WHO: Wesley Atwood, unknowingly accompanied by Jude Maraschino. WHEN: Late night on April 8th, 2019 into early morning April 9th, 2019. WHERE: Hotel property and then onto Serenity Bay. SUMMARY: Wes talks to plants until he gets to the beach and talks to Jude. Jude tries to interact with Wes and can't, but listens to everything he says. WARNINGS: Depression, talk of loss, alcohol use, feels.
As he stepped out of the hotel and into the night air of Hamnet Island, Wes felt like he could breathe again. His head was swimming in the lobby. He was terrified of Leila seeing him and forcing him to follow her back to the room they shared. It just felt like too much to ask of him. But he had agreed or offered, he didn’t remember. When it came to Leila, he always said yes. He couldn’t fathom ever saying no.
The breeze shifted through the trees and he followed its song as he circled the hotel property several times. He was trying to find his way to the water, but his sense of direction was impeded by far too much alcohol.
Jude felt dizzy and very, very, sick. When he’d woken up on the cliffs, it was dark and Jer was gone. Jude had slowly made his way back to the hotel, but couldn’t enter the building. He was hunched in discomfort but trying very hard not to look at any part of himself when he saw a familiar figure moving at the corner of his vision. Jude looked up. “Wes?” He took a few unsteady steps toward his friend. Seeing Wes’s face gave Jude the motivation he’d lacked before and he forced himself forward.
At least until Jude remembered why he’d been avoiding looking at himself. Jude stopped a few feet short and stared down at his hands. They weren’t quite as transparent as the last time he’d looked, but Jude could still see the whole jungle through them. “It’s not….” Jude mumbled. “It’s getting better.” Standing next to Wes, Jude felt stronger than he had before. Maybe he had drowned and Wes was his rope. But the sound didn’t make Wes turn his head and even when Wes did turn and walk toward Jude, his friend looked right through him.
“Can you hear me?” Jude still felt too weak to yell. “Please talk to me. Can you hear?”
There was a whisper to his right, a question, and Wes stopped to answer. “Why am I here?” he repeated the question before he scratched the back of his head. The leaves of a very aggressive plant were draped over his shoulders as he’d gotten closer to the voice to answer and appeared to be hugging some kind of tree. “My friends are here,” he answered. “Were here. Died here. Why are you here?”
Even though it wasn’t remotely the question Jude asked, his hopes lifted when Wes spoke. And then deflated when Wes walked right through him to hug a tree. Jude looked at his friend, crushed. His shoulders sank. “I don’t know,” Jude said. He’d missed the first part of what Wes said. “I think I’m dead. But I don’t remember dying. You’d think I’d remember something like that. And if I’m dead that means Jer’s dead too. But we haven’t even done anything dangerous. ..Well okay, I did jump off a cliff earlier, but that was after things got weird and I already knew the water was deep enough. ...Hermie, why are you here? If we’re dead, you should be with Leila and Syd. Did you bring them here? I saw you having a panic attack in the Grotto. Hermie, you shouldn’t be breathing in those flowers. There’s something weird about them. They made Leila act strange. Why’d you leave Syd?”
His hands were definitely getting more opaque and new confidence from that caused Jude to reach for the friend that responded by moving further away like Jude wasn’t even there.
When the answer didn’t come, Wes decided to continue on his journey, guiding himself out of the bush and back onto the path.
Jude rushed forward and stepped in front of him. “Listen to me. Look at me. Please,” Jude begged. Tears pricked at his eyes as Wes walked right through him again. “I’m right here.” Jude followed, eyeing his friend’s back. The drunk pace. Jude lasted walking beside Wes for a few seconds and then grit his teeth. He shoved Wes. His arms went right through and he almost lost his balance. Jude shoved harder. No impact. If anything Wes was swaying less.
Taking a few steps back, Jude squeezed his eyes shut. He braced and then with a loud guttural warcry charged Wes as hard and with as much strength as he could possibly muster in his current condition. Instead of knocking Wes to the ground, Jude’s shoulder slammed into the dirt. Hard. The impact wasn’t like jumping off the cliff had been, but emotionally, it was more painful. Jude kicked at him furiously in frustration. His legs ineffectively slid through Wes’s moving legs like they were air.
