Swansong (4 page)

“My life was changed for me.”  I don’t even mean to say the words.  They escape me while I’m preoccupied.

“Then your perception’s about to change, too,” Judas says.  “I guarantee it.”

4

Ode to the Levant

One of us has to be there for the house closing—Mom and Dad’s house, I mean.  If I’m not living there anymore—and I can’t—then I can’t call it my own.

“I’ll go without you,” Judas says.  He puts our breakfast bowls in the sink.  “You shouldn’t have to go back to that place so soon.”

I don’t want to.  I can’t.  Mom and Dad have been living in that house all these years; and if I walk into that house and it’s empty, devoid of everything that made it home…

Judas grips my shoulder.

“Jeez.”  I try to smile.  “Is this ever going to feel…not-weird?”

“Doubt it,” he says.

I laugh.  I have to.  I’ll go insane if I don’t.

Judas leaves early the next morning.  He leaves me with notes on the refrigerator and the square, chrome-topped kitchen table.  I retreat into my bedroom with one of his notes—
Don’t run the kitchen fan, it’s busted
—and open up my paints.  I mix them with old coffee and try—try—to ignore the tingling in my hands.

If I’m going back to school, I have to paint.  There’s no getting around it.  I prop up a bulk canvas against my closet door.  I don’t have an easel, but that’s okay; I sit on the floor, legs folded.  I’ll start with something easy, I think: a sunrise.  I plant my wood palette on my lap and mix red and white.  I slather my badger brush in pink paint and touch it to the canvas.

From the start, it’s a disaster.  My hand won’t stop shaking.  The paintbrush trembles on the canvas.  The pink paint blots.

I drop the brush on the palette.  I drop my head in my hands.

The headache starts.

It starts at the back of my head—the base of my skull and the tip of my spine.  It crawls into the space behind my ears, throbbing, dull.  It creeps across my scalp and into my forehead.  And that’s where it explodes.

Knives.  Fire.  The pain’s so bad it blinds me, excruciating, white-hot nothingness filling my eyes.  My fingers stiffen, icy and numb.  I brace myself, my hands on the floor.  I can’t see the floor.  I can’t see anything.  I can’t see anything but pain.

My chest spasms in dry retches.  The back of my throat tightens, choking me.  I draw one gasping, desperate breath—

—and the pain subsides.

Faint, frightened, I sit up on my knees.  The room is dim and blurry, my eyes stinging.  My head feels light on my shoulders.

What was that?

Brain damage.  I keep forgetting.  Why do I keep forgetting?

The pulsing aftershock echoes in my lobes.  I don’t think I can paint right now.  I seal the lids on my paint cans, pull the covering over the canvas.  I pick up my palette.

Something doesn’t feel right.  I don’t mean my head, I mean the space around me.  It looks changed, somehow, but I can’t describe how.  As far as I know, the door’s the same; the floor’s the same.  I run my fingers along the edge of the palette.

—Didn’t I lay my paintbrush on the palette?

I put the palette down and crouch on the floor.  I peek under the bed.  There’s nothing there but dust and springs.  I turn around ease open the rolling closet door.  There’s nothing there but wire hangers and clothes.

I sit on my knees a second time, puzzled, lost in thought.

A loud bang resounds through the apartment.  Somebody’s knocking on the front door.

I pull myself off the hardwood.  I feel like I’m floating toward the ceiling.  I drag myself out into the sitting room.  I unlock the door, pull it open—

“So it
is
you!”

I step back.

I don’t recognize the boy on the other side of the door.  He’s as skinny as a telephone pole—if a telephone pole had pierced ears, I mean.  His hair is messy, tawny; coupled with the giant eyeglasses, he makes me think of an owl.

He must notice my unfamiliarity.  “We go to school together,” he says.  “Kory Cohen?  I’m the sculptor guy?”

“That’s…”

“I hang out with the sociopaths?”

Oh.  “Oh!”  Cavalieri’s a big school; in any given class, you’re sitting with eighty or more students.  But the sociopaths—right, there’s this group of boys, very self-absorbed; they sit around pondering absurdism and nihilism and they all address the teachers by first name.

