Ivyland (22 page)

 

“What made the noise?” I say aloud, tears finally standing at their outposts, the journal slipping with a dry snap to the floor as I cave, not knowing what he might have endured. My eyes trace the rim of a burned portal that will not fade. Henri absorbed in folding space.

“Trust me. Please.”

I wait for a sign.

*

I have to wait a day, this shell of a day, before I can go to Harvey House. Phoebe gently nudges me, as she had to, and I stumble out the door into blinding sunlight, past the turned dirt that held our maple, and the unruly grass, still flattened here and there from the tents. I walk along the dirty creek and past Floods Hill and the duck pond and come at last to the squat and sinister building, a normal brown two-story except for the swinging sign out front. Here by the grace of science goes whoever.

For the first time, I'm forced to think of the people ruined. The Grady that was supposed to be. What husk or reverse-ghost he became. Then again, he probably enjoyed life more than me. There's a VV ad for you:
No matter what, you'll see things in a better light
.

The woman at the front desk smiles tiredly, maybe guessing I'm a long-lost brother here to connect with an unlucky sibling. I ask for Grady, holding up the letter, and she directs me to the rec room down the hall.

He's sitting next to this foul case playing both sides of a checkers game, swatting when Grady leans in too close. I say Grady's name; they both turn to stare, agape, hunched.

“Henri's friend!” Grady exults, and the knot in my stomach tightens that much. I haven't told anyone except Phoebe, whom I blurted it to, and Anastasio, who seemed to know already. I asked the stately man what he'd seen that evening in Henri's window, but he shook his head as if to say we would never name that agony.

“Henri's friend,” I confirm. The checkers guy sniffs and turns back to the board as Grady shakes my hand vigorously. “Aidan.”

“Nice handshake, Aidan.”

“Henri wanted me to give this to you.”

But when I take the envelope out, a tremor of panic interrupts Grady's face. Henri knew I'd have to read it. I tear the letter open and recite a shakily written sentence.

“I have something for you, in my old room.”

Grady waits, spellbound, for the end of the message. But that's all there is.

I ask a nurse doing paperwork nearby whether Grady can go for a walk. He can, he's very well-behaved. Home by 5:00 for house dinner, she warns. Grady throws a teenaged eye-roll my way. I actually laugh.

Grady can't contain himself during our stroll, pointing out his favorite benches in the park and rattling off his names for turtles that tread lazily in the stagnant pond, eager to tell anecdotes altogether thrilling but hard to follow. Daily minutiae elevated to epics. He swabs his glasses with his shirt, tells me that I'm about to step on a caterpillar, picks up the furry yellow-speckled thing and deposits it on a low-hanging maple leaf.

Suddenly, near the creek, he bursts into tears, and I'm sure that he's figured it out. He points to a mangled bike upturned in the water. Judging by how he averts his gaze, it's the one Henri gave him.

*

The house is neutral, scrubbed of its history. I'm supposed to leave. We trudge upstairs and come to the room, Grady's nose twitching anxiously. With my hand on the knob, I pause, then step back.

“Hurt?” Grady asks, looking at my hand. No way to begin answering that one.

“I think you're supposed to go first.”

Grady is lost in what resembles reflection for ten seconds. His eyes probe the door, suspicious. Finally, a grin gets the better of him and he shoves it open a little harder than he meant to, not hesitating to whoop with ugly, guttural joy when he sees what's inside. Taking up half the room is a blue habitrail Henri must have finished assembling the other day, a maze of plastic tubes with wood shavings and an exercise wheel and strategically placed water dispensers. Rifling through the circuit is a familiar rodent with white rings bristling on a puffy tail.

“Dr. Hal Rockefeller!” Grady bellows, putting his palms to the plastic bend where the ferret has frozen in its tracks, squeaking excitedly. He pulls apart the tube, allowing Dr. Hal to pour out into his hands and shoot up the length of an arm to settle on his shoulder.

“Thought you was lost forever!” Grady exclaims, laughing at the thing's affection. “Henri found Dr. Hal!”

