If I Fall, If I Die

by Michael Christie

  Will and his mother lived as indistinguishably from the house as its appliances and furniture, its lumber, drywall, and brick, dousing time with activities and art. Days were spacious and never-ending. Will painted masterpieces while she played guitar or thwacked paperback pages in her reading chair. They scoured flyers and transcribed codes for what they needed from catalogues—A, B, C, D … AA, BB, CC, DD—and the very same things materialized in the arms of deliverymen. Once, a teenager from the grocery store returned with a replacement egg for one he broke, pulling it from behind Will’s ear like a magic trick.

  Will signed their clipboards with a swashbuckling replica of his mother’s signature, and the deliverymen tousled his hair and asked why he wasn’t in school. “Home school,” his mother would say, bending around the corner from Paris in one of her threadbare, translucent tank tops, acting as if she hadn’t come to the door because she was cooking, not because she was afraid to touch the doorknob. “Lucky duck,” they’d say with a conspiratorial wink he knew was more for her, because she frowned.

  Will and his mother reigned over their private kingdom with the Black Lagoon as its border. It decreed where they could go, how deeply they could breathe, what shapes their thoughts could assume. It reminded them that the Outside world was dark, pitiless, futile, transpiring only in the windows, in their books and films, in the TV they seldom ignited, that there was no true world but their own. It was perfect.

  Until it wasn’t.

  In the weeks after his jaunt Outside, a clutch of nine minutes Will had rekindled over and over with perfect dives of fragrant memory, the house seemed infiltrated, altered, both unfamiliar and familiar, disgusting and comforting, like a wetsuit he’d been wearing for a year.

  Since then, Will could muster no desire to paint masterpieces or sculpt or even sketch during Relaxation Time. Maybe it was an attempt to emulate Other Will’s bravery, the way he moved through the ocean of the Outside as though he’d been born there, or maybe his spirit had infected Will somehow, emboldening him. But each day, as soon as the headphones were clamped over her ears and the glasses set over her eyes, Will would descend into Toronto to satisfy a new hunger.

  His first Destructivity Experiment involved the G.I. Joe figures that had survived the great toy cull of a year previous, when his mother solemnly phoned the Salvation Army, and an annoyingly cheerful man came to cart Will’s childhood away. His mother had already loathed ordering the ammunition-laden figures in the first place. “We just got this stuff,” she said. “But that’s okay,” she added quickly. “You’re really developing lately.” Will wept when the man plucked his boxes from the foyer, all his soldiers finally sent off to die. “Killed by the Salvation Army,” he said later, and her laugh spat coffee on the table.

  Down in Toronto, with the windows open to vent fumes, he burned the remaining figures into napalm-attack survivors with a barbecue lighter he’d secretly ordered and hidden behind the furnace. They burbled above the flame as drools of plastic slipped from their arms, legs, and—when he’d built the nerve—their faces. They released a purple-black smoke that stuck in his nostrils and pushed his head into somersaults. He shaped the little corpses with popsicle sticks, sculpting mutants, severing their elastics, and undoing the screws that bound their bodies, reassembling them in unholy configurations. Next he managed to start the ancient lawnmower and ran them over, flinging the soldiers across the unfinished basement, leaving gory gashes in their already mangled appendages.

  After a month of Experiments, Will had amassed a plethora of important Destructivity data:

  • You can smash a snow globe with a ball-peen hammer and be disappointed that the glass is actually plastic and the snow actually ground-up Styrofoam.

  • You can laminate anything by winding it in plastic wrap before a five-minute tumble on Cotton in the dryer.

  • You can microwave a lightbulb for nearly twenty beautiful seconds as it turns in there like a pink comet before it finally goes supernova.

  • You can safely remove your Helmet and whack your head repeatedly on the drywall, weaving an orange velvet into your vision, before you manage to leave a dent.

