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When Richie enters the apartment, he’s greeted by the curve of Eddie’s neck as he bends over the cutting board on the kitchen island. Thinks, as he always does: I would like to put my lips there, on that stretch of exposed nape. Wants to bury his face in those straining tendons, press himself against that angry, rigid little body, and listen to Eddie complain about how he smells like a subway rat and Jesus Christ, Richie, I’m trying to cook here.
The kicker being that he can do this. That he does this every day, now.
“How are you always sweaty? It’s like forty degrees out there,” Eddie says, shrugging out of his grip now, bitching about knife safety as he tries to keep chopping a cucumber, then putting it down and standing there expectantly until Richie grabs him again. Letting out a big sigh and relaxing into the grip as Richie grins into his shoulder.
“I’m naturally moist,” Richie says. “Self-lubricating.”
“You wear synthetics and wonder why you fucking stink all the time,” Eddie replies, which prompts Richie to maneuver him into a headlock and deposit his face into Richie’s fragrant armpit.
“We are all bags of sentient goo, Eds,” he says cheerfully. “It’s a beautiful and natural thing to smell like it.”
Eddie gags theatrically and Richie releases him, but he doesn’t miss Eddie’s long and intentional inhale, the flush creeping up his neck, before he steps away. Richie leans against the counter and Eddie turns back to his cucumber and says, “I packed your shit, by the way. You’re welcome.”
“What a good little housewife you are,” Richie says. “What’s time the flight?”
“First of all, do not fucking call me your wife.” Eddie takes a long breath through his nose. “Second, I am arguably more employed than you are, than you have ever fucking been, actually, so I am very much not your house-anything, asshole. Third, and as I have said to you literally eight separate times this week, the flight is at seven from Newark. I will be leaving here at 4:30, with or without you. You will remember your suitcase. You will remember your passport. It’s in the inner pocket of the jacket you’ll wear tomorrow. You will not remove it from there until asked to do so at security.”
“Fuuuuuuck,” Richie says. “Are you as hard as I am right now? I love it when you run our vacation like it’s a CIA op. Fucking wetworks level of organization. Emphasis on the wet.”
“You give me no choice,” Eddie sighs. “Trying to get you to pay attention to any kind of time-sensitive requirement is like trying to teach a dog long division.”
“And yet you still think that dog is fuckable,” Richie says. “Sad!”
“Gross, dude.” Eddie shakes his head, face turned away to hide his smile. Richie allows himself a moment to just look at him—and it does still feel like an allowance, a thing he has to ration. Still training his gazes to be less furtive, his motions to be slower. The old urge to put on a show until Eddie pays attention to him, until he turns that scornful gaze in his direction. He still luxuriates in that disdain, but there’s a wider range of gazes available to him now, too. New, if not entirely unfamiliar, arrangements of Eddie’s face. Expressions that open him, liquefy him. Ways of looking that Richie never thought he’d be on the receiving end of.
Sometimes, he can’t help but rhapsodize. “Oh, Eddie spaghetti, you beautiful American Psycho, Patrick Bateman-ass bi—”
“I want to cave in your skull with a rock,” Eddie says tenderly, without looking up.
-
One thing Richie knows: most people don’t care. Their gazes are turned inward. They do not ask. He credits this fact with how he managed to go so long giving almost no thought whatsoever to the blackhole that was his childhood. Indeed, for nearly thirty years, no one had ever really asked, or had any interest in the answer if they did. It helped that he’d had nothing even close to a serious relationship and maybe also that he worked in show business all that time, where a degree of self-absorbed impenetrability made people unlikely to inquire about the lives of others. Maybe an interviewer or two had asked him whether he’d always been funny; he doubts that he’d answered seriously, given any thought to what he’d been like as a child, where that childhood had occurred, who had populated it.
He’d known the basics, as presented on the Early Life and Education section of his Wikipedia page: born on March 7, 1976 in Derry, Maine. Attended Hampshire College for one semester before dropping out to pursue a comedy career in New York. He actually doesn’t remember that semester very well, not for killer clown reasons but because he was vertiginously, profoundly stoned for most of it. Regardless, he’d still gotten to spend fifteen years paying off the loan. His Wikipedia page is still relatively sparse these days, but under Personal Life there is one new little factoid: In 2017, Tozier came out as gay. It cites a tweet he’d made, apropos of apparently nothing, in the aftermath of a night of binge drinking alone post-clown murder [hello everyone. i am gay. please be nice or i’ll kill myself] after which he’d had to spend months doing press trying to convince everyone he was serious, that it wasn’t all just some astonishingly homophobic PR stunt, and that he was also sorry for the garbage character he’d made for himself before that. That and all the Twitter dogpiling was actually somehow less of an onslaught than the phone call he’d gotten from Eddie twenty-six minutes after he’d posted the tweet, a phone call which began at high volume, mid-profanity, as Eddie told him that if he ever joked about killing himself again, he’d buy a glock, kill him himself, and toss his body in a canyon so that animals could eat his eyeballs and his tongue and his dick. “Eddie, there’s something so wrong with you,” he’d said, crying laughing, and then just crying, and Eddie’d said he was getting on a plane to LA in an hour, see you soon, you fucking moron piece of shit.
