The Danger of Being Me (39 page)

She shakes her head again.  Starting to give up. 
I've always been here.

I know
, I say. 
So have I.  But before we were always here, we were someplace else.

She looks into my brushed-chrome eyes.  She thinks I'm mocking her. 
That doesn't make sense
.

Always is funny like that
, I tell her.  The idea strikes me as unbearably hilarious.  So I laugh.  Because I can't help it.

She watches me, and waits for me to finish.  Then she asks,
You're insane, aren't you?

I laugh again, because she's right, and that's unbearably hilarious too. 
A little.  Runs in the family, I think.

She cracks a tiny grin at that, then looks back down at her hands.  I say nothing, because there's nothing to say.  I can't convince her of anything.  No one can but her.  I watch her look out toward the mist again with longing in her fuchsia eyes. Then she turns to me again and sighs.  She deliberates for most of a year, then tells me,
The-world-from-before is a myth.

That's what They say
, I say with a shrug.

It's not real
, she says, looking at me. 
You can't go there
.

You have to figure out a way to go there
, I tell her just as deliberately. 
If you don't, Michael is going to die
.

Fury flashes in her eyes, turning them into blue fire.

He won't die!
she erupts like a divine ultimatum.

She doesn't give me time to answer.  The unseen force of her infinite will throws our boats apart.  And in a revelation like a flash of heat-lightning, I know that I am the mind out of time.

And I know what I have to do.  I stand from my seat and my boat starts to capsize.  As it goes over, I launch myself toward Regina's boat, across four feet of water and all the years stacked up between us.  She hurls a furious scream at me.  The shrill sound slices through my mind like a bitter breeze.  She barely has time to scramble aftward before I collide with the edge of her boat, flipping it over and throwing her into the arctic water.

She kicks, trying to stay afloat.  She struggles to throw off her thick cloak, but it soaks through in an instant and tangles itself around her.  I fight through the current to get to her and throw my arms around her shoulders.  For one brief moment, she thinks I'm there to help.  I feel a flash of pity for her, and then I grab onto her and pull us both below the surface.

We sink into the icy bowels of that sea of dreams.  Regina thrashes madly against my grip, and she's so much stronger than I ever imagined.  She nearly breaks free, and I roll us both.  I want to tell her that I'm sorry, that I wish it could have been different, but of course I can't.  So I don't even try as we drag each other down toward the bottom of this infinity.

My lungs burn in my chest.  And just when I think it must come to an end, it must be over, we must wake up in that world-from-before, I was wrong it's a myth and we're going to die, I feel Regina's fingers tighten against my arm and my neck.  Even in watery darkness, I see her open her mouth, and her scream rips through my head so viciously that I gasp.

I jolted awake on the bare mattress in Room 16 of the Gateway Motel.  The air tasted like ice and death.

8.

I propped myself up, blinked hard against the light.

Sweat soaked my clothes.  I shivered in the stale air, and remembered drowning in a sea of ice.  The memory faded, and the harder I tried to hold on to it, the faster it trickled away through the cracks in my mind.  I thought of Regina then, on the far side of a dream, waking in her upstairs bedroom and staggering down the stairs, bleary-eyed and half-awake, sweating and shaking like she'd just crawled out of an ice-bath, and finding me with my face mashed against the faux-wood tabletop.  Of her telling Janice to take him to the hospital for Christ's sake.

The idea was purest nonsense, and I had no doubt that it was the truth.  My truth.  Her truth.  Our truth.

The harsh glare inside my head faded, and the room came back into focus.  Room 16 at the Gateway Motel, I remembered.  I came here long and long ago to do some improbable work.  One last job.  I shook my head, shoved the heel of my left hand against my eyes until phosphenes burst, then blinked them away.  I couldn't remember what I had come here to do all that time ago.  But whatever that impossible task had been, I was sure that it was done.

