Because You'll Never Meet Me (30 page)

I haven't told you about the night before we confronted Lenz. The night we returned to
Partygänger
. Mel didn't even sigh when he let us in. Another night of music and noise and
illumination and the kind of company that was beginning to comfort me. Company that no longer made me look over my shoulder in trepidation.

We danced. We laughed. Owen mouthed along to words and I acted like a fool to the beat. The world wept to see my terrible dancing. I danced anyhow.

And at one point while a song crescendoed and broke like waves on the shore, Owen leaned forward and kissed me out there on the dance floor. Hyper-real in the vibrations of the bass and bodies and breath and motion. He pulled my head toward his and held me close so that you might have thought I could not breathe. For once my weak heart did nothing. Felt nothing.

For a moment I understood silence. I pulled away from him. I left him standing alone in a field of movement. Even as I turned around, of course I could still see him. Could see how his face crumpled as I retreated.

I pushed through nameless torsos to the bar. Fieke pounded me on the back. If only I could blink my thoughts from my head.

“Well? You've gotta be fluffin' pleased.”

I shook my head. “Beg pardon?”

“What?” She scowled. “All that chasing after my brother and you
ditched
him? Are you shitting me?”

I allowed her to shove me that time. I could see Owen headed for the exit, pushing past people. Harried. Losing his innate rhythm.

“What the fluff were you thinking? Are you even human?” As angry as Fieke ever was with me, this was the angriest.

“I don't love him,” I said.

“As if you know what the hell it is to love anybody, you android.”

She did not stomp away. She glared at me until I had to leave. Until the noise was showing me too much of Owen's painful absence.

But I do know what it is to love anybody. I realized it the moment Owen pressed himself against me and the rest was only silence.

I can confess because I am already doomed.

Doomed, not only that I love a boy far away, but that I love a ghost. I love a boy who will forever be a stranger to me and my crippling heart. It is also that you have been, since the moment I first knew you existed, completely in love with someone else. And I loved you anyway. Despite or because of Liz's impenetrability.

I love the way you fail to stay on topic. Your admittedly lame sense of humor. Those self-effacing comments you make that demonstrate the extraordinariness of your heart. I love the way you feign optimism for the sake of those around you.

It causes me no end of grief, loving you. Ollie, you cause me no end of grief with the way you counteract yourself. With the way you bring misery onto yourself and act like an idiot for the sake of a girl who does not appreciate you. Who cannot appreciate the loneliness and the silence.

Forgive my bluntness.

Now you cannot say I do not trust you. I have shown you my beating heart. Pacemaker and all, confidant.

Now that I have trusted you with the darkest depths of me, I have sent you this package. Inside you will find a womble, a rubber hazmat suit that my mother once wore in the laboratory. Perhaps your father wore one, too. I beg you to go out and stand up for yourself. Stand up for the girl you're in lovesickness over.

Win the girl and take her away into the night after your masquerade ball.

I am going to the hospital. Nothing can hurt me now that I've faced the power line that is you.

Worry about your weakhearted fool of a pen pal no longer.

Yours,

Mo

I hope that one more thing you can forgive me for—or love me for or whatever—is my bad habit of being a complete ass.

I'm sorry. And now I'm terrified. What are you doing? What will happen to you if you turn yourself in? What will you do when you get to the hospital?

No, screw it. There's more I need to say to you.

Mo, I can't hate you for loving me. Although I can wonder whether you're on drugs—not because I'm a boy, which, whatever, Oscar Wilde. But because I've been such an idiot all the time.

Maybe if I'd met you first, out by the power line with pockets full of berries—not Liz, but you—I mean, who knows? I don't know anything about love except that it stings a bit and makes people act like cat-pissing doofuses.

Never mind.

What I'm saying is this:

I didn't mean to blame you for one second about what your
mother did. I was so scared, so angry, and I took it all out on you. Because Mom can't walk anymore, and Auburn-Stache said nothing the last time I asked again if she was going to die.