No reaction. Wes just walked further away while Jude tried to pick himself up. Once he had, Jude ran to close the distance between them. “Where are you even going?” It sounded a bit more confrontational than Jude would have ever meant, but in the second before Jude apologized, he realized how it sounded didn’t matter.
There’d always been this voice in Jude’s head that told him he was nothing. He guessed now, at least to Wes, he was.
Wes found a sign that indicated the direction he needed to go to reach the water. The words looked scrunched and scribbled. He blinked several times, but couldn’t make heads or tails of it. He picked a direction and followed, wobbling in his wandering until he heard another whisper.
Helplessly, Jude had to watch his friend walk off the path and right into a bush.
“Why did I move to Boston? Because I didn’t have anyone there. I didn’t have to worry that someone would show up to my apartment asking questions. When I was alone, it felt easier. Like it was always meant to be that way.” He brushed himself out of the leaves again as he realized that he was standing, tangled, in the leaves of what seemed to be a spider plant. “Excuse me,” he said, climbing back onto the grass, “I best be going.”
Jude wanted to lash out and yell that Wes was going to get one of those rashes like Jude had gotten when he was a kid that time he’d convinced Wes to play camouflage Yu-Gi-Oh soldier in the woods, but when Wes mentioned Boston, Jude froze. It was like his veins turned to ice. He heard every word Wes said, but it was like a switch turning off in his brain. When Wes walked away from the plant, Jude released a staggered gasp.
“No,” Jude said. He shook his head. “You’re drunk. That’s wrong.” Wes was in Boston now? What? That wasn’t right. That wasn’t the plan. And how could Wes be moved to Boston when Jude had just seen him a few days ago? What was even happening? “No,” Jude protested like arguing made a difference. His chest felt like it was crushed in two and Jude clutched it. Weaker, “No.”
Wes had no idea where he was. The world was a blur of leaves and sand. Somehow, the sky and the ground had switched. Everything he thought he knew was different. Dizzying. But he had a job tomorrow. It wasn’t long enough and it wouldn’t keep him from interacting with Leila. Still, it was something to do. Some small thing to look forward to.
Propelled by the need to get as far away from the hotel as he could, he had guided himself on a walking tour of the hotel property, looping the building, stumbling, tripping over absolutely nothing and then laughing, numbed, with the scrapes on his hands and his knees.
When he thought he would never reach the water, he decided to rest on a bench. He started to drift when he heard another whisper. What was with all of these questions? He stood and stepped closer. He didn’t like this question.
“I don’t have a family,” he told the tree, as its branches rustled overhead. “The storm killed them all. I truly hate to be rude, but I really should get back.” He gestured in a direction and was ultimately surprised when he heard the water.
“A storm?” Jude asked, looking up for the first time since he’d realized that paying attention to where he or Wes was going didn’t matter. His brow furrowed. “The island doesn’t even have storms.” Not bad ones. It was too much for Jude to process then. He clutched both sides of his head like he was trying to keep himself together. But if Jude stopped moving, Wes would just leave him there, all alone, with nothing familiar, and so when Wes started moving again, Jude pressed on.
Wes reached Serenity Beach and took off his shirt with a sweeping motion. He kicked off his shoes. When the world began to spin, he vomited violently behind a trash can. After he’d finished, he found his way into the shore.
Jude stood glassy-eyed and stiff nearby. He remembered all the times he’d been with his dad in this position. Only this time no one was asking Jude for anything, and he couldn’t help anyway. He reached anyway and the tips of his fingers went through Wes’s back.
Wes sat on the sand, close enough that the water lapped up to him, far enough away that he wasn’t in any danger. The soft whoosh of the waves was comforting in a way he didn’t know how to explain. It felt like home in a way that it hadn’t in a very long time. He closed his eyes before he leaned back to stare up at the sky, taking in the impressive number of stars, unimpeded by the clouds or the lights of a bright city.
