Excerpt from TWOS: A Novel

by Matt Runkle

One.

In which Nephi and Daniel first meet

Nephi had never been to Boise before he was asked to participate in the Anarchist Forum on the Projected Effects of Global Warming. He’d gone to art school with one of the organizers—a prematurely gray, self-obsessed light artist, a man whose main achievement was a Coat of Many Colors studded with Christmas-tree lights. When Nephi was asked to be a featured artist at the forum, he jumped at the chance to have a new project and get the hell out of Portland for a while. He boozily prepared a presentation on Projected Apocalypses, researching predictions of future climates, and designing a slideshow of painted creatures who had evolved in response to shifting weather patterns. Species that were feared to become extinct were represented by barren landscapes. The future wasn’t so much a straightforward global warming, he explained to the tiny crowd. It was more of a global weirdening.

Nephi’s college friend, the organizer—typically, anarchistically—didn’t show up to the event. And despite the radical nature of the gathering, there wasn’t a queer in sight. He’d half hoped to hook up with some dirty, dick-smelling Radical Faerie, but the crowd was more of the “manarchist” variety—somber, defensive about their privilege—and Nephi felt frustrated as he drove back west into a clump of clouds, a flask clasped between his knees. Boise had reminded him of his hometown: everything dusty, practical, presided over by the grandstanding, lawned-in Mormon Temple. He imagined the temple as an ark, a dry place away from the storm, its six spires fending off the clouds. Dodos and dinosaurs and furry elephants dotted the lawn, flapping and shuddering, evenly spaced and solitary as though part of a well-managed menagerie. An island of sorts, comforting and clear. But now he was returning to the mist, and Daniel was waiting to be picked up on the way.

Rain poured down in sheets as Daniel came into view. He was white at first, perlescent in the watery light of the storm, for his coat and backpack were covered in plastic grocery bags. But when Nephi pulled over and peered at the hitchhiker’s face, he realized his skin wasn’t white at all. Maybe the bags were more for PR than for waterproofing, he thought. Brown skin is a handicap for a hitchhiker. He felt a satisfaction as he told him to get in the car.

“Where in Portland are you headed?” he asked as the stranger settled himself in.

“Someplace dry.”

“That’s hard to find this time of year.” He watched him peel the plastic bags from himself and his backpack: he pulled them apart with quick tears at their seams, and let them drip-float to the floor in pools and gelatinous layers.

“Hard to get a ride in this weather?”

“Nobody wants you to make a mess in their car.”

“Cleanliness wins over pity, huh? I guess that makes sense. It looks like you’re recreating the Great Pacific Garbage Patch over there.” The stranger gave him a look, his eyes slightly skewed with confusion—or was it contempt? “The Pacific Gyre,” Nephi explained. “It’s this huge expanse of plastic bags that are trapped by currents in the middle of the ocean. It’s like the size of New Jersey.”

The stranger turned toward the window.

“The plastic breaks down to the molecular level and gets in the food chain,” said Nephi. “It’s kind of a disaster.” And a wave of lust squirmed down his torso. He handed the stranger the flask, which Daniel took with controlled eagerness.

“Are you going to visit your boyfriend?” asked Nephi.

“No,” said Daniel. “I don’t know anyone in Portland.”

“Where are you from?”

“Hermiston. Oregon.”

“God’s country.”

“Jehovah’s.”

Nephi squinted into the backspray. “Are you Jehovah’s Witness?”

“Not all Mexicans are Catholic.”

Nephi smiled as Daniel finished the flask. “I’m Mormon,” he said. “I’ve always been jealous of Jehovah’s Witnesses. I mean, not when I was a kid. That whole no-holiday thing was kind of a turn-off. But once I became interested in art. Your art is so much more imaginative than ours.”

“Yeah, well, sadists are famous for their imagination.”

“Ha. Those watercolors. The ones in The Watchtower? Mormons have the architecture, but man, those watercolors. They’re like flesh and blood.”

“Saturated.”  

“Exactly.”

“Can we stop somewhere and get more booze?”

Outside of Troutdale, they pulled into a roadhouse with a rose-glowing sign, and Nephi ordered them shots.

“We’re a real pair, huh?” he said as they claimed a corner table. “Can you imagine us showing up at somebody’s door? Theological chaos.”

“I don’t really like talking religion.”

“Well, I don’t believe in God either, of course. I assumed we saw eye to eye on that. Sorry, I thought it was a safe topic.” He held his glass in the air for an apologetic toast, but it hung without a clink. Daniel was getting under his skin: that scar, those eyes. Italics. Daniel looked across the room to where a woman was shaking her umbrella with a vengeance.

“Ass out of you and me, huh?” said Nephi, but Daniel shook his head, his eyes still on the woman.

“No, it’s fine,” he said at last. “You assumed right. I just want to talk about something else.”

“Okay. So, do you like girls?”

“Yes,” said Daniel.

“What about boys?”

Daniel slid his empty glass toward Nephi, and finally met his gaze. “Sometimes.”

The woman with the umbrella was ordering drinks as Nephi went to the bar for another round. Lace-trimmed white silk—wet, but not yet grimy—peered from beneath her trench coat. For a moment, he lost his balance, his focus humming in two directions. He touched the woman above the elbow.

“Your slip is showing,” he said.

She turned around holding a glass of blush. The wine glowed in the bar lights— so bright it was bluish at the edges. The woman’s eyes were wide set, almost on the sides of her head like a fish. She gave off an innocent confidence. An ingenue, thought Nephi, but only if her dad was the producer. She leaned against the bar, then wavered, and Nephi could tell she felt as drunk as he did.

“I’m not wearing a slip,” she said.

“I’m sure it feels that way by now. Just wait until it’s around your ankles.”

“You’re making the other side of the room sound really good right now.” But the woman pulled herself onto a stool, and rotated her shoulders out of her coat. It looked like she was wearing a wedding dress.

“Sorry,” said Nephi. “That was creepy. Did you get married today or something?”

“Yes.” The woman crossed her legs and shuddered. “See that over there?”

Nephi looked and saw Daniel’s eyes—italics—right on him.

“Across the room,” said the woman, “If you keep talking to me, that’s where I’m gonna be.”

“That’s where I’m gonna be too,” said Nephi. “My friend’s sitting over there, and I think he’s checking you out.”

Nephi wobbled back to the table, shots in his hands, unreasonable dreams of a threesome keeping him going. Daniel had a bottle of Old Crow in his hand.

“You had liquor this whole time?” said Nephi.

“Yeah. Bus fare too.”

Nephi rubbed his eyes. He pulled the lids tight over his eyeballs. Give to me your leather, sang the jukebox, and he felt himself sink into it. Take from me my lace.

“I can’t think of a witty way to put this,” said Nephi through closed eyes. “I think you’re really hot.”

Take from me my lace. He could feel the woman approaching from behind and turned, blinking, to greet her.

“Fucking faggots,” she said, and some wine slipped out of her glass and down the front of her dress.

Once they were back in the truck, she became known as the Blushing Bride. An easy target, a pink apparition against the slate of the sky, she was all they needed to talk about as Nephi drove them—drunkenly, cautiously—home to Portland. The Blushing Bride was what kept Daniel close to Nephi as he hunted for his spare key beneath the mat, and even closer later, as they wrestled in bed, relieved and awkward. Awkward, yes, but only half as awkward as if she’d never spilled that wine on herself. Their bond formed out of the Blushing Bride’s absent humiliation, thought Nephi. It was almost as if they’d had that threesome after all.