by Patrick Ness
The word “meth” has turned a queer screw in her belly, a cold one, a fearful one, and words again come up from inside, floating like a choke of feathers, I don’t, I don’t, I don’t–
“I don’t,” she says.
“I look at her,” the man says, “and I don’t know if this is the truth she speaks, if these words are even the answer to my question, and the sun that hits my face is not, it is not, the same sun that hits her face, a sun cast through water, a sun dappled, moving, breathing.”
He stands, then seems surprised to find himself standing. His voice reaches out once more. “You have nothing to fear from me.” He stretches back into the shadow and picks up a black can, already opened. “I can help you with your thirst, though to be honest, you probably shouldn’t drink too much. Not in this heat. Not with the sun shining on you like that.”
He steps towards her. “Here, my lady, I don’t expect you to come to me. You can’t expect her to do that. You’ll have to go to her. You will. You must. But will she harm you?”
“I will not,” she says, discovering it is true as she says it.
The man crosses the grey concrete, his gait stiff, painful, but steady. He stops slightly more than arm’s length from her. He holds out the can, straining to reach her, as if he can come no closer.
She steps to him instead, taking the offering hand in both of hers, steadying it. He gasps, astonished at the physical contact. She can smell him now, a smudge of unwashed skin, poverty, extreme loneliness. She takes the can, still holding his hand, unrolling it, running a finger across its weathered palm.
“This hand,” she says. “This hand killed me.”
“Not this hand.”
“A hand like it.”
“All hands are alike. As alike as they are different.”
She releases his palm, finds herself still holding the can, a remarkable odour of yeast pressing from it, almost alive.
She drinks. The taste is a railroad train, the boom of a timpani, a lighthouse through fog. She laughs aloud, the foam running down her chin.
“God, I hated this stuff,” she says, in a voice that is entirely hers and entirely someone else’s. It shocks her into silence.
I have never drunk this before, she thinks.
I have drunk this before and hated it, she thinks.
“Both are true,” she says.
“They always are,” the man says.
“Tell me. How many of me do you see?”
“I’ll see as many of you as you wish.”
She wonders if he speaks true, if he will be able to answer the questions that hover here, just above and behind her, a flock of watchful birds, waiting for her to stumble. How is she here? Where is she going? What is this thorn in her heart and what does it bind there?
But no. He is troubled by his state, she can see that now. He is a damaged human, as so many of them are (them? she thinks), and he struggles through the best he can manage. She can’t even feel disappointment, only pity.
“Thank you,” she says, handing him back the can with a deep seriousness.
“She gives it back to you,” the man says. “She turns the sun to you and she thanks you.”
“I do.”
“She thanks you.”
The man watches as she crosses the square of concrete, wading out towards an unbusy road, an intent seriousness seeming to drive her, one that ignores the broken ground punishing her feet.
“She leaves,” he says, drinking from the can.
He keeps the same unsurprised expression when the faun steps onto the square of concrete, hooves clopping like a prim donkey’s. He is seven feet tall, furred to his haunches, horned of head, bare of chest, naked as a wild creature, his priapic goat smell clearing the man’s nostrils as effectively as any menthol. He reaches for the man.
“It’s touching your eyes,” the man says. “It’s a dream, this. It can only be. It offers you forgetfulness and the forgetfulness is sweet.”
The faun leaves the man standing there, in a euphoria that will be the only thing he’ll remember of this encounter. The faun hurries after her, glancing up at the now mid-morning sun. The day is long, but it is not endless.
He has until dusk. He has only until dusk.
Adam crossed the seven-mile mark as he finished the little segment of lakeside path. One mile from home, unless he wanted to turn left and add another four. But all that was out that way was a closed 7-Eleven and probably half the meth labs in the county. He might have, regardless, and had done so on his very best running days (and his very worst), but today he had no time.
He turned right instead, running through the parking lot at the end of the trail, noticed his brother’s truck there, his brother behind the wheel.
“Adam!” Marty shouted, loud enough to be heard over Adam’s playlist.
“Not stopping!” he yelled back. He turned onto a back country road – shoulderless, of course, it was an ongoing miracle that he’d never been knocked into a ditch – and kept at full pace. Halfway down this road, he’d pass the western fence of Angela’s farm. You couldn’t see her house from there, but her horse and its companion goat might be grazing.
“Hey, bro,” his bro said, pulling alongside in the truck, keeping pace, waiting for Adam to turn down his music. “I honked for you when you started on the lakeside. Guess you must not have heard me.”
“Sure.”
“Get in. I want to talk to you.”
“No. And I thought you were helping Dad.”
“Yeah, well.” Marty’s voice had a surprising hitch in it, enough to make Adam look over, but not enough to make him stop.
His golden brother. Hair so blond it was almost white, facial hair that faded to lighter blond rather than the usual ginger, a strapping set of shoulders, a smile that would normally have made him the world’s most successful youth pastor, if – and this was his father’s point about effectiveness – Marty hadn’t been the most boring Sunday School teacher Adam had ever had. If the rumours were true, Marty had also matured into the most boring preacher in his entire seminary.
