One terrible night, budding teen poet Renaldo Calabasas is struck by lightning. And he emerges from the storm a very different boy…
We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from Another Dimension of Us by Mike Albo, out from Penguin Workshop on January 17.
In 1986, Tommy Gaye is in love with his best friend, budding teen poet Renaldo Calabasas. But at the height of the AIDS crisis and amidst the homophobia running rampant across America, Tommy can never share his feelings. Then, one terrible night, Renaldo is struck by lightning. And he emerges from the storm a very different boy.
In 2044, Herron High student Pris Devrees jolts awake after having a strange nightmare about a boy named Tommy and a house in the neighborhood the locals affectionally call “The Murder House.” When she ventures to the house to better understand her vivid dreams, she happens upon an old self-help book that she soon realizes is a guide to trans-dimensional travel.
As bodies and minds merge across the astral plane, Pris, Tommy, and their friends race to save Renaldo from a dangerous demon, while uncovering potent realities about love, sexuality, and friendship.
1986
Tommy
Tommy was crying, holding his head in his hands, saying over and over that he should have kissed Renaldo Calabasas that night when he had the chance.
It had been a week since Renaldo was struck by lightning. Tommy was sitting where it happened: under the charred tree in Hollow Pond Park, huddled into the base of the blackened trunk—the exact spot where they almost kissed. He wrote down his thoughts.
You are like smoke, a dark dance in the air.
No.
You are a storm cloud, weightlessly heavy.
No.
You are as mysteriously beautiful as black smoke.
No.
A crow.
No.
A raven?
Tommy crossed out his words. He was such a shitty poet. He wasn’t even a smidge as good as René. And his bad poetry couldn’t match what he was feeling.
But he kept writing in the book. He had to. Renaldo Calabasas was lost in the astral plane, floating somewhere in its expanse. And it was the book that told Tommy that if he wanted to find Renaldo and bring him back to Earth, he had to write down how he felt. He had to get close to him in words, and the words would be his path to him.
The book told him to write it all out.
The book. The book.
June, three months earlier
Tommy stood at the bike rack watching Renaldo Calabasas unchain his clunky old banana-seat Schwinn.
René was sweating through his white button-down shirt, and Tommy could see the contours of his chest through the wet fabric.
It was Friday, the last day of school, and everyone had cleared out in an end-of-the-year frenzy, ripping up and throwing away their schoolwork and locker decorations like they were getting out of jail. The trash bins next to them were filled with spiral notebooks, crumpled papers, tattered locker posters of Van Halen and the Doors. All the wealthy juniors and seniors of Herron High had driven away in their cars to some popular person’s party somewhere. Tommy wouldn’t know where.
Buy the Book
Another Dimension of Us
“You ready to go?” Renaldo asked, piling books into his basket before stopping suddenly. He leaned against his bike and stared up at the sky.
“What are you looking at?” Tommy asked.
“I’ll come to you when the sky is cerulean blue,” René said.
“What?”
“That sentence. It came to me last night after a dream. Like someone said it to me. I’m just wondering if this is what ‘cerulean blue’ is.”
Tommy followed Renaldo’s gaze. The sky was strangely dark in color, like the coldness of outer space was closer than normal. Cerulean, cerulean, Tommy repeated to himself.
Renaldo rummaged through the bike basket and ripped out a page from his notebook. Tommy could see that there was a poem written on it titled “Storm Omen.” Even by sight, Tommy knew it would be good and that it would appear in the next Cornucopia— the student literary magazine they worked on. Everything René wrote made it in there.
“It’s about lightning,” René explained, still staring at the sky, “about this thing called keraunoscopy. Do you know that word?”
“No, sorry,” Tommy said. He wanted to say, Do you know how beautiful you are? But of course he didn’t.
“It means divination by lightning,” said Renaldo. “I mean, isn’t that the most amazing word ever? Apparently, the Etruscans believed that lightning and thunder were omens.”
Tommy only had a vague idea who the Etruscans were but nodded assuredly, anyway. Renaldo was so well-read. Lightning was his latest obsession.
“Lightning on a Tuesday or Wednesday was good luck for crops. But on a Sunday meant a man would die, a whole different thing. On a Friday, it meant something foreboding was coming. I wrote this last night. Well, technically, this morning after midnight, so it was on a Friday.” René talked quickly and floridly, like he always did, and Tommy ate up every word.
He scanned the page.
I am naked, only in my skin,
bare bark,
listening for storms
waiting for omens
Tommy couldn’t get the naked part out of his mind.
“Come on,” René said suddenly, snatching the poem back, “we have to get to the library.”