If
Vorgaggingdon'tmakemewriteitagaindamnit
is all about moving past the actions of a previous generation, how can you just sit there all shaken with guilt about your mother's bad choices? I mean it.

Let me put it more artistically, with greater sophistication:

They left us in the toilet. In the deepest pile of shit. And we're coated in the crappy residue of their decisions. But that does not mean we are the one who pooped, Moritz. And neither are we the poop.

Never think that. We are not the poop.

I think that analogy puts it straight. And don't argue with it. Don't even try.

Moritz, you are not the poop.

(I can't wait for you to cringe through this. I hope you can still laugh at my lame humor.)

But, god, I'm not laughing. I'm terrified. I'm scared that you've ended up like your mother somehow, buried under the weight of her bullshit. And then there's me, powerless to do anything about it. Powerless yet again.

Moritz, don't go anywhere.

Father will not look at me. I told him what happened. Told him the awfulness of what I did to Lenz under the bridge. He contacted Lenz's father. A phone conversation that I left the room for. That I plugged my ears to make myself blind for.

Father told me to get in his car. He didn't turn on the radio. He sighs in his throat, and I can hear the echoes of how he can't bear what I've done. What I may have become. Am I so different from the girl who tried to drown me?

I gave him the address of the Abend residence. When we passed under the bridge, I could not see it.

The basement apartment seemed shabbier than I remembered. I walked right down the steps and took a deep breath. Knocked on the door.

After a moment, Owen eased the door open. His gaze shifted to his feet. I could hardly see him despite the way his pulse trilled. He soon withdrew. Of course he did, after my
inhumanity on the dance floor. My violence under the
Südbrücke
.

Fieke appeared in the foreground, pulling out the chain latch.

“Look what crawled out of its cave.” All her piercings had been removed. Her face was actually soft-featured without those rings and studs. I saw the little girl in her again. She looked in dire need of sleep.

I coughed. Straightened myself up. Tried to project confident dolphin-waves. For whatever good it could do. “I am going to see Lenz. I am going to tell his father what happened.”

“What, did you grow a pair? He's been lying there for ages. It's a bit late.”

“I came to ask you to accompany me.”

“Fluff off,” said Fieke. “Why would I ever want to see him again?”

“Because you're sorry for what happened. Because you can't sleep, either.”

“You don't know shit.”

“He never touched you,” I said. “He wasn't the one who hurt you.”

Again I let her hit me. The smack of her palm on my cheek confirmed my words. It wasn't Lenz. But it was someone, anyone else. It was the parents neither of them speak of. The reason they live alone in an apartment in disrepair without proper heating. Why Fieke is nineteen years old but still in
Hauptschule
. This is their inheritance.

The slap echoed in my head. I retreated up the steps. A
bus passing on the street bombarded me with sound that I wished I could vanish into. No matter what, I will always hear my rushing blood and creaking bones. I slipped into the passenger seat beside Father.

He finally looked at me. Switched the car into first. My stomach roiled.

“I thought they were my friends,” I said.

“They are.”

I like to imagine that Owen ran out to the street as we pulled away, his hand outstretched.

But of course I could not see him.

Father has been apologizing to Lenz's family. It is a family as small as mine. A family that is only a father, a man who wrings large hands and frowns. Father does not ask whether they want to press charges. Neither man says anything of the kind. Of course they would not do so in front of me.

God, does this waiting room haunt me. It looks like all waiting rooms.

I cannot talk. I scribble in this notebook. I hope that no one will speak to me. Half an hour ago, I met Lenz's father. Afterward, I had to run to the restroom to vomit up the shameful bile in my stomach. I clung to the toilet bowl and gagged. The sound echoed and illuminated nothing so much as my own face, creased in self-disgust.

Because I have seen Lenz's father before. I recognize those hands, of all things. I recognize them for their crevices. They are a baker's hands. I knew then who Lenz was. How I
made him scream as a child in the bakery. How I made him scream and scream at the nothingness of me. And suddenly Lenz's hatred makes some sort of sense to me.

