Emergency Places

The funeral for Thomas’s brother Eddie was on Friday -- just three days away --and Thomas was still deciding if he was going to skip it or not. He’d almost made it through another work day without mentioning Eddie’s death before a coworker asked him about it. Jesse, who worked at a standing desk nearby, and who had never asked Thomas a personal question before, stared at him, and then knelt down beside him.

“I heard about your brother,” she whispered. “I’m so sorry.”

A few other coworkers glanced over. Jesse was the messenger. The grand marshal of the Grief Parade. More sorrys would come soon. Pulling aside in the office kitchen. Mentions of dead friends and relatives. An enormous office flower arrangement for Eddie’s funeral. Maybe drinks with one or all of the firm’s partners. 

For a moment, Thomas considered lying to Jesse.

“I don’t have a brother,” he imagined himself saying; his face confused and kind.

Instead, he took a breath, and nodded graciously. 

“Thank you,” Thomas said, decidedly at normal speaking volume.

“Can I hug you?” Jesse asked, her arms already stretched out like a scarecrow.

“Sure,” Thomas said, right as Jesse wrapped herself around him. 

He patted her once on her back, and watched as co-workers chose between pretending not to notice or staring directly. He saw four of them talk amongst themselves. One of them, Josh, cleared his throat and walked over. A new emissary. Jesse unhooked herself from Thomas and stood aside for Josh. He put his hand out; Josh looked down at it -- pale and wide. Thomas took it in his.

“Sorry about your brother, man,” Josh said, shaking his hand; he was wiry and thin-looking. Twerpy. But Thomas felt like he was going be knocked to the floor from the force of the handshake. 

“Thanks,” Thomas said, his voice cracking. 

Josh nodded while staring at him intensely. Thomas, not knowing what else to do, smiled. He could picture himself as he did it, looking strange and blank. 

“My dog died,” Josh said. “Seven months ago.”

Thomas was nearly unable to understand the words he just said, but fortunately was able to muster up a “Wow, that’s so sad.”

“Yeah,” Josh said. “It was really hard.”

He then placed his hand on his hip, and just stood there with his crotch in Thomas’s face.

Thomas’s direct boss, Lydia, an associate partner at the firm he worked at, told him he could take the rest of the week off. Lydia was one of the few people Thomas felt comfortable with at the office. They’d gone out for drinks a few times, and even to a gay club. But she always kept things professional and detached at work. Thomas initially refused, but she said it was paid, and also said because of Eddie’s affiliations, and the press interest in the story, it might be best. 

“People are a little uncomfortable,” she said, almost ashamed.

Thomas understood. 

His brother had been a prolific conspiracy theorist, and quickly rose the ranks of social media trolldom -- collecting coveted ire from the Left and the Right over the last half decade. Eventually, his YouTube channel as well as his Instagram and Facebook, had been suspended for spreading misinformation. His podcast — which had become wildly popular in the last year — was booted from all streaming platforms. He spent his final months recording erratic monologues on Twitter about Wifi being tested on us against our will, and reading excerpts of supposed Affidavits. He had attended the Insurrection but claimed he never insurrected. The FBI looked into him twice, but there was seemingly no evidence to connect him to the actual Capitol siege.

Eddie tweeted two times in those final months: once to Selena Gomez and Jeff Bezos, asking them for help. Help with what, he never said. But he turned to them. His final tweet, sent at 4:35 PM from an iPhone that was found in an empty lot in Jersey City, near where Eddie had been living. It just said, Goodbye. It was retweeted and shared thousands of times, responses divided between glee and concern. Thomas and his mother were contacted by the FBI and state police, who considered Eddie both a suicide risk and possible terrorist threat. Eddie had posted photos of his car, stacked to the brim with homemade explosives, and an AR-15.

Three weeks later, Eddie’s body was found in a rental car off the Pennsylvania turnpike. It had been paid for in cash. His arsenal was untouched. Eddie had starved himself to death and cooked in in the August sun. He was mummified. One side of his nearly skinless face—which was turned to the side as if bracing for something—was fused to the car seat; his mouth wide open and locked in an endless shriek.

****

Eddie’s death made the CNN homepage. There were rushed think pieces, and Twitter threads about mental health, and the dangers of Internet radicalization. Thomas’s mother, still living in the house he and Eddie grew up in North Jersey, was doxed, and Thomas' phone number was leaked. Thomas’s own Twitter, which boasted 34 followers and one tweet from 2015, where he railed against Delta Airlines for losing his luggage, soaked in a 48 hour flurry of death threats and other insults. 