Tommy watched as he folded the poem meticulously into a triangle, like he was folding a flag for a soldier, and placed the little parcel in the front pocket of his shirt. Then he hopped on his bike, and Tommy quickly strapped on his backpack full of books and grabbed his bike, too, pedaling hard to keep up.
They rolled down Freedom Avenue. Tommy let René go first so he could watch him from behind, his hair flying, white shirt billowing in the hot air. It was the beginning of June, the air was humid, and every yard they passed was dense with green lawns, sprinklers chattering away in wet stutters.
Tommy wrote poetry, too, but never as good as Renaldo’s.
Except for the poetry he wrote about Renaldo.
About René’s dark curls that cascaded down his neck.
About his strong nose and deep brown eyes that were so open and expansive, they were almost like staring into a night sky filled with stars.
About René riding his bike in his strange white pants and white shirts that he always wore, sometimes with an equally unstylish fedora hat, his bushy hair peeking out from under it.
About his brown skin, not one freckle.
About his body that was wiry and skinny and surprisingly strong, even though he never exercised.
About his old poetry books that he was always carrying around, along with his giant hardbound notebook that he wrote in constantly.
About the callus between his left index and middle finger that had formed because he wrote so much.
About how René wasn’t popular but he didn’t care at all. Tommy wasn’t popular, either. That was for many reasons. But the big one: His last name was Gaye. And because life was apparently one giant cruel joke, he had always known he was gay, too. Last week he even said it out loud. He shut the door to his bathroom, making sure his parents and his brother were safely downstairs, and he looked in the mirror and whispered it to himself. I’m gay.
He muttered it quickly in the mirror so that he wouldn’t have to get close and look at his pimply skin and feel even worse about himself. But now he was with René and they were on their way to the library and school had ended and he was free, flying down Freedom Avenue, and René was on his bike in front of him. He felt jolted with life.
Just two hours ago, René had surprised him at his locker before last period.
“Hello, fine sir,” he said, miming the bow of a mannered gentleman from a different age like he always did. “See you at Ziller’s after sixth?”
“Yes!” Tommy answered, already regretting his enthusiasm. “I know Ms. Ziller wants to, like, say goodbye to us or something?”
“Yes. And what are you doing after?”
“Um. Nothing, I guess,” Tommy answered.
“Can you join me? I want to take you to the library and show you some of my secrets there,” he said. Tommy swore he winked as he spoke. It made Tommy’s heart leap.
René was talking about the public library, the one behind the Kmart in the middle of town. René had discussed going there with him for months, since they met at the beginning of the semester. It was his sacred space, where he checked out poets like Anne Sexton and Langston Hughes and Christina Rossetti— always someone new—and gave them to Tommy to read. At home, Tommy would dive into each page looking for messages. (Emily Dickinson was the hardest to decipher, but at the same time, strangely the most powerful, like her words were almost supernatural visions.)
“And anyway, I have to return that Anne Sexton book you keep hogging.” (He gave Tommy the poet’s Love Poems last week. Tommy had been poring over every word trying to find messages to him: “That was the day of your tongue / your tongue that came from your lips,” she wrote, and Tommy felt himself vibrate.)
“Sure,” Tommy said, trying to sound calm. Inside he was shining with excitement, but he had learned to not be so expressive, ever since his brother made him feel bad about it. (“You’re so… expressive,” Charley said when he caught Tommy dancing in his room to the Xanadu soundtrack.)
“Great. Well, I better make haste to what they call ‘PE,’ ” Renaldo said, making air quotes. “We have some sort of incomprehensible final fitness test we have to complete.”
“I hate PE with all of my being,” Tommy said.
“To my very essence, pure loathing,” René answered, and bounded off. “See you at Ziller’s!”
Ms. Ziller was their favorite teacher. She ran the poetry club and was the literary magazine supervisor. Tommy had spent a lot of time after sixth period in Ms. Ziller’s room this past spring. After winter break, he saw a light purple flyer on the bulletin board saying that Poetry Club was meeting on Thursdays after school. Something about the color alone made him know it was the right place for him.
It was just the three of them every Thursday—René, Tommy, and their friend Dara—and all they did was hang out and work on The Cornucopia and read poems or draw. When the door was closed, Ms. Ziller was funny and talkative and like their friend and not their teacher. Dara was the artist—lately obsessed with spiders, which in turn informed René’s writing to include cobwebs and entanglement. Every Thursday, René would show up with a new typed-out poem that Ms. Ziller would quickly mimeograph on thick white paper, and Tommy would hold the wet, buttery paper in his hands and read another perfect work. Then Dara would pull out her charcoal pencils and begin an illustrated reaction to it like they were a jazz duo. Tommy’s friends were so talented.
Tommy had only one poem that he was proud of (but no way would he show it to anyone), called “More Than Friends.”