So it all still feels new. Being known by anyone, by everyone, in a way he’s never been.
He’s moved to New York. He’s moved in with Eddie, somehow—they never really talked about it, but he gets the sense they both initially saw the other as in need of babysitting, post-clown. He’s still got a career, sort of. He has the Losers, and their twice yearly vacations as a group, splurging as only wealthy and childfree forty-somethings can afford. The morning of their flight, he sleeps through three alarms and wakes only to Eddie pinching his nostrils shut until he gasps into consciousness. “Fifteen minutes,” Eddie says, already dressed, sitting on the end of the bed to slip on his socks.
“On it, boss,” Richie says. “Think I have time to shit?”
“No chance,” Eddie says, with a flick of his watch.
“Did you pack me enough underwear to shit myself?”
“Yeah, but only once,” says Eddie.
“That’s a bad bet, Eddie my love,” he says. “I thought you were a better risk assessor than that.”
“I’m a very good risk assessor,” Eddie says primly. “But if you shit yourself twice on this trip, that’s on you.”
“On me, indeed,” he says, and Eddie barks out a laugh, disappearing toward the front door.
In the airport, Eddie carries their bags, leads him through security, deposits him at their gate, then hands him a coffee that he’s somehow located and purchased all while Richie was gazing around at the early morning hoards, thoughts chasing each other like squirrels across branches. “Your passport,” Eddie says. “Where is it.”
“My what?” says Richie.
“Passport.”
“Who?”
“Kindly go fuck yourself.”
Richie levers himself halfway up out of his seat, mimes looking around for a suitable spot, giving up, shrugging, reaching for his zipper.
“Don’t, you ape,” says Eddie. He sits down beside him, their arms touching as he relaxes into the seat. Richie claps a hand on his knee.
“We are so stupid early,” he says. “I could still be in bed right now. We could still be in bed right now, edging each other into oblivion, and still not miss this flight.”
Eddie snorts. “You take too long to come. Final boarding call and you’d still be only half-hard and crying about it.”
“Sorry I can’t keep up with you, Mr. Pump-and-Dump,” Richie says. “Delayed gratification is a lost fucking art.”
“What the fuck do you know about delayed gratification?” Eddie retorts. “I’ve seen you eat half a deli sandwich in the ten seconds it takes the guy to ring you up for it. You unhinge your jaw like a freak.”
“You’re jealous I have no gag reflex.” Richie shrugs. “It’s a gift.”
On the plane, he takes a Xanax and falls asleep on Eddie’s shoulder, listening to the slide of Eddie’s ballpoint pen as he does the crossword in the back of a month-old New Yorker. A challenging puzzle, according to the subheading. By the time they land in the British Virgin Islands, Eddie has only one clue left unsolved.
“Five letters, loveable boor,” Eddie reads.
Richie says, “Clown.”
-
Now that he remembers his childhood, there are things inside it that are interesting, insofar as they explain him. Explain what he carries with him. In Derry, even before and after that summer, he had never not been afraid. Fear a thing that hummed beneath the place, suffused everything. And that fear followed him into adulthood, even after he’d lost the vocabulary for it. A stress response so constant he’d stopped noticing it. Only now, in middle age, does he feel that his shoulders aren’t pulled eternally up around his ears. His blood pressure is noticeably better than it’s ever been (still not great, admittedly: which he knows because the automated cuff Eddie keeps in the living room still beeps angrily when it reads out his numbers. Fuck.)
Of course Stan hadn’t wanted to go back there. Stan, safe in his happy life, knowing what duty required of him. The only one who had anything to lose.
He should be here, Richie thinks often, when they’re all together like this. On Ben’s enormous fuck-off sailboat in the glittering Caribbean sea, having cocktails while the sun sets orange and pink. Stan and Patty and the kids they should have been able to have. It’s not fair, but the unfairness goes back so far as to be impenetrable. Stan deserved the exhale. He deserved a better one than he got.
Eddie, shirtless, is stretched out across one of the bench seats on the bow, tumbler perched on top of the scar just to the right of his center chest. That impossible thing. Wounds that knit themselves together, blood that floats rather than falls. Richie is engaged in explaining the plot of Alan Alda’s 1981 comedy The Four Seasons to Bill—trying to jog his memory, feeling unreasonably sure that their parents had some kind of double date night outing to go see it while leaving them with a babysitter that he recalls Bill being enraptured by—but all the while his eyes dodge back to Eddie’s chest, the way they are wont to do, in that familiar mix of lust and horror. Did it hurt, still? Allegedly not. Eddie’s overnight oats and his carefully calibrated weekly strength-training-to-cardio ratio and his treadmill jogs with a weighted vest. His macros tracked relentlessly. Total mastery over the body, over aging, over decay, and thus over pain. Yet, still, a twinge in his chest Richie sees reflected in his face at the end of his workouts, coming home looking wan and worn out, insisting that he’s fine, fine as anyone, he does not need anything, never has.
