Wonders of the Invisible World

by Christopher Barzak

  “Well—” I said, but Jarrod lifted a hand.

  “Please don’t,” he said, still looking down the hall instead of facing me, as if one glance from me might set him on fire. “I’m embarrassed enough. Just go, Aidan. Just go home, will you?”

  I didn’t want to leave with things so unsettled, but with him not willing to talk any longer, I did what he asked and stood, brushing against him in the narrow doorway as I pushed past. For a moment, a flicker of energy leaped between us, like it had when he’d reached across to me at the fountain in the park, and I stopped there, waiting for him to change his mind. When he didn’t say anything, I shook my head, angry, and fled.

  After firing up the Blue Bomb and backing down the drive onto Cordial Run, I felt more sober than I’d been before drinking the six-pack. I stuck to the back roads anyway, drove slowly with the window down so that the cold October wind blew against my face as the red and yellow leaves of autumn appeared in the wash of my headlights.

  I didn’t know how to think about what had happened, about what he’d said and about that weird flash of heat and energy that had sparked between us. I was too surprised. By his confession, by the way I hadn’t pulled away from him, even as I started to understand. I’d just sat there and watched him caress my hand like it belonged to him. And then, to top it all off, I’d said nothing after he told me a truth that obviously hurt him to talk about.

  I was the one who should have felt ashamed. He’d been open with me ever since he’d come back and made a friend of me again.

  But me? I was a locked door. A door even I didn’t have the key to.

  When I got home, my mom was still up, reading in the living room, the room dark except for the light from her tablet. One of her nightly rituals. A chapter or two of an ebook before heading upstairs. Toby and Dad had made their way to their beds and were probably already off to dreamland.

  “Hey,” I said as I passed the room, hoping she wouldn’t stop me and see that my eyes were glassy or smell the beer on my breath and guess that I’d come home because Jarrod Doyle had semi-drunkenly held my hand while we sat on his bed and he confessed an attraction to me. I couldn’t deal with her prying into things even I didn’t understand yet.

  Before I could make it to the staircase, though, she said, “Aidan, I thought you were sleeping over at Jarrod’s tonight. Did something happen?”

  “Decided not to,” I said from the landing, “so I can get up early and help Dad.”

  “Well, that’s nice of you,” she said. “Why don’t you sit down here with me for a while, though? I have some things I need to talk to you about.”

  Here it comes, I thought. The lecture on drinking and driving. And of course she would know that I’d done that, because my mom knew everything going on around her, even when she wasn’t there to see it with her own eyes.

  “I’m tired, Mom,” I said, and feigned a loud yawn. Through the entryway to the living room, I saw the portrait of my suicidal grandfather eyeing me in the foyer, judging my bad acting. I made a face like I would come at his portrait with a large knife if he kept staring like that, if he kept judging. And to my mom, I said, “How about tomorrow?”

  “Now would be better, actually,” she said.

  But I was already halfway up the staircase, pretending I hadn’t heard her. I’d sleep peacefully, I told myself as I got into bed, and when I woke in the morning I’d do work for my dad. And after that, maybe I’d get Jarrod to talk to me. If he would talk to me, that is. If he could.

  If we could talk to each other.

  “Sleep is a place a person goes to,” my mother once told me. “It’s not a thing a person does. It’s a place where we go to find peace for a little while.”

  I was a little kid when she told me that, and in the fog of my memory I could still see her sitting in a child-sized chair beside my small bed, leaning over me as she spoke, her hands pulling my comforter up to my chin. I can’t remember all the details—I was probably sick or unable to fall asleep for some other reason—but I do distinctly remember my mom brushing my hair from my eyes and placing a gentle kiss on my forehead. I do distinctly remember that, somehow, after her kiss landed on me, my fever broke, or whatever it was that had kept me sleepless went away, and my lids grew heavy, and I then fell asleep fast. Fell being the key word. Fell into the place called sleep, where we rest. Where we find peace for a little while.

