"Seriously, Isaac, I had no idea-- I let that fucking maniac into my bed, I'm so--"
"It's not your fault," I sighed. "I never showed you what my body looks like. Not that any of my old pictures would've had a strong resemblance to that."
"Still. I feel-- on Tinder it said his name was Kurt!"
"Oh my God. Kurt?! Really? You fell for that!?"
"What, don't look at me like that-- he told me his parents named him after Kurt Cobain! Lots of people did that! I was gonna name my oldest Kurt but my ex wasn't having any-- Oh, so you do know who Nirvana is?"
"Okay, I--" We were interrupted by Heather's phone going off on the table in front of her. Incoming call from: "Kurt". Heather made a face and picked it up, putting it on speaker.
"Hey ladies. You at the booth I mentioned?" asked Marvin's voice. (It sounds nothing like mine, at least, not how I remember it.)
"Think so. Where are you?" I was perfectly fine to let Heather do the talking.
"Oh, nah, I'm not coming in. This is more of a pit stop, I just want to make sure you two see something. Set the stage a bit." I rolled my eyes. "But yeah, if you look at the wall opposite to the bar counter, about head height, you'll see a band pic that's just two guys. Got it?"
I didn't get it. Heather and I, already frustrated not even sixty seconds into the ordeal of interacting with Marvin, looked around at any of the band photos in the vicinity. "You mean the one where they're both wearing these colorful... bodysuit things?"
"What? No. It's somebody else."
"Somebody Else played out here? I saw them in Albany when they were active like ten, fifteen years ago. I thought they only stuck to Canada and the Northeast--"
"Heather, what are you talking about?" I muttered.
"Whoever that is, it's not them. It's just two guys. In normal clothes. Really skinny guy in overalls and a bigger guy with facial hair. It's not that hard."
I noticed a photo with two men matching Marvin's description, posed together onstage, closer to my side of the booth. They appeared fairly young, and happy, though the bigger one looked like he was having the time of his life and the skinny one seemed a lot calmer about it.
I pointed the photo out to Heather. "Green overalls?" She asked her phone.
"Yeah." Marvin rather uncharacteristically paused for a few moments. "Okay, we're good here. Meet me outside and we'll talk." Marvin hung up, and Heather and I glanced at each other as we headed for the exit.
We found him in the parking lot, leaning against his oversized rental SUV like he's gonna wake up in somebody else's seventies again if he spends a single second not trying to convince himself he's cool. He wasn't any easier for me to look at than the night before.
"You guys get a good look? Cool. I got one more place to show you, and then I'll actually get to the point and talk about why I'm doing all this shit, I swear."
Heather crossed her arms. "Uh huh, and what is this place?"
"It's a while away but it's just off the highway. It'll make more sense when--"
I tried looking at him, almost. "You're expecting us to just trust that we can blindly follow you? You're not even gonna tell us where this is?"
"*You're* not the one in position to demand things from *me* right now, okay? But, I get it, it's pretty sketch. That's why I'm asking you to follow me in your own car instead of doing the whole 'get in the car now, no time to explain' bit. If I'm lying and I end up driving you up to an abandoned warehouse or something you're free to fuck right off. And I'm not gonna hurt you. You outnumber me, I bet Heather's got mace on her or something, and besides. I don't have anything against Ainsley."
We got in the car and followed him.
"A while away" turned out to be over an hour down I-10, west of the city, well into the pitch-black desert. The highway narrowed to two lanes in either direction. Heather drove-- she told me this wasn't her first car chase and I'm inclined to believe her. I confirmed with her that Marvin's intuition was right and she had, in fact, brought pepper spray.
"I don't like this one bit," Heather said once we'd crossed the point where the only sign of civilization's existence became the highway itself. "This is some true crime BS. 'Two young women follow a jilted man obsessed with their bodies out into the desert for some reason'? Really? Do we want to be that stupid? Mace isn't gonna do us any good if he's got a gun."