I left the room to sit in the hallway. Tried not to overhear my father or the baker.

I rested my elbow on my knees. My chin in my palm. Listened to the feet of the hospital staff as they passed by. The familiar swishing of scrubs and squeaking of plastic shoes. I listened and my throat burned, and I knew I was on the sidelines again, Ollie.

The lightest of footsteps drew near. A set of unfamiliar tennis shoes appeared.

“Budge over.” Fieke slumped into the chair beside me. Diminished without her boots.

I swallowed. “Thank you for coming.”

“
Pffft
. I didn't want to. Owen wouldn't stop tugging my arm and staring at me with his freak eyes, and finally I agreed to let him follow after his eyeless loser of a girlfriend. No offense,
Brille
.”

I felt her lean over to look at me. Why is the act of looking so vital to other people?

Why is it so vital to me? Because I can never look away?

I spent so long being unseen. Until you wrote me, no one would follow me to dark places.

Fieke wore a knitted sweater pocked with holes, and her eyes were always narrowed, but she was here. Someone normal might have hugged her.

“Owen's in the bathroom, if you're wondering. Took one look at your depressing face and slunk backward into a toilet
stall to escape the overwhelming stench of self-pity.” She coughed, that old wheeze and something deeper. “Sorry it took us so long.”

I shook my head. “Please, no. Don't apologize. I'm the one who can never apologize enough.”

“For what happened with Lenz? Or what you said to me before? Because yeah, you don't know shit about what raised me, Moritz. It's not only freaks who have wretched upbringings.”

“For that. For everything. For things I can't even verbalize.”

I could hear the beeping of monitors all down the hallway, calling the surfaces of walls and floor and ceiling to life. Which were the sounds of Lenz?

I pressed the heel of my hand against my chin. Allowed my shaking fingers to cover my mouth.

“
Brille
, are you crying?”

“I'm eyeless,” I said. “I can't cry.”

Fieke pulled my head onto her shoulder. “Of course you can.”

I had not spoken to my mother in weeks. She had not allowed me to leave the laboratory since the anechoic incident. Sometimes I heard her weak heartbeat as she passed through the hallway outside my room (my cell). She never told me whether her love for me existed or was infinite. More than ever she was unknowable. She would not look at me. Her feelings were never clear to me or anyone else.

You may think you do not know your mother because of
her secrets, Ollie. But I knew my mother's secrets and she was a stranger.

Doctors advised me to stay in a wheelchair during recovery. Advised me not to put further strain on my heart. Auburn-Stache treated me as he does you:

“Moritz, please eat.”

I lacked your witty retorts. I only slumped. I only shivered.

I had days like you've had, Ollie. Days when I did little more than sit alone in the cafeteria.

We had not done well on the last inspection. Hardly any countries sent representatives to visit; two frowning men and a woman with arms folded, who only yawned at what I recall as triple-armed and reptile-scaled and heartless infants. I had become a resident, but the other children were leaving. One by one, walked or wheeled away.

My mother knew that her work had not “progressed” in years. Perhaps the initiative's funding was being cut. A lot of her staff had followed after Merrill.

Her broken children were not equipped to repair the world.

My mother was a distant woman, but I cannot believe that she was heartless. She did not kill the children she dismissed from the facility. She allowed Auburn-Stache to place them with their families. Or in facilities and foster homes across the world. In cabins in the woods across the sea, Oliver. She was not so monstrous as to murder her failures.

I think about her when I wake on weekend mornings. How far away she seemed even when she carried me, heart-to-heart, hundreds of Saturdays ago, to my car seat. Maybe
it wasn't the irregularity of her heartbeat that frightened me. Maybe it was the irregularity of her heart.

My mother did not
feel
in the way others do. She processed the
echoes
of feelings. Their resonance did not reach her until long after the events that inspired them. She did not realize the pain she caused until it had reverberated for years. Maybe she felt that realization when I died.