Ten Miles One Way

by Patrick Downes

  Also by Patrick Downes

  Fell of Dark

  This work was completed with the help of a 2015 Creation Grant from the Vermont Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Arts.

  PHILOMEL BOOKS

  an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  Copyright © 2017 by Patrick Downes.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Downes, Patrick, 1968– author. | Title: Ten miles one way / Patrick Downes. | Description: New York, NY : Philomel Books, [2017] | Summary: In the wake of a near-fatal car accident, Isaac Kew, twenty, recalls a very long walk he took three years earlier with his bipolar girlfriend, Nest. | Identifiers: LCCN 2015041653 | ISBN 9780399544996 | Subjects: | CYAC: Manic-depressive illness—Fiction. | Mental illness—Fiction. | Love—Fiction. | Automobile accidents—Fiction. | Classification: LCC PZ7.1.D687 Ten 2017 | DDC [Fic]—dc23 | LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2015041653

  Ebook ISBN: 9780399545016

  Edited by Jill Santopolo.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Cover art © 2017 by Jim Tierney

  Author photo © 2017 by Michèle

  Creative direction by Danielle Calotta

  Version_1

  Contents

  Also by Patrick Downes

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  The Why

  Mile One

  Mile Two

  Mile Three

  Mile Four

  Mile Five

  Mile Six

  Mile Seven

  Mile Eight

  Mile Nine

  Mile Ten

  Dedication

  In the Age of Gold,

  Free from winter’s cold,

  Youth and maiden bright

  To the holy light,

  Naked in the sunny beams delight.

  —William Blake

  Her pleasure in the walk must arise from the exercise and the day.

  —Jane Austen

  THE WHY

  It’s been five days since Nest drove a car into a tree at sixty miles an hour. She’s sleeping. Unconscious, at any rate. If and when she wakes, she will face questions. What else?

  I was there in the car, next to her, a helpless passenger. What do I remember about the collision? Not much. My own memory of it can’t be trusted. I remember—.

  I remember the Chimaera behind the wheel.

  The Chimaera roaring in the middle of a great fire. The lion roaring fire. The goat bleating. The poised snake. No one can get near, it’s all so hot.

  I’ve been questioned by doctors and the police. I don’t mention the Chimaera. Otherwise, I’m honest.

  “Nest asked me if I wanted to go for a drive, and I said yes.”

  “I remember my life up until I shut the passenger door.”

  “I don’t know why Nest drove the car into a tree. I don’t think she intended to.”

  “Yes, I know she’s totaled two cars in two years. But—. You don’t know about her headaches. The first time, a headache shut her eyes. The same thing happened to her father.”

  “I’ve known Nest almost half my life. Her boyfriend, yes, off and on. Off, lately.”

  “Suicide? I don’t think that’s in her. She gets—. Her mind. She’s bipolar, sometimes psychotic. Yes. No. She seemed happy and calm enough when we started, then BOOM.”

  “I’d say black ice. Maybe, snow. It’s December, right?”

  “No drugs, no alcohol. You must know that already.”

  “Boom. Just boom.”

  “I’m alive.”

  “My name is Isaac Kew.”

  Nest calls me Q. I am, right now, an empty Q. Q without Nest.

  I fell in love with Nest in eighth grade, when we were thirteen, at exactly the same moment when I hated her. She cast me as a fire hydrant in a class play she’d written. She has, since we met, teased me for being stupid, but that’s only because she told me first thing she had a silent P in front of her name, and I believed her. I was gullible. But I was gullible because I had no reason to doubt the first girl I’d decided was beautiful.

  “P-N-E-S-T,” I said, spelling it out. “But silent. Like the P in pneumatic. Or pneumonia.”

  “That’s right,” Nest said. “Just like that.”

  “Cool,” I said.

  Then she said: “I think you’d make a great fire hydrant.”

  Every so often, Nest relents. Five days ago, the night of the collision—I remember this—Nest said, “You’ve always had a giant love for me, Q. It’s not stupid to love. But my brain makes love seem ridiculous. I am the Chimaera. Beast and girl, and deadly. I am unlovable.”

  That last sentence: “I am unlovable.” That would have been enough for the police to think Nest really had wanted to die outright, commit suicide, and was willing to take me with her.

  I’m not convinced.

  I believe, no matter how Nest’s illness rips her up, Nest knows I love her. Nest knows her mother and father love her. It’s difficult to end your life when you know you’re loved. Not impossible. But difficult.

  Nest was right, though. I don’t have her intelligence—or trouble. I’ll never be forced to take a drug to calm down. I’ll never see the inside of a mental ward, except to visit. And I’ll never have a mythical beast living inside of me.

  I’ve been writing almost five days straight to no one in particular. To the you we all have inside of us, not ourselves but no one else either. Not quite a god or a devil; not quite a friend; not quite a hero. No one in particular, but someone just the same.

