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0 miles from Calgary.
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“It’s a rental,” Bam says to Khun, freshly awoken, who is standing on his front porch.
Khun blinks three times, slow, to make sure he is not seeing things. He looks to his left. His packed backpack and suitcase are on the concrete floor next to him. He looks to his right. His father’s bright blue Cadillac is parked in the driveway. He looks to the front.
“I can see that,” Khun says to Bam, who looks like he’s been awake for hours, head poking out from the rolled-down driver’s window of what may be the most nondescript van in existence. It is not Bam’s usual grey Toyota. It is an almost sickly shade of beige, and Khun is thinking about rewriting the names for the colors sand and cement to create something to describe the monstrosity in front of him. It is three forty-nine in the morning.
There is a squeak as Bam makes to get out of the car, but stops to roll the window up first. It is an old sound, ear-piercing, and Khun sees Bam match the wince on his own face through the flash of the glass slowly inching upwards. If this were a movie, his neighbor’s cat would squeal in response at the noise and a car alarm four houses down would go off in the night.
This is not a movie.
His neighbor does not own a cat.
No car alarm goes off, and the only sound from any sort of vehicle is the gentle click of the van in front of him as Bam unlocks it, the ker-chunk of the door opening. Bam walks out in a white dress shirt with black collars, sleeves rolled up to his elbows. His hair is in a distracting little ponytail that Khun rarely gets to see on him, lower than it usually sits. In the chill of the night, Khun has to resist the urge to pull off his own coat and settle it on Bam’s shoulders, wrap his muffler around the nape of his neck to cover the spot where hairline reaches neck reaches a small black hair-tie, today.
It is three fifty-one in the morning. Bam walks over and takes his suitcase, and Khun grabs a strap of his backpack to sling over his right shoulder and follow. It’s the wrong strap, he realizes as he’s stepping down the two steps to the road, but he doesn’t care enough to change it. There are only four more steps to the van.
Bam slides open the backseat door, which glides surprising quietly for all the noise the driver’s seat makes. He sets Khun’s suitcase on the floor besides two smaller duffles, and reaches out a hand to Khun for his backpack. Khun hands it to him by the left strap, the wrong strap, and Bam sets it next to the suitcase. The door glides shut.
Bam looks at him again then, and flashes him a smile that outshines the dim glow around them. The streetlights on Khun’s street are unevenly spaced, and some flicker out every now and then. Bam has perfect teeth.
“Let’s go,” is said through those perfect teeth, louder than a whisper but quieter than regular speech. Nothing changes yet, then, and Khun wonders why he was expecting something to. He walks over to the passenger seat of the van.
When he opens the door, Bam is already in the driver’s seat, holding his buckle. Khun puts a hand on the door to balance himself, and puts one foot in.
Bam’s seatbelt clicks. Khun puts his other foot in, the rest of his body following. And something does change then, in the moment where Khun is not expecting anything to change at all. The air is sweet and sour and tangy all at once, warped, the taste of the beginning of a fever dream, like stepping over the edge of a new dimension that is not quite his but not quite not his, either.
He sits down.
“Ready?” Bam asks.
79 miles from Calgary.
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There is a saying. March comes in like a lion, and leaves like a lamb.
It is six twelve in the morning, and Khun awakens to the edge of a lake and the beginnings of a golden sunrise.
He rubs the sleep out of his eyes, stretches as far as the limited ceiling of the van will let him, and gently shakes Bam awake with a hand on his shoulder. He corrects his previous thought.
Khun awakens to the edge of land in the middle of a lake and the beginnings of two golden sunrises, one rising in the east over still waters, and the other in the driver’s seat to his left. The one occupying the same space that he is in rubs his eyes, gives a little shake of his head. The low ponytail from just hours before is almost completely undone, hairtie only clinging to a few strands that had gotten crushed between Bam’s back and the tanned leather seat. It takes moments for sleep-bleared eyes to turn to bright gold, and the car feels a little lighter, brighter, then. They sit in silence and watch the dimmer sunrise.