You look at me
Brown endless eyes
As if
You were sharing something
More than enough
A more perfect union
More than friends
He crumpled it up immediately. Then tore it up. Then ripped it into smaller pieces. And then ran downstairs and put it at the bottom of the garbage can in the kitchen.
“What are you doing?” his brother, Charley, asked, suddenly behind Tommy, surprising him.
“Nothing!” Tommy answered, trying to sound calm.
Ever since he and Renaldo became friends, Tommy had a vision. Or more like a daydream. He would be in bed still half-asleep after yet another night of wild dreams that made no sense, and like a movie under his eyelids, he would see himself and René, older, maybe even as old as sixty or seventy, in a house by the ocean. Tommy was in the kitchen making something (he had no idea how to cook anything but could in this daydream). He would finish cooking and bring the food out onto the porch, and there would be the ocean, not far away, crashing in relentless shushes, and René in his chair, with a book in his lap. Then Tommy would ask if he wanted some lunch, René would say yes and offer to help, and Tommy would say, No, no, keep reading. Then, Tommy would come up to him and stroke his long hair and kiss him.
Tommy wanted to do so, badly. But even though his best friend had asked him to come to the library, and summer was starting, he wouldn’t dare try to kiss Renaldo Calabasas.
And so, when the bell rang on that last day of school, Tommy walked through the trash-strewn hall to the back of the building, where Ms. Ziller’s room was at the end. The sign posted on the door read:
“All that we see or seem
is but a dream within a dream.”
—Edgar Allan Poe
As if she had known, Ms. Ziller opened the door before he knocked and waved him into the classroom. She was wearing a sunset-orange turtleneck and tight bell-bottom jeans—so completely out of style, they were almost cool again. Behind her, on the walls, were other quotes in bubble letters on the bulletin board from people Tommy had never heard of: “You write in order to change the world,” said James Baldwin, and “Poetry… is the liquid voice that can wear through stone,” by Adrienne Rich.
Tommy slipped into a seat. René was perched on the top of a desk. Dara was leaning back in a chair, wearing her usual powdered white foundation and charcoaled-out eyes, her hair spiked up and standing on end like dynamite had exploded on her face.
“René told me you’re going to the library, so I don’t want to take up too much of your time,” Ms. Ziller said, opening and closing drawers, rummaging around in five different directions like she often did. “I have something for you guys, since I won’t see you till September.”
“Oh, I can’t go to the library,” Dara interrupted. “My parents are going out, and I have to babysit my little brothers,” she explained, and Tommy felt bad for feeling thrilled that it would just be him and René.
“Well, here you go,” said Ms. Ziller. She held out three slim gift-wrapped boxes. Inside each was a pen, heavy and gold, with a removable cap.
“Just a reminder from me to keep writing. All summer.”
“Wow. Thank you, Ms. Ziller,” said Tommy.
“Cool,” said Dara.
“It has a heft to it,” said René, weighing it in his hands.
“For heavy words. And light ones, too,” she said, almost embarrassed by her gift. “I just want you three to keep creating this summer. And be safe.” Tommy watched as tears pricked her eyelashes. She was getting emotional.
“Now go, get out of here!” Ms. Ziller composed herself and pushed the teenagers out the door.
“Have fun. I’ll see you guys tomorrow,” Dara said as she walked off in the opposite direction toward her locker. “We can watch this movie I rented.”
Tomorrow they all had plans to hang out at Dara’s. Tommy was already excited. Now he got to be alone with René. And then tomorrow, the hangout.
***
Tommy and René stepped into the library. It was empty. Just a smattering of old people concentrating on their magazines. A blast of air-conditioning chilled Tommy’s face, and his eyes darted around, trying to spot a bathroom so he could go to a mirror to see if his bad skin, his acne-covered skin, looked okay.
“I’ll be right back!” he said.
He was glad he did—in the bathroom mirror, he saw that two whiteheads had formed on his nose. He popped them immediately. He hated mirrors. He hated his skin. Furtively, he dabbed the little spots where he was bleeding until they stopped. Someone knocked on the door and he jumped.
“Hold on! Sorry!”
He washed his face and dabbed his skin again and quickly slipped out the door, an annoyed middle-aged woman staring at him like he was in there masturbating. He felt the wetness of his skin in the air and the tiny sting of his pimples.
Tommy found René in the reference section, standing before a giant dictionary set on a wooden podium. It was the biggest dictionary Tommy had ever seen. It smelled like museums.
“Here it is,” Renaldo said, introducing Tommy to it proudly, like it was his souped-up car. The pages were delicate and thin, the words so microscopic you needed a magnifying glass to see them. One dangled from the podium on a string.
