Mike’s startled out of a little daydream where he and Sean are lying on the ground, watching the clouds overhead. He’s grateful it’s dark, because he’s blushing slightly. He thinks about Sean too much, he knows. He’s really got to get a hold on it.
“Don’t hurt yourself,” he says, because Oscar expects that.
There’s a flash of teeth as Oscar grins around his cigar.
Mike waits, because he thinks this is different. It feels different. Sure, they can shoot the shit until the cows come home, but those three words—I’ve been thinking—aren’t something they usually say. It’s weighted. It’s heavy. It’s heavier.
He doesn’t have to wait long.
“Before you,” Oscar says, setting his cigar on the patio table, “it wasn’t the same. Things here weren’t the same.”
The cigar smolders as the smoke curls up. It smells sweet and it reminds Mike of something, but it’s just beyond his grasp, not quite on the tip of his tongue.
“How do you figure?”
“Just is, Mikey. I don’t know. Maybe I’m just talking out my ass here. Pro’bly what it is. I can remember a time when you weren’t here. It’s there. But it’s like it’s not, you know? I try, but it’s… hazy. Like smoke.”
Mike doesn’t know what he’s talking about, not really. He doesn’t know whether he should be worried or not. “You okay?”
“Oh yeah,” he says. “I’m in fat city, my friend. Cloud nine and all that.”
“Are you?”
Those teeth again. “Couldn’t be anywhere else, even if I tried.”
“I don’t—”
“There was this pretty honey,” he says, eyes drifting off into the dark, slightly unfocused and eerie in the flickering light from the torches. “Before you. She was stacked, you know? A real dolly. She worked at… I don’t remember. Funny how that is, I guess. I don’t think it matters, in the long run.”
“Oscar—”
“Hush, Mikey. I’m your elder and your better. I’m speaking.”
“Up your nose with a rubber hose,” Mike says, and Oscar laughs.
“Oh yeah,” he cackles. “Mikey’s got jokes now. Ba-zing, folks. Come one, come all, listen to the funny man, sure as shit, fo sho!”
Mike’s laughing too, but he’s not quite sure he gets what’s going on, because Oscar’s got a slight hysterical edge to him now, his eyes maybe a little wider than they should be, breath a little quicker than it normally is. He’s only a few years older than Mike, and he swears he’s got a good ticker (“I don’t actually eat the food I make at the diner, Mikey, Jesus Christ, no, what are you, insane?”) but there’s something happening now. Something he can’t quite put his finger on, so he’s laughing. He’s laughing with a man who, outside of Sean, is probably his best friend.
Their laughter dies an unnatural death and Oscar’s staring off into the dark again. He says, “Mikey, what was I saying?”
“Stacked honey,” Mike says quietly. “A real dolly.”
“Right,” Oscar says. “That’s right. She was… real great. We got to talking, you know? Here I was, trying to act like I was this cool cat, but she wasn’t taking any of it. Like she thought it was just a bit. She’d say, ‘I see you, Oscar Johnson. I see you all chrome-plated and cool. I see you even though you try and make me see something else.’”
Somewhere, in the dark, a bird calls, low and sweet, and Mike is chilled, because he’s thinking about a cloud of birds, a storm of birds, moving like they’re dancing, like they’re smoke and water.
“She saw me for my shit,” Oscar says. “Through the threads and the hep talk. She shot me down, you know? Real fast. And I was gone on her after that. I told her, ‘Baby, baby, baby, can’t you see? I ain’t no square. You’ve got me cranked, fo sho.’” He sighs then. “And she laughed at me, and maybe I was okay with that. So I dropped the act, I stopped trying to be something I wasn’t. She saw me. The real me. Not the actor. Not the spaz.” He’s fond when he says that last word, and Mike thinks it means something, something just for him. Something between Oscar and this honey who Mike’s never heard of before, and it’s odd. Because he knows everyone in Amorea, and he can’t figure out anyone it could be.
Which leads to a troubling thought that he’s having a hard time holding on to.
What if it’s someone outside Amorea?
Someone who’s somewhere else?
He understands the fundamental concept. He understands the possibility. But he can’t quite get there, because it’s something so outside the realm of possibility that it’s hard to think about. It almost hurts. It’s a pressure, a pain right behind his eyes, like a pulse, and he thinks of pushing it, like tonguing a loose tooth, because it hurts, yes, but it’s a good hurt.
But he doesn’t want to.