"Even if he actually wanted to kill us," I replied, staring into the darkness, "I don't get how he'd do it without ruining things for himself. He keeps talking about stealing my body, you think he'd want to make that body a wanted criminal? And he's not gonna run back to the Inn and make it someone else's problem, he keeps talking about how much he hated most of the bodies he's had."
"There's your problem; you're assuming whatever he's doing has to make sense. If anything he did made sense, and he still wanted to steal your body, he would've just gone no-contact with you. And he definitely wouldn't have shown up here. Maybe he's just crazy. You sure you don't wanna bail?"
I looked at my lap. "Not following him is a risk, too. He's holding me hostage. I don't blame you for not wanting any part of this, it's not... It's not your fight, really." I felt bad that I never even suggested that Heather go home and let me follow Marvin himself. Everything is all lined up with the woman in her body, and they're communicating regularly. She could go to Maine without me, if it came to that.
Heather said nothing. But once Marvin slowly decelerated in front of us, she followed in turn, and she didn't leave him behind when he pulled over on the highway's left shoulder.
Marvin exited the SUV, hands up and pockets inside-out. We watched without leaving the car. "Evening, officers, is there anything I can do for you?" He joked. "But seriously. I know what this looks like, and I'm saying again, it's not. So get out the car and let's talk."
Despite what I'd said, leaving the car felt like an insane idea. But Heather and I glanced at each other, and I think the tipping point was being too curious for our own good at why on Earth he'd take us to this specific place. She left the car, and I climbed out through the driver's side rather than open the passenger door any closer to the highway.
Marvin walked us down the highway, around fifty feet from our cars. All of us had our phone flashlights on. The entire time since I first arrived in Phoenix I'd never left its massive sprawl before now. The world became void, its only features the stars far greater than any I'd seen in Phoenix or Charlottesville or the NoVA suburbs, and the occasional shrub I had to avoid tripping over. Every so often the void was disturbed by the roar and blinding lights of a car speeding through the darkness, breaking the illusion of nothingness for just long enough to remind me of my own fragility.
Finally we came upon a spot about ten feet off the highway with an angled pole sticking out of the ground, and Marvin stopped. There were objects scattered around the pole-- album covers, cards held down with rocks, figurines, a handpainted tile, a couple framed photos of the same two guys from the Lounge, covered in dust. The highway next to us bore a large, unsettled scar in the pavement, clearly old but obvious nonetheless. There was a moment of silence.
"This is the spot where they died," Marvin spoke. "They and their tour manager, about seven years ago. They'd just left the Lounge and were driving off for their next gig. Drunk driver going full speed the wrong way on the highway. It was instant, you see that shit on the road?"
"What does that have to do with--"
"They were your-- they were Ainsley and Sara's ages, just about. But they did something with their lives, in that short time-- way more than you, or Ainsley or Sara. Or me at that age. It's the kind of thing that when you hear about it you go, man, I haven't done shit with my life. I thought I was kind of a fuck-up when I went to the Inn. My girlfriend dumped me. Said I was 'behaving toxically'. Okay. Fine. We'd just moved in together a few months before and she bailed and stiffed me with the rent. But I was doing pretty good besides that, y'know? I went to the gym and thru-hiked when I could get the time off and had friends I'd get drunk with and go to Vegas with and they'd invite me to their bachelor parties and... Yeah, a lot of them dropped off when they had kids, but I had a pretty good thing going."
"Then I found a nice vacation deal in Old Orchard Beach and it all got taken away from me over and over and over again. The thing with waking up four decades older and some dickbag stealing your body is you start obsessing over how good you used to have it and how much you'd do with it if you somehow got it back, and you feel like you wasted your life now that you're stuck and everything's just over, and you can't live up to the potential you knew you had. It's contradictory, but that's what it's like. You two are the lucky ones! Especially you," he pointed at Heather. "But at least you know it. But you?" Marvin looked me in the eye, a gesture just barely visible past the glow of the flashlights. "You only think you know it."
