Chapter 3

I secretly love disasters. I love watching everything get completely destroyed. I slow down when I drive by accidents, I watch the news nonstop every time there's an earthquake or a hurricane or a tsunami. I like watching those big steel skyscrapers get wiped away by a flood or shaken down by an earthquake or something. Because you know what? Sometimes I think that all this stuff we build to last forever is just wrong; there's something bad about it, something rotten. I'll be walking downtown and I'll look up and see the dizzyingly straight rows of buildings, lined up like prisoners waiting to be executed, and I'll feel sick to my stomach. We're not meant to last, so why do our houses and buildings live
forever?

I brought this up with Quinton while we sat and ate chips.

"I get that feeling too sometimes," he said. He smeared Doritos particles all over his shirt and on the couch.

"Yeah?"

"Yeah." The Simpsons played in the background but we'd both seen it before.

"I guess, I don't really know." He paused. "Sometimes I look at me and all I see is s**t you know? I mean, I've got all this money from software I wrote back in university and I don't even know what I want to buy."

"You mean aside from a flat screen TV, a Ferrari and a massive house?" Quinton laughed.

"Well yeah, I mean, I have all those things right? But I think I just bought them because it seemed like the kind of thing I should do you know?"

I asked him what he meant by that and he said,

"I dunno really. It's hard to explain. But I woke up one day and suddenly my Mum's dead, she's left me a load of cash, I invest it in my own software and now suddenly I'm a millionaire and I don't know what to do. What the f**k are millionaires supposed to do? How are we supposed to act?"

"I dunno, buy yachts and jets and mansions and stuff I guess."

"Yeah exactly, all that Forbes magazine bullshit. So I bought all of that kind of stuff and now what I mean, I've got more money than I'm ever going to need. So do I just fill my day with expensive toys and playboy bunnies?"

"That doesn't really sound that horrible to me."

"Yes! And that's the most fucked up part because I know my life is amazing. It's f*****g great. I've got everything anyone could ever want but the problem is I don't know what I want. I mean, everyone always asks themselves 'what would I do with a couple million dollars?' I don't think they really understand what it's like to have a couple million dollars. You can buy almost anything in the world, you can do almost anything, you can afford to be who you really want to be." He paused and there was a nice silence between us. We ate Doritos and sat on his couch. I drank cheap beer and looked around at Quinton's million dollar house.

"And I mean, I tried the whole backpacking travel, you know 'see the world with your own eyes' or whatever. Like when me and Kevin went to Nepal remember?"

"That trip where you both almost got robbed in that little mountain village?"

"Yeah, that one. Anyway, the whole thing was just so f*****g bogus. We sat in a circle at this hostel while some hippie d********g played s****y folk music and everyone was singing along and all I could think of was 'what movie have I seen this in?' Nothing I could do there was real because I'd already seen every 'real' experience on TV."

If I was living inside a TV show it'd be the most boring, cynical, jaded, ironic show on the air. We sat in silence for a few minutes. I sipped my beer and it tasted like a mid-life crisis. Outside Quinton’s window the city sparkled and shone. Skyscrapers and office buildings reflecting out over the ocean like a million star in the pale night sky. Sometimes when you look at an office building at night you get lucky and lots of people have their curtains open. It looks like that building contains a hundred separate little worlds, all similar but vastly different. It's enough to make you wonder what else is out there. Something I'll never see.

"Do you ever think back to that night on the roof?" I asked Quinton. He looked up at me and bit his lip.

"Sometimes, yeah."

"Me too." My hands drummed on the couch. "All the time."

"Sometimes I wish I could go back there," he said. "Go back before things got so f*****g unbearable." Having all that money must really stress him our or something. Most of the time anyone is stressed it's about money. We're a generation of rich people pretending to be poor because we don't know how to deal with money. We're all trying to be quirkier, funnier, more 'random,' than we are because maybe we can't deal with the fact that we're all really, really boring people.

"I could live in that moment; on that rooftop. You know, like just close your eyes and repeat that moment over and over again until you die."

"You think about Michelle a lot?"

"Yeah."

"Me too," said Quinton. Me too.

"It's her birthday on Saturday." We both smiled and drank the rest of our beers. Next thing I knew there were these god awful tears running down my face. I closed my eyes and went back there.

It was the morning after, on the roof. We all woke up lying on top of each other, listening to the gentle sounds of the sunrise. I rubbed the crust off my eyes and stared out into the world. The city looked ugly in the sun, unnatural, propped up by twisted glass and metal. I think cities can only really look beautiful when it's almost too dark to see anything else.

One by one we all came back to life. I struggled to my feet, groggy from last night as Quinton vomited all over the ground. Cheryl looked up at the clouds with this distant look in her eye. Michelle leaned forward and kissed me and I could taste her lip gloss. It was Dr. Pepper flavoured. The gravel in my shoes stabbed at my socks, my joints were sore and the air was cold. We shook our limbs and began to make our way off the roof. There was this section over in the corner with a rusty maintenance ladder. Kevin climbed down first and I started to follow when Michelle said,

"Hang on, I forgot my purse I'll be right back."

I climbed down the ladder and met up with Kevin.

"Some night huh?" he said to me with a small smile.

"Yeah it really was."

"What happens now?

"I really don't know," I laughed. Quinton climbed down the ladder and joined us. Cheryl followed afterward. Quinton leaned up against a concrete beam, his face pale. I had all these little cuts and scrapes from sleeping on the roof. The sun cut through the air with brilliant orange beams and it looked like the whole world was bleeding.

Kevin started laughing at something Cheryl said and suddenly there was a scream.

I turned my head just in time to see Michelle's hand slipping off the ladder, her foot stepping down into empty space; her eyes wide open with shock. She fell silently, silhouetted by the brilliant orange sunrise, down and onto the sharp, cold, hard concrete with a wet smack.

I don't remember very well what happens next. There was blood, lots of blood. All over my shirt and hands. I held her broken body in a Wal-mart parking lot on a Saturday morning. Stop my mind from thinking these thoughts..

I opened my eyes again. Quinton was staring at me from across the room, holding back his own tears. I thought back to Cheryl, about being broken and stuff, about how everyone breaks. Sometimes I think that maybe I broke the soonest. I cracked after Michelle and broke away from anything. I'm an island floating alone out at sea. I’m sitting here screaming, swim to me. Come meet me in the warm waters we bathed in as children. Forget who we were, forget who we are. Swim until you run out of air and I'll meet you there, on the other side of those waters. Swim beside me. I want to feel your bleeding heart, brain, body, mind and soul next to mine.