This is the brother

Your brother was a real piece of shit

I’m glad your bro is dead 

Terrorist like ur brother

What’s wrong with ur family??

Hope you die too

Ur whole family should kill themselves

You look gay

But by Tuesday, it had mostly stopped. Social media moved on. A cousin, who Thomas and Eddie hadn’t seen since 2005, and who documented her battle with a vague, ever-changing illness on Facebook, wrote a novel-sized status about Eddie’s descent into madness. She used a photo of them from when they were five—their faces painted at a summer block party. It received thousands of likes and hundreds of comments. He nearly blacked out reading the closing line: Even at the end, I know Eddie had a soul, and it was good. He was tempted to comment something cruel, but instead, he blocked her. Then he deactivated Facebook.

Thomas left his office without saying bye to anyone. He just walked out. He didn't take anything. No one stopped him. He decided to skip the subway and take a cab, not a Lyft, from Midtown to the Lower East Side. 

‘Here’s to me!’ Thomas thought as the cab weaved in and out of 8th Avenue traffic. 

He watched some guy he recognized from the Real World on mute hosting a cab TV show. Then his mother texted him.

She asked if he could get himself from the train station to their house when he came home.
Your aunt and I are going to be busy with funeral arrangements. I’m sorry.

Thomas drafted a response:

Fuck you both. I’m not coming home.

He watched the blinking text cursor, then highlighted and deleted it.

Yes, he wrote.

I love you, his mother wrote.

Thomas didn’t write back.

He thought about the last time he saw or spoke to Eddie, more than a year ago. Eddie had wanted to meet at the Chipotle near Union Square. Thomas, then half-pretending to be on Keto, asked if they could go somewhere else, but Eddie refused. He waited outside the old Barnes and Noble on 17th, hips bent, leaning against the stone, arms crossed, watching for Eddie to emerge from under the earth. For a moment, he imagined how he looked, out of body, looking down. Faggy and aloof. It felt good. He never felt a need to butch up his stance with Eddie. It was just the two of them. Eddie was four years older.  Thomas Eddie had always protected Thomas, even when they were younger, and neighbors and classmates bullied him. One time, a neighbor they used to play kick the can with called Thomas a cocksucker and punched him in the face. Eddie hit the neighbor across his skull with a skateboard. 

When Thomas came out to his mom one summer break during college, she told him he wouldn’t be gay under her roof. Thomas called Eddie, who drove up to North Jersey from Philadelphia with his girlfriend. They collected Thomas and let him stay with them for the rest of the weekend. Eddie was sober then, working at a restaurant in North Philly. Thomas smoked cigarettes inside, and watched movies for two days. They both ignored phone calls from their parents. That same weekend, Thomas ended up losing his virginity to a 40-year-old adjunct professor at Drexel University who came to a party Eddie’s friend was hosting. Thomas took the train back home the next day, and his mom apologized to him. Still, Eddie didn’t speak to her for months. He didn’t come home for Thanksgiving. He loved to make his point known. He liked to punish.

Eddie was sober for most of the time he lived in Philly, until he and his girlfriend relapsed on heroin together. She died the following winter of an overdose. 

When Eddie was ten minutes late, though, Thomas felt the urge to call his mom.

“Eddie’s missing,” Thomas imagined himself saying.

But when he looked up at the 17th Street subway entrance, there in the stream of people flying up the subway stairs, he saw Eddie. He didn’t see Thomas yet, and looked small and worried. He had buzzed hair and looked like he was bouncing off the people around him for momentum like a pinball. A part of Thomas wanted to run into the crowd, pick Eddie up and carry him away, screaming at everyone to stay away from them. Then he suddenly felt the urge to slip away. Leave Eddie to wait for him. He imagined Eddie searching the faces around him, waiting for a shape to turn into Thomas, checking his phone. His sad Path Train back to New Jersey. Thomas felt guilty for how satisfying that image was. But he stayed where he was. 

“Hey, little brother!” Eddie called out.

As the cab neared Delancey Street, Thomas looked up at the sky over the Williamsburg Bridge, pale yellow, dimming. He suddenly thought of Eddie when they shared a bedroom as kids, sleeping on his side on his bed across the room, watching Eddie’s body rise and fall as he breathed; bread baking in an oven.

Thomas started crying.

***

Thomas decided to post up at a dark bar on Eldridge Street before Joss’s birthday party. Joss was his old roommate, who’d recently bought a place in Chinatown with their wife Lynn. Thomas thought about texting a coke dealer he’d stored in his phone a few years prior, but worried the number was wrong. He imagined accidentally texting some random teen in New Jersey, asking for drugs. He figured someone at the party would have it. He drank Pinot Grigio with ice and continued fielding texts and messages of sympathy from childhood friends, acquaintances, a TA from college that fingered his ass at a concert. A few death threats and spam from trolls. Nothing from Andy.