When you were that handsome, everyone assumed you could work an audience, so often that no one ever actually bothered showing you how. Physical beauty, of all the curses, was obviously the best you could get. It was still a curse, though.
“He wasn’t happy with the suggestions I made for his sermon tomorrow,” Marty said, puttering alongside Adam. “The words ‘grade-school hokum’ were used.”
“Dad’s from Oregon. Why does he talk like an Appalachian hick?”
“They call it ‘folksiness’ in seminary.”
“I’m on the home stretch, Marty. I really need to concentrate–”
“Get in. I’ll drive you.”
“And again, no.” He kept moving. Marty kept pace, watching out for traffic behind them. The road was deserted, which was why Adam used it.
Marty was starting his senior year in a couple of weeks, too, at a church college in rural Idaho, one that was training him to preach and to minister, with an eye to being taken on at The House Upon The Rock and maybe, one day, being the second-generation Thorn as head pastor. This was something Marty wanted very badly, despite what was slowly being confirmed as his complete unsuitability to do so.
“Listen, bro–”
Adam finally stopped. “I’m in the middle of something, Marty! I mean, seriously, have you gone blind or has seminary just made you so sure you’re the important one that no one else’s lives matter?”
“Whoa, where’s all this coming from?”
“What do you want?” Adam was aware of Angela’s horse and its companion goat behind him over the fence, coming closer, chewing their grass, interested in the gossip.
Marty didn’t answer him at first, just sat there, his truck idling. “It’d be easier if you got in–”
“Marty–”
“I’m going to be a father.”
Adam blinked. So did the horse and the companion goat. The sentence was so in
congruous that at first Adam misunderstood. “You’re becoming Catholic?”
Marty looked startled, then rolled his eyes. “Not that kind of father.”
Adam stepped closer to the open passenger side window of the truck. “You mean…?”
“Yeah.”
“Are you shitting me?”
Marty closed his eyes. “I’d really appreciate it if you wouldn’t swear–”
“You got Katya pregnant?”
Katya was Marty’s long-time girlfriend. Beautiful, Belarusian, teensy bit racist about the Jews, if we’re being honest. She – through some impossibly convoluted chain of patronage and government sponsorship – had somehow ended up studying engineering at the same rural Christian college as Marty. As likely the two prettiest people on campus, possibly in all of Idaho, their coupling had an inevitability to it. When Katya visited, she brought her own scales to weigh her portions of food. Adam’s parents were terrified of her.
Adam saw his brother swallow. “Not Katya,” Marty said.
“Not…” Adam put his hands on the window ledge. “Oh, Marty. What have you done?”
Marty took out his phone, swiped a few times and brought up a picture. A very pretty (of course) black girl looked off-screen, laughing, holding a blue plastic disposable cup, the kind you got at parties (not get-togethers). She was Marty’s age and wearing a sweatshirt of the church college. Marty had never mentioned her before in his life.
“Her name’s Felice,” he said, smiling to himself. “It means happy.”
“Well,” Adam deadpanned, “that makes everything okay then. What’s her sign?”
Marty’s blond eyebrows started a conversation with themselves. “Leo? I think? Why on earth–”
“Marty! How the hell could you get her pregnant? Are you a complete idiot about contraception? Is she?”
“The school frowns on it,” Marty said, frowning on it.
“More than pregnancy?”
“We never meant to go that far–”
“Wait a minute.” Adam was quickly losing his running heart rate. His muscle tissue would already be swelling for post-run healing. He was basically going to cool off into a golem if he didn’t start running again very soon. “Why are you telling me? Why did you track me down on a run to–” His eyes narrowed. “You haven’t told Mom and Dad.”
Marty at least had the grace to look sheepish. “I had to tell somebody.”
Adam exhaled. “She’s going to have it, of course.”
“Of course! Abortion is out of the–”
“For her or for you?”
“For both of us!”
“Sometimes it’s the wisest course of action, bro.”
Marty shook his head, disappointed. “Dad’s right about you. You got lost on your journey somewhere.”
“That’s what everyone says who never bothered to go on a journey in the first place. And–” he halted his brother’s apology, which he could already see coming– “we can take comfort in the fact that Dad was completely wrong about you.”
They were quiet for a minute, the road still deserted, only the idling of the truck engine cutting across the dew-filled morning. The horse and the goat still stood and chewed, blamelessly curious. Adam ran his hand through his sweat-slicked hair.
“Are you going to marry her?”
Marty nodded. “She only found out yesterday and called me.” He grinned. “I proposed immediately.”
“Over the phone?”
“She’s talking to her folks in Denver right now. I’m telling Mom and Dad this weekend. If we both survive, we’re going to get married as soon as senior year starts. The university has special housing for married undergrads.”
“Where? 1952?”
Marty laughed, gently. He always laughed gently.
“What do you want from me?” Adam asked. “Congratulations? You got ’em. Based on the thirty seconds I’ve known about her existence and the one photo you’ve shown me, I’m thrilled for the both of you.”