The sun has made a decent curve of its rotation in the sky by the time they get out of the van and touch dirt floor outside. Khun finally looks at the cabin in front of them, unobstructed by the corners of the van’s dashboard. It is located in what could’ve been the center of the lake if the lake had been a perfect circle and the little peninsula was slightly more south southeast.
“First stop,” Bam interrupts his circle calculations, “Banff National Park. Lake Minnewanka.”
Khun suddenly recalls the name in their second and tenth grade history textbooks, in travel brochures, advertisements blaring across neon screens. It is the new perspective, actively being in the not-center of it all, that throws him off.
There is also the second part that throws him. “It’s March twentieth.” Bam is looking at him like he doesn’t know why Khun is bringing up the date, but Khun knows there is no way he doesn’t know, a sightseeing bucket list item Bam has had with his mother for years. A sightseeing bucket list item Bam has given up on because half of it is already long gone. “It’s the vernal equinox, Bam, how are we the only people here for this, there’s no way we got here early enough to get this cabin, is this why we left at three in the mor-”
“I rented this months ago,” Bam tells him as he carries one of his duffles and Khun’s suitcase inside. He disappears in the doorway of the cabin without a door, and Khun stares, dumbfounded.
At nine thirty at night, Bam walks back outside to the van and pulls out two kid sized blankets. The first is old, covered in a floral pattern not meant to appeal to their generation, but one above. The second is a pale blue, something he thought he’d lost in the years before eighteen, and Khun hears the words because it matches your hair ringing in his ears.
He doesn’t hand one to Khun, however, and places them both out on the dirt in front of the van, on the side of the cabin, by the edge of the lake. One edge of a blanket lines up and overlaps perfectly on the other. The lake laps as close as it can to a corner, but there is not a disturbance in the waters large enough to push it over the edge, the distance it needs to reach cloth.
Bam sits on one corner of it, creating a diagonal space instead of one where the two of them each sit squarely on one color. He pats the floor next to him, the rustle of a blanket, and Khun sits. The blankets rustle again. The two of them themselves do not overlap like the blankets do.
Khun doesn’t know if he wants the lights to start soon, for how long Bam has been wishing for this moment, or if he wants them to hold off as long as they can, so he can savor this moment before Bam’s moment. A firefly dances in his line of vision, dragging his gaze willingly to the curve of Bam’s cheek.
It is in that moment the auroras come like a sheet of rain, pouring down around them like a strike of lightning. It is dark save for the single firefly, and suddenly it is not. March comes in like a lion, indeed.
Khun thinks that there are better names for them than the Northern Lights when they are so omnipresent like this, filling in all of his senses from all of his directions. He can no longer tell if their cabin needs to be more south southeast. There are only two blankets, two people on them, in the absolute center of something new.
The world lights up around them, breathtaking, and Khun turns to Bam, breathless. Light pierces into the waters around them and it feels like the shifting colors from above pulse around them straight into the ground under their feet below, utterly encapsulating. This is not their world. A new one, where Khun understands the meaning of being wrapped in light.
Bam, however, is crying. There are tears on his face, not streams, but just small pricks escaping the corners of both eyes. Khun remembers that it is not him that is supposed to be here, but he is the one who is, anyways. He brushes his pinky against Bam’s, I’m here, and Bam curls them together. The touch is warm. Khun leaves it at that.
It is dark when they finally get up, deciding to leave the blankets for the next morning the way Khun thought they left them in the past. Bam walks inside their cabin first and Khun lingers, just a bit, to look at Lake Minnewanka at night, another perspective not caught in history textbooks.
For all the auroras have settled into Khun’s heart, permanently shifted it on its side, the waters around them remain untouched. There is still not large enough of a disturbance. Whoever has this cabin for the morrow will not know what Khun has experienced here, tonight. March leaves like a lamb, indeed.
It is two twenty-two in the morning. The corners of their blankets remain dry.
