Wonders of the Invisible World

by Christopher Barzak

  “Seth?” I said, and the man in the black suit nodded.

  “Yes,” he said. “He was a sage child, that one. He saw far too much for his own good.”

  “Like what?” I said, chilled by his words. They were the same ones my mother had said whenever she talked about Seth.

  “He saw Eva,” Old Black Suit said. “He heard her voice, like you did. This was before your mother truly understood that her father was right. That Eva would never let go of the curse. This was before your mother decided to tell a story so that Eva couldn’t reach you, so that the curse couldn’t find you.”

  “The curse,” I said, and Old Black Suit nodded once more. Then he waved one of his arms to the side like a showman, and from behind him a small child came to stand beside him.

  It was the boy in the photo in my living room. It was Seth. It was my older brother. The brother who had died before I was even born.

  He was quiet as he stood there, looking up at me with innocent eyes, wearing what was most likely the little suit he’d been buried in. I blinked and blinked again, and my breathing quickened as Seth reached up with his tiny hand to grasp hold of Old Black Suit’s outstretched fingers.

  “Go ahead,” Old Black Suit told the boy. “You can show him.”

  Seth looked back at me then, his green eyes seeming to glow a little, and a vision appeared between us.

  It was a vision of Seth, waking up in the early hours of the morning, after hearing a voice call his name. The voice from the Living Death Tree. The voice of Eva Jablonski.

  Seth, she called to him. Seth Lockwood.

  And Seth had risen from his bed to follow the trail of her voice, until he came to the old tree in the orchard, where she showed him what his great-grandfather had done to her. She showed him the day that she’d picked the orchard clean to save her son. She showed him the day she died in the very tree Seth stood under.

  And then she had stepped from behind the tree itself, curling her finger for Seth to come to her. “I have something else to show you,” she told him. The same thing she’d said to me once, before my mother interrupted her.

  And Seth, curious, innocent, went to her.

  It was then that she crouched beside his small frame and undid the knot in her dress, where the curse throbbed in its folds, hot and white and blinding in its ferocity. Eva spread her dress so that she could show the child the curse, reveal his fate to him. Show him the truth that would consume his life in an instant. It was blindingly bright once placed before him. So bright. So bright. Bursting and popping with hate.

  It was then, looking down at it, that Seth fell backward and began to shake, to convulse, to turn blue, to stop breathing.

  My parents discovered him an hour later, his face lifeless, after they’d woken and found his room empty and begun to search for him.

  The vision faded then, but Seth still stood before me, clutching the hand of Old Black Suit.

  “You can go if you want, child,” Old Black Suit said, and Seth nodded. Looking at me for a moment, he waved his small hand in a polite fashion, then retreated to his place behind Old Black Suit’s coat and was gone from sight again.

  I felt tears, hot and burning, well up in my eyes as Seth retreated from me. A moment later, one rolled down my cheek, and quickly I raised the back of my hand to my eyes to wipe away any others before Old Black Suit could see what he’d done to me by showing me my brother.

  “It isn’t fair,” I said after he’d left us.

  “Life,” said Death’s agent, “isn’t very fair to anyone, now, is it?”

  “No,” I said. “It’s not life that’s unfair. It’s Death. Death is unfair.”

  “You are quite mistaken,” the man in the black suit said, looking almost insulted. “I give many chances, over and over, to people whom I could easily take in a moment.”

  “You haven’t been fair to my family,” I said. “You might have turned away those people I love, those people Eva brought you.”

  “Why don’t you tell me about all of this?” Old Black Suit replied, as if he knew nothing of what I was speaking about. He looked around and, finding an old fallen tree nearby, sat down with his big hands draped over his knees. “I like a good story,” he said, “and your mother’s family have always been good storytellers. Why, your great-grandmother Eva kept herself alive for many years by telling me stories. Your father’s family, though? Not so good at this, I’m afraid. How far, I wonder, has the apple fallen, and from which tree?”

  “Everything,” I said, before I could think about what I was doing. “I’ll tell all of it. Even the things my mother said others wouldn’t understand. Like the Living Death Tree of Sorrow Acre, and how I came to discover I’d been cursed or blessed with visions even my mother couldn’t keep from me. I’ll tell you about how the white stag haunts my father’s family, the way you haunt my mother’s. I’ll tell you all of these things and more. I’ll tell you the secrets of my heart, the things that are invisible to even you, if you’ll make a deal with me.”

  The man in the black suit raised his red eyebrows, and a corner of his mouth twitched just a little, barely enough for a person to see he was grinning.

  “If you think I’m here to carry you out of the world, you needn’t worry,” he said, waving my proposition away like a fly. “It’s for your mother and great-grandmother that I came today. Your mother also made a bargain with me. This bargain, actually.” He looked at her as if the evidence of her body explained everything. “A bargain to pay the way across for the two of them, and to take away the burden Eva carried.”

  “I’m prepared to make a different bargain,” I said, and he raised his brows even higher, doubting my words. “My story for my mother’s life. There’s an hour left in this watch before she is yours to take. And if you’ll agree to bring her back, I’ll tell you everything.”