  A white haze surrounded that memory now as I put myself to bed and pulled my covers up to my chin like my mom did when I was little. If I could have kissed my own forehead to put myself at ease, like my mom could, I would have. Heavy eyelids were what I wanted. As quickly as possible, I wanted to feel myself being pulled down into the dark place of sleep, where I could find peace after a night of unexpected and worrisome revelations.

  Peace wasn’t what I found when I did finally fall into sleep, though. A strange dream came instead. It wasn’t one of mine, though, I could tell immediately. Maybe it belonged to someone in my family, or maybe to someone nearby. I had no idea. But wherever the dream came from, it swooped into my room on dark feathers, plucked me up like a baby, and carried me away to another world, where the peace of sleep did not exist.

  A world where the scream of an engine burst in my ears, so close, so loud, it rattled my teeth, scraping them top against bottom.

  I blinked as I came to, and turned my head to either side, looking around slowly. A row of soldiers sat against the wall opposite me, their faces blackened with some kind of paint; their round helmets covered in netting; their bodies slung with guns, grenades, parachutes; their eyes heavily lidded with worry. Then gunfire began to chatter against the belly of the plane we rode in—that was what it was, I realized as I continued to scan my surroundings—and the bullets rang out like pebbles thrown against a window.

  One of the soldiers lining the wall across from me vomited, wiped his mouth with his knuckles, then looked down at his own hand as if he couldn’t believe the hand had actually cleaned the spit from his lips without protest.

  “Out, out, out!” someone shouted, and the soldiers stood to form a line. “Out, out, out!” someone shouted again, and I looked out the open door of the plane, where the wind whipped through the entrance and ran its hands all over me.

  It was dark outside the hatch, black as black can be, but I could hear more airplanes ripping through the clouds around us, could see the flare of their engines, the shadows of their wings forming a bridge of darkness across the sky.

  A young man was sitting next to me, fingering the netting that surrounded his helmet like a web. “Out, out, out!” someone ordered again, and the young man stood, his eyes wide with fear, and went to the door as commanded.

  I stood with him, I don’t know why. I just stood, because there he was, a man in trouble, a man who stood despite being afraid, who looked out over the edge of the open door, where the sky, ruffled like the petals of a black flower, flowed by. To jump or not to jump? That was the question. And I went to him, this young man seized with a sense of duty that emanated like an aura. I took hold of his arm, and when he leaped, I leaped with him.

  Into the sky we flew, the wind whipping around us. I didn’t think about why I was doing any of this. It was a dream, so I flew into the sky with him, peering down at the dark fields of clover and woods, where gunfire chattered, breaking sparks of light into the night, and people ran through the landscape like frightened rodents.

  Then everything stopped for a moment. The air itself seemed to pull us higher into the sky, to pick us up like a kitten by the nape of its neck and return us to where we’d jumped from; then it dropped us again without any warning, and suddenly, throughout the sky, hundreds of white parachutes opened.

  We hung there, suspended in the air like white dandelion seeds blown away from their core. And down below, below this soldier and me, a battle had started.

  A barn was burning, illuminating the night with its fire. There was a steeple, ringed by the low two-story houses of the villa
ge the church served. The men who had flung themselves out of the plane circled the burning barn and the bell-tolling church like moths attracted to firelight.

  Where was I?

  In the air.

  You’re in a dream, I told myself.

  I was in another world.

  Through the black air we drifted, until suddenly a gunshot rang out, and the young man I clung to grunted in pain. He held one hand against his chest, and when he pulled it away, he found blood there, hot and wet in the cool night air.

  Then we hit earth, stumbled, rolling against each other, and came to a stop at the edge of a woods, where we lay stunned, looking up at the sky as the planes cut through the dark on their way back to England.