611 miles from Calgary.
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A border is a divider between two things.
There is the physical, like Canada meets United States. There is the metaphysical, like heaven meets earth meets hell. There is the intangible, like the space where Khun meets Bam even though he still can’t reach him, not when Bam slings his arm around Khun’s shoulder, leans his whole weight on Khun for even just a moment, atom to atom.
Point Roberts is on the border between Canada and this new country they both have never stepped into. They learn at the visitor center that the space is officially known to be a part of the state of Washington, but that the name was given through Canadian roots. This is one point along a five thousand mile border that was self-made by signatures on a parchment piece of paper sold for more pieces of paper. Khun scoffs at the idea of it.
Bam is walking ahead of him, just by a few steps. He is the first to reach the pier the attendants had mentioned, finds the wooden plank scuffed by so many footprints before the two of them. There is a hesitation, and Khun takes the opportunity to catch up.
“I’ve never been to the United States,” Bam says, right before he puts one foot over it, and it is seven words that makes Khun realize that the being in front of him is not as unreachable as a god. The heaven meets earth is self-made, too. This is unfamiliar territory for him, and he is only just crossing this border for the first time, human, just as Khun is.
Khun tears down the metaphysical. He reaches for him. Stands in front of him, mirroring his position standing two feet spread apart.
A border is a divider between two things, but not all things are meant to be separated. They tear down the physical. The two of them stand not on opposite sides of two spaces, but each with one foot in one and another in another.
749 miles from Calgary.
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Seattle is known for the Space Needle and Chihuly Gardens. There is something about a monument that stands six hundred and five feet off the ground and two people standing six feet tall on top of that. There is something about a museum of glass flowers hanging from ceilings with two people walking in distorted sunlight underneath being called one of the most beautiful gardens in existence.
It is a place known for the extraordinary, but what Khun will remember most is this.
The growl of two stomachs. Parking in an alleyway too crowded with people and smells of lunch. A farmer’s market, open all days of the week. Bam pressing a piece of mint gum into his hand after they buy food to try from six different stands.
The ordinary.
It makes something in Khun ache, like being six hundred and eleven feet tall, like viewing a garden upside down, because it gives him something that he doesn’t know if he will ever be able to have again, outside of this place. There is Bam, pressing a fresh strawberry to his lips with one hand and Khun’s lips with the other. There is Bam, holding a flower the man at the stand had given him for free with a smile that blooms just as brilliantly. There is Bam, buying an overabundance of food for the two of them to eat later, together. It is all so domestic and yet it aches because Khun knows that this home in Seattle will only be home for two more days, and he wants to hold onto it for two thousand more.
They reach the end of the market just as the stalls are starting to close up for the day. Bam takes ahold of his hand, temporary. “I want to show you something,” he says, and Khun wonders what Bam has to show in this place they have both never seen. Bam leads them back to the market entrance.
Bam turns left this time instead of going in, and down eleven steps Khun hadn’t noticed were there the first time. They enter an alleyway with a couple dozen tourists and a couple thousand pieces of gum stuck along both walls, and Khun stares.
“Seattle’s Gum Wall,” Bam is explaining to him, though he is looking around in just as much amazement as Khun is, “A tourist attraction created, still growing, by the tourists themselves.” A family in front of them presses gum into the wall at five different heights, and Khun remembers that he is chewing gum Bam had given him hours ago.
Khun holds his smushed piece of gum between the thumb and forefinger of his left hand. Bam mirrors him on his right. They press their pieces onto the wall together, side by side.
He looks at them, two specks of the same color, the same gum, in the midst of a wall where most pieces don’t match the one next to it, pink on blue on white on red on green on grey cement. Bam snaps a photo of them and Khun tells him gross but also to send it to him anyways. Bam laughs.
Khun has never been the type to carve his name into the tree behind their school building like a lovestruck teen. It is a bogus idea, because people don’t usually end up marrying their high school sweethearts and no one wants to visit their old school, of all places.