I felt whole and real and human again.  I shifted on the mattress, saw the sheets of neon-orange paper scattered across the bed and over onto the carpet.  I remembered reading Ethan's story, though I couldn't be sure how much of what I remembered had actually been written into his manuscript.  I remembered searching the rocky grasslands along the banks of the Allt a' Mhuilinn for cloudstones, and I was sure that had not been part of the story.

I had fulfilled my promise.  Finished the manuscript.  Even if I had waited too long to do it.  And that was okay.  I'm not sure that it would have made any difference.  I sat up on the mattress and rolled my shoulders to work out the knot that had formed there.  A light glowed warmly through the half-open door to the bathroom.  I had left it on.  I remembered doing that.  Reinforcements.

I smiled, and turned to the thick blackout curtains at my right.  They remained drawn over the doors, and I remembered doing that too, but now I saw a faint white line falling across the carpet at the foot of that curtain.  I stared at it for nearly a minute.  Then I eased to the edge of the mattress, climbed off the bed, crossed the room.

I drew in a cool breath, then I drew the drapes aside.  The breadth of Prophecy Creek sprawled out a mile away.  Glistening mist clung to the town, casting a drowsy grey light.  The Speaker Tree broke through the billowy fog, and a beacon glowed within the restored commentator's tower at the Camlann Fields Baseball Park.  I stared out down the rolling hill behind the Motel, breathing on the glass.

And I smiled.  Because the morning had come.  I slid the glass door open, stepped out onto the balcony.  Bracing April air washed across my face.  I folded my arms across my chest to hold in some warmth.  The deck was nothing but a cement rectangle with a rusting metal railing.

A cracked plastic chair squatted to my left.  The chair where John Doe 83 had died fifteen years ago. I nodded to it, because all at once I knew, in the same irrefutable way that all accidental prophets know the future.  I had looked into the eyes of John Doe 83, and seen that they were the color of brushed chrome.  His eyes were the color of my own, but older, and I knew that he had known.

I laughed at that.  It was a light, transcendent sound in my own ears, and it made me smile as I looked back out over the dreaming little borough of Prophecy Creek.

The grey light of morning brightened to white.  The sun erupted from the far side of the world, turning the sky to blue fire.  I blinked against the rising of the day.  I stood on the cramped balcony where the body of John Doe 83 had been discovered all those years ago, and I considered what an abysmal human being I had turned out to be.

I had failed my family.  I had failed my friends.  I had failed everyone who had ever mattered to me, and many who didn't.  But as the sun scorched the sky and burned away the glistening mist over my town, I smiled.

Because I could make things right.  Of course I could.  I was my father's son, and I was not my father.  I was my his greatest mistake, and his last chance for absolution.

I was the author of my own life. And I didn't even have to wait until tomorrow. Because I could start today.

Absolutely.

I turned my back on the breaking day and stepped back through the doorway into Room 16.

A stink of sweat and madness hung inside the room.  I left the door open to let the cold morning filter in and drive out that stagnant air.  I rounded the foot of the bed, turned off the television.  Spun toward the wall above the head of the mattress.  Saw the bedsheet draped over the frame that hung there, fluttering in a bitter breeze.  Almost like some inexpressible thing was breathing on the other side.  An image shimmered in the distance of my memory.

A painting. Not just a print, but an actual painting. An ordinary urban sidewalk in downtown Philadelphia.  Billy Penn towering over the skyline.  I was sure of that.  And I was sure that I had seen something unspeakably wrong in that picture last night that I couldn't describe in the sane light of the morning.  I thought of abandoned subways, and inescapable catacombs.  Of marmoreal flights leading to incomprehensible caverns and hideous forests.

I shook my head.  I had lived through the night, even if I might never know what had happened.  That would have to be enough.  But looking at that fluttering sheet draped over the corners of an intricate wooden frame, I thought that maybe I understood a little bit about this room.

I spent an hour gathering up the neon-orange pages of Ethan's manuscript, getting them back in order.  Most of the sheets had sprawled across the carpet.  Some tumbled like dead leaves under the table and the bed.  Those lying scattered across the mattress had fared worst.  I smoothed them all out and straightened the stack as best as I could, counted through them three times to make sure that I had collected all 716 sheets, and opened my bookbag.

