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The night was starless still, not late enough for the orange glow of the sun to fade completely over the horizon. Morty's feet hurt from another day at the conveyor belt, and the chill was creeping through the stitching of his thrifted North Face puffer, but he stayed where he was. His visitor was late, of course- he hadn't expected anything different. Plenty of time to let the damp seep through the seat of his pants and reflect on the fact that every choice he'd made in life had somehow led up to this moment- twenty-five, with the body of a fifty-year-old and looking out at the harbor while he waited on a cosmic twin. Eleven years since he'd seen him, eleven years of his own mediocre choices that he could partially blame on himself and partially on the government or his family or cosmic horrors beyond his comprehension- eleven years leading up to now.
College had been out of the question- he owed his passing through twelfth grade entirely to Goldenfold's continuous lobbying in the faculty lounge. Rick's dream meddling had a wider effect than the old man could have imagined, even in his booziest, most grandiose moments. The diploma sat on the living room mantle until nobody cared about it anymore, and after the tenth fast food interview that suburban house had shrunk and shrunk until he'd picked up the firefighting pamphlet Beth had left on the coffee table. She'd been too timid or too apathetic to even make a verbal hint. He'd lasted two seasons out by Steens Mountain before he'd quit and found the closest place to home he could afford a studio- this old town on the inlet, where he made $21.75 an hour as a green chain puller at the lumber mill that hugged I-5. This life was all he'd managed to build for himself, and he'd resigned to its semi comfortable monotony because, at least, he'd built it with his own hands.
Monotonous and reliable, forty hours a week standing by the conveyor belt lifting pine and cedar boards, on his third year uninterrupted by family or old acquaintances, until the email had come through. The little prick must have looked him up on TruthFinder or whatever corner of the internet had paid off Google for the privilege of his contacts and his PornHub search history. It's been a long time, the message had read. Meet me dockside Wednesday?
That was how he'd found himself here, freezing his ass off on the cold cement of the upper tide wall and holding Smirnoff vodka and a pack of American Spirits in a brown paper bag.
rip lil peep, read an ancient scrawl in black sharpie below his middle finger.
I'll drink to that, Morty thought, as he poured some out for the old man. "I'm a genius and a god," he muttered, like an incantation.
The moon shone off the foam crests of the ocean, and Morty let his mind empty. Celine had taught him to think of nothing while they contorted themselves on yoga mats and hotboxed her brother-in-law's apartment with 7-11 Nag Champa- the twinge of pain at the thought of Celine broke the meditation and he made a mental note to remove her from his neck, and Maria Gonzalez from Steens Mountain from his bicep. Celine had always hated that one.
Morty looked over his shoulder as a muffler-less engine approached on the strip behind him. A metallic black Nissan glided to a stop, and Morty squinted to get a better look at its occupant. When he stepped out, he looked like Morty himself -well, of course he did- if you didn't count the hair color, the eye patch, and the ink under the good eye.
"Nice wrap," Morty said lightly.
"Yeah, nice hair," came the answer. "What inspired it- the blue Gatorade?"
"Hey, fuck you!" Morty protested. "No wonder they call you Evil Morty."
"I don't go by that anymore," Evil Morty said. "It's Chauncey."
"Our middle name?" Morty put a hand over his mouth to stifle a laugh.
"You've spent seven years as a grown man without doing anything about Mortimer."
"Fair enough," Morty said. He patted a spot beside him on the tide wall. "Will you sit? I have A-american Spirits."
Chauncey pointed to the Smirnoff bottle. "I want that."
"Sure."
Chauncey sat on the wall. His jeans were tight, and ripped in some places over white longjohns. His breath puffed out in front of him. "How do you live here? It's so fucking cold all the time."
"You get used to it," Morty said, "When it's your whole life."
"The Citadel had controlled temperature."
"Well, you don't beat around the bush," Morty said. "You blew up the Citadel, remember?"