In this moment, though, he thinks he gets it, putting a piece of gum on a wall at twenty-six. It is akin to the same feeling of leaving something physical behind, that this thing in his chest is not only in his chest and the world is forced to acknowledge its existence. It is taking something temporary and making it permanent, to hold onto for as long as he possibly can.
Seven hundred and forty-nine miles away, amongst wedding planning frenzy, Ascencio gets a venue suggestion from a brother he hasn’t texted in months. It is a link to a cozy little spot off the coast of Seattle, Washington, and a photo of two pieces of mint colored gum, stuck side by side.
1033 miles from Calgary.
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The dashboard clock blinks red at him, a constant flickering of the colon between hour and minute with each passing second. It is four twenty-seven in the afternoon. Khun breathes, two dots flicker, and it is four twenty-eight.
Khun’s left hand is on the top of the steering wheel, and his right is on the gear stick. There is a warmth creeping up along his right wrist, and it takes him a while to realize that it is not from the sunlight streaming in through the front glass, that it is a different kind of heat.
Bam is leaning over the center divider between the driver and passenger seats, taking occasional glimpses at the GPS that only seem to increase in length. He has had the radio turned off for the past two minutes. His right hand is holding his phone, thumb hovered over a play button that Khun can see in the reflection of the passenger seat window, but can’t make out the backwards title.
His left hand is the cause of the warmth spreading from Khun’s right wrist, the cause of the warmth spreading across the tips of Khun’s cheekbones. It’s suddenly eight degrees hotter in the van, and Khun wants to turn on the air conditioner to give himself some semblance of self back.
His brain to nerve muscles fail him there, though, as he chooses to click the on button for the fan with his left hand. His driving hand. Not the hand that remains still in Bam’s hold, which is the cause of the heat to begin with. Khun would put his face into his palm if he didn’t think that he would accidentally not on accident raise his left hand for that, too.
He continues driving.
He continues sneaking peeks at their point of intersection.
Bam startles him with a shout, “Welcome to California!” ringing in his ears and pop music blaring in the background. Khun had forgotten that they had been sitting in radio silence, and the van jerks violently to the right before he is able to get it back under control with both hands. Bam’s hand is no longer on his, then.
It takes him a little longer to calm his heartbeat, both from the scare in his ear and the scare on his heart. He tunes back into the present as the chorus of the song goes off, Bam still looking at him while singing along to California Girls, of all things.
Khun has just calmed his rapidly beating heart but this turn of events is so unexpected that it picks up in speed again, increasing with the volume Bam turns up on his phone as he belts lyrics Khun hates but loves in this moment. He is radiating joy. Khun doesn’t know who is radiating more. It is so easy to fall in lo-
In something, with the Twenty-fifth Bam, the person by his side right now but not entirely by his side in life, permanently, singing they’re unforgettable into his ear.
“Why,” he laughs out, and Bam is laughing, and the way their laughs blend together match the tempo of the song, too.
“Rak was telling me about there’s a state called Florida across the country, and how they call the people who do ridiculous things like fighting crocodiles a Florida Man.” Khun’s no longer rapidly beating heartbeat stutters to a stop. Bam continues on enthusiastically. “Endorsi was saying that being a California girl was better, whatever that means.”
There is a warmth in his gut now, and Khun recognizes immediately that is is not the same soft sunshine coming through the front glass. This one is a fire, burning, and he recognizes it as jealousy. Endorsi had known about this trip. Rak had known about this trip, too. They hold a piece of this, whatever this is, hold a piece of Bam, that Khun cannot touch even though he is the one here right now.
There are nine other than the two of them in their friend group. Khun wonders how many people Bam had asked to go on this trip before him, if he is a third, fifth, seventh, eighth, last choice. There is a part of him that wants to ask but the question catches in his throat, his own safety net, preventative measures from a body that knows it is not ready to take the truth.