“I saw your name on the mailbox,” Kory says.  He steps right past me, inviting himself into my apartment.  That’s a sociopath, alright.  “Rozas isn’t exactly a common surname, is it?”  He pinches the bridge of his eyeglasses and gives me a Look, as if to suggest that I had better agree with him.  “I saw what happened to you.  It’s all over the news.
  Unsurprising, of course.  There are more than five million car wrecks in the US every year.”

My hand drops at my side.  I push the front door closed with a click.  Here comes the gravity again, trying to pull me down.

Kory’s face fluctuates with concern.  “That pretty singer girl; she’s really…”

“Yeah.”

“And your hair.  It’s so short.  You look like a cancer patient.”

I try a smile.  “That’s what I said.”

Kory looks around.  “Can I have some coffee?”

I head into the kitchen and turn on the coffeemaker.  Minutes later I join Kory in the sitting room while he admires the paint splashes on the wall.  I hand him his cup and he blows on the surface.  He peers at me carefully, like he’s a scientist and I’m a quark.

“What is it?” I ask, trying to be polite.  I sit on the floor.

“I think I feel sorry for you,” Kory says.  “It’s strange…  I’ve never felt sorry for anyone before.”

I know what comes next:  He starts quoting Camus.

He doesn’t quote Camus.  “People will ask questions, you know.  Curiosity, that’s the nature of the beast.”

“Yeah…”  I grip my knees.

“Are you ready for that?”

“I don’t…”  I don’t know.  I can’t even paint.  How can I go to school?  How can I face those questioning stares?

Kory nods, as if I’ve confirmed his suspicions.  “Then I’ll have to provide you with my services.”

“Uh…”  I draw a blank.

Kory sips his coffee.  “I
do
consider myself a Good Samaritan, you know.  Human beings are so frivolous, but if we don’t safeguard those frivolities, the propagation of our entire race is at stake.  This coffee is disgusting, by the way,” he tells me cheerfully.

There’s a sociopath in my sitting room, asking to be my bodyguard.

“That’s it exactly,” Kory replies.  But I haven’t said anything for him to reply to.  “I’ll deflect the attention off of you and onto me.  Personally, I like attention.  I don’t know why.  Another frivolity, I suppose.”

“Y-Yeah.” 
Sociopath.  Why?

“So, then,” Kory says.  He puts down his drained coffee cup.  “Anything I can do for you in the meantime?”

“Actually—”  Well, he’s here, isn’t he?  “I can’t find my paintbrush.”

“Come again?”

“My badger brush?  It’s…”  This is a little silly.  “It’s fan-shaped.  I was painting—”  No, I wasn’t.  “—and then the headache, and then I…misplaced it, I guess…”

“You don’t have another brush?”

“I do.”  A sable brush.  “But—”  This really is silly.  “Different brushes have different effects.”

“Hrm,” Kory says.  “Let’s look for it, then.”

He doesn’t sound enthused.  I can’t blame him.

We turn the apartment upside-down looking for my badger brush.  The only place we don’t search is Judas’ room, because I’d like to give my brother at least a little privacy.  It’s like the brush disappeared.  It’s not wedged between my mattress and box spring; it’s not stuffed inside my Neon City schoolbag; it’s not in the cupboards, it’s not in the freezer, and it’s definitely not in Judas’ booze cabinet, because the cabinet’s been locked for the past three days.  Kory raids the pantry.  It’s not there, either.

“Buy a new one,” Kory suggests, his mouth full with potato chips.

“But how can it have disappeared?”

Kory shrugs.  “There’s always a logical explanation for these phenomena.”

Judas walks in through the front door.  He looks tired and windswept, his eyes bruised with dark circles.  He squints in our direction, the pair of us kneeling on the sitting room floor with our hands under the sofa.

“I’m not gonna ask,” Judas announces.  He trudges into his bedroom.

I pull my hands out.  I wrap my arms around my knees.  Kory studies me carefully.

“It’ll turn up,” Kory says wistfully.  “One of these days.”