  Old Black Suit threw his head back and laughed at me. But when I didn’t join him, when he noticed my straight face, he quieted down and looked at me with narrowed eyes. Scratching his stringy red beard, he took some time to consider my offer. And finally he said, “If you tell me your story now, you will not be able to tell it again later, when it’s you I’ve come for.”

  “I understand that,” I said.

  Then, after adjusting the tilt of his hat, he nodded.

  “Go on, then,” Old Black Suit said, settling in to listen.

  And I began telling stories.

  Here’s the thing: we’re all as thin as paper. Like those paper people you used to find in children’s magazines, inhabiting a two-page spread with other paper people, all of them hanging out somewhere together—at the park, at church, at school, at the mall, in the family room—until some kid took a pair of scissors to the dotted lines surrounding them and cut them out of their paper world. That’s us, that’s anyone. That was me. A cut-out paper person removed from the world I once belonged to.

  Until someone called my name, and I turned toward him, leaving my life in paper behind me.

  That was how my story began. That was how I began, really. Before that moment when Jarrod called and I turned to find him, it was like my life was this object that had been packed away in Bubble Wrap. And even though it was a safe enough life, it was no life at all, really. I moved through the world like a ghost, invisible to the people around me. I wasn’t an athlete like my brother or father, and I wasn’t charming, witty, or artistic, though I did have a talent for making my mom laugh at things. I was a decent student, even though I did tend to daydream during classes. But basically, yeah, there was nothing to me.

  Or so it seemed.

  There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

  There was more to me, actually, than I’d ever dreamed.

  What happened down in Marrow’s Ravine that day in early spring is the story I’m telling. It’s about this young guy, seventeen years old, who falls in love with the best friend he’s forgotten. It’s about this son whose mother has made
him forget parts of his own life in order to protect him. It’s about a family and their secrets. It’s about curses, and how a story can change the world depending on how you tell it. It’s about a mother who sacrificed herself for her son, and a son who told his story to save his mother.

  Which I managed to do, though just barely. Old Black Suit, after all, is a finicky listener, having been around so long and having seen as much as he has. I have no illusions; I realize that some of the things I told Old Black Suit that day were probably pretty mundane for someone like him. Old Black Suit doesn’t have any interest in seeing or hearing about high school or marriage or babies, or any of the memories we’ve all been told to retain. Old Black Suit is interested in our invisible moments. The unnoticed gestures and forgotten conversations, the unlikely incidents and the dying light of abandoned places, the conflicts that evaporate from memory once they’re resolved, the people we have no idea are important and no way of understanding why until it’s all over, the last page turned, the story finished.

  Then it all goes away.

  Everything.

  Except for my mother, who returned.

  He brought her back to me after I finished my story, after I’d spent the last flicker of a golden hour my mom had saved. Right there, in the bed of buttercups and daisies, my mother’s eyes fluttered open, and she gasped a breath that sounded like it was the first she’d ever taken. And when she’d gotten her bearings and was able to sit up and see me waiting there next to her, holding her hand, the first thing she did was shake her head as if she was amazed by everything her eyes were seeing.

  “You are so brave, Aidan Lockwood,” she told me, after she’d had a chance to look around, to accept the reality of her return. “You are so brave, my son.”

  I didn’t think I was as brave as she was. I mean, it wasn’t like I’d gone to Death and back, like she had. But I got what she was saying, and I appreciated the fact that she could look at me and see me and tell me that. It kind of made me embarrassed, actually, to be called brave, when for most of my life—or at least, most of the life I’d been able to recall for a long time—I’d been nothing. Just this kid who went to school and roamed the hallways, took his classes, got good grades, and had nothing, nothing, nothing of any importance to say to anyone.

  I had to start getting used to being me again, now that I was returning to myself, my real self, whoever that was. And maybe, I guess, brave was one of the things I was, or it was one of the things I could be.

  “Come on,” I said, and held out my hand to help my mother stand.

  She hugged me for a while afterward, rocking me in her arms like I was still the little boy she’d taken outside one summer to show the constellations only she could see. And after she hugged me, after she pulled away, wiping the tears from her eyes, we quietly climbed out of Marrow’s Ravine.

  We made our way back through the woods, back through the lane, back through the pasture, taking our time, because in all honesty we were both exhausted. And when we found ourselves at the back door of our house, my mom stopped to look up at it and to say, “I used to see the Lockwood house from the bus on my way to and from school every day when I was just a girl. I was drawn here. Sometimes I think I fell in love with this place before I fell in love with your father.”

  I didn’t say anything to that. I just looked up at our house with her, seeing it—I mean, really seeing it—almost for the first time. Admiring it a little, even, like my mom was doing. There was history in those rooms and hallways. My history. And I’d never understood that before.

  After we went in, the first thing I did was to go upstairs to look for Jarrod. I found him still sitting in a chair next to my brother, who was just then waking up from the heavy sleep my mother had weighed him down with.

  “It was all a bad dream,” I said before Toby could shake the cobwebs from his head and ask where I’d gone and why Jarrod was sitting in his room with him. Then I grabbed Jarrod’s hand and pulled him out of there and into my own room, where we stretched out on my bed and fell asleep together, even though my door was open and anyone who passed by could see us in there, holding on to each other like it was the most ordinary thing in the world.

