Medication



act i.

They practice eloping once a week.  Romeo&Juliet were an art form, not an allegory, and Kyle leaps into shotgun every Tuesday with a little Shakespeare in his step.  “How camest thou hither?” he asks, florid with getaway vernacular.  Never remembers his goddamn seatbelt.  Stan pauses to tiptoe the harness across his chest, hesitating over his heart, like, please, God, keep this safe.  Kyle’s pulse is too desperate under Stan’s fingertips, reckless in its captivity.  Kyle breathes in fits and measures, like a time bomb.

“You’ve got to trust me on this, okay?” Stan says.  “I’d leave with you tonight if it were that simple.”

“Stan Marsh, the man with the plan.  I believe you.”  Kyle shrugs off the seatbelt and brings their mouths together, struggling to smile.

Lately he’s been kissing only as punctuation, and this one is an ellipsis (if it were any simpler…) that Stan can’t quite follow-up.  Somewhere between Prozac and Paxil, Kyle took a false turn.  He bites his nails.  He feels dead in Stan’s arms.  He sketches exotic birds in the margins of his calc tests, kiwis and cassowaries, winged creatures that can’t fly.  Whenever Stan asks, he just pulls him closer and stares nervously up at the clouds.

Think about heaven, all that atmospheric pressure, Kyle says, his lips a whisper against Stan’s cheek.  Death by repression.  That’s the worst way to go.




act ii.

This is retrospect:

Tweek Tweak had it right the day he climbed onto the school’s roof and threatened to jump if they didn’t commit him.  “Get me out of this place!” he’d screamed, one foot over the railing.  “This way or the highway!  Someone make the call!”

That was ninth grade.  Stan still has days when he feels sick on the ground, sedentary and claustrophobic, hungry for the martyrdom of his classmate’s almost-suicide.  There had been clarity in that crisis, delicious vertigo.  Tweek was stories above the sirens, above the psychiatric platitudes spilling out over the town’s PA; Stan trusted Tweek because Tweek was breathing the cleaner air.  So much glory in that philosophy, escape or die.  Maybe that’s the last choice anyone ever has.  Maybe it’s the only choice.

Eventually, they coaxed Tweek down with the promise of barbiturates.  Standard procedure for the high-risk, the radicals, the ones who object too loudly.  Such is the power of small-town pharmaceuticals: South Park pins everyone with a prescription.

Stan is possibly the only resident over the age of thirteen who isn’t medicated.

He wonders if this makes him very sane, or very stupid.




(
intermission.

It’s getting worse.  Stan dreams of shuttered windows, doors that are closing too fast for him to catch.  He dreams of Kyle padlocking his wrists to anvils like Houdini.  A tank of water, a purple curtain. Faceless crowds commending his wordless departure.  What a beautiful finale!  The world’s most honest disappearing act!  Who needs a prestige, this is about accuracy!  Because who really says goodbye?  Who actually comes back?

They make love on Friday night.  Kyle has gone home by Saturday morning.  There is a note pinned to Stan’s pillow when he wakes up, sloppy cursive on a five-dollar bill:

hey there, Paint-By-Numbers,
free fingers bleed splinters in schematic retreat.
your reason is a hammer on my ready escapist-glass.
Regards.

~Scribbles-Outside-the-Lines.
)




act iii.

Kenny will only talk to him during doubles with Clyde and Craig, who play tennis like they fuck: competently, fiercely, publicly.  Craig serves straight down the line, aiming to concuss.  Clyde’s a little more roundabout, looping off twists and topspins, but he can punch back volleys in these gorgeous crippling lines.  Stan’s choking for breath before they’ve even warmed up.  Kenny just laughs and lowers the brim of his cap, his racket loitering at the ready.

“What’s eating you, Tailback?” he teases.  “Forgotten what it’s like to play with small balls?”

“Kyle wants me to run away with him,” Stan says.

“Then go.”

“Try not to get sentimental.  Jesus.”

“Set, hut!” Craig yells from across the court, dripping sarcasm, and clobbers one over the net.  Kenny has to step on Stan’s foot to return it.  Clyde smashes it back with a neat forehand, disgustingly effortless, and Stan skips away towards the baselines to escape the furor.  The three of them batter the ball around for another half a minute, all sweat and rage and ricochet.  Kenny finally misses on a rebound.  He sits down at center mark and signals a time-out, which Craig acknowledges with his middle finger.