“He did,” I say, already distracted: off to one corner is a brand new mountain bike, complete with bell. A note taped to its handlebars. Grady and Dr. Hal watch me remove and unfold the paper.

 

Dear Grady,

Found good old Dr. Hal living in our miracle tree stump and didn't think it was too safe for him there. Sorry about your old bike, too. I know this isn't the same, but I hope you like it. Wish I could have given you these things in person.

The house for Dr. Hal is all yours, too. Aidan can help you take it apart and set it up again at Harvey House. He knows what to do.

—Henri

 

The back of the paper is blank. That's it. Not the barest reassurance. Nothing addressed to me. No explanations. I know what to do? Fuck.

This is what you do in a staredown with demise. Make amends with a failed pet project. You thought this had to happen, but what made its momentum? What made you understand that Grady's bike was warped and rusting in the creek? You meant me to take care of him in your absence, but looking into those shiny damaged eyes as I tell him the bike is his and what you said, I'm not human enough. He wants to thank you, Henri, and I don't know how to say he can't. So listen to his thanks.

When I say
you're welcome
—say it on your behalf—he nods, the light hits his features a certain way and a simmering fear makes me ask his last name. It's Clafter. His dad, he says, lives on a big hill.

But if you want me to think of this coincidence in fuzzy spiritual terms, Henri, I don't know why. The dismantling we try not to imagine, from whole to final useless cog.

We contradict ourselves. But what else? The meaning evaporated with you.

I tell Grady I'll be back. He's not listening, overcome as he is. I hear my cell vibrating as I come downstairs. I come into the room and watch it buzz across the table. It stops. Then it starts afresh. Something's important. I leave.

Moments turn reluctantly, end over end. Wandering in decayed afternoon. Spring day for child's mischief slipping behind the horizon. An orange pearl of sunset. I come to the creek and sit on the weedy bank, Grady's busted bike a few feet away in the filthy water. I throw pebbles in to see the rings.

A soft crunch. Phoebe's car stopping up on the gravelly road. She gets out and steps down through the high grass to join me. Doesn't need to speak. Don't want her to. Don't want to be right about what she says. I throw a rock at a glass bottle lazing on the brown slick, then another, and another, till it shatters and sinks.

“This is the game we should've played. Submarine.”

Cal made up the name, I think.

It's getting colder. The moon etched high. Wonder if he's there yet. Maybe I'd surprise him, show up for his big return. Phoebe picks up another of the hundred glass bottles littered about in the weeds, sets it out to drift. My hand grazes hers.

“Trying to spare me,” I say.

A faint breeze pulses, the raised wheel of Grady's bike spinning mournfully in place. A sparrow lands on the crossbar and cocks its head at me. Asking. Asking. I can't breathe. Just can't. I clutch at the ground with my free hand, eyes filling.

We both hear a rustle and turn to look up at the lip of the road and Floods Hill rising across the way. No one. A fine sand on the wind.

CAL

I watch my brother from where the grass rolls down to trickling water. Shuffle through the first dead leaves. He and Phoebe turn to face me. Stare straight and blank. Want to sweep through and make them right. But this is what you get: tread time for one dissolving view.

How do we erase obsession? A riptide that punishes our struggle against it? Children are naturally smitten with anything that weds danger and secrecy, hints at discoveries unmade. The boy who worships Bigfoot can't fathom a Bigfoot hunter as laughingstock. The same confidence crumbles with age: pulled certainly, rapidly out to sea, the current works invisible.

People vanish. Always will. Some bend into nothing, lost in the wrinkles. Some burn away for no reason at all. A young woman, asleep, engulfed in 17
th
century France. Her husband acquitted of murder. The 1960s fading, a meter reader stumbles upon some doctor's ashes. A weary soul spontaneously combusted: black circle on the floor of her beachfront home. She'll have blown away when they come to see.

Each name reduced to dust in the black-and-white sketches and photos, pages of odd, ignored books. Little mounds of self-destructed person. In youth I traced these pictures and, when those grew stale, invented my own.