They drink into the night, as the sun dips into the water and is replaced by a dome of stars. They lie together as a group on the boat’s broad back deck, tracing constellations. Bev lays her elegant feet on Richie’s chest and her head on Ben’s. “I feel like I’m in Tarantino’s wet dream,” Richie says, and Bev drops her heel onto his solar plexus so that all the air grunts out of his body.
Eddie lays above him, their heads only centimeters apart; periodically, he feels the brush of Eddie’s nose on the crown of his head, his inhale. He keeps his eyes on the indigo sky and is reaching up a blind hand, searching for Eddie’s face but willing to settle for a nipple, when Mike says blandly, “IT’s from somewhere up there.”
Silence. In his stillness, Richie senses that Mike has rehearsed this. That what comes next is something he’s been approaching all night, slowly, on soft feet. He says, “You guys know I’ve been doing some PI work.”
Mike’s aptitude for research. He’s left Derry behind for good but the skills he’d honed there remain. And what else is there, for him? They’d left him there to become an adult on his own and now this is the adult he is: a man on the hunt.
“Yeah,” Bill says, keeping his voice light. “Anything cool?”
“A lot of missing people to track down,” Mike says. “I like those cases. You’d be surprised how often they turn up. Most do. So it interests me when they don’t—like, I started to look into patterns.”
“Patterns?” Eddie says.
“Clusters,” says Mike. “Some of it’s obvious. People get lost in the woods, so popular national parks and forests have clusters. And then you have the most dangerous neighborhoods of big cities, where they’re missing but it’s just because the body’s sleeping with the fishes. But then there are other clusters.”
“Mike,” Bev says. “Just say it.”
No hesitation, then. Mike says, “There are other towns like Derry. Not a lot. But some of them—it just doesn’t make sense. Places where the missing rate has no reason to be so far above the national average. Places where there seems to be an echo.”
“Fuck,” Richie says. Like another hit to the solar plexus: all the breath gone from his body.
“Are you sure?” Bill says. “Couldn’t they just be statistical anomalies?”
“The data suggests otherwise,” Mike says.
Eddie is sitting up. Richie feels him looming. “You have the numbers with you?” Eddie says, his voice sounding abruptly sober. “Can I take a look?”
“For sure,” Mike says. “I brought my laptop. Hold on.”
He brings it up from below and soon he and Eddie are sitting at the bar, bent over it together, talking P-values and standard deviations. Richie tunes them out because it’s boring and also because he notices, eventually, that his whole body has gone rigid with the effort of trying not to throw up and pass out. He breathes through it, because he’s a fucking champ at this shit by now—when he remembers to go to therapy he’s assured by his psychologist of his amazing, unprecedented-in-the-history-of-CBT progress—but goddamn if it doesn’t take work.
They go to bed soon after that. In the twilight of the lamp illuminating their swaying aft cabin, he watches Eddie undress, folding his clothes neatly into the zone of his suitcase designated for dirty laundry. Richie doesn’t ask him about the validity of the data, in his professional risk-analysis opinion. There hadn’t been much discussion after that, but it was clear the question that hung in the air. It was clear Mike was waiting for someone to ask it, for the debate to begin. But no one did. No one stepped over that threshold. No one said: okay, so there are others. What the fuck do you want us to do about it?
-
He likes this role he plays now. He won’t deny it. “I’m Eddie Kaspbrak’s trophy wife,” he says by way of introduction, sometimes, because it makes Eddie look like he wants to throttle him instantly. “His sugar baby, even. If you will.”
And Eddie will perform all his usual protestations but then continue to escort him through doors with a hand on the small of his back, pull out chairs for him, slap down his weapons grade titanium or whatever-the-fuck credit card at dinners for which he’d made reservations and laid out a suit for Richie to wear. “You make me feel like a cheap whore,” Richie gushed.
“You’re an expensive whore,” Eddie said. “Nobody ever told you it’s uncouth to always order the most expensive thing on the menu?”
“Eddie, baby.” Richie grinned wolfishly. “You’ll get your money’s worth. Don’t worry. You know I go down like the Titanic.”
“God bless you, you do make an effort.”
“What I lack in skill I make up for in enthusiasm.”
And Eddie smiled then, the smug and pinched thing that meant he was trying to hold it back. Eddie likes doing these things, likes the response it produces in Richie: the little blush, the semi-ironic preen, even the obliging eyeroll. Eddie is not fragile, he seems to know that about himself now, seems to have on some level always known that he’s tough little tank of a person, despite his mother and his ex-wife’s entreaties otherwise—but Richie thinks now that maybe he himself is the fragile one. A weak man in a large and unwieldy body who wants someone to take care of him.