“I mean, c’mon, we all know Kyle was never made for this place,” Kenny says, rolling onto his back.  “South Park breeds cow ranchers, not revolutionaries.  Hell, it inbreeds.  You’re his best friend.  You must’ve realized getting out was always part of his contract.”

Stan studies the pale line of Kenny’s profile, honeyed perspiration at the hairline.  “So soon, though?”

Craig and Clyde lean over the net.  “Who the fuck can blame him?” Craig asks, mopping bangs out of his face.  His hands play absently across Clyde’s back, under the hem of his shirt.  “Listen, Stan, this place is poison.  I’m only surprised you guys lasted here for seventeen years.”

“Yeah?” says Stan.

“Hell, yeah,” says Clyde.  “And you’re still breathing.”

He trusts Craig&Clyde.  They were necking in lecture hall three years before Stan’s lips formed around the first, “I love you Kyle;” they wrote the Small Town Book of Fuck-the-World Homoeroticism.  They never gave a shit about who saw what.  Craig pins dirty limericks on Clyde’s locker, comically graphic: “If your penis were corn from Nantucket, I’d siphon it clean and then s(h)uck it.”  Stan&Kyle can one-up them in delicacy, maybe, but not longevity.  Certainly not entirety.  Craig and Clyde love each other with hearts like wide, open windows.  Kyle’s never been quite that transparent.

“Give me advice,” says Stan.  “For the record.”

Craig doesn’t need to think about it.  “Get out while you still can.”

“Don’t look back,” Clyde agrees.

The two of them hold hands between matches.  Stan only realizes this when they break apart, ready for a vicious game of singles.  Watching them play is something miraculous--all that reflex, the dignified finality of gut instinct.  Emotion is instantaneous.  Only connotations take time.  Craig and Clyde wouldn’t rehearse their getaway, Stan thinks. They would meet up for pizza in North Park and just forget to go home.

Kenny hasn’t moved off center court.  The serves are violent, close enough to make the net quiver, but he just lies there and lets the ball whistle in and out of his peripheral.  His eyes are dark and hurting, ten years older than the rest of him.

“You going to move?” Stan asks.

“Fuck, no, I like being on the battlefield,” Kenny says, too blithely.  “Some people just gotta hold down the fort, you know?  Keep the crazies at bay.  Clear the escape routes.”

“You’re not making any sense.”

Kenny rolls a bottle of water between his hands and watches the prisms leap across the cement.  His backpack is open at his feet, weeping homework, pencil stubs, childproof containers of tombstone-shaped pills.  Kenny is a Lexapro man.  Twice daily.  With vodka.

“Wake up, Stanley, not everyone gets out,” he says finally.  “Look at me.  Look at Tweek.  Kyle’s tired, okay, he’s getting ready to give up on you.  Don’t let that happen.  You two still have a chance.”

“Come with us,” Stan pleads.  Get off the court, he thinks.  Get out of there.

Kenny sighs melodramatically.  “I’m already fucked.  Save yourself, Romeo!”

Maybe it was never meant to be grand.  Maybe this is the clearest sign he’ll get--guidance from the prisoners, calmly secure in their narcotic shackles.  Clyde and Craig operate on love and sedatives.  At least Kenny knows how to play the game.  Stan gathers his shit and leaves the court, his only send-off the soft cadence of tennis balls crashing against their chain-link confines.




act iv.

So in the end, it’s nothing like they planned.  It isn’t Tuesday, and Stan doesn’t wait at the curb.  He wakes Kyle with Shakespeare (“Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon”) and carries him to the car, so still, so light.  Kyle must think he’s dreaming, because he actually lets Stan tether him down with a seatbelt.  Stan takes a deep breath.  Starts driving.  Swears not to stop until he feels the weight come off their shoulders, gram by gram, quick-dissolve capsules like the vapors of heartache.

Kyle wakes up in Nebraska, the state of golden vacancy.  Dawn is just beginning to color the sky.  His breath catches in his throat, and then his hands are on Stan’s, groping for solidity.

“Don’t get too excited,” Stan warns him.  “I have no idea where the fuck we are.”

“Pull over,” Kyle says.

Stan edges onto a dirt shoulder.  He’s barely set the parking brake when Kyle clambers into his lap, his mouth mapping anxious paths along Stan’s neck.  Stan has to hold him steady to kiss him.  Kyle kisses back tasting like Prozac and progress, and the gesture is still only punctuation, but this time it’s a question mark: we made it?

“We made it,” Stan confirms, and presses his lips to Kyle’s.  Full stop.  “Yeah.  We made it.”




(exeunt)