  There are two styles of handwriting here. Myself in one. Most of it, though, in a handwriting to show when Nest’s speaking aloud to me. Speaking and speaking for miles.

  Three years ago, when we were seventeen, Nest asked me to go on a walk with her. I’m writing out half of it, ten miles. This is in case she dies. I don’t want the world to think she died without ever having been loved.

  Nest had never asked me on one of her walks before. Manic walks, when she thought and felt in a rush and talked to herself and somehow made it home alive. She always went alone, once a week, sometimes more, for months, depending on how she slept. She’s someone for whom sleep was a disaster. It was her father who started taking her on walks, day or night, when she was young. I knew that, but not—.

  I don’t want to say too much too soon. I want you to hear what happened over the course of a long walk, or half a long walk. The second half doesn’t matter. I don’t know if the second half even exists. I don’t remember ever making it home.

  MILE ONE

  We could see our breath at the beginning.

  Nest buttoned her flannel. It might have been her father’s originally, I don’t know. She swam in it. I remember an elbo
w patch, the Nepalese flag, for no reason I could guess. Nest isn’t Nepalese. A mystery. And another mystery: a raised scar of blue thread above the chest pocket. Knife, match, bullet, age? She wore the red flannel over some kind of white camisole or T-shirt. I couldn’t really tell. You don’t need to be sure of anything to love a girl.

  “Where are we going?”

  There was only one rule, and I broke it almost immediately. I shouldn’t have talked.

  “Are we headed somewhere specific?”

  Silence.

  “Nest?”

  “Don’t say anything,” she said. “You promised you wouldn’t say anything. It hasn’t even been five minutes.”

  No, don’t apologize. I said you could go with me, the whole way, if you didn’t say anything. Not I’m thirsty, not I’m hungry, not I’m tired and my feet hurt. Definitely not Where are we going? The whole adventure, Q—wandering, drifting this way and that, north by northeast by southwest, mood and question and whim and hunger and thirst and.

  You’re not allowed to comment either. Nothing.

  A silent companion. That’s what you are. Like a coin in my pocket. Or my own heart. Or, you know, my spleen, my gall bladder—.

  Pretend you’re a penny, or a rib, or my tiny heart.

  You haven’t done anything like this before, I promise. You walk all the time: school, coffee, diner, pizza, here, there. The neighborhood. But you’ve never walked like this, Q. Never so far, and never with me. Never for me.

  When I walk alone, at the start, I’m barely touching ground. I’m skimming. Levitating a little. But the farther I walk, the heavier I get. The ground gets closer bit by bit. At some point I realize I’ve landed. Sole on concrete.

  Somewhere along the loop that begins with my parents’ house, I run into myself. I can’t explain it any other way. It sounds nuts. There I am, loitering, waiting for me to arrive. It’s happened all over. Stairways, pews, public bathrooms, trees, stoops, the library stacks. Alleys, windows, mirrors. Once, I was steam coming through a manhole cover. Last month, I could’ve sworn I was the cap on a doorman’s head. I’m serious. I wasn’t, though. I was his shoe.

  Kidding. I was, actually, the doorman—.

  By the end of the walk, I’m sleep. Get me to bed.

  A walk like this: what can I compare it to so you’ll understand?

  You’ve fished a million times. I went with you and your uncle that once. I remember all the ropes, rods, and buckets; and the salt and seagulls and.

  Walking and fishing start the same way. You gauge the sky and take your best guess: weather or no weather? Then you cast off. For a little distance, you can look over your shoulder at the docks, the piers, the other boats, everything you recognize. The wake stretches all the way home. You’re still home.

  Forget the wake: it’s the going out that matters. You motor out, churr, churr, churr. You’re on the compass.

  I love going forward, the slow forward, in any direction. Not even very far. All of a sudden—whoops. The whole world drops off. Home’s gone. You’re in the ocean now. At sea. Everything that surrounds you goes much deeper than you know.

  Our neighborhood, Q, no matter how well we think we know it, is an ocean. We don’t know anything. We know what the houses and buildings look like, but we don’t know what goes on in any of them, not really. We’ve grown up our whole lives right here, in the city, seventeen years: it’s completely familiar and totally unknown. Every block is like the ocean, pure muscle, but concrete, not water. All the street has to do is flex, even a little, and we might flip over and drown in pavement. Swallowed up. Crushed—.

  Cobblestones.

  That’s a great word: cobblestones.

  I’m not trying to make you afraid. Home is behind us, out of sight, but everything’s okay. We’re shipshape and right side up. We’re chugging along. The weather’s fine. No storms, no big waves. No sharks. No danger at all. I love the ocean, and I love the city.

  We’re going for a walk. The city is beautiful even when it’s not.

  Trust me.

  We’d barely gone five blocks, and I already had a slight fever. I felt a little trippy. Whatever was solid, even my own body, seemed to liquefy. I thought, This is what it means to be around a person who’s not quite in her right mind.