This is the Oregon-California border, which Bam has made somehow more meaningful than the one between Washington and Oregon, a state to a state, more than Canada to Washington, a country to a state. They cross this border, like all the other borders, on the four wheels of a dingy little van, and Khun still tiptoeing a line on the wrong side of another one.
1058 miles from Calgary.
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The Golden Gate Bridge is not golden. This is a fact Khun learns at five thirty-seven in the afternoon as they cross into the edge of the Bay Area.
Khun rolls down the driver’s window, now immune to the harsh squeal of the glass sinking into rubber. He hands over the fee of seven dollars and twenty-five cents. He leaves the window open as they start across.
Everything is very reddish orange, not unlike the streaks of color beginning to appear in the sky. The sun is dipping lower, and they are a quarter of the way through, cars around them moving slow in evening traffic. Rust, Khun thinks in passing, is a good name for the color. Bam echoes his thoughts, pulls up his phone to search why is the golden gate bridge red.
Google gives them two reasons. First, the coloring is not that of the original bridge. The reddish orange hue is due to a primer that is supposed to protect the metal underneath from corrosive elements. Water oxygen rust rust-colored, goes through Khun’s head, and he lets out a small laugh at the irony. Bam looks up from his phone.
There is a little lookout on the bridge where people stop along the walkway, supposedly the center point of the bridge. They are on the wrong side, the vehicle side rather than the pedestrian walkway, to stop, but Khun takes the time to look, regardless.
The mainland stretches out before them. It is a view framed by the four corners of the driver’s seat window, and something compels Khun to reach his hand through it. He estimates that this point is just a little beyond the halfway point, not entirely center.
Second, the bright “International Orange” color had been chosen on purpose. To stand out amongst suspension bridges that are usually grey, to glow in a night sky that fades from rust to navy to black. It is for ships in the night to see, to follow, to return home to.
The car behind them beeps, and Khun turns back to the road. Bam continues watching the ocean on the other side of the bridge, hand stretched out his window like Khun’s had been. He watches the sun setting on the horizon through open fingertips, and Khun watches it in turn through golden irises.
The Golden Gate Bridge is not golden, but its steel pipes and beams reflected in Bam’s eyes as they hit three quarters of the way across make it so.
1060 miles from Calgary.
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The Bay Area is something of its own entirely. There are so many different jagged pieces that somehow fit together like the pieces of something delicate, exquisite. Chinatown ends up being one of Bam’s favorite cities, something in the air seeming to soothe frazzled nerves of an otherwise too busy puzzle.
There is a small gift shop. A small, old woman with hair duller than the tatters covering their backseat tries to hustle away their money. Shirts with fake name brands, placed just slightly off-center that most wouldn’t notice if they weren’t looking close enough. Bags with just a slight sheen that catches wrong in the fluorescent lighting, a material faker than overpriced cheap faux leather.
Khun breathes it in, watches the way Bam moves through the store, and feels like they feel a little more real surrounded by all these things around them that are less than so.
They do not fall for any of it. Bam gives the old shopkeeper with the forgettable face small smiles while politely declining interest in each item she shows off. Khun falls for that gentle look on Bam’s face, instead.
He is not paying attention to where he walks, lightly bumps into a stand of keychains. One of them falls to the floor, a metal clang against tile, and the shopkeeper and Bam both turn to watch him bend down to pick it up.
It is small and golden, barely stretching across three of his fingers placed side by side by side. The outer circle is ring-shaped, holds an inner golden coin that spins on a vertical center axis inside. I <3 SF is engraved on the coin, and there are two small dents on the lower left edge from where it had collided with the floor.
There are no circles in existence that are perfect in itself. Khun has dented another one. He flicks at it once and watches the coin spin a few feeble rounds.
“You need to pay for that!” the woman shrieks, a smugness in her tone at finally getting them to drop money on her merchandise showing amongst fake fury. She doesn’t do well at hiding it. Khun has the lingering thought that she belongs in this shop.