Ben’s boat is anchored off the coast of some unnamed cay, surrounded on three sides by empty white sand beach. During the days they swim and tan and read and bicker and drink. Eddie puts sunscreen on Richie’s shoulders four times a day and then shouts at him when he doesn’t wait the requisite thirty minutes before letting himself fall back into the cerulean water. “Come on, Eds,” he calls, spreading out his arms in the water. “We all float down here.”
Bev throws an inflatable fender at his head. Eddie dives in, smooth as a dolphin, to retrieve it.
It’s all very beautiful. Very unreal. Richie feels a familiar little shiver at this. How they can be here, actually. Sometimes he thinks: I’ll wake up from deadlights soon. And they’ll all be dead, and then so will I. In the afternoon, Eddie dozes, his head on Richie’s thigh. The side of his head flat enough that Richie uses it as a drink holder until Eddie wakes up and says, “Stroke my hair, asshole.”
“Stroking,” Richie affirms. “I’ll stroke you all day, baby.”
The nights are a problem. A silence sets in promptly, each evening after dinner, while they wait for Mike to start speaking. And he does, eventually. Tells them about former mining villages in Colorado and Appalachian hollers and towns that sprout of the desert, where not even the relentless sun can bake the evil out. Something’s wrong in these places. Has always been. There are cycles at work there, cycles that can be broken. Something they know to be true.
They listen. They ask questions about what Mike has learned about these places. They do not ask anything else.
Then they’ll finish their drinks and go to bed, retreating to their staterooms. Sometimes, Mike and Bill stay out on the aft deck, and he hears them still talking; the soft, unintelligible murmur of their voices. Comforting, almost: like being put to bed as a child and hearing his parents downstairs, their activity a kind of sentinel against the darkness and the quiet. Richie has never been able to stand quiet.
But by the time he and Eddie are under the covers, he finds he doesn’t feel like talking. They fuck in near silence, Eddie’s hand fisted in his hair, lean muscle of his arm pressing against Richie’s face. “Fuck,” Richie breathes out, into the sheets, the pleasure disorienting alongside the dread.
-
They make it all the way to the last night before someone says it. Before the liquor hits right and the dawn is breaking and they’ll have a plane to catch in a few hours: maybe a kind of escape hatch. If there’s one thing they know how to do, it’s run. In the end, he’s not sure who ends up asking it, but the question hangs long in the briny air.
“Mike, why are you telling us this?”
-
The worst fight the two of them have ever had as adults, so far: about running shoes, of all things. About the pair Eddie had bought for him and earnestly expected him to use. Fuck if he hadn’t gotten a solid fifteen minutes of material out of that—completely off-the-cuff, kind of on a role, actually—and at the end of it Eddie had turned to him with a look of such volatile fury that Richie’s mouth had snapped shut of its own accord. Rendered speechless for perhaps the first time in his entire life.
“Fuck you,” Eddie said, with far more venom in that simplicity than in all the elaborate insults he’d ever spun out before.
“Whoa,” Richie had said. “What’s your fucking problem?”
Eddie ended up not speaking to him for a week. Had disappeared to visit Bev and Ben without him, which was fucked, in his opinion. Immature, he would have said if asked, but no one did. When he called Bev to find out what the fuck was going on, she passed him to Ben to explain it, but all he said was, “You’re being inconsiderate, man.”
“Inconsiderate because I don’t want to be some fucking yuppie jogger faggot dickhead?”
Ben winced at that over the videocall. “It’s cool,” Richie said. “I’m reclaiming.”
“Eddie cares about you,” Ben said, recovering his patience. “This is how he shows it. And you’re in your forties, man. It couldn’t hurt to hit the gym a little. It feels good and keeps shit from going to pieces on you.”
“I’m not taking gym advice from someone who looks like you,” Richie retorted. “You’re like a freak of nature or something. No one has a neck like that.”
Ben rolled his eyes. “Okay, if not me, then take advice from Eddie.”
“He’s also a freak of nature. But for willpower. And Napoleon complexes.”
Eddie did come home a few days later, looking rung out but still, improbably, animated by anger. But he was talking now, at least, and crossing the living room to take his blood pressure while he explained all the horrible things that happen to your body as you age, all the premature deaths associated with a lack of sufficient mobility and strength, and why it really wasn’t that fucking hard to get thirty minutes a day of vigorous exercise for the sake of your goddamn cheeto-and-ramen encrusted arteries, dumbass.
Richie took this all in, feeling as lost as he’d ever been, wanting to argue and feeling too confused to do so. “Why are we fighting about this?” he’d asked finally.