"I'd ask you to imagine," Chauncey said with a breezy intellectualism, "twenty million dear old grandpas breathing booze into a recycled-air ecosystem. Not even a planetary thermostat is worth putting up with that." He lifted the bottle, and Morty caught the ink under his eye in the distant glow of a streetlight.
"91:4?" he said, "is that- did you get a Bible verse?"
"Under His wings I find refuge," Chauncey said into the bottle. "They converted me in Time Prison. Well, sort of."
"I thought you were too smart for all that. Remember when someone let Jehovah's Witness Rick into the Citadel?"
"Eternity is a very long time," Chauncey said.
"How'd you get out of there, anyway?" Morty asked. "I thought they locked you up forever."
"Parole," Chauncey said. "Common practice to alleviate overcrowding. But I'm confined to the planet and dimension they picked me up from."
"Huh. I hadn't thought about those guys in years."
"You haven't even stepped in a spaceship, have you? Since Rick died."
"No," Morty said. "Not for nine years." He felt a sudden burning start behind his eyes and swiped at them angrily. "Fuck. I miss him. Why'd you have to come here and remind me?"
"I'dunno," Chauncey said, and sounded less sure of himself. He slid closer to Morty on the wall. "I just... wanted to see how you were doing, I guess."
"What? So you can brag about how much better you're doing? Not stuck here with nobody?"
"I work in Amazon warehouses. Better than your job, marginally, because I can listen to music. An ankle monitor doesn't open a lot of doors, even an alien one."
"Oh." Morty looked up, into the brown eyes that he knew were carbon copies of his own.
"I always liked you off-world Mortys," Chauncey said. "There's a sweetness in you." He slid closer. "I like it a lot."
"Oh, Jesus Christ!" Morty jumped to his feet.
"What?" Chauncey asked. "Your grandpa had a fling with the entire state of Virgina, as I recall. And sentient horses."
"Even if I wasn't coming off a relationship," Morty said, "this is too weird."
"Is that about this Celine on your neck?"
"I don't want to talk about it."
"Then we won't," Chauncey said. "Just sit down?"
Morty sat. The adrenaline was still there, and the repulsion, too, but he admitted to himself that no one had looked at him with that type of intensity for several months or brought their hand close enough to his to feel the static current between bodies.
"This is too weird," he said again, but Chauncey's leg was pressed against his, the muscles in his thigh tense in the cold. Touch-starved, he told himself. I'm touch-starved, as his eyes traced the white column of a throat and a jawline with a day's worth of five-o' clock shadow. Chauncey's jean jacket had a striped flannel lining that he must have added himself, poking slightly out of the sleeves and over his wrists and a Hamilton watch. He groaned and inclined his head until it was resting on the hollow of the throat. He could feel Chauncey's pulse against his skull, beating in exact time with his own. He swallowed.
Chauncey's breath surged, and a large hand lifted, fingers raking into Morty's hair, callouses rubbing over a scalp that immediately stood on end. They curled and tugged slightly, and Morty felt himself leaning into it with an exhale that deflated his entire chest cavity- and then a sudden wave of dizziness.
"Fuck!" He jumped back and would have fallen off the wall if Chauncey had not kept an uncomfortable grip on his jacket collar. Morty leaned away from the knuckles, which had several silver rings and a thin layer of brown hair, and reached with a shaking hand into the paper bag. He lit a cigarette and reinflated his lungs with the bitter smoke.
"Too much," Chauncey said. It wasn't a question.
"I'dunno, it's..." Morty put a hand over his face. "I-I have nothing, you understand that? Nothing in the world."
"Yeah," Chauncey said.
"Will you stay with me, a while?"
"I'd stay 'til we're both dead." And Chauncey raised the bottle again.
"Pour some more out for Rick."
Chauncey obliged, letting a brief splatter onto the asphalt below.
"I'm a fucking genius and a god," Morty said, and blew a plume of smoke at the first stars peering over the dark expanse of ocean.