Bam looks like he’s trying to hide a small grin, simply offers him a shrug, what can you do? clear on his face.
Khun lets out a sigh and walks up to the counter. Bam drops the pretense of looking at anything else and comes to stand next to him. Khun looks down at his wallet to grab a bill, looks down past his wallet at their shoes. There is an inch separating them. Khun doesn’t know if Bam does it on purpose. He pulls out two one-dollar bills.
“What’s that?” he hears in his ear right before he’s about to slide the bills forward. He follows Bam’s finger to see him pointing at a small basket of woven cylinders. There is a primary color on each one, strips of brightness interwoven with boring, plain beige. The ends are spiky, sharp, like a warning to stay away, but Khun knows better than that. He picks one up, the soft paperlike material yielding gently in his grasp.
“A Chinese fingertrap,” he says, settling the two bills back into his left jacket pocket. Beside his wallet, but not inside. “Put a finger in.” He uses his right pointer to follow his own instruction on one end, holding the other in Bam’s direction. Bam follows, easy.
“Now try to take it out.” Bam pulls, and the little contraption stretches out, woven pieces criss-crossing at a sharper diagonal than before. The fingertrap pulls thin, skinny, but holds, and Bam looks at it with the wonder and confusion and joy of a child discovering something new. Khun can feel the warmth of his finger on the other side of the trap, not quite touching. An inch in between.
Something happens for a moment there, as he watches Bam try to tug his finger out. Khun almost forgets where he is, where they are, the two bills in his pocket, and hyper-focuses on the scrunch of brows in front of him.
His voice is unfamiliar to his own ears, softer than he’s ever heard himself. He watches his other hand settle on Bam’s, stilling its motion. It’s as if it’s not his own.
“It’s meant to be a trap, Bam. Push inwards.” He feels Bam’s pointer tendon shift under his hand, pushes from his own end. There is a heat where they touch in the middle, the point of contact hidden under the woven strands that have relaxed their contraction. No separation. Khun feels it burn in the tip of his finger, is surprised for a moment when he doesn’t see the fingertrap go up in flames in response.
It releases both of their fingers at once, and Bam takes hold of it this time. Khun watches as he continues to hold it, not putting it back in the basket. The sound of a throat clearing jolts him back into reality, and he briefly remembers that they’re still in the shop. The old lady is looking at them like she’s seeing them for the first time, and the look in her eyes is brighter in a different way than it had been earlier.
Khun realizes that they still need to pay, reaches for his wallet and pulls out a five instead of the two bills from earlier. He slides it across the glass counter.
The shopkeeper looks at them for just a moment longer, and slides the singular bill back. “Just take them.” Her voice is gruffer than the shriek from just a short while ago. “You’ve left your mark on this city, and this is my mark on you.”
The words don’t make any sense, but Khun chalks it up to a Bay Area thing. In that moment, though, her blurred edges had sharpened to perfect clarity before returning to something fuzzy. Khun is still not going to remember her face, but he thinks that she had stood out from the rest of of her shop in that moment, had become as real as they were, standing in the midst of her own fakes. The afterimage now is still clearer than it had been to begin with, just by a slight bit. He thinks about the dents already made on the keychain before it had become his, that is now his.
Bam is thanking her, taking both the keychain and the fingertrap from the counter and putting them into his backpack. There is a movement in his left jacket pocket, and Bam is suddenly pushing two familiar bills across the counter towards her, anyways. She says something like come back again, I’ll remember you, but Khun forgets exactly what because of the tug on his sleeve, pulling him back towards the entrance. The movement carries him, and Bam is not exactly holding his hand but their pinkies brush when the momentum carries them to a stop outside. Khun stares at it.
“She was nice underneath that snarky exterior after all.” Bam’s looking at him with the same small smile that he’d given to the shopkeeper. It feels like there’s something behind it, words hidden underneath the words he says, but a drop of sweat drips off Khun’s bang and into his eye in that exact moment and he loses his train of thought.