Andy was Thomas’s something. They had sexted on Grindr for months before they finally met unplanned at a warehouse party. It turned out, as it usually does in Gay Land, that Thomas and Andy had mutual friends, and had both briefly dated a guy they both decided was a covert narcissist. They went home that night and had limby, laborious sex. That next week, they had sex again, fully sober; present and passionate, three different times. After that, they wordlessly anointed each other as fuck buds, and would go on to see each other once or twice a month. Thomas felt confident that Andy was objectively more attractive than him, but a lot more boring, which Thomas could deal with. Andy was shorter than Thomas, and more muscular. Thomas loved Andy’s big hands and his uncut cock, but still after all this time, knew very little about him. He knew they were the same age, that Andy' had grown up in New Hampshire. He knew his mom died when he was a teenager. He didn’t know what music Andy liked or what he did on weekends. 

“I’m bad at Instagram,” Andy said one time, after Thomas mentioned in the most subtle way he could that Andy hadn’t followed him back. It would be another month before Andy got around to it.

The day after Eddie’s death was announced, Thomas set his Instagram to private and posted a photo of him and Eddie, from the early 90s with a spare, polite caption, including gratitude for the condolences his family had received. Surely, Andy would’ve seen this, or one of the articles about Eddie -- some of which mentioned Thomas by name. Andy worked at Google. He couldn’t be that bad at social media. 

He finally texted Andy:

Hey!

Then he turned his phone screen over onto the bar. 

Joss’s apartment was small but safe. Thomas almost asked to take a nap when he got there. He was tired. His exhaustion felt devastating. Supernatural. But his best friend Robbie offered him a bump of coke, and he was fine. Joss and Lynn stood with Thomas in the kitchen, asking about Eddie, how his mother was doing. They offered to go to the funeral. Thomas waved them off, telling them it would be small and annoying. Joss’s party was scarce. A bunch of people had canceled last minute.

“Sick or something,” Joss said, shrugging. 

People started smoking cigarettes inside. It was hot, and Thomas started sweating. He could tell people noticed, but didn’t want to say anything. Sympathy silence. Joss suggested the party move to a bar a few blocks away. Thomas was relieved.

About twenty minutes after being there, the bar lost power, along with the entire neighborhood. Two thirds of the party left, and the ones too drunk or too lazy to leave, moved out with Joss on the front patio. Thomas was still sweating. They watched the commotion on the street. There were sirens everywhere.

“Probably not on the Upper East Side,” Robbie said, pleased with his statement.

Thomas thought about the power outages during Hurricane Sandy, back when he lived in Bushwick. He and Joss were still roommates, and fully finished their alcohol supply before the storm even hit. They decided to go up to the roof entryway and watch the storm roll in. The roof door almost ripped off its hinges. Their faces were soaked in the sheets of rain and salt water as they watched lavender flashes of exploding transformers. Then the lights of Lower Manhattan suddenly disappeared. The skyline was swallowed into the rain. Dematerialized. Withdrawn from this world. 

Then Thomas thought about when he and Eddie were young, and Eddie was afraid of the weather. They’d had one summer where New Jersey got rocked by flooding and severe thunderstorms; that was it for Eddie. He told his mom he was convinced there would be a tornado and the house would collapse on them while they were asleep. He would pace his room for hours, keeping watch.;Thomas could hear him through the walls. It got so bad that he had to go to a sleep specialist. Eventually, he grew out of it. The storm never came. 

Out on the patio, someone else—a gay who Thomas had never seen before—mentioned that his friend in Los Angeles had come down with some weird flu, and a bunch of people he knew there were getting it.

“Who is that guy?” Robbie asked Thomas out of the side of his mouth.

***

A little while later, Thomas and Robbie split a cab uptown. Lyft was down. The cab crawled. People ran out in front of backed up cars in the dark streets of Midtown. When they reached Robbie’s place in the Upper West Side, he offered to sleep at Thomas’s, in case he didn’t want to be alone. Thomas said he was fine.

It took Thomas ten extra minutes to climb the six flights of stairs in his building. Some neighbors milled around with flashlights in the otherwise pitch black stairwell, checking on each other. One of them asked Thomas if he needed water. His own apartment as hot as an ancient, airless tomb. He shone his phone’s flashlight to find his way around the living room. He called out to his roommate, Tellen, a flight attendant, who was supposed to be home from Europe that night. But when he looked into his room, he wasn’t there. 