The cuff beeped. 141/89, which was impressive, considering how red Eddie’s face was. More evidence for the freaky willpower theory, he supposed. Meanwhile, Eddie scowled fiercely at him for a long moment, then broke his gaze. Looked blankly at the notebook where he listed out his daily BP readings, morning and evening, in neat columns. “Because you need to know.”
“Know what?” Richie said. “Jesus, Eddie. I’m like one of those unkillable sea slugs that lives next to a thermal vent in the ocean. I eat garbage and shit fertilizer. I’m essential to the ecosystem.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“It means I’m fine,” he said, exasperation pitching his voice high. “Not even the fucking murder clown could get me.”
“That’s exactly what I’m talking about!” Eddie exploded.
“What?”
“We got lucky down there,” Eddie seethed out. “And now we cannot fuck this up. We have to live. We have to prove it. We cannot get early-onset dementia or cancer or drop dead of heart attacks. You—” His voice, low and angry, faltered. “You cannot leave me like that.”
A beat. “Oh,” Richie said.
Eddie turned the full force of his dark and liquid gaze on him. “If you leave me like that, after all this bullshit, I’ll fucking kill you.”
He felt a lot of things, then. He won’t lie, either: some of those things were good. Cared for, looked after. A shady of Derry fear persisting, turning him tender and desperate at once. The same thing that had brought Richie to New York—a desire to make sure that they were both still intact. That they really had made it out of Neibolt, their second chances truly delivered. No one left behind in that dead and dying place.
He’d wanted to touch Eddie, then. Place hands on his chest and back and make sure the stitches and glue were holding, the pieces flush against each other. And later that night, he had—Eddie wrapped up in his arms, deflating into his grip, as though he’d been waiting for someone to take over. Like the effort of holding all the pieces together himself had finally exhausted him, and only in the dark, in the deep night, would he allow a shift change.
“I’m sorry I’m becoming my fucking mother,” Eddie had said, sounding so defeated, so diminished, that Richie wished his anger back.
“It’s okay,” Richie said. “I always enjoyed fucking your mother. You’re like the next best thing.”
Eddie groaned and laughed and they did fuck, then, and it was ridiculous and sublime the way it always is. Sex with Eddie like getting pleasantly murdered. Fondly bludgeoned to death. People think Rich Tozier is bullshitting when he makes jokes about being vigorously topped by five feet nine inches of neurotic rage incarnate, generally assuming that the boyfriend character in his sets is a mythical entity, but to Richie himself it feels improbable only that he survived this long without it.
Eddie spends their first evening back from the BVI in the kitchen, furiously meal-prepping for the week ahead, no doubt disturbed by five days of vacation food and too much alcohol and too little cardio. Richie leaves him to it, knowing that Eddie’s meal prep ritual is a Whole Fucking Thing, and slinks off to his office—the apartment’s spare bedroom, where he dicks around when he’s supposed to be coming up with new material or answering emails or doing Zoom interviews with boring Youtube idiots. Today, he does actually manage to get through some tiny iota of his inbox, ignoring the 42,384 unread emails below it. Returns a text from his agent, talks shit in a groupchat he maintains with a few other comics from the old days: that strange liminal period after Derry but before fame, before things defamiliarized and he fell hard into substances and selling out. Then he doodles on some notes for a new set, draws a miniature portrait of Bill pinwheeling backward off the yacht’s bow two nights ago. Does all this; listens to Eddie bang around the kitchen; almost manages not to think. Not to feel the disquiet.
The group said their goodbyes at the airport, hugged long and tight the way they do. Made no decisions. Mike seemed patient, unbothered. He’d made his case and now has left them to their choices. Said, only, that this summer in Magnolia, Colorado might be interesting, based on the data. Bill had looked to him, an expression of fierce devotion, and nodded once.
He and Eddie have not discussed it yet, but they’ll have to strategize, sooner rather than later. Have to figure it out, somehow: how to break it to the rest of the Losers that there’s no fucking way they’re seeking out another murder clown in some other godforsaken place, and none of them should do it either. Will it fracture the group, to speak this truth? Will he lose them again? He’ll have Eddie, at least, but to let go of the Losers, to watch them march to their deaths—just the thought of it boomerangs him back to the deadlights, for just a moment. A white slice of horror through to his core. They’ll have to convince them. Mike, who hasn’t figured out how to let go of his position as guardian, collector of information, problem-solver. Bill, newly divorced and wanting to go save other Georgies. Bev, he can’t be sure of: her sly smile, her coyness. What does she think she owes the world? What does the world owe her? Ben will follow her without a second thought, if that’s what she decides. But she’s been in the deadlights, too. Knows they have been lucky. Knows just how much worse it can get.
If they go, they will die. There is only one end to this story.