He blinks, irritated, rubs at it, and hears Bam laugh, brighter than the rays of sunlight still high in the sky. It’s a beautiful laugh, Khun thinks, watching him for as long as he can get away with while Bam’s eyes are still crinkled shut. Something else catches in his eye then, but he can’t look away.
The moment gets locked away like a memory, put in the center of the Chinese fingertrap now sitting in the front pocket of Bam’s backpack. Khun sticks two fingers in and lets it be, doesn’t pull, but doesn’t push, either.
1544 miles from Calgary.
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There is a saying about liquid courage.
He had asked Bam to hand him some water, a few miles back. Bam had reached an arm blindly into the backseat, and Khun heard the rustle of clothes, of plastic bags, of Bam’s nail dragging along the metal teeth of a backpack zipper. He’d pulled out a water bottle and handed it in Khun’s direction, before realizing it was empty. He’d frowned.
Bam had unbuckled his seatbelt then, leaned back over and grabbed the three-quarters full plastic gallon of water they had picked up at the last gas station. Twisted the cap off the top, placed the empty water bottle with the cap also twisted off between his knees. Khun'd slowed from eighty miles per hour to seventy-five. Bam had laughed at him, pushed his shoulder, and he had slowed to seventy.
Khun remembers watching the stream of water from the three-quarters full plastic gallon trickle into the small opening of the plastic water bottle. He watches Bam, too, whose tongue had crept into the left corner of his mouth in concentration. A probable unconscious action, Khun decides, mesmerized by that slip of pink against pink lips against peach skin and the sound of water in his ears.
The highway in front of them is empty. Bam’s hands are steady. There is no spillage.
The now three-fifths full plastic gallon is capped and placed back on the floor behind Khun’s seat. The now seven-eighths full plastic water bottle is in the cupholder between them. Bam had left it uncapped for easy access.
Khun lifts it to his lips now, takes a sip with one hand on the wheel and the other following the motion of cupholder to mouth to cupholder.
His throat is no longer parched, but the question still refuses to come out, the second time in as many thousand miles. It sits on the tip of his tongue, ice, but slides back down his throat just as easily, liquid. It does not crawl back up through his windpipes like water in their eleventh grade chemistry beakers, a curved meniscus. Khun decides that courage is not liquid after all.
“Almost there,” Bam bounces a little in his seat, a different kind of nerves than the ones Khun is holding. “I wonder if any of the others have ever seen Los Angeles.”
Courage is a gas, Khun realizes in a flash. It is a feeling, just like love, like hope, like jealousy. It rises with heat, rises in his chest, and sometimes there is a chemical reaction that will threaten to explode without a way to stop it.
That statement is what makes his question finally slip, rising past the roof of his mouth, unable to be held back by something like the closing of lips or the tip of his tongue. A leak of his breath and something more into the air around them. A question he was unable to ask five hundred and thirteen miles ago.
“Did you ask me first?"
Los Angeles, 4.5 miles, says a green sign as it whizzes by on the right.
1545 miles from Calgary.
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“I asked you,” Bam says, looking at him like those three words are supposed to clear everything up, all the questions built up left unanswered, all the questions still unasked. There is a hush in the air like he’s just given away a secret he was supposed to keep tucked into the glove compartment of their van, the one with a broken lock and a missing key. He’d told Khun the first day that he couldn’t open it, that the hinges on the inside were probably too rusted.
Khun had believed Bam about the glove compartment that time, had never bothered to check. Had simply said okay, grabbed their maps and rental papers and shoved them into a secondary backpack he’d left in the space at Bam’s feet instead. An image comes to mind now, Bam’s shins pressed against the front cover of the glove compartment where it should open, legs pulled up so that he can rest his head on his knees. He looks at Khun with bright eyes and something else behind it. “I guess you did,” Khun replies, blue eyes still settled on the road ahead.
Los Angeles, 3.5 miles, says a green sign as it whizzes by on the right.
1549 miles from Calgary.