Thomas threw on gym shorts, grabbed some pillows, a thin bed sheet, and a bottle of wine and crawled out on the fire escape. Neighbors had the same idea, listening to music, watching movies on their laptops, iPads, smoking weed. His one neighbor on a fire escape one floor below him and over one, waved up at him while smoking a cigarette and FaceTiming with someone. She mentioned once that was a senior at Columbia, but Thomas forgot her name. She frequently had parties, and Thomas pretended to ignore it when he was trying to sleep so she and her friends wouldn’t think he was a lame thirty-two. Thomas waved back, and then looked down at his own phone. Andy hadn’t texted him back yet. He closed his eyes.

***

When he woke up, the power was back on. He looked down at the streets. People walking to work. The driver of a U-Haul truck yelling at a man helping direct him in parking. A woman, wearing a face mask, walked her dog. Thomas decided he would skip work, buy a box of face masks at Rite Aid, and then get drunk somewhere; maybe at a new bar that opened two blocks away. He crawled back inside and charged his phone. As soon as it was on, his mother called. 

She sounded strangely calm and casual. She asked Thomas if he wanted to speak at Eddie’s service. He said no. It was only two days away now. Thomas's aunt and her husband were helping her with arrangements. Eddie was splitting the cost with them. It was a private service, for family and close friends, held at the church Eddie and Thomas were baptized at. She warned Thomas there might not be a big turn out. 

“I’m not worried,” Thomas said.

His mom didn’t respond to that.

“Why don’t you come home today?” She asked Thomas. “You can relax. More room to breathe in case there’s another outage.”

Thomas said he had a crazy day at work ahead, and that he was late. She didn’t fight him on it, and told him he loved him.

“Me too,” he said.

Right after he hung up, Thomas projectile vomited, right there, in his bedroom, against the wall, splashing back on his face, which made him throw up again. His legs started to give out, and he doubled over, gasping for air, wiping off the steaming vomit from his mouth with the back of his hand. He spent an hour cleaning and getting the puke smell out of his room.

In that hour, he got 15 new spam calls.  He answered one of them, taking a break from cleaning, and flopping flat on his bed.

“I hope you die like your brother,” a man’s voice said. 

He sounded like he was from the midwest. Maybe Ohio. Or even Pennsylvania. A TV was on in the background. Thomas realized his number must’ve been leaked.

Thomas laid back on his bed, twirling a phantom phone cord, picturing himself like the cover of an 80s movie.

“Did you hear me?” the man asked.

“Yeah,” Thomas said, almost starry.

“Good,” the man said. “You and your family don’t deserve to be in this country. Or alive. Fucking traitors.”

“What are you watching?” Thomas asked.

“What?” The man asked.

“On your TV,” Thomas said. “I can hear it in the background.”

The man was silent for a moment. 

“The news,” the man said.

“I hate the news,” Thomas said.

There was another patch of silence; he could hear a news anchor listing off fuzzy dread.

“Fuck you, faggot,” the man said.

He hung up. Thomas stared up at his ceiling and almost started laughing, but cupped his mouth. He decided he had to change his number but he didn’t have the energy to right now. 

He started heading to Rite Aid but turned back almost immediately after stepping outside of his building. He was shivering, and he went back into his apartment to take a bath and shower.

Around 4 pm, a mass text went around instructing people in New York to avoid Sunnyside, Queens, citing a “public health risk.” The text ripped through the boroughs. It trended on Twitter. Two group text threads Thomas was in spent nearly an hour trading theories on what was going on. People said it had something to do with the blackouts. Others said it was some “bad bug” going around. 

My old roommate from college has it. So does her kid. They’re really sick. They’re in Boston.

I hate Boston, someone else replied.

One friend, who actually lived in Sunnyside, said he had no idea what anyone was talking about, and that everything was normal there. Later that evening, another mass text rolled in, claiming the first mass text was a hoax. Thomas texted Andy again.

Did you get those texts about Queens?

‘Dumb,’ Thomas thought, looking at his own words.

He waited a few minutes for Andy to respond. He didn’t. Thomas then muted the group texts and went on Grindr. It was as business as usual there. Thomas could always depend on that. He messaged a profile with no photo that was 60 feet away from him.

Are you in my building? Thomas wrote.

The profile blocked him.

Then a profile with just a photo of a Mets cap and the name ‘DISCREET JOCK” messaged Thomas in rapid succession:
Het man

**Hey

What up

U there?

Can I breed you?

???

Fuck you

Then twenty minutes later: 

Hey man.

