The Danger of Being Me (38 page)

That delighted Eric, and he laughed, and he knew that he was dead.  There was a measure of relief in that, he thought.  He shook his head again, but his smile never left his face.  He glanced back down at his feet, and found his shadow still stitched obediently to his feet.  Then he looked back up at Matthew, and opened his mouth to speak.

But he had nothing to say, so he said nothing.  He just glanced past the kid.  A girl approached Matthew's back, and Eric knew an unknowable truth.  She was the thing the kid had been missing.  Eric closed his mouth, nodded over Matthew's shoulder, telling him to take a look for himself.  But before the kid could turn, the girl said his name.

Matthew hesitated.  So Eric turned him away, pushing him around with the unseen force of his own infinite will.  And when Matthew finally looked away, Eric woke.

But he woke on the asphalt, broken and dying in the cold on an abandoned stretch of American highway.  There was no pain.  There had been none for a long time now.  He looked for Orion but he could not find it.  The Hunter had abandoned him.  Probably to continue his pursuit of Pleione.  And that was okay.  Eric just smiled.  He went on smiling until the new day broke.  Because he had died.

Then he woke from his night terror in a bedroom of his house in Scotland.  He had been screaming.  His mother hurried into the room to comfort him.  Cecilia.  She sang the Highland Fairy Lullaby, and he fell back to sleep sure that she had to be an angel.  Of course she was.

The text ended halfway down that final page.  A curt
END
in bold letters left no room for argument.  I flipped the sheet, stacked it on top of the disheveled manuscript.  Then I stared at the bare mattress, and waited for the rest of the story.  Because it couldn't be done.  There had to be more.  No life could be that profound, and that short.

A horn blared across the room.  I looked up, blinked hard, shocked back into my own head.  The Flyers game was over for the second time.  Sean Burke had shut out the Kings; Alexandre Daigle, Joel Otto and Shjon Podein had scored for Philadelphia.  I swiped tears off my face.

They had gone unnoticed since I had watched Eric say goodbye to Fiona, and seen her burst into tears and run off.  I had not seen her again, not even when Eric went back to Musselburgh during the summer before his senior year of high school.  He had meant to find her, to make things right with her, but he had failed.  An absurd conspiracy of coincidence beyond his control had intervened.

I resigned myself to the finality of that overturned manuscript.  There were no more pages to read.  There were no words.  The story was over.  I had read Ethan's story, just as I had promised him I would, even if it was too late to make any difference.  I had achieved something, even if I didn't understand it, but I felt only the agonizing weight of fatigue piled up inside my skull.

I reached for the untidy stack of pages in front of me, meaning to straighten them and return them to my bag.  That was when I saw the back of that last sheet of neon-orange paper lying facedown on the top of the finished manuscript.  It looked blank, of course, except for a single sentence hand-written across the bottom in pencil.  Seven words, scribbled in Ethan's nearly-illegible scrawl, read: "It's okay if you waited too long."  He had scratched out two dots and a quick curve into a knowing grin.

I read the message, and reread it, and read it again.  I blinked twice, expecting the words to vanish, willing them to disappear.  But they didn't.  Of course they didn't.  So I laughed.  Because there was nothing else to do.  This was the spectacular practical joke that Ethan had planned to spring this year.  I was sure of that.  The prank had sprung a few days late, but that wasn't his fault, and of course that really only made it that much more perfect.

I recognized the knowing grin on that final page. It was a trickster's grin of infinite amusement. It was Ethan's grin. 
Gotcha
, it said, or maybe
you missed it
.  Maybe it didn't say anything at all.  Maybe it just grinned from the other side of that Mythic Brink, letting me figure it out for myself.

The weight of Ethan's manuscript rested heavily in my hands.  It contained the weight of an entire life typewritten onto 716 sheets of neon-orange paper.  The life of Ethan Gibson.  He had disguised it as an autobiographical novel, of course, but I was certain that every word of it was the truth.  His truth.  The only truth that mattered.

Because if such an absurd thing as a soul existed, then Ethan had inscribed one for himself.  My fingers tightened against those pages as if the book were all that anchored his memory to the world, and I thought of the clef of the universes.  The clef of eternity.  Of an endless thread that weaves through time and interlocks all.  All spheres.

