Gus took Evan’s hand back up again, enclosing it in his comforting warm artisan’s grip.

“I really am sorry, Evan,” His voice was faded at the edges, like a well worn map, all soft with wrinkles and hard to read. “Garbage was right, you know? I should’ve just asked you in the first place.” Evan avoided his eyes for a moment, not sure what to say. For a brief, confused moment, he reached out for the mentioned presence, a question in his thoughts, a deference, ready to receive and consider an outside trusted opinion. But a jutter skimmed his thoughts as he realized he was asking himself, and he knew the answer.

“You did what you did.” He said. “And I get why, Gus. Just don’t do it again.” And with that, it was dropped. “I’d like to go back.” He changed the topic. “To hug point. Like we planned. If that’s cool with you guys? We have one more night, maybe we can get some R and R after all, right?” Coral clapped her hands and skipped a pace forward into the sea of stationary vehicles surrounding them.

“Perfect!” She shouted out across the hot pavement. “If we stop for some food though, God I’m hungry.” Don clicked his car’s fob and a honk issued out to the left.

“Great. I just took the tents down you know.” He said. Coral hung on his shoulder dramatically, eyes like a puppy’s mooning up to his decidedly averted glare.

“Oh Donny, you’ll love it, you know it was the best place east of the ocean. I’ll come with you, a little fast food will make the whole thing look better.” They wandered off toward Don’s car, Coral shouting over her shoulder that they’d see them on the coast.

The geo that Evan and Gus climbed into was oppressively hot from the sun. When they started it up they spent a silent moment with the doors open and the air running to empty the baking bubble into the summer day. Finally, the doors closed. They were alone. The tick tick of the half broken air meting out the pregnant moments. Their first moment since everything that could truly be said to be private.

“So he’s really gone?” Gus pricked the bubble. That decadent relief flooded briefly through Evan’s arms and legs. “Gone Gone?” He clarified. He was craning his head to search Evan’s eyes, as if some fleck of his iris or shadow in his pupil might dash his fragile hope and prove the relief Evan felt to be temporary. Evan smiled, half sardonic, and watched Gus right back. He leaned forward, almost in a rush to connect his lips to Gus's. Gus didn’t hesitate to respond. Closing his eyes, he quickly embraced his lover, cradling his jaw with his warm wide hand, spreading his fingers across the back of his neck. It was like a familiar shirt, pulled on after a long sleep. All the folds fit easily around his contours, stretched to the memory of his body. All the parts of him that needed to be touched, cradled and held by all the right hands and lips. Evan felt, gradually, the tension and the worry of Gus’s body dissolve from him, until, when they broke apart, when they faced one another in the now cold blast of the geo’s air conditioning, he saw that his smile found a match.

“He’s Gone Gone,” Said Evan. “When I met you, Gus, I was not together. I mean in more ways than one, you know? Like, I’m a shit show half the time, maybe a little better than before. Maybe a big step into better now, maybe. But like, when I went into that classroom I was fucking traumatized by life at the home, by my friends from before, and by life, just like you were. You fucked up today, that’s a fact. But we were both broken people when we got together, and I don’t think we’re ever just suddenly going to be fixed. So yeah, Garbage is gone. But I’m pretty sure new garbage is on its way in. For me, for you, for everybody ever. If I threw away our relationship everytime some dumb garbage got in the way, I’d never have time to pick it up again. Life is garbage. But I want to live my garbage life with you okay?” Evan squeezed Gus’s hand and Gus squeezed his right back, a word-free affirmation of his commitment.

“Alright, lets go to the god damn beach.” Gus said. Evan cackled at him, his broad smile growing broader. He kicked back against his seat and propped his legs up on the dash, then belted out the first line of the Wizard of Oz.