After some weightless edging on Grindr, Thomas felt better. He opened up his fire escape and let some air. He looked up at the bruising sky above — the orange light pollution holding it up. It felt entirely possible that tonight the sky would fall down.

He looked down at street. A single car rushed past. Other than that, no other noise, save for the scuffing of someone hurrying along the sidewalk. In the distance there were sirens.

He walked over to Tellen’s bedroom again. He still hadn’t come home. The bed was immaculately made. A Diptyque candle sat on the nightstand, stoney and still, waiting to be lit. Thomas went over and smelled it, then sat down on his roommate’s bed. He had the thought that this bed would never be slept in again, preserved like the room of a dead child. Thomas pulled his roommate’s number up and called him, but it went straight to voicemail. They’d lived together for almost two years now. They weren’t particularly close, but they understood each other. A knowing ease. No explanations necessary. One of the great roommate love stories of the century, cemented in courtesy and boundaries. Thomas had never wondered about him flying before. Hundreds of hours in the sky, the odds grew greater of something terrible happening, even if slightly. Thomas suddenly imagined Tellen’s plane slamming into the water in the North Atlantic. He tried his phone again, and again, it went straight to voicemail.

Robbie called. He asked Thomas if he wanted to grab a late dinner. Thomas said he was too tired. Robbie asked if he’d heard from Joss.

“Not today,” Thomas said.

“She texted me this morning that Lynn woke up with a fever,” Robbie said.

“Do you think it’s that thing going around?” Thomas asked.

“What thing?” Robbie asked.

Thomas was annoyed. Sometimes he envied Robbie’s ability to tune things out. What things, Thomas didn’t know. But there were things happening. Things all around them. Sickness. Loss of light. Overdoses. Wildfires in the West so big, there was smoke blowing out over Iceland. And then there was Eddie alone and dead in a car. Hungry and baking in the ugly sun. What a terrible end. His Eddie. His brother. Dead before he could see all of this. He wondered what Eddie would’ve made of it, these strange things. He would’ve seen beyond them, something worse. Maybe Eddie was smart to die.

‘He got out early,’ Thomas thought.

Then Thomas felt embarrassed and crazy. He’d often wondered if he had whatever Eddie had within him. He was the well-adjusted one. The polite one. The one parents wanted their kids to be like. But underneath that sweetness, something hideous and wild. Like Eddie. Thomas wondered if he should just go to dinner with Robbie and not be alone in his weird, hot apartment.

“She’s probably just hungover,” Thomas finally said.

Robbie told him to call if he needed him. Thomas thanked him.

***

A few minutes later, Thomas became hungry. It happened fast. Confounding hunger. Inconceivable. Hunger that made him nervous. He called a pizza place nearby and ordered a large pizza and ate the entire thing in silence. The delivery had taken longer than usual; higher volume of orders. In addition to power outages, cell phone reception had been bad, and most delivery apps were down.

Later that night, Eddie’s ex-wife Christen called Thomas. She had taken their son and left a few days after the Feds came to their door, to go live with her parents in Chicago. Thomas didn’t recognize the number, and realized she’d probably changed it. She sounded like she’d been crying. She told Thomas how sorry she was; and that she hadn’t told her and Eddie’s son yet.

“He doesn’t need to know right now,” Thomas said.

“He’s going to grow up with this following him,” she said.

“People forget,” Thomas said.

Christen didn’t say anything. Thomas told her that Eddie loved his son, and promised to come visit them in Chicago when things calmed down. 

“I don’t know if I want my son to know you,” she said, like it was dawning on her.

Then she apologized for saying that.

“I’m just--,” Christen said.

“It’s OK,” Thomas interrupted. “We can figure all that out later.”

Then they mumbled some pleasantries and hung up. 

Thomas put his phone down, turned the lights off, and crawled into bed. His AC window unit had fried out in the outage the night before, so it was muggy in his room. He barely got his window open for a breeze before he started to shiver again. But not like before. The cold was rapid and constant. His teeth chattered so loud and so hard, he was certain he chipped a molar. His head throbbed, and his body felt like it was sinking into mud. At one point, he somehow lifted himself up—his elbows digging into the mattress — and saw Eddie standing in the corner of his room. It was dark, and Thomas struggled to stay upright, but he could see it was Eddie, smiling; his teeth gleamed in a shock of streetlight from outside.

For a moment, he could reach out to Eddie. He was tangible, holy and human at once. Perfect. Sinless. This precious thing in the dark. He wanted to tell the world about his beautiful brother who came back from the dead to stand before Thomas and let him know he wasn’t alone. Thomas wasn’t alone.