A grumbling broke through the dark clouds of exhaustion choking my brain.

I thought back over the events of those months since the grand opening of the Tetraplex.  Some inward part of my brain insisted that the poetry reading at the bookstore had occurred a day and a half ago.  I laughed.  The notion was purest nonsense.  I remembered everything that had happened, and realized that I had eaten only once in all that time.  The Late Nighter at the Snake Eyes Diner in Atlantic City.  Garden State cuisine at its finest.

I laughed into the silence again.  The sound was soft, and perfectly sane.  A light, transcendent sound.

Ethan's manuscript rested in my lap.  I looked at the neon-orange cover page, at the words
Cecilia's Song
in large, plain font.  I had read the entire story in a single sitting.  I had earned a small reward.  I could run across town to the Creekside Diner and order everything on the menu, and I could eat it all.  I could order coffee and tell them to leave the pot.  Or maybe I could head up to the One-Nineteen, another little diner out here near the edge of town less than a mile up from the Gateway, on the other side of Route 119 in Sylvan Springs.  I could do that.

I looked up from the book.  The room swiveled in front of me on a lopsided axis, then settled again.  I stared at the television for a long moment, not paying any attention to the commentators discussing the hockey game.  When I was satisfied that the television wasn't about to slide off the bureau and tumble across the mattress, I turned to the desk under the window to find my bag.  The room did another tilting pirouette, and my stomach clenched.

Carbonation popped across the surface of my brain.  The lines of the world had blurred in the last few hours, and I decided that I was in no condition to drive.  It felt like the first good decision that I had made in all those months since that night at the Tetraplex.  If I tried to cross Prophecy Creek right now, I'm crash into a telephone pole or flip the Jeep into a roadside ditch.  Maybe I'd barrel through the guardrail of the Sawmill Bridge and drown in Prophet's Creek.  That would be just my luck.

That would be damn-near poetic in itself.  I laughed, and felt myself listing over toward the mattress.  I could catch a quick nap to clear my head.  I could do that.  I had read Ethan's story in a single sitting, and I had earned a small reward.  An hour of sleep, maybe two, to reboot my mind.  Then I could decide where to get breakfast, and I could get there without killing myself.  Then I could figure out what would come next.  I could do definitely that.

My head missed the pillow, hit the mattress.  No comforter, no sheets.  I had torn that all away.  The stack of neon-orange pages spilled off my lap, scattering across the bed, fluttering to the carpet.  I felt a flash of pity for the manuscript, but it came from so far away that I hardly recognized it.  My bookbag sat on top of the desk, and I remembered the little snubnosed revolver tucked away in the side pocket.  But the bag and the desk and the room were pulling away down a long, dark tunnel.

I realized too late that my desperate attempt to seal off the room had failed.  I hadn't blocked the windows well enough, or I hadn't locked the door securely enough.  The darkness was creeping in, wrapping itself around me like the delicate breath of my own mortality.  So I smiled.  Then I lost my footing and slipped down that marmoreal flight toward the sweet silence of sleeponcemore.

And this time there was nothing to pull me back up.

7.

I cannot remember how long I have been sitting here.

I knew it once.  Long and long ago.  In another life.  In the world before memory.  I have forgotten.  I have been sitting here since time out of mind.  Since the beginning of always.

I feel a gentle rocking beneath me, and remember that I am sitting on the narrow wooden bench of a rickety rowboat.  I listen to the serene murmur of water lapping against its hull, and smell the brackish cologne of the sea, and I remember.  I am a drifter on a neverending sea of dreams.  I recall myths of a body lying on a bare mattress in a motel room in another world, and apocalyptic prophecies foretelling an unknowable day when that body will wake and my own world will end.  It is purest nonsense.

Glistening mist clings to the water, filling the air with shimmery everywherelight, shrouding anything beyond a dozen yards in every direction in a billowy fogbank.  I draw a deep breath that tastes like honey and death, and I remember.  This sea extends beyond the mist, and beyond the horizon.  Beyond the distant borders of the world.  I drift in this rickety rowboat across the surface of a molecule of water within a bead of sweat on the flesh of that otherworldly body in that motel room.