  That was where he came from, I realized. I could pick that up from the current of his thoughts, like picking up a leaf as it floated by on the surface of a creek. The impressions of his mind had begun to enter my consciousness. But the longer I held on to him, the more I became confused. Couldn’t distinguish between his and my own feelings, couldn’t tell whose memories were whose.

  He’d been in England, training for this moment. That much I knew. I could see the months that had led up to his boarding the plane to jump out into the sky over a field in France. I turned to look at him lying in the grass beside me. As he stared up into the sky we’d just jumped from, the line of his jaw was chiseled against the night, creating a familiar silhouette, the profile of a face I somehow recognized. And I thought, He looks like my father.

  He tried to stand, got himself halfway up with a good effort of gritting his teeth and grunting. Then he braced himself against the trunk of a tree, pulled a cigarette out of his pack of rations, lit it, inhaled deeply, and exhaled a smoky sigh of relief. When he tried to move away from the tree a minute later, though, something squished inside his boot—the sound of bones moving through jelly—and he winced as pain rang through his body, crippling him momentarily. He stopped, leaned back against the tree again, and waited there, breathing heavily.

  In front of us, the trees thinned out and a field opened, spreading toward the horizon. A dirt path cut across the center of the field, leading toward the village I’d seen from the sky. I could still see an aura of light surrounding the burning barn, most likely a mile from where we stood, but I couldn’t see the barn itself any longer. I could still hear the church bell tolling in the center of the little town, but I couldn’t see its steeple. Instead, I saw the dandelion seeds of young men drifting toward it. I saw one float right into the flames, consumed in the barn’s conflagration within moments, as if it had never existed.

  Click-clock. The young man beside me had pulled a toy from his pack. Click-clock was the noise it made when he pushed on it, this piece of metal painted to look like an insect. A cricket, the army officers called it. I’d seen them before, in the sad and dusty toy aisles of run-down stores in Temperance that carried nothing but pieces of the past for purchase. Bubble-gum cigars, wax lips, lollipop whistles, plastic rings, and crickets. Click-clock went the cricket in the young man’s hands. Then he looked around, listening hard, but no crickets but the real ones chirping in the meadow answered.

  The patch of blood on his chest had spread and grown darker as we stood there. I wanted to do something, but I didn’t know how to help him. And since he didn’t seem able to see or feel me near him, I didn’t know if any of this was real or just a dream I’d fallen into. I was somehow there, though, in this other world, even if that world didn’t register my presence.

  “Where are we?” I decided to try asking.

  “Hell,” said the young man after a pause, as if he’d heard me. His voice was so low no steam escaped his mouth. A second later, though, he said it again: “Hell. To hell with it,” and I realized he was just talking to himself.

  I put my hand on his shoulder, trying to reach across, the way Jarrod had shown me I could do, to put myself inside him. And when I managed to slip inside his mind, I pulled back quickly, shocked by the sensation of the bullet that had cut through his flesh. It nestled in his body, a hot, hard thing, burning and burning like an ember.

  He looked up, his mouth open, not knowing what to do, not knowing how to feel about anything. The other men were either in hiding or running ahead to the village, gunfire blasting around them. I should follow, he thought. I should go to the battle. He tried to take a step in that direction, despite the broken bones in his foot, but before his second step, something appeared in his path, stopping him.

  A silvery-white light floated in the field in front of us, moving up the path that crossed the field, coming toward us. The young man looked harder, squinting, and gasped when he saw a white stag emerge from the dark. A white stag with an enormous rack of antlers glinting in the night like a giant candelabra.

  I shivered, not from the cold, but from a wave of awe that overwhelmed me as the stag came to stand not ten feet from us. It stopped near the edge of the woods where we waited with our backs against our tree, and looked at us for a brief moment before snorting and shaking its head from side to side as if it were angry, as if it were issuing some kind of challenge.

  A moment later, the stag seemed to rise into the air as it jumped past us, so close I could feel its ivory fur brush against my skin. Then it fled into the dark woods behind us.