"God, man, I was so happy to wake up a college kid instead of yet another retiree. And I felt kinda guilty about it-- yeah, hard to believe, I get it. I was gonna do it the right way. Adjust to your life, try not to fuck it up, enjoy it while it lasts, go back to Maine and pray I land somewhere long-term with an expiration date that's not in the next couple of decades. But when I got into it, there's hardly anything about your life to adjust to. Besides being able to actually walk and move and see and hear without hurting anything after five seconds, that's all great, but that's not you. Other than that it's just the accounting classes. Bro, you don't do anything! Your letter was tiny! The only obligation you even have outside of classes is watering a couple of plants. Like, was I missing something the whole time? Do you just take your parents' money, sit in that dorm room all day, and rot? I kept thinking there had to be some weirdness, something I'd missed, but there wasn't shit! I looked at you in the mirror every day and I, I started to hate you. You have every advantage in the world and you choose to just exist. What's wrong with you?"
I don't know if Marvin expected a response from me, but Heather gave him one. "Do not," she said, making herself as big as Sara could, "talk to my friend that way. You don't fucking get to take out your personal issues with getting your life stolen on him. I signed up to listen bullshit from adults who still don't know any better when I took a job at a high school, he didn't. You got unlucky. But there's guys your age who get cancer and I never hear about them going around telling 20-year-old kids they're wasting the gift of life. So tough shit."
"Oh really? You're going to say that?" Marvin sneered. "That's rich. I should just accept it. Tell me, all year, you really never once thought about some way you'd get to keep that body? Not stealing it, no, never, you're too kind for that. But that's not the only way it could happen, can it?"
Heather flinched.
"Why, there's so many ways! You don't even have to hope the real Sara dies in a convenient freak accident. She could just... have something come up, and then she asks you to bodysit for another year since it's better than risking anyone worse. But, nah, even that's gonna make you too guilty, right? So you think about what if she wants to stay! It happens all the time on that blog! Some kid gets knocked up and wants to keep the baby? Congratulations, give up that rusty old retiree body of yours and start all over at eighteen! Girl you're in falls in love with her new body's previous owner? Throw away a lifetime of scholarship and slut your way into being a homewrecker no matter how many times you tell yourself it's just temporary! A beautiful, single twenty-something fresh out of college in the big city gets a life that's apparently better, refuses to elaborate, and leaves? It's all yours!! We like to think we're just too good to steal a body, but you imagine it just... ending up that way and it not being your fault, don't you. For it to just kinda happen that way, so you have to reluctantly accept the burden of getting to be young and hot again. And it doesn't matter that all that youth comes from somewhere else, it fell into your lap anyway, right? For everyone who won the lottery there's just as many people who got permanently fucked into an old one-- at least the ones who die suddenly while they still think they get to go back don't have to live with it! And people like that, they seem to be a lot less talkative on the blog, huh. Maybe they just don't have the energy for it anymore, not at their age. That's what it's like for the rest of us, either we give up and die or we turn into that GIF of those old people at a casino hitting the slot machines all day. That's terrible, you feel bad for them, sure. But why go back to the Inn? There's no need to donate a decade or two to the beggars, right? There's so much that can go wrong. You might as well donate a kidney to a stranger, or sell your house to buy malaria nets. The people who do it are saints, but you're not gonna do it. There's no need. You're free to imagine getting what you've always wanted, but without asking for it, so you don't have to take responsibility for wanting it. To be young, and free from your mistakes, and wild again, going to concerts and being hot and getting high and having one-night stands with whatever hot college boy from out of state catches your eye. Or am I wrong, Heather, and you're too good to even catch yourself dreaming?"
No response from Heather besides a clenched fist and a silence which spoke for itself. Marvin turned back to me. "But anyway. I was gonna say... The more I got to know you, the more it felt like you were living life already dead. Like I could do better. You were barely occupying your own body, after all, and every day it got harder to look at. The potential you're just not using. So why shouldn't I change things? And I did. Isaac Strauss has a life now. He takes care of himself. He's getting jacked. He gets laid. He has actual friends who like having him around and do cool shit with him. Your 21st birthday was wild, by the way. His parents look more and more relieved every time they see all the progress he's made. But dammit man, no matter what I do with your body there's no escaping the old you, is there. Nothing's ever enough. I keep building and building and I still have to look at your face every day in the mirror and it, I just hate it. It's like it's mocking me, somehow. It's disgusting. I wanna pull a Nic Cage and just... take it off."