“This is how I found keraunoscopy,” Renaldo told him.
Renaldo’s spectacular poetry was full of amazing words. He confidently sprinkled them into long, descriptive lines like a chef with herbs. Caveat, brindled, encomium. The Cornucopia was basically an excuse to publish Renaldo’s work. And Dara’s accompanying drawings, which were also amazing.
“So, if I ever get blocked or don’t know what to write about, I come here and just close my eyes and find a word, and then pow!” He made a head explosion gesture. The sudden movement made Renaldo’s white shirt lift up, and Tommy saw the hair leading down his stomach. “Other times I just walk through the poetry section and pick out books randomly and read a line or a stanza to try and get messages. That’s called poetic divination. James Merrill did it, and so did Sylvia Plath. A lot of the great poets used to do this.”
Tommy watched René glide his hands over the dictionary. He flipped through the book again.
“Augury!” he said. “Oh, I know this one. It’s a sign of what will happen in the future, like an omen. It’s a word from the Romans. The Romans loved omens. They even had, like, government-supported psychics called sibyls. But from what I’ve read, the Romans really owe their whole psychic knowledge to the Etruscans. Who were very observant about the planes.”
“Planes? There were airplanes flying around?”
Renaldo laughed and rested his hand on Tommy’s shoulder. Tommy felt electrified by his touch. “Not, like, airplanes. Meaning, like, areas. Planes of reality.”
If he wasn’t obsessing about poets, René was focused on ancient myths and magic. He often talked about spirits and other worlds like he really believed in them.
He pointed to the walls. “This,” he said, pounding the floor with his fist. “This, the earth we’re standing on, is just one plane. There are others!” He said this loudly, swerving his arms around.
The librarian looked up from the desk and glared disapprovingly.
René quieted down. “There isn’t just life and death,” he whispered. “The Etruscans, the Romans, the Mesopotamians, the Maya, all these ancient cultures thought that there were other planes—other places where we exist. They had way more respect for… elsewhere. Our culture, now, doesn’t respect that. Why do we think we are so much more evolved than them?”
René tugged at his hair again and then stared at Tommy with his deep brown eyes.
“Yeah, sure, sure,” Tommy answered with confused enthusiasm. “How do you get there, to this other place? I mean plane.” Maybe in this other plane, René would actually kiss him. Tommy imagined it looked like one of those special episodes of afternoon soap operas where Sierra, the rich girl, and Locke, the stable boy, finally made love on a gauzy four-poster bed surrounded by a menagerie of lit candles and rose petals sprinkled on the comforter.
“Different cultures say different things,” Renaldo said. Then he grabbed Tommy by the shoulders and placed him in front of the huge tome. “Your turn.”
Tommy closed his eyes, flipped through the book, and moved his finger around the tissue-thin page. He opened his eyes to find his finger on projection.
“Cool,” Renaldo said encouragingly. “Projection. Like a projection into the astral plane!”
“The astral plane?”
“Oh! That’s what they call the other planes these days. I have to show you this book that I am obsessed with. It’s about traveling to the astral plane and how to do it.”
“Cool,” Tommy said, not fully understanding what René meant.
René stood up, grabbing Tommy’s hand. Tommy hoisted his backpack over his shoulders as they scurried through the tall stacks, down to an area that seemed like no one frequented it. It was in a corner. René crouched in front of a low shelf of books, dusty and undisturbed.
“Here it is,” he said, rummaging through the shelf to find a slim volume. The cover had a swirling illustration that looked like melted stained glass. Tommy saw the title emblazoned in scarlet letters.
THE SACRED ART OF ASTRAL PROJECTION
“I check it out at least once a month. It’s full of history that you won’t learn at Herron,” René said, scooching next to Tommy to show him the pages. “There are several different methods to project. Some are super insane, like you swallow two worms in a glass of water. The Druids were all about hanging mistletoe.”
“Mistletoe? Like Christmas?”
“Yes! That’s what it became. Pagan rituals of sacred passage are turned into watered-down versions in our culture.”
“Oh wow, so that’s why we have it around at Christmas. Like, it was some ritual before?”
“Yep. And now it’s just become an excuse to make out.” René laughed.
Tommy wanted so bad to say, I wish I had some mistletoe right now, but even just thinking it made him cringe inside. He wasn’t sure how Renaldo felt. One slipup, one admission, one mistaken touch, and he could ruin everything.
René handed Tommy the book. “Now you have me obsessing about Druids,” he said. “Look through it! I’m going to go find some other stuff. By the time I come back, maybe you can figure out how to astral project, too.”
“Wait, you know how to do this?”
“Oh, I’m just practicing. But maybe we can help each other. Master Sebastian can teach us. He wrote the book,” René said. “Read about it and maybe you can visit me tonight in our sleep. Ha!”