  It was a long sleep, and much needed, for me, at least. When I woke, Jarrod was gone, leaving me curled around the empty space where he’d slept beside me. It was light out, and I could hear voices coming up from the kitchen through the vents. Above me, the crack in the ceiling that threatened to split my room apart was still there, but I didn’t pay it any attention. Instead I rolled out of bed and went downstairs to find my mom and Jarrod sitting at the kitchen table, talking. When I came into the room, they stopped and looked at me.

  “There you are,” my mother said, as if this were any other morning, even though when I looked at the clock on the wall, I saw it was already two in the afternoon. Not morning at all, and not an ordinary hour for me to be waking.

  “Where’s Toby?” I asked.

  “At work,” my mom answered. I blinked, speechless, because going to work seemed like something too normal to do on a day like this one. But Toby had slept through everything because of my mom, so for him it must have felt like the exactly right thing to do, like today was, in fact, just like any other.

  After I sat down to join in on the coffee, my mother caught me up on her and Jarrod’s conversation. She said that a whole lot had happened, and none of it easy to explain, and that she thought we should probably keep it a secret between just the three of us. “To spare Toby,” she said. “We’ve had a lot to deal with, and there’s too much he doesn’t know about. Where would we even begin?”

  “I don’t think we should do that,” I said, and my mom tilted her head and asked why not. “I’m tired of secrets,” I told her. “My whole life feels like it’s been one big secret for too long already. I don’t want to live that way anymore. I don’t want to do that to Toby. I don’t want to do that to me and Jarrod, either.” I looked over at Jarrod after I said that, and reached across the table with my hand palm up, and right there in front of my mom, he took hold of it, squeezing back gently.

  My mother’s cheeks flushed a little, and she looked down into her cup of coffee. I could tell that I’d embarrassed her by reminding her of how she’d done that very same thing to me. Made me forget things. Left me clueless. And look where it got you, I wanted to say. I didn’t, though. Jarrod was there, and being corrected by your youngest son in front of another person can’t feel good. So I just said, “I don’t know where we’ll begin either, but we should tell him. Somehow. We’ll figure out a way to do it if we try.”

  My mom straightened her head, her lips pursed resolutely, and nodded. “You’re right,” she said. “We’ll figure out how to tell him the truth. Didn’t I always say it was the hardest thing for a person to do?”

  Jarrod and I took a bus to Lily Dale a few days later to retrieve the Blue Bomb. Without it, we were both stuck taking the school bus, which was incredibly lame, especially for seniors who were graduating in a month. On the way up, Jarrod held my hand, and for a while I felt a little afraid, like someone might see us, and I was just then getting used to our being together that way in front of my family. But then, when some people on the bus obviously did see us and didn’t do or say anything, didn’t even make a face like I expected, I let myself sink down in my seat with his hand in my lap, and looked out the window at the passing scenery.

  There were these brittle pine trees, greening under the sunlight.

  And this almost crayon-yellow sun above.

  And the sky was so blue—watercolor blue—with white, scarf-like clouds soaring through it.

  Everything about us was entirely normal, really. We were as ordinary as anything we might come across in this world.

  Maybe Jarrod’s father wouldn’t see things that way, and sure, there were probably a lot of other people who would see things the way his father might. But what other people saw wasn’t necessarily the truth. And in the end it was the one tr
uly and totally not-normal thing about me—the kind of sight I’d been born with—that helped me to understand and forgive the people who couldn’t look at Jarrod and me and see us for who we were: just two people in love.

  When I looked at other people now, I could see how so many of them were wearing blindfolds like the one my mom had put on me. I could see how so many of them had damaged vision. How they couldn’t see things clearly. How they saw only the stories other people had told them. And understanding how all of that worked now, I started to even feel bad for them a little.

  Carolyn was happy to see us again, and we stayed overnight in the angel-and-fairy-infested house once more, to tell her about what had happened after we left her. I promised her that I’d bring my mother up for a visit soon, now that my mom, too, was released from the constraints of her own story. “Please do that,” Carolyn said. She told me to remember to tell my mom something else: that time, however much of it exists in the universe, does eventually run out for everyone.

  There was only one month of school left, and even though I thought it was way too late to become the kind of guy who suddenly makes friends with everyone at the end of the movie, I decided I also wasn’t going to go back to being invisible. So when I saw Jarrod in the hallways at school, I’d meet him with an open smile, or I’d make fun of his hair being too long, because he was constantly having to brush it out of his eyes. He was the starting pitcher—the coach, as he’d expected, wasn’t willing to let someone with Jarrod’s talent go just because he’d missed a couple of practices—and he was earning his keep, with two no-hitters already on his scorecard for the season.

  Sometimes, during breaks between classes, Jarrod would lean against the locker next to mine as I put books away or got out new ones, and he’d reach over to hold my door open, wanting to be near me. Before, I probably would have flinched, worried that he’d give us away. But now I’d just close my locker and lean back against it with him, our shoulders touching, watching everyone going by like a parade that didn’t know it was a parade.