With every word Marvin spoke his breath grew heavier and Isaac Strauss' voice raspier. He stared, manically, at somewhere between me and the ground. It was the most utterly alien I'd seen that body yet, sweating and pushed to the limits and in a terrible passion. Or, that's the impression I had, even if my eyes hadn't been blurry the darkness made it so difficult to tell aside from the occasional passing headlights, so I had to fill in the blanks myself.
He'd paused long enough that it felt like he finally expected me to say something. "I hate it... I hate it too. Seeing my body look like this," I said, barely audible over even the distant cars, let alone the closer ones. Trying to reason with him over the whole scope of his rant felt pointless. "So if you really agree... You know where to go in July."
"Dealing with seeing your face in in the mirror beats seeing an eighty-year-old's. Look, I'm gonna be honest. Keeping your body was never the plan, and it still isn't. I really don't wanna be responsible for someone else getting hit with what I've been through. But that doesn't mean I don't think about doing it every waking moment. Trying to do the math in my head to get something that means I get to live again. You wanna know the real reason I came out to Phoenix, besides showing you what your life and body are capable of with someone who knows how to use them? I wanted win an argument with myself. I let all this shit I've been thinking out at you without getting you so mad that you throw your own body onto the highway and add to the death count at this exact spot. And now I want you to tell me. Man to man. How do I know I'm not gonna hand this perfectly good body over to the walking dead?"
I don't want to know how long it took for me to say anything to that.
"It's... It's not fair. It's not fair! You come in here with this... this whole speech, you hold my body hostage so you can shit all over me for all this time almost uninterrupted... And you expect me to--" I almost said thank you but got scared. "--to just. Defend myself? Write a cover letter for my own life? It's not..."
I sat down on the ground, balling myself up, totally uncaring of all the sand and dust and car exhaust that'd get on my jeans. "I-I can't take it anymore," I spoke quietly, through tears. "Everyone keeps telling me they can live life better than me... that I'm wrong... whether they think I'm Isaac or Ainsley. I've always been... behind other people, but I... Yeah. I don't know how to live my life. But that doesn't mean anyone's got the right to make me do it their way!!"
I tried to look Marvin in the eye. "I want to grow vines on the window of my dorm... I want to hug my parents again... and I want everyone to stop looking at me. That's all I'm good for. And if you think I need to be like those guys in that band, or Kurt Cobain, or Tupac or whoever, or a thousandth of that to not waste my life, then... that's all I can tell you. I'm sorry." After that I put my head in my arms and never looked back at him.
"Well, I hope you're happy," I heard Heather say, with a gentle but firm tug on my arm. "I hope your little vent session was worth it, I really do. But if you really think we're the same, Marvin, you need to realize that no matter what I'm tempted by, I would never do that to Sara. Torture her just because I feel that awful about doing the right goddamn thing and I want an award for it. C'mon Isaac, get up. We're leaving. He said he's giving it back. You don't owe him another second to indulge himself."
"Oh, I don't need you for that." Marvin snapped. "I've got another few weeks left in this, before I have to go. I'm not gonna waste it, I know how to enjoy myself. Maybe the original owner should try it sometime."
I didn't give him the dignity of a response. Heather and I returned to the car, she helped me into the passenger seat from the driver's side and drove us off, able to make it up to speed from the left shoulder without any problems. We were silent the way back through the desert, I stared blankly up at the windshield, leaning back in the chair, trying to fade from existence. It almost worked, but whenever we passed someone going the opposite direction the headlights would catch my eye, and I'd flinch just slightly, holding on to every tether, and imagine how I'd have felt about my life up to now if it'd been me on this stretch of highway west of Phoenix seven years ago.
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