Vacation

by Jeremy C. Shipp

  And I do.

  I’m sitting on Santa’s knee and he says, “What do you want for Christmas, young man?”

  “I want Noh to live,” I say.

  No, he’s not Santa.

  And I’m not a boy.

  “No luck, huh?” Blackbeard says, a pirate again.

  We’re on a ship with a skull flag and a parrot on every other shoulder.

  “I could have all the luck in the world and it wouldn’t help me now,” I tell the Captain. “Noh’s going through with the execution no matter what I say.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” he says.

  “There is something you can do for me, if you don’t mind.”

  “I’m all ears.”

  “Sleepwalk me to the church. With the priests who were attacked. I don’t know how to get there on my own.”

  “I’ll send Matek to guide you.”

  “Thank you.” Before plunging in the water, I turn back around. “One more thing. Could you tell him to bring a camera with him? A video camera?”

  “Of course.”

  I walk the plank.

  The water isn’t cold.

  This time when I leave the Garden, I don’t say goodbye. But at that same spot where Matek and I split ways before, I say, “Hello Matek.”

  “Here,” he says, and hands me the camera. “Let’s go.”

  We’re walking and I say, “Are you okay with this?”

  “With what?”

  “Going to see the priests. I know it was an order, but are you okay?”

  He grabs his gun. “Nothing a little violence won’t fix later.” The way he says this, I know it’s a joke, but neither of us laugh. Then he says, “Blackbeard won’t let us kill many people. It has to be self defense. Or they have to be real wicked assholes. Sometimes we get some Tic prisoners, who we’re going to set free later, and I shout gibberish at them and act like I’m going to blast them. But I don’t. It scares the shit out of them.”

  Secrets don’t last long among the Meek, and maybe that’s because knowledge isn’t just power here. It’s survival.

  But maybe that’s just part of it.

  Maybe the Meek do such terrible things that it’s too difficult to hold the truth in for too long. You have to tell. Allies, enemies, it doesn’t matter. You have to confess.

  “I killed my sister,” I say.

  “Seriously?” he says, and he releases his gun, and lets it dangle at his side.

  “Yeah. Before I was born, I killed her.”

  “How could you?” This isn’t condemnation. He wants to know the details.

  “My parents didn’t tell me until I was grown up. It’s called Twin-Twin Transfusion Syndrome. Most identical twins share the same placenta, but our blood flow wasn’t balanced due to irregular vessels. With TTTS, the donor twin transfuses blood to the recipient twin.” Matek’s looking at me funny, so I say, “The donor dries up from giving the blood and the recipient gets bloated. Too much blood and too little blood is bad. My parents decided to get an operation where a laser would cut the bad vessels between me and my sister. They used this procedure, because even if one of us died, the other one had a better chance of being healthy without brain damage than if they used another method. The problem was, after the surgery, I didn’t share enough placenta with my sister. There was no way for anyone to know how much placenta I was using before the surgery. So she died. My parents didn’t tell me the part about the placenta. I had to figure that out myself. I killed her.”

  And then, when everyone’s confessing, no one is innocent.

  No one’s alone.

  Years ago, here I am, standing on the most important patch of grass in my life, and I drop the flower. This is the last flower I’ll ever drop.

  I tell myself Twin-Twin Transfusion Syndrome is the reason I’ll never come back.

  Because.

  The truth is.

  The sick truth is.

  I resent her for being dead.

  Growing up, I don’t complain, I don’t talk back, I don’t follow my own path, because I should be grateful for my life as-it-is. Because at least I’m not my baby sister who has nothing but the cold ground and a flower from me every Sunday.

  Fair or not, she’s the scapegoat for my life.

  I want to love my sister, but I can’t stand to be near her anymore.

  Not because I think she hates me for killing her.

  But because she makes me hate myself.

  At the church, many of the priests swarm around us, limping and coughing. Some of the priests remain in the fresh graves we saw out front.

  Skeleton Face steps closer and says, “Matek, is that you?”

  “Hello, Father,” Matek says.

  “How has life been treating you?”

  “Good, Father.” Matek lowers his eyes, then walks over to join the children.

  A young priest smiles at me and says, “You’ve come back to us.”

  The deep dark secrets of these men bubble inside me.

  And these are the kinds of truths that can’t be held for too long.

  You write them down, or tell them to statues or to men in fancy clothes or to the darkness when you close your eyes. You ask and beg to be forgiven. And maybe, just maybe, you are.

  “God came to me in a dream,” I say.

  “Your words,” Skeleton Face says.

  “You’ve been cured,” says another.

  All priestly eyes are on me now.

  Matek removes the ammo and lets the kids play with his gun.

  “In that dream, God asked me for your sins,” I say. “I told him what you told me, word for word. He asked me to deliver you this message. God didn’t send the Black Tide to attack you. That was Satan’s work. God was the one who sent Weis to protect you.”

  The priests murmur to one another.

  “And,” I say. “He forgives you.”

  Now they murmur, but not to each other.

  “He also asked me to perform one other task,” I say.

  I hold up the camera.

  Today, it’s the eye of God.

