Preventing the Inevitable
Story fragment by Clark Humphrey
7/10/99
The Match That Would End Everything was underway, and there was nothing anyone could do anymore to stop it.
When Hannah and Marcellus were born, on the same hour of the same day in the same hospital, their respective parents knew something was touched about each of them. When the two first met, at some public function when they were six, the parents saw the instant connection between the two and knew it must be stopped. The parents could tell by the way those two talked and laughed and smiled and answered one another’s jokes and finished one another’s sentences. And by how the kids’ eyes lit up like 4th of July sparklers when the kids first eyed one another.
The two sets of parents set up a plan the very next day.
Both moved their families to different towns.
Both set to teach the potentially troublesome children to be sexually repressed and socially inhibited, to trust no one, to speak only when spoken to and sometimes not even then. Hannah and Marcellus were trained, individually, to see their own bodies, especially their own genitalia, as disgusting, stinking, abhorrant things to never be shown or mentioned to anyone else.
Time, of course, has its way of changing young people, no matter how the adults who love them might wish otherwise. Hannah and Marcellus indeed entered puberty as social cripples, totally unpopular in their respective towns, incapable of speaking out or standing up for anything they wanted.
So when their glandular urges started to rev up, they each fantasized about no one in their own schools or churches. They longed only for one another, for that perfect connection that came to them so briefly, so long ago.
Each did not know where the other was, but knew, somehow, they would reunite.
Somehow, but not someday.
ASAP.
Marcellus’s voice-cracking and Hannah’s first period took place the same week, over 200 miles apart. They’d been quietly obsessing about one another all this time; as longing memories, as fantasy companions through their present-day loneliness, and as their sole hope for a better future. But once their adolescences became physically manifest, they knew. They would track one another down, meet, and never be split up ever ever again.
This took a hell of a lot longer than they wanted. At times each of them, separately, felt the crushing fear that it might not happen.
Then sometime in her fifteenth year, Hannah found Marcellus’s address on an email search engine. They immediately began a secret electronic correspondence which took up their entire private lives. Their respective parents thought the two were simply shuttering themselves away in their respective bedrooms as a continuation of their exactingly-trained loneliness.
But Marcellus’s mother, spying in his room as was her frequent wont, came across an un-encrypted file of the pair’s love emails. That set everything in motion.
The two families immediately took their children out of school the next day (Hannah had two siblings; Marcellus none) and embarked on open-ended, cross-country road trips. When asked, the four parents claimed it was because they’d suddenly realized what a mistake it had been to shelter their poor wistful little innocents. They now had to catch up and get a crash course in experiencing life, and the best way to do that was to take them out of all comfort zones, especially those mind-absorbing computers.
They found one another anyway, in a cute and semi-improbable way.
The four parents met up as they realized Hannah and Marcellus were off somewhere they couldn’t get to, fucking their brains out, and nothing could stop it. Some toasts were made to the inevitable and how, just like aging and death and losing in certain video games, we try to forestall it but it happens anyway and the best you can hope for is a high score along the way.
—NOTES—
1. Why are the four parents so disturbed by the connection?
Could be the lovers-to-be are of different races, or the two families could be feuding rivals (that’s been done).
Or, there could be an emotional-mental-psychic connection among Hannah and Marcellus whose power, and potential danger, is evident from the start. One moment you have two individual children, not really all that different from any other children in the city park or at the annual carnival. The next moment, a hyperactive, ultraintelligent being-with-two-bodies was upstaging all the other children and adults in the place. Winning all the rigged carny games through either telekenesis or instantly calculating the proper throwing trajectory or both. Politely declining the company of all other children, who had instantaneously begun to appear unformed, incomplete, and, yes, immature. They don’t turn into instant geniuses–they don’t instantly know any more than they did at the beginning of the day, but they’re better and more avid learners. Each is eager to know what the other knows about absolutely anything–what makes the bubbles in a soda pop, why bird poop is white, what fireworks are made of.
They could have become such totally different creatures when they were together, it would be easy to understand why their respective parents would get scared, even if it was the best thing that would ever happen to anyone in their respective families. One of the mothers might be a fundamentalist Christian, and convince the other three parents that a Hannah/Marcellus combo might have more personal power over the universe than any mortal human is meant to have. She fears they could even grow into demons on Earth, avatars of the Antichrist. The world would not be safe if those two otherwise-innocent little ones ever spent another second together. Especially considering the children would reach sexual maturity right around the end of the millennium, which wouldn’t necessarily bring The Last Days (since, Hannah’s mother knew, the Bible warned that mankind would not “know the day nor the hour”) but still just might.