I felt the weight of that document in my hand, and the subtle texture of the life it contained.  I looked down at the cover page, at the words
Cecilia's Song
in large, plain font.  I smiled.  I knew that I would have to read the manuscript at least once more.  Just to figure out what had actually been part of the story and what I had imagined.

But that would be a job for another day.  I had done all I had come here to do, and I had come away from it with the parting gift of my own sanity.  For all the lives this room had taken, it had given one back on this bitter Spring morning, and that was a good start.  For both of us.

I crammed the stack of pages back into my bookbag.  I closed the main compartment, and the bag banged against the tabletop with the sound of metal on wood through cloth, and I remembered.  The Smith & Wesson.

I turned the bag to unzipper the smaller compartment, almost reached my bare hand inside, and thought better of it.  I opened the main compartment again, dug under the nest of paper, and pulled out my batting glove.  I slipped it on, reached into the side pocket, closed my fingers around the revolver, and removed it.  It was a machine designed by humans to make themselves into dark gods, and it wanted blood.  But it would not have mine.

I held the gun in the palm of my gloved hand.  It seemed to weigh nothing at all.  Like an illusion out of a feverish nightmare.  I looked at this thing that took life, that destroyed, that was fury and hatred and violence.  I looked at this thing that was death.  I felt its dark pulse.

I considered turning in the revolver to the authorities.  I could drop the little five-shot into a manila envelope, with a note explaining the weapon's origin, and mail it to the Prophecy Creek Police Department.  I knew that I should do just that.  But I also knew that I couldn't.

The gun would certainly get to the police in time.  But not yet.  Because my work in this room was done, but the snubnosed Smith & Wesson had one last job to do.  And my part in its story had come to an end.  I had taken it away from the heartless bastard that Amber had called Hank and brought it across the water to this rundown little motel hunched alongside a barren stretch of Route 119 inside the eastern border of Prophecy Creek.

I had served my purpose.

The revolver lay buoyant in my hand, absently pleasing to the touch.  Cool jasper pressed against my breastbone.  There was only one more thing to do, and so I did it.  I slid the drawer out from the underside of the table, and laid the gun down next to the Gideon's Bible inside.

I looked at the two, side by side.  It was an appropriate choice.  Neither option was correct.  Not for me.  I nodded, and closed the drawer.  I reached across the table, opened the drapes to let in the fresh light of the morning.

Then I pulled my bag over my shoulders, and left.

CODA

Half-an-hour later, I twisted the steering wheel to the right.

The Jeep Wagoneer rolled around the corner, down the curving two-lane driveway, into the student parking lot of Prophecy Creek High School.  The blacktop was filling up at just after seven in the morning, and I rolled past toward the faculty parking section at the front of the building.

I pulled into a space at the front of the cement forecourt and stared through the windshield.  The flag flew at full staff.  It had all week.  I watched it snap curtly in the bitter breeze that sliced across the open grounds, then shut down the engine, grabbed my bookbag out of the passenger side footwell, and climbed out of the car.  I crossed the wide concourse, passed through the double doors into the foyer, and entered the main lobby outside the cafeteria.

I saw no one.  No one saw me.

I made my way along the corridor, through a bay of lockers, around a corner to the
Creek Reader
newsroom.  I pushed through the heavy door and find the room empty.  I grinned.  The assignment board on the wall opposite the door had been entirely filled in.  All of the space on all of the pages accounted for.  I saw the block in the middle of the bottom of the board reserved for the movie review page, and saw that Ethan's name was still scrawled next to the title of Section Editor.  He had done the layout work for the April issue, and we had all agreed by silent consent to acknowledge his efforts one more time.

After the April issue, things would change.  The staff would discuss whether to discontinue the movie review page or assign it a new editor.  Dr. Lombardi would ask for volunteers to take over for Ethan.  And looking up at that assignment board, I knew that I wanted the job.  I had lost the Senior Editor's position to Gale last June, but I would not lose this position next week.  I wanted the page.