  This part of the forest isn’t much of a stranger anymore.

  “I can find my way back from here,” I say. “You can head back to Blackbeard if you want.”

  Matek shrugs. “It’s alright. I’ll leave at the usual place.”

  “Okay.”

  After a silent while, he says, “Which twin were you?”

  “What do you mean?” I say.

  “The donor or the receiver?”

  “I was the donor.”

  “See, you were trying. You were giving her everything you had. It just wasn’t enough. It wasn’t your fault you didn’t share enough of that thing. You didn’t do it on purpose. You didn’t kill your sister. You were just a little baby.”

  All I can think to say is, “Thank you,” so I do.

  “You shouldn’t be so hard on yourself,” he says.

  “I know.”

  “My problem is, I’m too easy on me. Those priests, I’d’ve been a lot better off with them. Without this gun. They always told me they thought of me as a son, but they gave me away. They had to, I know. But shit. If I were still there, they’d tell me when I go too far.” He kicks a fallen branch and sends it whirling in the air until it gets stuck on a branch above. “I like to think about what it’d be like to get into the Garden and live that life. But I don’t belong there. Not the way I am.” He sighs, and it sounds like a grumble. “I could never do what Noh is doing for us.”

  “You think you know her, but you don’t.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “She isn’t who you think she is. She isn’t who any of you thinks she is. I’ll tell you truth.”

  He looks me in the eyes for the first time.

  So I tell him.

  I tell him the secret that only I know.

  Part 22

  Noh lets me into the Garden without a word and I resupply for my next trip. This mental hospital outfit isn’t wh
at I want to die in, so I change into Gardener clothes.

  Odin stands in the archway to my room. “Leaving again?”

  “Yeah,” I say.

  “Where to?”

  “Konstantin’s.”

  “You remember the way?”

  “It’s a straight line from here.”

  “I could go with you.”

  “You don’t have to do that.”

  “Man, I know the language. Sometimes that alone can save your life out there.” He picks at the dirt caught between his eye-patch and his skin. “It’s the least I can do for you, dude.”

  So, minutes later, we’re in the desert together, and I say, “I never thanked you for what you did to my body when I first got here. Thank you.”

  “No problem, man. The more healthy people I see in the world, the happier I am.” And the way he says this, I know he must have seen a lot of sick people.

  “What were you before you came here?” I say.

  “What was I? What do you mean?”

  “What was your job?”

  He laughs. “Dude, I never had a job.”

  “You’re American, aren’t you?”

  He shakes his head. “You’re way off, man. Way off. I may sound American, but that’s because I learned English mostly from watching TV. I didn’t have TV when I was a kid though. English was later. Garden later.” He shivers, but it’s not cold as shit yet. Not cold shit. “I was born and raised in a poor Meek village. You might think all Meek villages are poor, but we were poor by Meek standards. We didn’t have any Blackbeards or Weis’s helping us out. Toward the end, there was one guy who came around and traded food for sex. But some families only had sons, and he didn’t want sons.”

  I wonder what “Toward the end” means.

  “The families who got food didn’t want to share,” he says. “The food they got wasn’t enough to survive on in the first place. So, we fought. Like Noh says, desperate people do desperate things.”

  And suddenly, I think of the photographs. And then, my mind focuses on one. A photo of a boy. “That was you,” I say.

  “Yeah,” he says. “That was me.” He almost trips, on what, I can’t see. Maybe there’s nothing there. “My parents said she had Vacation Madness.” The she he’s talking about is the woman from the same photograph. The dead woman.

  “Vacation Madness?” I say.

  “They said that sometimes, people in our village would go crazy and try to get into the Vacation Spot nearby. But when a Meek tries to get into a Spot, they’re incinerated. That’s bad, because the other villagers wouldn’t be able to use their bodies that way.”

  I know what he means by the word “use” because I saw the photograph.

  “So,” he says. “If anyone seemed like they were getting the Madness, the other villagers would lock them up. Or worse.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I don’t know if the Madness was real or not, but it could happen. We told a shitload of stories about that Spot, though none of us really knew what the fuck was going on in there. Still, it was heaven to us, man. I dreamt about going there all the time. And the fucked up thing is, even though I don’t give a shit about going to that Spot anymore, I still have those fucking dreams. I always will, probably.”

  “I’m sorry you had to live that way.”

  “So am I, dude. But I know I’m a lucky bastard to be where I am today. Noh saved me at the last second. When everyone was dead or dying. I remember I had to do a lot of weird shit for her. She was testing me to see if she could use me. I didn’t realize it then, but if I hadn’t passed that test, I’m pretty sure she would’ve left me there to die. I don’t know. I’ve never asked. I’m just glad I passed that fucking test.”

  “Me too.”

