Looking For Alaska

IT WAS FIVE IN THE MORNING and I was reading a biography of the explorer Meriwether Lewis (of & Clark fame) and trying to stay awake when the door opened and the Colonel walked in.

His pale hands shook, and the almanac he held looked like a puppet dancing without strings.

“Are you cold?” I asked.

He nodded, slipped off his sneakers, and climbed into my bed on the bottom bunk, pulling up the covers. His teeth chattered like Morse code.

“Jesus. Are you all right?”

“Better now. Warmer,” he said. A small, ghost white hand appeared from beneath the comforter. “Hold my hand, will ya?”

“All right, but that’s it. No kissing.” The quilt shook with his laughter.

“Where have you been?”

“I walked to Montevallo.”

“Forty miles?!”

“Forty-two,” he corrected me. “Well. Forty-two there. Forty-two back. Eighty-two miles. No. Eighty-four. Yes. Eighty-four miles in forty-five hours.”

“What the hell’s in Montevallo?” I asked.

“Not much. I just walked till I got too cold, and then I turned around.”

“You didn’t sleep?”

“No! The dreams are terrible. In my dreams, she doesn’t even look like herself anymore. I don’t even remember what she looked like.”

I let go of his hand, grabbed last year’s yearbook, and found her picture. In the black-and-white photograph, she’s wearing her orange tank top and cutoff jeans that stretch halfway down her skinny thighs, her mouth open wide in a frozen laugh as her left arm holds Takumi in a headlock. Her hair falls over her face just enough to obscure her cheeks.

“Right,” the Colonel said. “Yeah. I was so tired of her getting upset for no reason. The way she would get sulky and make references to the freaking oppressive weight of tragedy or whatever but then never said what was wrong, never have any goddamned reason to be sad. And I just think you ought to have a reason. My girlfriend dumped me, so I’m sad. I got caught smoking, so I’m pissed off. My head hurts, so I’m cranky. She never had a reason, Pudge. I was just so tired of putting up with her drama. And I just let her go. Christ.”

Her moodiness had annoyed me, too, sometimes, but not that night. That night I let her go because she told me to. It was that simple for me, and that stupid.

The Colonel’s hand was so little, and I grabbed it tight, his cold seeping into me and my warmth into him. “I memorized the populations,” he said.

“Uzbekistan.”

“Twenty-four million seven hundred fifty-five thousand five hundred and nineteen.”

“Cameroon,” I said, but it was too late. He was asleep, his hand limp in mine. I placed it back under the quilt and climbed up into his bed, a top-bunk man for this night at least. I fell asleep listening to his slow, even breaths, his stubbornness finally melting away in the face of insurmountable fatigue.