I am not my body.  I am a drifter in a place of no-time.  A place without seconds or years or centuries.  I sit on this narrow wooden seat in this rickety rowboat, and feel the cool rinse of a spring shower against my face.  I smile up at the brushed-chrome sky overhead.  A sky that is maddeningly familiar.  Brittle drops of rain shatter against my jacket, flicking rhythmically at my skin, carried out of the mist by the sighing of an angel.

Perhaps I have died.  That would be just my luck.  I laugh at the thought.  Because I know the truth.  My truth.  That I have crashed through the bottom of the deepest catacomb of my own subtle self and tumbled into the dazzling infinity underneath.  This bit of me sitting on this narrow wooden seat in this rickety rowboat, drifting listlessly across a neverending sea of dreams, is a mere miniscule sliver of my indivisible self.  Perhaps in time I will set out on a grand quest to bring together all of those infinite splinters and reintegrate that impossible thing that is me.

But not now.  I have other matters to consider.

Millennia pass.  They might be milliseconds.  I cannot tell the difference, if there is one.  I suspect that there is not.  I think and drift and become ancient.  I fade from existence and appear again.  I dissolve into the twilit mist and become one with all things, and I see and I know.  And I remember.

There is a world beyond this, wrapped in prophecy and myth.  A forgotten world where a body lies on a bare mattress in a motel room.  I consider that as I look out across the water toward the thickening mist at the borders of the world, and a grey silhouette appears in the gloaming light.  I smile.  I have known that this would happen in the same irrefutable way that all accidental prophets know the future.  This is why I have come here.

I think and drift, and that shadow does the same.  We become ancient.  It fades from existence and appears again, and in time the prow of a rowboat materializes out of the mist and becomes real.  It emerges from that billowy fogbank, and I wait.

Centuries pass.  They might be seconds.  That rowboat drifts toward mine, and I see a figure huddled on the narrow wooden seat.  Hunched under a thick cloak the color of charcoal, the hood pushed back around her shoulders.  I am sure that this drifter is a woman.  Her dark hair has been matted down against her head and neck by the gentle rains of uncountable eternities.

Then the prow of her rowboat clunks against the starboard side of mine.  The woman in the charcoal cloak looks at me, and I remember.  She says nothing.  She is impossibly ancient, and no older than sixteen.  I watch her as she watches me. She knows me, though she does not know me.  Shimmery everywherelight casts a dazzling heliograph off her fuchsia eyes.

Regina's eyes.  I remember.  I wait for her to remember mine, but the years pass by and though she knows me, she does not know me.  I can understand that.  Decades after her boat ran up against mine, the girl with Regina's eyes turns away, looking out toward the glistening mist that smells like honey and death.  Toward the infinite horizon, beyond the borders of the world.

Regina
, I say.  She turns back to me, and the shadow of confusion crosses her face.  She recognizes that name, even if she does not remember that it belongs to her.  She glances down at her hands, folded in her lap, looking inward on herself.  I see then that her rowboat is upholstered in luxurious fuchsia velvet.

And my gut tightens.  A horrible familiarity crackles in my veins at that sight.  And instantly, inexplicably, I know that I am not dreaming.  Not anymore.  I am delivering a message.

Regina
, I say softly, and she looks up.  Her expression is troubled.  She seems to realize that there is something for her to remember, and she cannot understand why she cannot remember it.  She watches my eyes, and I can see the desperate expectation in her face.  Her hope that I can help her to remember.  I look into her fuchsia eyes, and tell her,
You have to go back.

She stares at me with bleary incomprehension.  She blinks.  Her brow tightens down as she struggles with the alien letters of my words.  She finally shakes her head at me. 
Back?

I grope for words.  Struggling with the concept myself. 
You have to remember.

Remember what?
she asks.  The pleading lilt of her voice breaks my heart.

The other place
, I tell her, and it sounds as absurd to me as it must sound to her.  But I try again anyway, because I know that I must. 
The world from before.