I feel like I could start crying again.  I don’t think it has anything to do with the brush.

* * * * *

Judas takes me for a checkup before the school term begins.  The hospital is in the south of The Spit, taller than it is wide,
top-heavy.  Navigating its interior is like maneuvering through a maze:  There are staircases where there shouldn’t be, desks standing in the middle of the floor.

The physician’s name is Dr. Moritz.  He seems more interested in his clipboard than my head.  He asks me vague questions and starts writing even before I’ve answered them.  In the end he prescribes me yet another medication, which makes for a total of seven.

“I don’t like this,” I mutter.

I follow Judas out of the exam room.  We leave the hub through big, gauzy glass doors, following the marble hallway to mahogany elevators.  The hallway slants diagonally, then juts out into a random Z-shape.

“Statins are good for you,” Judas says.  “Keep you from having another stroke.”

“Another?” I ask, stunned.

He presses the button beside the gigantic elevator.  “You had one when you were in your coma.”

I feel like Frankenstein’s Monster, held together by scars and stitches and a plethora of drugs.  I feel ugly, and ungainly, and like I shouldn’t be walking this world.

The elevator doors slide open.  A boy brushes past us.  I catch a sideways glimpse of brown curls.

I don’t know why, but I shiver.

* * * * *

Later that night I pack for school: my books, my brushes, my oil paints, my cell phone.  I never did find the badger brush.  I don’t bother with the canvases.  The teachers usually provide those.

“I don’t know,” Judas says, lingering in my room.

“You don’t know what?” I ask him.

“You could take a year off,” Judas says.  “Scholarship money’s yours.  They’ll freeze it until you get better.”

I don’t think I’m going to get better.  I don’t think brain damage is something you get better from.

“It’s okay.”  I muster up a smile for him.  “I’ve even got a bodyguard now.  I’ll be fine.”

He quirks his eyebrows, but says nothing.  He leaves me to my packing—and my thoughts.

I never realized how insignificant my life was until it changed.  Something devastating happens, and you expect the world to hold still with you; but it doesn’t.  The world is busy with plans of its own.  Where do we as human beings fall on those schematics?  Are we just the afterthought?  It seems needlessly cruel to me that the world keeps spinning on its axis, as though it doesn’t realize it’s a few precious people lighter.  But then, who were they precious to?  To me.  To Jocelyn’s parents.  Maybe that’s not enough.  Maybe this is the world’s way of telling us our feelings are inconsequential.

I can’t believe in a world so cruel.  I don’t want to.  So I won’t.

I pick up the pen and the post-it pad sitting on my bedtable. 
Call Jocelyn’s parents
, I write down.  The three of us were left behind.  That doesn’t mean we’re alone.

* * * * *

The alarm wakes me at six the next morning.  I shut it off with the smack of my hand.  I bolt out of bed, confused.

School
, reads the blue post-it note to my left.  It’s sticking to the edge of a glossy white calendar. 
September
, the calendar reads.

One by one, I take my pills, a bottle of water as my alleviant.  I mark the date on the wall with their names.  I shuffle out of bed, dress, and shunt outside, stuffing the post-it pad in my jacket’s woolen pocket.

It’s dark in the apartment, which makes me think Judas must be sleeping in, which makes me think he hasn’t found a job yet.  I can’t imagine picking up the pieces of your life after your life’s been cordoned off for ten whole years.  When I think about it, maybe Judas and I are alike, in that regard.  I can’t say that I’ve been suffering anywhere near as long as he has—or that he hasn’t done anything to deserve his sentence—but the both of us are broken, unrecognizable shells, maybe past repair.

Why did I have to lose my parents to gain my brother?  I think I would have liked all three of them at once.  Beggars can’t be choosers.  I’ve got to remember that.

I fry eggs at the stove.  I cover them and leave Judas a note with instructions for the warmer.  I can’t remember whether the microwave’s working; something in this kitchen is broken, that’s all I know for sure.  Rebelliously, I drink cold orange soda.  Mom’s not here to yell at me to drink milk.  It doesn’t have the same effect.