At night, riding my bike alone—they were always alone when it happened—I would release the handlebars, balancing, and stretch out my arms, trying to conjure the spark inside. I pedaled furiously, so that as I broke apart, the bike's momentum would keep it coasting in the wash of that rare still-working streetlight, ash running off the seat like the tail of a comet till I was gone forever and the spokes still made their inertial orbit. The bike riding itself in a cone of white. Then it would touch the edge of the pool, be enveloped in the flattening dark.

I don't know when the fantasy failed. I couldn't be one of these molten few. They had something I didn't: access, no choice. Saw flaws and gears behind the days. A vision that blossomed for decades but with age became overripe and unendurable. Strangers' thoughts seeping through cracks, inverting life and sleep. Friends' thoughts a torture all their own. Even loneliness must have failed. Sequestered in bare rooms, staring at walls, shadows liquid in barbaric theater, they would summon my loneliness the same way I called for their spark. They fared no better. Walls came tumbling down. Glistening ids and egos slithered in, shuddering in cool air, unhinging jaws and tasting gray matter.

And as we savaged their minds, eclipsed the real, gnawed on a hollowed rind of soul, the body took pity and forged a diamond flame within. Smoke bloomed out in painless Pyrrhic victory. All escape redirected here. A spectrum of blazing anti-time, incendiary space, blue inward electric waves. Exhausted spark became ash. Meager memorials left behind: a singed shoe, stripped bone.

*

I'm standing in the moon lander's airlock, watching distance between the surface and me diminish—first imperceptibly, now by leaps and bounds. But the moon falls up at me. I pull the same.

I want to touch it, feel its powdered dust on my face, in my pores, in the whorls of my fingerprints. See it cling to the glossy white hair on erupting wrists, its grittiness in my rough chin sprouts. To taste true barrenness and sputter, die, drown in the tranquility, my brains lying next to me and one hand full of alien earth. My eyes cracked glass and overawed at the wasteland I've come home to. My corpse will seem alive in a field so calm, a beacon in the gray.

I'm surprised. A dream, the first I can remember, has stitched itself together from a hundred microsleeps, so incandescent and ripe with future dreads that it took days to recognize. It had actually happened. Aidan was there, toddling along, not wise enough to fear me, in that cheerful oblivion adults spend their lives trying to regain. He sidled along, only half my height then—

I've put aside the notion of not knowing him, the two of us passing on the street as strangers. A moment's codes would yield that face no matter how well encrypted, a face that held the vestiges of an innocence I destroyed and pride neither of us could abandon. We might have talked again, I know, but it was the first note of contact that eluded us always, silence more easy than deliberate.

So: he toddled and I strode, each dragging a cheap plastic sled, beneath a bloodless slate thing that loomed above our town, hearing the friction in puffy snowclothes. As did countless children before us, we breathlessly awaited the moment when Floods Hill would reveal itself in blinding glory, shake loose the bordering trees and houses, become its monolithic self. It might be pristine, mythically unspoiled, or already ravaged by Flexible Flyers, jagged swaths of mud and grass shredding the white to lace. It could be overrun or deserted. Snow that had a crunchy skin but lay powdery underneath; snow that was uniformly wet, packable. The infinite designs and variations ran together and realigned as we walked, but no prediction was ever uttered.

One variant that never snaked through my head was the one we found. It was an invented outcome, transforming as the sky. There were no other sledders … it appeared none had ever existed. It couldn't be understood till we touched it, and even when our ungloved fingers grazed the rough hoarfrost and the smoother surface beneath, it did not abolish our anxiety.

The hill was sheathed in ice. Pure, unmarked ice that warbled in three dimensions, making bulges and miniature alpine ridges, fault lines and tectonic plates, a geology all its own. In it were trapped tiny pockets of air, freeze-framed bubbles gasping for the surface but locked in time. Beneath, yellow grass bent in static breeze.

“It's ours,” is how Aidan summarized it all.