  This is the honest truth. To walk with Nest when she felt manic—that’s the right word, manic, a word I didn’t know then but know now—was to walk with a girl whose own mind was a fever.

  I trusted her, though. I trusted her the way I would trust a river.

  Nest flows one way, undisturbed until disturbed, constant but wandering, and entirely natural. I knew she was swimmable, but I’d had to wait. I’d had to wait for her to invite me. I’d waited and waited. For years, really, I’d waited, from thirteen to seventeen. We were friends, off and on, we would sometimes talk, and we’d done this and that together, like go fishing once, and one time ice-skating, but I could never find the right way to get any nearer.

  Finally, the river spoke to me. She called me at six in the morning, October 4, and told me to come.

  I trusted Nest. That’s what matters.

  I didn’t sleep last night. Not that I remember anyway. I might have dozed, but.

  If I count it up right now, I’ve averaged about two and a half hours of sleep a night for four nights, so ten hours in four days. That’s why I haven’t gone to school in a week. I’m useless. Three nights ago, I slept for a blissful five hours straight, but only about two hours the next night and almost nothing last night. I’m so tired; I have that queasy feeling, sick. And I can’t really trust my eyes. My eyeliner is fire. I had to look twice at your shoes because I was wondering about the pink. They’re not, but for a second or two they were PINK. Sounds are coming to me from far away, from the end of a long empty hall. Everything echoes.

  I’m not sleeping because I’m not sleeping. My mind: up and down, round and round, always. My mood. You know how it is. I’m afraid to sleep. The constant dreams and terrors. Sometimes I fall straight into dreams. It’s like.

  Falling from an airplane.

  Sitting there, looking out of the window seat. Such empty sky. Nothing but cold, blue light. I don’t want to close my eyes, but the sun, Q: it’s bright. It just won’t stop, ever. It might blind me to sleep. I don’t want to sleep, though. I want to stay awake. I lean into the window and look down. I imagine myself outside the plane, strapped into seat 17A, hovering six miles above the earth, above the clouds, almost past oxygen. I’m fighting to keep conscious in the thin air and bright light. A never-ending faint, a constant falling.

  How long do you think it would take to fall six miles?

  I want to land, go home, see you, ride my bike to school: life. But falling, or wanting to fall, seems stronger, so much stronger than needing to get home. I don’t have wings. So I fall, mile after mile, through all the fists of clouds.

  Dreams.

  Sometimes I fall through them, on and on, until I hit the ground at a thousand miles an hour. I never understand why I don’t explode the exact moment I wake up. Bones and goop every which way.

  Do you think a plane can die midair and go down, fwoop, like a bird shot to death? All the people, two hundred passengers and crew, terrified, made to die together and alone. What about the people who won’t cry or pray? Like that guy who’s pretty sure his wife is having an affair, would he strangle her? Or that woman with her baby, would she breastfeed or smother him? Will that couple kiss or hug or—? While the man behind them sleeps all the way to the bottom of the sky.

  Touch the window, Q. Go ahead. Feel the whole plane trembling?

  The plane’s a gigantic steel husk, heavier than air, working to break itself and scatter its load of human seeds over the earth. A few seconds before the crash, what would I do? Would I scratch my face, tear my hair out, forget everybody I ever knew? You’ll be a pro
mise I get when I die, when the plane hits the ground. So fast.

  Phew.

  My mind, I know, but.

  I’m making all this up. I’ve never even been on a plane.

  I imagine the plane filled with a noiseless noise—. A hum, deep and gentle. It might even be coming from inside me. It might be the sound of the engine of my imagination.

  Five after seven. The traffic is just waking up. We could still walk in the street without getting killed. A different story an hour from now. An hour from now, we’ll be at the bridge. Up the arch and down the arch: a mile, outside to core. The whole thing, cables and concrete and iron towers, vibrating and coughing and, and clattering.

  It’s a little cool. Not uncomfortable, though. It’s barely October, only a few days in, so that warm, coppery feeling will catch up to us any second. We’re walking, and the fog’s almost gone. Almost time to take the flannel off.

  My psychiatrist until very recently, Elaine Ruff—. Wait. Did I already tell you this—?

  That’s a terrible way to start a story. You should always start a story with something memorable. Also, you should know your audience, like, for instance, if you’ve told the story before to the same person. Especially true when you’re talking to an audience who may be afraid of what they’ve gotten themselves into by agreeing to walk with a madwoman.

  Let me start again.

  My psychiatrist until very recently, Elaine Ruff, looks like a beagle—.

  This is just getting worse. Always start a story with a true sentence. Dr. Ruff looks nothing at all like a beagle. Except for her ears.

  I’m exaggerating. Dr. Ruff’s a liar, but she’s a very pretty woman.

  Especially if you like beagles.

  I’m going to shut up a minute, but when I start again—. I’ll start at the next stop sign.