Jude followed, but stopped a couple feet before the wave’s reach. The smell of the water made Jude want to throw up, but unlike Wes, Jude felt that the feeling was all he actually had in him. Which caused a whole bunch of questions that Jude wanted to ask, and nearly did, but then stopped like a puppy remembering the action had gotten him whapped on the nose the last few times.
He sat with Wes anyway, believing, hoping, somehow that Wes would know.
Completely alone, save for the ocean and its occupants, Wes felt the weight of truth bear down on him again.
“I don’t want to be here,” he told the sky. “I should have been there. I could have stopped it.” His voice pinched off as he dragged his fingers through the sand. He was quiet for another long minute. “I know you wouldn’t want this. I know you’re disappointed in me. I’m disappointed in me.”
Jude looked at Wes. He didn’t know what ‘the ‘it’ was that Wes thought he could have stopped. Since Wes’s eyes were upward, Jude assumed Wes was talking to God. It felt more wrong to eavesdrop on Wes’s conversation with God than when Wes was trying to date a tree. But like with any conversation that Jude knew he shouldn’t be eavesdropping on, it wasn’t quite enough to get Jude to stop listening.
“Hermie, what did you do?”
Wes dropped a handful of sand into a pile. “You were my brother. I never wanted anything more than to live next door forever. I fought so hard to get back to you guys and then I wasted all of our time studying.”
It was then that Jude realized Wes was talking to Jer.
Jude’s pet name for Wes was short for brother. When they were younger, Jude had offered Wes his hand and said ‘Brothers.’ and Wes had shook it. But Jude had gone even farther than that and asked Wes if he wanted to be brothers for real and then Jude knew that Wes hadn’t. At least not with him. Jude’s pet name was still short for brother, but sometimes after that, he also thought about that god on Olympus with the winged sandals and hat. That one had always reminded him of Wes. Always giving people things and showing up when you needed, but also always flying off because he knew there was someplace better to go. Since it had a double meaning, Jude felt like it was okay to keep using, since Wes could choose whichever meaning he’d liked.
Jude hadn’t thought Wes was wrong, though. Even though Jude sometimes wished Wes would notice more of the things about the places they were at, Jude didn’t doubt that where Wes really wanted to be was better. Wes had just always been able to see better and further ahead than Jude could.
“You didn’t waste it. You’re going to save the world. And you chose to go to IUP even though you could have gone anywhere. That meant a lot to us both.”
He laughed a little bitterly. “If I had known, man. I would have spent every minute I had doing whatever you wanted to do. But now you’re gone. You’re all gone. I just don’t know how to exist in a world where you don’t. I keep waiting, thinking that you guys are going to walk in the door at any minute and say this was all some kind of elaborate joke. That would be so much better than this.”
Wes leaned back to stretch out in the sand, but the moment he was horizontal, his stomach seized. He surged to his feet and staggered his way back to another trash can, vomiting for the third time. Or fourth. He wasn’t keeping count.
Jude looked concerned, his eyes still wide and sad after what Wes had just said, but when he tried to get up, he faded, and Jude realized he didn’t have the energy for it anymore.
Exhaustion was there at the forefront, plucking at the strings of Wes’s remaining resolve. He settled back into his spot by the water, knees tight against his chest, arms looped around them. “Y’know, I’m never going to hear you call me Hermie again. It’s been three years and I thought that over time, things would get easier. Leaving everything behind seemed like the best option. But it feels like everyone else is moving on and I can’t. I’m just so tired, man. I’m so tired.”
Jude looked at Wes, eyes cartoonish in their bigness, as the realization finally dawned. His throat caught and he almost missed what came after the nickname, but Jude didn’t. It had been too much to process all at once before, and this was too. “Three?!” Jude opened his mouth to argue, but realized he didn’t have the energy for that anymore. His shoulders slumped. Jude reached for Wes one last time, but didn’t make it. In the end, all he could manage was a soft voice and a half-smile. “Go to sleep, Hermie.”
Jude knew then that the salt was what was making Jude weaker. But like a friend you couldn’t see or hear, Jude didn’t think it mattered all that much.