He emerges when he hears Eddie doing the dishes. Strip of neck exposed, hairline a little rough at the edges: no doubt it’s nearly time for his once-every-three-weeks trim to keep things tight. Richie presses his nose and lips there, plants a couple wet kisses down for good measure, wraps his arms around him. “Ugh,” says Eddie, relaxing into his grip. Richie often feels that he’s not quite mastered how to hold someone he loves: that he’s a little too ironic with it, a little too bro-ish, quick to throw an arm around Eddie’s shoulders or slap him on the back. So he practices—maneuvers his hands lower, tucks his chin. The way Eddie leans into it: trust. Too real to be real.
-
Something that he carried with him all those years without understanding or acknowledging: a hope, maybe, that he’d die before they were called back to Derry. An easy off ramp when things seemed tough and getting tougher: well, maybe I’ll be dead before I have to deal with that. No real interrogation of that thought, all the many times he’d had it over the years. Hadn’t even known what “that” was, or convinced himself that it was many things he wished to avoid and not the one that he’d known, on some level, still loomed. It’s a habit it’s still far too easy to fall into: slip back into the comfort of half-living, of seeing no future and thus being unconcerned by it.
Four calendar reminders and two Eddie reminders and he manages to make it to his therapy appointment on Thursday afternoon only fifteen minutes late. Talks with Sam about his vacation—she’s always so pleased to hear that he’s a man in his forties with four whole friends besides his partner—and about how he seems to be settling into the new Lexapro dose nicely. What he wants to discuss, of course, is something that he cannot. How to explain to said four friends that he doesn’t want them to have another clown murdering summer vacation. That he can’t do it. That if strangers die, that if they keep dying, he’s not sure he cares, or doesn’t care enough to run the gamut. Doesn’t care enough to sacrifice any of this, or to even risk it. That he’s never had anything before that he’s so afraid to lose.
“You seem distracted,” Sam says, in the last ten minutes of the session, tilting her head curiously at him.
“Yeah, well,” Richie says. “That’s kind of my whole thing. My vibe, as the kids say. ‘Guy who kind of isn’t all there.’”
“We have time, if you want to discuss something,” Sam continues, unfettered. “Everything okay with Eddie?”
“Oh, yeah,” Richie says, nodding vigorously, crossing and uncrossing his legs. Thinks of Eddie this week: ferociously deep cleaning the bathroom on Monday night, spending an extra hour at the gym on Tuesday, waking early on Wednesday and sitting perfectly erect at the dining table to get a head start on the work day. Taken individually, nothing out of the ordinary in these behaviors. But, still, Richie registers a general unease in the air. Eddie no doubt sublimating his anxieties about disappointing the other Losers into his habitual coping mechanisms, unwilling to confront the shame of letting the others down. Richie doesn’t want to cause him that pain by bringing it up. Doesn’t want to face any of it either.
“I guess sometimes I think that it’s actually too much,” Richie says.
“Too much what?”
He shrugs. “Too much love. That I didn’t feel anything like it for so long and now—I don’t know where to put it. I didn’t think I’d have to deal with this and I never, like, trained for it. I never learned what to do with it all and how not to be a fucking weirdo idiot asshole about it.”
“You think other people know what to do with it?”
“Yeah, like other people work their way up to it, you know?” he says. “They date a series of shitheads who eventually become more head and less shit and they work out their own issues while they do it and they learn how to cohabitate and resolve problems and get older. And I didn’t do any of that. I was a kid until I was forty and now I look fucking stupid all the time because I’m like, what the fuck is a Roth IRA? Why do I have to get a colonoscopy? Who the fuck am I in a relationship?”
“I don’t think it’s fair to assume that other people are so much better informed than you are,” Sam says. “It’s not usually as linear as you describe.”
“It doesn’t seem fair to Eddie,” he says. “To have to look after some fucking man-baby.”
Sam shrugs. “I think you’re way overestimating how much Eddie has figured out. I don’t claim to know any more than what you’ve told me about him but, personally, I think we’re all weird idiot babies at heart.”
On the walk home, he finds himself thinking about Stan again. Stan, the least fucked of them all, removing himself from the board. The happy life he couldn’t reconcile having to give up in order to be called home. The risk too great, the future too sweet to sacrifice. He could have ignored the call, Richie thinks. Hung up and blocked Mike’s number and lay back down next to Patty in bed and closed his eyes and then opened them. He could have, but there was no world in which Stan would have done that. No world in which the dishonor of a shirked duty would not have left him a husk. The trap of an adult’s sense of responsibility: all of them in suspended adolescence, back then, by comparison. Death as real to them as it had been at thirteen, when they’d run headlong into the wrath of cosmic evil, because they’d known no better. Because none of them had ever really believed in their own future.
When he arrives in the foyer, he sees Eddie in the kitchen, having arrived home from work just ahead of him. Eddie looks up from his phone and says, “You good to get on a call with the others in half an hour?”
Richie, who has never been all that proficient at keeping up with the groupchat once it gets into the weeds of dates and times when they’re all available, is caught off-guard. “Oh, uh, yeah?” he says. “About—?”