It would also be easy to understand why, once separated after a mere afternoon together, they would devote the next ten years of their lives to missing one another, then attempting to reunite. And why they would be so damned miserable and frustrated during these aching years apart (which would eventually last more than one and a half times their pre-meeting lifespans). And why they’d feel doomed to spend the rest of their pre-adolescence, and then their early adolescence, feeling cut off from the only connection that had ever really mattered or would ever really matter to them. They’d feel lonely and lost even without parents and schools doing everything to make them feel cut off from the world.
2. How do they actually, finally, reunite?
Perhaps their few months as teen email correspondents help them to develop a psychic bond. Enough that they could sense when they were, say, ten miles apart or less, and could silently plot to each run away at exactly the right time-space coordinates so they could meet before their respective parents could contact the authorities to track them down.
Or, if you don’t want to get that supernatural, it could be established that, during their email correspondence, they’d discussed the places in America they’d most like to see, or the places they think they could most successfully run away to. Remember, every moment they’re together, either in person or in Internet chat rooms, they feed off of one another’s intelligence, they each become smarter (or at least capable of faster, more thorough absorption of knowledge). At the time they’re separated from their respective computers, they could have already been plotting their rendezvous.
Hannah might be the first to run away from her traveling family. She could spend the entire open-ended road trip looking for just the right opportunity–scouting out every motel, every gas station, every truck stop and chain restaurant. But the parents spspect her motives, and don’t even allow her to use a restroom except in the company of her mother or one of her sisters.
The opportunity might finally avail itself two and a half months into the trip. They could be at one of those new mini-theme parks popping up along the American suburban landscape, on the site of a defunct shopping mall. In a funhouse-type attraction, she slips away from the family. She spots an overdressed boy her size, leads him into a dark corner, and offers sexual favors short of intercourse if he will giver her his baseball cap, sunglasses, flannel shirt, and jeans. Upon the conclusion of the favor, she gives him her T-shirt and a pair of unisex shorts she’d been hiding in her large purse for just such an occasion. She also tells the boy to tell his own parents that he’d accidentally fallen into the drink at one of the park’s water rides, had ruined his clothes in the fall, and had been given these replacement clothes by a kindly park employee. Hannah even told the boy how to make real-looking bruises on his arms and legs, to make his story more believable.
From that point, Hannah finds it easy to sneak out of the funhouse and out of the park. Hannah’s parents and sisters immediately fan out across the park once they realize she’s out of their sight, but all they find is a darting glimpse of a boy wearing a t-shirt exactly like Hannah’s. But it’s a popular shirt design (though the parents don’t think it odd that a boy would wear an N’Sync shirt), so they don’t pursue him.
The cops are called. It makes the news. Two states away, Marcellus hears about it on a car radio. While he doesn’t hear Hannah’s or her family’s name, he knows it’s her. Within an hour, he’s plotted his own escape. Three days later, he executes it. With fewer family members to watch him, he doesn’t have to work as hard as Hannah had. He simply waits for a moment when both parents are out of the car, yelling at some motel desk clerk; he sneaks out of the car by himself, and hops on a commuter bus heading into the town.
They know in advance that traveling to their predetermined rendezvous point, alone and underage and with old photos of them all over the news media, won’t be easy. But, after several harrowing misadventures hitchhiking, taking small regional bus lines that don’t require picture ID, riding in vans with touring rave DJs, hopping the rails, and each teen charging the occasional meal or commuter-plane flight on the other teen’s dad’s credit-card number, they arrive. Marcellus gets to the spot (relatively secluded but in a city they could quickly disappear into) exactly at the predetermined hour of high noon. Hannah’s thirteen minutes late. Marcellus does not panic. When she appears, running and gasping, he is not alarmed.
3. What happens next? They know exactly what they will do. They will find an even more private place and then make out like the teens-in-heat they are. No thought will be given to making their first time slow or tender. That can happen later. For now, they must have the simultaneous orgasm which will bond them for all eternity, and they must have it before anyone recognizes and separates them.
They almost complete the task then and there, but an older woman sees them, with Hannah’s bra half off, and glares disapprovingly. They reassemble their clothes, pick up their backpacks, and run off.
They finally do it on a ferry boat. The ride takes almost half an hour. Their first time, under a grocery truck parked on the boat’s car deck, takes less than ten minutes (closer to five, actually) from first unzipping until completion. At the exact time she grasps his penis and shoves it inside her, without even a moment’s pause to look at it, her parents run into his parents back at the ferry dock. They all realize it will be useless to ask the cops to search the boat when it arrives at its destination. The inevitable has occurred. And only the universe knows what terrors will follow.