“I love her. I mean, I really love her. And she says she loves me the same.”
“What happened to Katya?”
“Katya was kinda mean.”
“No kidding.”
Marty looked sheepish again. “I was going to tell Mom and Dad tonight while you’re at your get-together. I don’t suppose…”
“Don’t suppose what?”
“Don’t suppose you’ve got anything big you want to tell them first?”
“What?”
“I figure if it’s both of us, then the heat gets split in two. Less for each.”
“Anything big to tell them like what?” Adam held his brother’s stare, daring Marty to say it out loud. Marty didn’t, so Adam went on. “No matter how mad they’re going to be at you for this – and they will be – at the end of it, they get a grandchild. You weather the storm, there’s a happy ending for you.” He couldn’t stop himself from adding, “Like there always is.”
“Not always,” Marty said.
“More often than me.”
Marty shook his head again. “You’re still just a kid. You wouldn’t even know what it is to fall in love yet. You will, though, one day. I hope.”
“You’re twenty-two, Marty. What do you think you know about love?”
“Bro–”
“If Felice isn’t the first girl you’ve slept with, then she’s the second, right?”
“I don’t see what that has to do–”
“Well, one, my sex life is already more vibrant than yours–”
“I don’t want to hear about that–”
“And two, I know what it is to be in love, Marty.”
“No, you don’t. Teenage love isn’t love. Especially if it’s…” He stopped.
“Especially if it’s what?” Adam leaned into the truck, raised his voice. “Especially if it’s what?”
Marty looked genuinely distressed. “You think they don’t know? You think they don’t talk to me about you all the time?”
“They never talk to me about me, so I just imagined they did their best not to think about it at all.”
“Look, I’m not…” Marty threw his hands in the air, failed to grab the word he wanted, rested them again on the steering wheel. “I love you, bro, but you have to know that this life you’ve chosen–”
“Tread carefully, Marty. I mean it. The world has completely changed around you while you weren’t looking.”
Marty looked Adam square in the eye. “It’s not real love. Everybody’s convinced themselves that it is, but it isn’t. And it never will be.”
Adam was so angry he felt winded, his airways struggling to get enough oxygen against the upswell of rage and hurt rising from his stomach. He wanted a line, a well-worded sentence he could hurl at Marty and wipe that maddening pity off his face, one that would incidentally destroy the truck somehow while annihilating his brother’s empty-headed arrogance, one that would win this stupid, soul-sucking argument once and for all.
But all he got out was “Asshole.”
He took off running again, turning his music back up. The horse and the companion goat watched him go.
He was stiff, had cooled off painfully, and it felt like he was running in leg splints, but he didn’t care. He ran anyway, leaving the truck behind.
I love you but…
It was always, always, “I love you but…”
He ran faster. And faster. And faster again.
This anger, he thought. This tedious, endless anger. Was that all there was ever going to be? Would it just twist him and twist him, obliterating everything else so he lost the ability to know when he should be angry because that was all there ever was?
He pushed, his strides growing longer, his hands opening and swinging higher into the sprint.
I don’t want this, he thought. I don’t want to be this person. I don’t want to always fight.
I want to love.
I want to love.
I want to love Enzo.
His legs were at their physical limit. They felt disconnected from him, almost their own creatures, filled with a wobbly sting, like an injury in cold weather. If he stopped to think, he would lose his balance. Running was the only thing that kept him upright.
I want to love Linus, he thought.
I want to want to love Linus.
He approached his house from the opposite direction he’d driven away earlier this morning, down a small gully, his speed peaking, the fire hydrant as his finish line, the fire hydrant, the fire hydrant–
He passed it and let up, slowing to walk in a circle. His heart was pumping so hard he could see it pulse in his wrists, his chest gulping air like a goldfish flipped from its bowl.
The music still blasted in his earbuds. He saw his mom looking at him from under the brim of her very corny gardening hat. She had a degree in linguistics, was only forty-three years old, but for some reason insisted on dressing like a grandmother from a commercial for fancy cookies. Folksiness, he supposed. Though she’d have the grandmother thing sooner than she thought.
He continued his circle, huffing air, letting the pounding in his temples and ears recede. He’d twice pushed himself hard enough to vomit, and though it was awful, there felt something heroic in it, too, something powerful about going beyond what you could safely do, into oblivion, to the point where you could erase yourself, be erased.
For that reason, he didn’t know now if his hands were shaking because of the run or because he was still raging.
He stopped, bending at the waist, trying to breathe through his nose. Without looking up, he turned off his music because his mom was clearly talking to him now. “What’s that?”
“I said–” she ruthlessly cropped an uncooperative chrysanthemum– “I don’t know why you always need to make such a big production out of it. It’s just a run.”
“What?”
She made a series of honking sounds so ugly, it took him a second to realize she was making fun of his breathing. “It’s just a jog around town,” she said. “It’s not like you finished a marathon.”
Adam swallowed once. “Marty got a girl pregnant.”
She didn’t even consider believing him. “Oh, drama, drama, drama. One day, you’ll grow up, baby boy, and we’ll all–”