  “After that, I learned everything I could about health. Noh didn’t decide that for me. She wanted me to dedicate myself to something, and that’s what I chose. Mostly, I wanted to know if there was anything around my village that we could’ve used to save ourselves. Turns out, there wasn’t. We didn’t have shit. I thought learning that would make me feel better, and I guess it does in a way, but. Mostly, I just want to cry about it. And I do. Sometimes. It’s important, I know.” He readjusts his head wrap. “The worst part of the whole thing is, before things got so bad, they were so fucking good. I loved that village. I loved my life. Everyone got along and everyone was happy. Sometimes I envy those Meek who live shitty lives all their lives. At least then, they don’t have to deal with that transformation. Where everything you know gets turned upside-down. That’s why it’s really the Tics I’m fighting for.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I want all the Tic citizens to know the truth. I know this sounds crazy, but you’ve had it easy so far. Imagine that you weren’t thrown into the Meek world alone. Instead, this world takes over yours, when you’re at home, with all your family and friends around you. The Tic resources are gonna run out, and you guys need to know the truth, because you need to get ready. Physically, yeah, but mostly, I’m talking emotionally. You gotta mentally prepare for the worst. Because I don’t want to take any more of those fucking photographs.”

  Maybe there is something worse than being in hell, and left alone to watch.

  It’s taking pictures.

  You may give up on your dreams, but they don’t go away. Even as a teacher, I dreamt of being famous. I wanted respect by society as-it-is. I wanted everyone to think they knew me, because that’s better than the real thing.

  These are my dreams.

  The Vacation Spot with walls I can’t climb.

  My heaven on Earth.

  My Madness.

  Johnsonitis.

  But as of now, my dreams have been flushed from my system. I’ll never be completely cured, of course, but who the fuck is?

  My dreams can and will haunt me forever, but I’m not afraid of ghosts. Not anymore.

  The truth is, I want to be a teacher again. I want my words to go into people’s heads and live there for a while, in the vacant rooms where there’re ordinary things that ordinary people think, but none of them work. I won’t use a snow shovel to scoop the trash into plastic bags and haul them off. I won’t carry the cats out and close the door and walk away.

  There’s a chance I’ll be hated instead of respected, and I’ll be known instead of famous, but that’s the price I’m willing to pay.

  Here I am, in this cold-as-cold-shit desert, and I’m the least lost I’ve ever been.

  This is Virginia Woolf in the River Ouse.

  This is Hemingway and his favorite shotgun.

  This is Pumpkin Head’s head if it had shattered on the ground after I knocked him over.

  This is a real dead body.

  I kneel beside the rotting man, and feel the urge to touch him, but I don’t. Instead, my hands hover above his chest, like those of an unsure savior.

  “It’s the guide, probably,” Odin says, behind me, not kneeling. “He must’ve gotten out of control when he didn’t find us here and the Shepherds had to kill him.”

  It’s worse than I expected.

  His death is my fault. This isn’t like me killing my sister. With my sister, I didn’t have a choice. I was a baby. But with this man, I chose my path, and this chunky mess is the consequence.

  “I did this,” I say.

  “These things happen,” he says.

  “That’s it? These things happen?”

  “What do you want me to say, man? It’s not okay he’s dead. But this is the world we live in. You’re gonna have to say your peace and move on. Otherwise, you’ll never make it.”

  This is what Noh must feel like all the time.

  “How do you do it?” I say. “How do you deal with something like this?”

  “Think of it this way, dude. Every time you paid your taxes or bought anything in your Tic country, you were responsible for a shitload of Meek deaths. For some reason, Tics only seem to feel responsible when the consequences are staring right
at them, but the world doesn’t work like that. We’re all connected, and we’re all killing each other. All the time.”

  And this is supposed to make me feel better?

  Somehow, it does.

  The body is only a few feet from Konstantin’s dome, so I’ve reached my destination.

  I stand and turn to Odin and say, “You should go back.”

  “Really?” he says.

  “I don’t know how long I’ll be here. Forever, maybe.”

  “That’s a long time, dude.”

  “I know. I’ll see you later, I hope.”

  “Yeah. Later, man.” He hugs me.

  I hug him back, and he may be too old or I may be too young, but here’s the son I never knew I wanted.

  This hug feels like an end-of-the-line sort of goodbye, and maybe it is.

  Because when you’re on a quest to create a ghost, you run the risk of becoming one.

  Part 23

  Konstantin doesn’t answer the door after the knock. Instead he says, “Come in!” so I turn the knob myself and it’s hot on my fingers. Inside, he’s lying on his pillows, wearing thick metal glasses, with his arms as an X over his chest. “Sit down!” he says. “Have some candy!”

  Some of his tiny tools look like candy, but that’s it.

  “I need to talk to you about something,” I say.

  He removes his glasses, sits up, and squints at me. “Is that you, son?”

  “It’s Bernard.” I step closer. “The last time I came here, you acted as if you knew what the dream device was, before Odin told you. Did you really know?”

  “Of course!”

  “Then I’m guessing you have some connection to the Agency.”

  “Obviously! It’s an Agency device!”

  “What is your connection?”

  He smiles. “I fix glitches in their programs in exchange for information and technology.”

  “So you have some way to communicate with them.”

  “Naturally!”

  “I want you to send them a message for me.”

  “If you have business with the Agency, use your own contact.”

  “I don’t have a contact and this isn’t business.”

  “There’s no way I’m going to endanger the symbiosis between me and the Agency.”