Renaldo Calabasas jumped up and ran excitedly down the stacks to find yet another pile of books.
I would like nothing more, Tommy thought. He sat on the floor, crossing his legs, and opened the book.
Master Sebastian. Tommy imagined him with long hair, in an iridescent robe, with a crystal ball in front of him. The physical body isn’t the only body, Master Sebastian explained in the introduction. Tommy read through the book for a long while. He noticed little notes in René’s handwriting. He must have checked out the book a hundred times. There were exclamation points and circles around lines about the “energy body” and how time was a construct. But this was the occult section. Tommy glanced at the other titles on the shelves—about ESP and Bigfoot and space aliens. He didn’t believe in those. But he wanted to believe in astral projection simply because René did.
“So, what do you think?” René said, crouching next to Tommy again. His body odor fumed off him, like he had gone through puberty since they were sitting there at the library. Tommy was intoxicated by it.
“It’s pretty wild stuff,” said Tommy.
“I know. And in every civilization there’s always ancients who believe in this. Also that there’s a multiverse with different timelines and—”
“Whoa, slow down, I’m still trying to understand what Druids are,” Tommy said.
René looked at him and smiled. “Maybe you can come over to my house for dinner tonight? We can practice.”
Tommy flushed with excitement. Was he just asked on a date?
They biked to René’s even though it was uphill and on the other side of town. Tommy followed René through the streets where the houses became older and smaller. They wheeled down the end of a cul-de-sac called Imperial Court, right off Marquis Street. The cul-de-sac dropped downhill, and Rene’s house was low and red, emerging from a deep wooded slope behind it.
Tommy walked up to the front door. To the left was a big bay window that looked into the family TV room, and beyond it, the kitchen. Tommy saw René’s parents and younger brother there, in the kitchen, all talking in Spanish. Tommy had no idea what they were saying. His father was bent over a boiling pot, in an apron, stirring and tasting what was in it, and his mother, wearing a flower-printed sundress, her long black hair tied up loosely in a bun, was clanking plates onto the kitchen table. They all seemed so connected, like they enjoyed being together. René flopped his bike into the yard, and what sounded like a dozen dogs started barking.
“Cállate.” he heard René’s mother say. The door opened and she stood there, two yapping dogs jumping behind her, René’s younger brother peeking from behind her skirt. “Callate! Callate!”
Tommy had almost forgotten that René’s family was from Argentina, which René had told him several months ago. Tommy had run home and looked in the encyclopedia to read about it.
René’s mother turned and commanded the boy to grab the dogs and pull them away. “You must be Tommy,” she said, opening her arms, kissing him on the cheek.
René’s father peeked around the entrance to the kitchen, with a wooden spoon in his hand. “Tommy! We have heard much about you.”
“It’s nice to meet you, Mr. and Mrs. Calabasas,” Tommy said politely.
Stepping inside, he smelled the air, rich with fried dough and vegetables and warmth. The dogs jumped on Tommy’s legs and then, satisfied, ran off. René bent over a pot that his dad was stirring on the stove. He looked more juvenile. Being in his home made him seem like less of a demigod and more of a teenager.
René led Tommy around the house. It was covered with books and plants. There were charcoal drawings hanging in the foyer hall. Nudes of a woman.
“Those are my mom’s self-portraits,” René said, as if it wasn’t at all scandalous that Tommy was seeing his mom naked. He understood then why René was so comfortable talking about nudity.
The dinner was delicious. Beef empanadas and then flan for dessert. René’s parents asked him questions about his life and his own poetry as if they were genuinely interested. They spoke glowingly about The Cornucopia and how René’s poetry was being printed in it. They were so proud.
“And your friend Dara,” René’s mother said, “she’s such a good artist.”
“Yes, she is very talented,” Tommy replied.
Mrs. Calabasas leaned over to Tommy and loudly whispered, “She doesn’t need all that ghost makeup! She is beautiful on her own.”
“Bea,” said her husband playfully, “she is expressing herself. Let her be.”
René’s father tapped the table. “Well, I’m sure you boys have things to do.”
“Right! We have things to create,” said René, who stood and cleared the dishes dutifully. “Tommy and I will clean up and then we can go to my room.”
Tommy was embarrassed, afraid that this was a joke. Why were they so encouraging of them to spend time in René’s bedroom? They must have thought Renaldo would never be interested in boys, much less one like Tommy. Maybe it was because René wasn’t gay. This can’t be anything, Tommy thought.
He followed René’s lead, helping rinse off plates and stack them in the dishwasher. René’s parents settled in the living room, reading. His younger brother played with Hot Wheels cars. The television chattered. No one paid attention while René guided Tommy up to his room.