  The young man sighed as he turned away from the burning village to look into the woods, where we could still see the white glow of the stag weaving among the tall silhouettes of trees. Instead of going toward the village, the young man decided to follow the stag’s light into the woods. Holding his hand against the hole in his chest, he stumbled forward, the bones in his foot crunching beneath him as he groped after the trail of light that flickered in the white stag’s wake.

  We chased after the stag for what felt like an eternity but was probably only five or ten minutes. I held on to the young man’s arm, tried to balance him, tried to help him carry himself forward. Just once he turned to me and seemed to see me beside him, peering through whatever veil came between us, and said, “Are you my guardian angel?”

  “I don’t know what I am,” I whispered, which was true. “But I’m trying to help you.”

  When he stopped to catch his breath, which rattled and flapped in his lungs like a frightened bird in a cage, the stag stopped with him. It looked over its shoulder at us, waiting patiently, and the young man thought, Damn you, quit playing with me. When finally he gathered enough strength to resume the chase, the muscles in the stag’s haunches flexed once more before it leaped, again, ahead of him.

  In a small grove in the woods, we found the stag waiting, seeming to ponder the young man as he arrived breathing in ragged convulsions with blood drenching his clothes. The young man blinked as he met the stag’s stare, as if he’d been waiting for this moment all of his life, as if Fate had conducted him to this time and place like an usher. The stag’s eyes seemed to grow as the young man looked into them, becoming larger, rounder, darker. A person could walk into them like tunnels. He could hide in them like trenches, and no one, nothing, not shells, not gas or grenades, nothing would ever find him in there.

  The young man took a step forward but fell as he attempted a second. A shallow stream trickled along the ground, winking with reflected light from the moon and stars above. The stream mirrored the glow of the white stag’s antlers too as the stag lowered its head to the water, a cup of light blossoming in the night-soaked forest.

  The young man looked where the stag looked, saw the glinting stream before him as a man lost in the desert will see water all around him, the thing that will quiet his convulsions, the thing that will quench his thirst.

  Drink, the stag told the young man, and the tips of its antlers touched the water, dimpling the surface, turning the creek into a stream of pure white light.

  The young man didn’t know if he’d heard the stag or if the stag had somehow put its voice inside him, but he did as he’d been instructed. He crawled the last few feet to the bank of the creek, and ther
e he leaned over to find his own reflection staring back at him. He drew closer to his own image, then even closer, until his face met the face in the water, the two merging into one, and then he opened his mouth to fill himself with himself.

  He would die there ten minutes later, his body half in and half out of the creek, the reel of his life rattling to a halt, sputtering.

  I looked away, helpless, put my hand to my forehead, and started to cry, even though I didn’t know the guy. Started to wonder why I was there, and why I hadn’t woken from this nightmare. Started to wonder if I’d be trapped here like a patient in a coma, dreaming this dream, whatever this dream was, for the rest of my life. A ghost forced to witness the lives of others without having one of my own.

  And later, when I had time to think about it, I realized that was what I’d been doing anyway. Going through life like a good zombie. Rise and shine, check off the boxes on the to-do list my dad always left me, then off to school, where I kept my head down and tried not to attract attention. An afternoon drive down back roads, looking for something I couldn’t put a name to. A route to some place where maybe my true life existed. Then home again. Water and feed the cows. Dinner. Homework. Bed. Everything I did in the morning done in reverse this time.

  The white stag stamped its hoof and snorted as I stood there trying to collect myself, and I looked up again, saw it standing only a few feet away. It dipped its head in my direction and I nodded in return, as if we were either old friends or else cautious, uncertain acquaintances. Then the stag did the most surprising thing. It knelt down on its front legs and spoke to me.

  Let me return you to your proper home, the stag said. Its voice sounded in my head, the way the voice of the Living Death Tree seemed to come not from outside but inside me. This is not your time, it told me. This is not your place. You have fallen outside of your own story.