“Yep,” says Eddie, and then he vanishes into the bedroom to change out of his work clothes. Richie stands in his wake, frozen for three long seconds, before he starts breathing through his mouth. Then he slides out of his shoes and into Eddie’s house slippers, his heels hanging off the backs, and sluices out into to the street, where a fine rain has begun to release the top layer of dirt from the sidewalk. Two blocks over to the nearest bodega, trotting across the stained floor tiles until he finds a pack of pink Snoballs, paying with a crumpled fiver that the cashier feels obligated to evaluate with the counterfeit pen. Then back to the apartment just in time for Eddie to emerge from the bedroom and go absolutely apeshit over the fact that Richie has worn his indoor shoes outside. In the rain.
“Do you have a fucking worm eating your brain?” Eddie gasps out. “Has the worm replaced your brain? Is that why you let my slippers become vectors of disease? Have you ever heard of fomite transmission, fuckhead?”
“Eddie,” Richie says. “What are we going to say to them?”
A tendon is still bulging in Eddie’s neck. “About what?”
His voice shoots high. “About how we’re not going clown-murdering this summer!”
Eddie counts backwards from ten. Not out loud, but Richie sees it in the narrowing of his eyes, the softening pink in his face. Something that grown up Eddie can occasionally do: talk himself down off the cliff, wrestle back a little restraint when the shit hits the fan. “Okay,” he says, finally. “So you don’t want to do that?”
Richie just looks at him. “You do?”
Eddie shrugs, the motion exaggerated. “I’m not going to let them go alone.”
“So we convince them not to go,” Richie says. He can feel his eyes widening, his chin raising in indignation. “Obviously?”
Eddie isn’t looking at him now. Has his arms crossed, his gaze on the floor.
“Eddie,” says Richie, voice straining. “Eddie, Jesus Christ. You don’t want to—”
“No, I don’t want to,” he snaps out. “But what if we have to? Who else is going to?”
A beat where all he hears is the rush of his own breath. “Oh my god,” Richie says.
“Richie—”
“You can’t—” Richie feels his mouth go dry, his face go hot. His hands are in the air, waving. “You cannot be fucking serious.”
“Calm down,” Eddie says.
“You’re telling me to calm down?” Richie is aware that he might be shouting. “The angriest motherfucker on the planet wants me to calm down? What else do you want me to do, Eddie? Want me to go for a jog, go keto, buy a kettlebell?”
“What?”
“Cause you know what isn’t fucking heart healthy?” he says. “Getting three-hole punched through the aorta by some being of infinite evil from outer space.”
Eddie is staring at him, the creases between his eyebrows like two claw marks. Richie thinks: I’m going to throw up. He thinks: if I do it inside, Eddie will find a gun and shoot me with it, and then he’ll feel bad about having made me die. Outside outside outside, he tells his feet, still jammed in the slippers, until they obey.
-
No one to call who would understand, and those who would all on the phone with each other, without him. Nowhere to go besides the park across the street where a peanut gallery of pigeons eye him as he lays down on a damp bench and puts his hands over his face to block out the luminously gray sky. It is cold; he feels this only through the vector of the sweat that has materialized across his back, his forehead, chilling him in the lazy, gelid breeze. You used to not care whether you lived or died, he thinks. You used to know you were going to die wondering. There was nothing for it. And now—
Eddie comes to find him. It doesn’t take long. Whatever conversation he’s had with the other Losers has been a short one; Richie shudders to imagine how he’s been portrayed. It wouldn’t have worried him, before, to be thought a coward. Before, these people were no one to him: deep in that crowded, forgotten place. Now they live, they breathe. They see him.
“Eddie, I’m sorry,” he says, voice cracking pathetically, just as Eddie’s mouth opens. “I’m sorry. There’s nothing—I’m not—”
“Richie, shut the fuck up and come inside,” he says, reaching out to pull him to his feet.
He leads him back upstairs, sits him down on the couch, hands him a glass of water and two gluten-free crackers. Richie, feeling fuzzy-headed and boneless, allows himself to be maneuvered like a sedated zoo animal. He won’t ask it. Won’t be able to hear the answer. Am I losing everything? he thinks. Is it all going to be gone now? These years a strange mirage. Now back to real life. Dropped out of the deadlights back into where’s he supposed to be: nowhere.
Eddie is leaning against the counter, arms crossed, not speaking. All this telling him something anyways: silent Eddie usually a prelude to volcanic Eddie. Incandescent Eddie. He’d be lying if he said it hasn’t always done something for him: the fullness of Eddie’s attention at the height of his rage. Just how far he can see into Richie when he’s like this. But when Eddie looks at him now, the anger isn’t there, even though the comprehensiveness of his vision still is.
“You’d think we’d die, if we went?” Eddie asks simply.
Eddie and the others have asked him before what he saw in the deadlights. Whether he’d had the same kind of clarity that Bev did. She’s never asked, though, because presumably she already knows: you don’t see anything, in there. You just know.