We were eager to ride: our plastic discs slid across the mutated hill with no resistance. I climbed at reduced speed, leaving Aidan to manage the tricky slope himself. Stumbling and losing traction constantly, the summit took ten minutes to reach. After a customary survey of the sleepy valley, I sat and launched myself.

Aidan was a blur. The trees melted sideways. Going too fast, I reached out to control the descent, but my gloves skimmed hopelessly over the ice, capturing ripples in fast-forward. The hill terminated in a line of trees, but I slipped through, flung farther, across a street they never bothered to plow, down the start of a second slope that plunged into the polluted creek. I slammed to a stop in iced high grass. In that dazed moment of blessed immobility, I turned back to see the path I'd traveled, and thoughts came trippingly, taking in the dizzy height, the heart-stopping drop I sought.

Aidan was not yet halfway up the hill, not when I first turned round, not when I crossed the blasted street and started toward him. He faltered, lost altitude, gained some, lost his footing, paused. Starting again, he slipped, moved forward five feet, then dropped his sled. From a distance I watched him try to lunge for the disc while remaining upright, the contortions bringing his body down hard on the ice.

I ran, stumbling and bruising myself the whole way, seeing his shock twist itself into furrowed confusion and then a weary escalating cry. Aidan opening his mouth and producing no sound but surely crying. Then his breath caught and the siren flared up, hurt upon hurt, decibels carrying down the valley. Closer, I spotted the source, a candy-red crescent tented over his left eyebrow, brilliant and crisp.

His cry broke into labored gasps when I reached him and realized I knew no way to dampen the pain. I sat with him and held his shoulders and said I was sorry, sorry that I wasn't there, for bringing us, that the whole thing was stupid and come on, we can go. I touched the red with an ungloved hand and picked up its stinging warmth, then put my hand to the ice.

Perhaps the moon will feel that way: cold, vast, somehow mingled with the warmth of life. Cells slow till they stop. But there's death and there is slow enough. There's this glass. Even nightmares move.

Last breath. Door primed. Helmet, gloves, and boots left behind. Incidental memories, none especially worthy. They multiply, canceling one another. Jaw-clenching spasm of terror like a firecracker lit from inside. The organs xylophone up and down ribs, missing none. Craters and rocks stream by now, more fluid than fixed. The blue aura trembles with menace, acknowledgement of the cinching noose. Of returning weight. Uprush of ground recalls first lessons.

What comes up. Look both ways. Stove hot.

Vision slows, shadows seething. It's not to be believed. Atmosphere turns hazy, blue shot with curious mist. Hand outstretched and fingers splayed. Wait.

Emma drifts, immaculate. The ship will be her tomb.

Not mine.

The    door      dreams      of

falling             away

 

it

 

wakens

 

         and

                  does.

 

Only

 

                              betweenness and

                              the

                                 cold.

 

I come apart atom

                           by

                                 atom

starting at the toes.

A glimpse of my hand, full of ash.

Aidan and Phoebe, their paled voices.

I woke up to everything else. The cosmos groaned and realigned. New at the end of unspooling wire and melted dawn. Gravity forsakes its hold, the transformation speeding, wild. Close my fist, it breaks away.

Aidan. Me.

I carried both sleds under one arm, holding Aidan's small hand in my bloodied one. We moved in silence, he sniffling from time to time, me squeezing in reply. And in that last point of contact I felt the world slipping into ghastly futures, its grasp failing. Blue weakness slacked the beaten knuckles. The world a hiding place. Aidan, all that fastened me to it. I bounced his fist, cased in mine, wanting never to release. Certain I would. That I already had.

Mercy, please. I'm not ready to be free. I expected. Let the sun come out again: its warmth will colonize my skin. Let me stretch across the surface—release locks up my heart so tight. I reach and nothing will be held. Stolen moondust takes revenge, escapes, flares outward in decaying spirals, catches a swell that lifts me spinning too with coiled fear, over the creek, through the toss of dancing treetops and up to plumes of restless cloud, and I am turning through the years, I am lighter still.