Stepping into René’s room, Tommy felt suddenly immersed in his best friend. In the past he had secretly smelled René— his clothes when he brushed past him, a whoosh of him when he made a passionate point at a Poetry Club meeting. But now those brief breezes of intimacy filled the space like a scented candle.
His bedroom faced the backyard, with a big window looking out to the trees and sloping hill. Tommy felt like he had been here before, in a dream, like this was déjà vu.
René began excitedly showing him various things he had collected: poems by H.D. and by Elizabeth Bishop and James Merrill.
“He reminds me of you,” said René.
“Why?” Tommy asked.
“Oh. Just that he is sensitive to things. And he likes to write about things being… entangled.” René suddenly grabbed his shoulder.
“Oh, and another thing about Merrill! He loved to use divination to create his words. Like Ouija boards and other channels to other planes.”
Renaldo opened a bag of runes, and they tried to make a poem using the letters as a guide. The words were simple: crow, tree, fire. Then they tried the Ouija board to talk to spirits, only getting as far as nonsense words: lolly, oona, pris.
Renaldo looked up from the pile of runes and the Ouija board. “You know, nothing we do is going be as good as that poem you wrote.”
“Mine? What poem?”
“The one about leaving your body.”
“Why? It’s bad.” He knew exactly the poem. It was in the red spiral notebook Tommy carried around full of his bad poetry (much of it about René), in his backpack now.
“No, it’s not. Read it! I know you have it in your notebook,” René said, nodding to Tommy’s trusty backpack.
“I can’t.”
“Come on, poetry is meant to be read out loud,” Renaldo goaded. “You know what? I’ll read it.” René grabbed Tommy’s backpack and pulled out the notebook. Tommy lunged for it.
“Okay, okay! I’ll read it,” Tommy said, snatching it back and flipping quickly through the pages, careful to not show his other poems. Tommy cleared his throat.
We are just energy, just fizz.
We are far away, not hers, not his.
We meet and intertwine, not yours, not mine.
René looked at him and smiled proudly. “So good. It’s like you are expressing how much we aren’t locked into our bodies. How we aren’t even a man or woman…” René stared at him. “Wow, I have never noticed how blue your eyes are,” he said to Tommy. Tommy’s stomach lurched.
Then René turned out the lights.
“Wait for a second,” he said. “Close your eyes.” And Tommy complied, sitting there and burning with anticipation. Tommy heard the thrums of guitar and keyboard. Pink Floyd.
“Keep your eyes closed and concentrate on the sound,” René instructed. “I heard that they put secret messages in the music. Maybe we can detect them. Your psychic perceptions are more sensitive if the lights are off,” he said.
Tommy sat there, confused. They were in René’s room and it was dark and they were sitting next to each other, but they were listening to Pink Floyd. If it was the Smiths, that would be more of a signal that Renaldo liked him, because he heard that the lead singer was bisexual. But Pink Floyd? The scary burnouts who smoked in the back of the school wore Pink Floyd T-shirts. They didn’t seem gay. What kind of signal was that?
He tried to imagine René’s energy, as he had done countless times in his bed alone. But this time René was right there next to him. He was afraid that something would happen down there in his pants, and then he would be caught with proof of what he was feeling. The song continued. A bunch of noodling guitars. He didn’t dare reach across the darkness to touch René.
They sat there for what seemed like ages. The record ended, and Tommy looked at the clock. It was 9:00 p.m., and he needed to go home or he would get in trouble.
“I have to go,” he said, more abruptly than he wanted to sound. He rose and grabbed his bag.
“Okay. Well, we can try to astral project tonight. And then talk about it when we go to Dara’s house,” René said.
Tommy smiled and settled down. This wasn’t his only chance with René. He had the whole summer, and a hangout at Dara’s was the perfect next step.
He made it home that night dizzy with feelings. Before he walked in the door, he parked his bike and lay on the front lawn. Nestled there in the groomed grass, looking into the sky as it darkened to a deeper blue, he felt his body expand with what he could only call promise. Maybe this was how poets felt.
He sat up, went inside, and greeted his mother. She was cleaning the dishes, an empty Stouffer’s frozen pizza box on the kitchen table.
“How was your friend’s?” she asked.
“Fine,” he said, and then hesitating, “Can I go to Dara’s tomorrow afternoon? We have a… a Poetry Club scrimmage.”
Tommy knew that his parents would disapprove of him going over to Dara’s house, a girl’s house, even if he wasn’t the least bit interested. It was easier to pretend that poetry had scrimmages— that thing his brother, Charley, was always having to go to for his dumb soccer games.
“But why? The school year’s ended,” his mother asked.