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They arrive at their destination. They are here, in the middle of a scrappy old parking lot in the middle of the City of Angels because Bam had said it was the first place here they had to go. He’d put the coordinates into their GPS two miles back, and Khun had ignored the way Bam’s hand had shaken when he’d put the navigator back on the dashboard attachment.
Looked away when Bam missed the first time, brought up his second hand to steady his first, finally hearing the snap as the device clicked into its holder.
Khun looks at the van now, the beat-up old thing. There is dust collected on the edge of the front glass, where the windshield wiper reaches its end but not the window’s end, the difference between pushed-away dirt and wiped-clean clarity. He thinks back to yesterday when he’d pulled the little lever on the right side of the wheel, watched water spray before their eyes, the sunlight behind it distorting through the droplets. The skidding squeak of the wiper as it clears the remainder of their Canada air and Washington dirt and Oregon dust and opened their eyes fresh to California ocean.
This is you, Khun thinks, between the do you want to go on a road trip with me, the what do you say we buy this van, the will you get my wallet out of the glove compartment for me. The smile emerging at the end of the word compartment. Khun opens the passenger side door, places his hand on the handle on the front of the compartment, the one that had always left an indentation against Bam’s legs when he leaned on it for too long. He pulls. This is you, always asking me a question.
This is me, Khun thinks, between waking up at dawn with a backpack and a suitcase packed, the grin on his face at the thought of keeping this ugly rental they’d spent over a thousand and a half miles in, the shock on his face in the middle of the rental shop. The matching smile and fond shake of his head at the end of the word compartment. Inside the easily opened compartment are all of the keychains they have collected so far, and two new ones he has not seen before are on the right side, linked together. They’re intricate, glimmering, engraved with Aguero and Bam, names they had never been able to find in the souvenir shops. There is a ring sitting atop them. This is me, always saying yes.
He goes back into the rental store not with Bam’s wallet but not empty-handed, either. The analog clock on the wall says it is three forty-nine in the afternoon. Bam is waiting at the counter, and there is a glint on his own left hand. His voice wavers as Khun approaches, sliding the vehicle registration papers across to him alongside a ballpoint pen and a shaky grin. “Do you?”
Khun looks down at the papers in front of him. There is already a signature on it, today’s date scrawled on the side. He props his left arm deliberately on the counter, puts his chin in his left palm as he signs on the line underneath with his right. The end of the swoop of his signature curves up and touches the end of the swoop on Bam’s. He ignores the trembling in his own hand and his own voice when he answers, “I do.”
The rental store worker takes the stack of papers and taps them, once, twice, against marble countertop. The papers straighten out.
0 miles from home.
.
They are back in the rental shop’s parking lot, in front of a parking space occupied by a dirty van with a front window that is clear except for the edges where the windshield wiper does not reach. There is supposed to be a number on the wooden sign in front of it, but time has worn against whatever was supposed to be in the left space and a faded painted zero is all that remains on the right. Bam is standing next to him, the tips of their shoes touching. Their hands are linked in full, palm to palm. Khun looks again at the van.
A correction: Khun looks at their van.
Another correction: They both look at their van.
It is three fifty-one in the afternoon. Khun has decided on the name of the color of their van, this sickly shade of beige. Dust doesn’t have a color, it itself being a mixture of the colors of the universe, bright and colorful and nondescript and sickly and everything in between. It clings to the outside of their van and it is swiftly impossible to tell whether the color is from the dust or the dust-color of the van.
Their van is just another particle in their universe.
“This is us,” Bam says, looking back at Khun, like those three words are supposed to clear everything up, all the questions built up left unanswered, all the questions still unasked. He has asked one of them, now.
Khun gets it this time, understands, feels Bam softly thumb over the ring that sits solidly on his finger. An image comes to mind now, a white picket fence around a garden around a stone path around a house around a room around the two of them, together. He looks back at Bam, clear blue eyes on smoldering gold and not grey asphalt, and replies. “I guess it is."