“Yes,” Richie says.
Eddie says, “You think you get to die?”
“Huh?”
Eddie’s gaze is steady. “You think that’s something IT can do to you? If I’m there?”
“Eddie, what the fuck,” Richie says. “You—what IT did to you down there—”
“And yet I lived,” he says, shrugging. “You got me out.”
“You think we’re going to get that lucky again?” Richie splutters. “You’re the risk analyst and the fucking math on this doesn’t look insane to you?”
“It’s unquantifiable,” Eddie says. “There’s something else going on here. We don’t know all the variables.”
“All the more reason not to walk into this situation blind,” Richie says. “Is this the fucking Twilight Zone? Why am I the one having to say this to you, of all people?”
Eddie’s expression is abstracted, his eyes distant. “There’s something else going on here,” he repeats.
Desperation is building. Richie recovers his ability to stand, empties his hands of the crackers and the glass of water—items he’s been holding loosely, uncomprehendingly. He crosses the room to Eddie, feels like if he can just touch him, if he can just beg and badger and keep him in the room, this bizarre recklessness will pass. They’ll be safe again.
“Eddie, please,” he says, and is encouraged when Eddie leans into the hand on his cheek. Richie feels the ghostly ridge of the scar there. “I can’t lose you. I won’t—I wouldn’t be able to—”
Eddie’s eyes flash. He fists a hand into Richie’s shirt, pulls him abruptly closer, breathes into his face. “You don’t get to die, asshole.”
Richie feels his heart rate accelerate. “It’s not up to me, man.”
“It is,” Eddie says. “It’s up to us. IT didn’t manage to kill any of us before. Why should it now?”
“IT got Stanley,” Richie says quietly.
Eddie shakes his head. “No. No, Stan made his choice. No.”
“I—”
“No,” Eddie says. “No, you don’t.”
What had he been about to say? Whatever it is, Eddie knows. Sees all. He’s holding Richie close, scowling furiously up into his face. Radiating outraged heat. Richie commits this all to memory as best he can: the feel of them pressed close together, every severe line in Eddie’s face. The Red Sox t-shirt and sweatpants and grippy hospital socks he wears around the house. I have this, Richie thinks. I had this.
-
Real. Eddie sleeping as he always does: on his back, neck sunk into the memory foam pillow half-obscuring his head. They usually fall asleep holding hands, and throughout the night Richie will shift and migrate until he’s halfway wrapped around Eddie, clinging to him, entwined with him. By morning, Eddie’s face will be tucked into his shoulder, his neck, his hair. These are not details his mind would be able to invent: a realness to them. Nothing he’s ever been able to imagine for himself.
He lays awake, feels the weight of Eddie’s palm in his own. Thinks of the other Losers, what arithmetic they may be doing now, in their own beds. A kind of psychosis, maybe, for them all to even be considering this. For them not to be sufficiently thankful for what they’ve managed to salvage from the wreckage of their lives to leave well enough alone. When he’d finally seen them on a call this week: a certain inexplicable resoluteness in their faces to mirror that which he’d seen in Eddie’s.
But they’ve compromised. They’re taking their time and giving it more thought, allegedly. There will eventually be a vote and the result will have to be unanimous—they will all go or none of them will. Richie had found himself focusing on Bev’s face, her pale and pixelated eyes. Wanting some cue from her so that he might know better who they’re all becoming.
After the call ended, he and Eddie had sat together on the couch in silence. He’d watched Eddie flex his hand into a fist, then release it. The map of threaded tendon and bone there.
“I can’t fucking believe this,” Richie had said, because he really can’t.
“You once told me I was braver than I realized,” Eddie retorted.
“And then I made you climb down a horrible fucking hole in the ground and get stabbed through the chest,” Richie said. “Why do you want to do that shit again?”
Eddie made an ambiguous face then. “What the fuck is that supposed to mean,” Richie had said, but now thinks that there is certain Eddie-ness to all this that he recognizes. So little tolerance for the world, for the people in it, and yet still the belief that they must be saved. That it’s within his power—that explosive, excruciating willpower—to do so.
In the night, he sees all this laid out. New York night is not like the way Derry nights used to be; they are not even of the same species. That Derry-brand fear still lingers, but he’s shoved it far away. It’s bearable. But there are places, apparently, that know the same kind of shadow he’d lived with all those years. Other echoes ricocheting outwards. The short list of everyone he’s ever loved apparently drawn toward this like moths to a flame. So eager to leave this life behind. Why can’t he have this, he wonders. Why can’t he have anything, ever, at all.
I love you, you dumb motherfuckers, he thinks out to them. I love you. Rolls over and presses himself close to Eddie; feels Eddie mold himself to him, an instinctual, seamless response. I love you all, and I’ll die loving you, and then I’ll love you still, even once we’re all bones at the bottom of the well, beneath a parabola of the floating dead. Even then, you shitheads. Even then.