“Poetry Club scrimmages run all summer,” Tommy lied, and then, before she could ask too many more questions, he darted up the stairs.
After Tommy brushed his teeth, he sat on his bed and thought about what René had said about seeing him tonight. Tommy closed his eyes. He tried to remember what he read in the library from The Sacred Art of Astral Projection. That there was a technique for taking the first step to the astral plane.
Imagine spots on a path out the door, and in your mind, put valuable objects there. They are your talismans.
Tommy decided he would place his old Star Wars action figures in each corner.
He mentally placed his Luke by the door, Obi-Wan in the hall, and Princess Leia by the stairs. She was his favorite. He had learned at a very young age that boys couldn’t play with dolls, so she was the closest he could get. They were all worn down, scuffed up, cherished and chipped away by a younger version of himself. When he was younger, he remembered playing with a doll and it being ripped out of his hands. But it was blurred like a lot of his childhood memories. It all seemed so long ago.
Master Sebastian said that to begin astral projecting, you had to think about someone you cared about (that was easy) and focus on that person. Tommy lay in his bed, ready to travel to Renaldo and go somewhere free of containment. Somewhere they could actually kiss, far away from any judging eyes or danger. He felt himself drifting off.
***
Tommy jolted awake in his bed. His alarm jangled with that horrible Top 40 pop hit “We Built This City” by Starship. He lay there in bed feeling the reality of his life solidify out of the fog of sleep. He was Tommy Gaye, he had just finished ninth grade, and it was 1986.
He tried to remember his dreams. They were like they always were: absurd and hard to describe. Vibrant, intense, weird—full of strange creatures, flying whales, snake-horses, talking thumbs, hair that became gooey slime that became edible. They were always like this.
But then, suddenly, he remembered one part of his dream last night that almost made sense. He dreamed he was on a large, flat expanse, like the high-school football field but even bigger.
He felt like he was in a balloon, floating, descending through clouds, the air growing opaque until he landed like a feather. Then, he woke up.
That evening, while it was still light outside, Tommy biked to the Bauras’ house. He told his mother it was much closer than it really was. Dara lived on the same side of town as René, the side with all the older, shabbier houses. He parked his bike and walked up to the cracked cement porch.
Dara opened the door as he walked up. She was wearing less makeup than usual but was still dressed somberly, in a long black coat with a black shirt under it. She motioned to him to follow her downstairs to the recreation room.
Her younger brothers were in there, loudly pelting each other with bean bags from the Toss Across game.
“Quiet! Out!” Dara said firmly. Tommy was impressed at how obediently and quickly they left.
“Look what I got,” she said, and pulled out a bowl of cheddar-cheese-covered popcorn. “It’s gourmet. My parents brought it back from one of the fifty thousand events they go to.”
She pointed to a huge recliner and ordered Tommy to sit in it.
“Where’s Renaldo?”
“He called before you got here. He says he is busy tonight. Working on some new poem about some supernatural hogwash,” she said.
Tommy tried really hard not to look disappointed.
“Anyway, I am so psyched to show you this movie,” Dara said, pulling out a VHS tape. “It’s, like, going to change your life.”
She pushed the plastic rectangle into the machine. Tommy heard a ka-chunk and a whir.
“It’s gonna take a while to register,” said Dara. He still couldn’t believe movies could be contained on these things.
As they waited, Dara looked at Tommy.
“So… what did you do with René?” she asked, surprising him. The phrasing made Tommy feel unstable. There were so many ways for him to answer that. He really wanted, desperately, to talk about René and how he felt about him and ask Dara everything, but he couldn’t. This might be a trap.
So he tried to sound casual. “We just went to the library. Then I went over to his house, and we listened to Pink Floyd in the dark.”
“Ew, Pink Floyd?” Dara said to him. “That’s, like, so… classic rock! Like something my uncle listens to. Is Renaldo secretly, like, in his thirties or something?”
Tommy laughed. “I think he thought it may be a way for us to travel to the astral plane or something?”
“Oh, gag me, is he going off about that crazy book again? Master Sebastian! He talked all about it last fall. He’s obsessed.”
Tommy couldn’t hold back any longer. “I know. He won’t stop talking about it.”
Dara brushed popcorn off her long black skirt. “Renaldo is the most talented person I know… but he is also a little—”
“A little what?” Tommy interrupted, and then immediately regretted sounding so eager.
“Like he is on another planet sometimes. Just a little fragile,” she said. She busied herself with her bangs, twisted them into dark spikes like icicles on her forehead. “I worry that he gets too deep into all that occult stuff. Like it’s making him, like, overly focus on stuff. He can get a little too invested sometimes,” she said carefully. “Last fall before we met you? He was so obsessed with the concept of time, he didn’t sleep, and then he got sick. He was out for a week. Just be careful with him.”
Tommy felt his face burn.
The movie came on. It was called The Hunger, and starred Catherine Deneuve and David Bowie as vampires seducing people, and Susan Sarandon as their next victim. Halfway through, there was a scene where Susan Sarandon and Catherine Deneuve started making out, two women touching each other. Tommy couldn’t believe that something like this was in a movie. He and Dara remained silent. He looked behind him to make sure Dara’s brothers weren’t coming down the stairs.
They kept watching the movie. It was sensual and soft focused and scary. New York City seemed so dangerous and seductive. And David Bowie was… beautiful.
“Bowie is so beautiful,” Dara said, as if on cue.
Tommy didn’t dare agree.
Soon he found himself dozing off, and when he woke up, the TV was blaring a Lollipop Crunch commercial. Dara was in the chair next to him curled into a fetal position, sleeping peacefully.
He had to get back home. He promised his mom he’d be there by 9:00 p.m., and it was 8:30. Tommy didn’t want to wake Dara, so he left her a note and quietly walked upstairs and out the door.
When he got home, he could hear his mother arguing on the phone with his father.
“I understand, Walter. It’s fine. But we are going to see my sister. And you are coming. Have a great night at… work.”
She hung up the phone angrily. Tommy heard her sigh. He pretended to have just walked in.
“You’re back!” she said, with rehearsed brightness. “How was your poetry scrimmage?”
“Fine!” he said cheerily.
He ran up to his room and shut the door. He wanted to call René but thought he would just write another poem about him instead. But right before he put pen to paper, his mother knocked on the door, making him jump out of bed. She walked into his room and told him to think about packing tonight. With Tommy’s father working so much, she had put her foot down and insisted they all needed a family vacation. In two days, they would be driving ten-plus hours to Ohio to visit his aunt Susan. For almost three months.
He didn’t even get to say goodbye to Dara or René. He called their houses, but there was no answer. He left a message on the Bauras’ and Calabasases’ answering machines, letting them know he would be gone until the end of August. His dreams of a summer riding bikes with René and maybe possibly holding hands with René would have to wait.
And wait. And wait.
***
He bought The Hunger soundtrack and listened to it on his Walkman constantly, writing more poems about René, trying as hard as he could to pour himself into concealed objects like flowers and branches.
When he got to Ohio, Tommy wanted to call René and check up on him but couldn’t because that would be a long-distance call, and his parents would be angry at him for spending the money on his aunt’s phone. He wondered if René was maybe reaching out to him. He wished for a signal or a sign and looked for it in everything: the weather, the color of a car passing by, even what the next commercial on TV might announce.
The weeks seemed like they spanned decades. Tommy played with his cousins and cleared dishes and slept with his snoring brother on couches in Uncle Ross’s office den, surrounded by stamp collections and old books about maritime history. There was not one book of poetry in the entire house. Tommy would lie there and think about René, and worry about him, and fantasize about saving him, and he would, night after night, turn to a vision of them on a porch, the ocean roaring in the distance, René reading, Tommy kissing his head.
The days moved on and on in monotony: breakfast, pool, dinner, Charley’s snores, only broken up by his florid, bizarre dreams of flying absurdities and looming figures.
August rolled on. Tommy felt the air begin to thin and saw the yellowed edges of tree leaves begin to appear. Finally, during his last week there, his aunt took him to the library in town, because it was next to her dry cleaner.
“We don’t have much time!” she said from the chugging car.
Tommy ran into it, rushing to the poetry section. Hoping for a sign or signal, he thought he would attempt that “poetic divination” that René had talked about. Quickly he looked for his divine message, reached out for a book, opened it, and pointed at a line:
Divulging it would rest my Heart
But it would ravage theirs—
Emily Dickinson, once again, freaking him out. He chose again. Anna Akhmatova, who René had mentioned before. The book was worn down and old. He closed his eyes and pointed.
Because it is unbearably painful
For the soul to love silently.
He let out a sigh trapped inside him for weeks.
He chose again, Stanley Kunitz:
The universe expanding, thinning out,
Our worlds flying, oh flying, fast apart.
He hated that message, and grabbed a thick tome to his left above him. He opened it, closed his eyes, trying his best to feel like he had powers of premonition, and pointed his finger to a page. William Blake, one of René’s favorites:
O ROSE, thou art sick!
The invisible worm
That flies in the night,
In the howling storm,
Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy,
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.
“Tommy!” someone screeched.
As if he had been caught by police, he furtively shoved the book back onto the shelf. His aunt walked up. “Tommy, I’ve been honking outside. We have to go!”
Excerpted from Another Dimension of Us, copyright © 2022 by Mike Albo.