  • You can cover a wall dent by hanging a masterpiece over it and claiming that you need the work at eye level to properly appreciate it.

  • You can simulate immortality by sticking a rubberhandled flathead screwdriver directly into the outlet and only trip a breaker.

  • You can ride the laundry basket down the carpeted stairs like a mine cart four times until it catches and ejects you to the bottom, where you strike your elbow and it swells red as a hot-water bottle.

  • You can safely light the fluff on your sweatpants with a barbecue lighter and send flame rolling over your legs like poured blue water, leaving a crispy black stubble.

  • You can halt a fan if you thrust your hand into the blades bravely—only when you hesitate will your knuckles be rapped.

  • You can stick the chilly steel tube of the vacuum to your belly and generate a hideous yet painless bruise, and these pulsating circles when placed carefully can form an Olympic symbol that lasts well into a second week.

  Of course his mother’s catching wind of any of this would mean a cataclysmic Black Lagoon. But she didn’t. Like Will, she was a genius, yet she was also naive. Because everything wasn’t only making. When he was a little boy, Will’s mother urged him to paint masterpieces of trees, houses, and doe-eyed animals, and then it was impressionistic splatters and loosely patterned blocks of color. But he knew now it had all been meaningless. In his true heart he’d rather draw a fight, a war, a chemical spill pulling the flesh from the bones of the villagers. He torched bugs by magnifying the noon sun that throbbed through the window in Cairo, not because he enjoyed pain, but to witness what would happen, to grasp it. And what was the difference between making something and making it come apart? Painting a masterpiece was also destroying a canvas, sculpting was wrecking a good rock, drawing dulling a good pencil forever.

  Even though his Destructivity Experiments charged him with daring, he still couldn’t bear to sleep alone in New York—which was supposed to be his bedroom, though he used it as a studio. A single bed would be like a house without a furnace, a body without blood, and without the clean whoosh of her breathing beside him, Will could never settle.

  After her Sessions she baked him fresh bread in the breadmaker, read page-turners, or strummed folk songs, her small, white-tendoned hand flexed at the guitar’s neck, always seeming too small to corral the thick strings. For someone afraid of everything, she was most fearsome on the stool at the counter in Paris, the stretchy phone cord coiled around her thin arms, where she’d arrange the week’s complex schedule of deliveries. Sometimes, when arguing about an overcharge or when met with an outsized incompetence, she’d hold the receiver away from her face and stare at it, her dark eyebrows flexed in disbelief, as though the object itself had betrayed her.

  But even when the deliveries went smoothly and Will didn’t have accidents, there still remained Black Lagoon traces in everything she did. If he said “Mom” as a leadoff to something, she’d instantly answer “Yes?” stricken with alarm, as if he were about to inform her of their recent death sentence.

  He knew the textures and temperaments of their house just as intimately as he did hers. She’d archived his detailed architectural blueprints along with his masterpieces in Toronto. They’d always called the kitchen Paris, his studio New York, their bedroom San Francisco, the living room Cairo. She told him it had been his idea when he was young, yet he couldn’t remember having it. He did recall that she’d insisted on naming the basement Toronto, which seemed to please her, maybe because that’s where she’d grown up, even if the Black Lagoon never allowed her down there. Will did the laundry and fetched arm-numbing frozen loaves of her bread from the deep freeze.

  Sometimes other rooms would temporarily close off to her. She’d avoid one for as long as a month, take the long way around. Will loved when this was Par
is, because they’d be forced to order in, and he could talk her into off-limit, choke-prone foods like pizza or Chinese. When it was San Francisco, Will would pick her outfits from her closet, mostly shift dresses she’d crudely sewn or floral tank tops and elastic-waisted jeans, and they’d sleep on the couches in Cairo and wake in a whirlpool of sun from the big window. Luckily it was never the bathroom, called Venice, because she couldn’t pee in the sink, as Will did sometimes as an Experiment, because even though she was a mother, she had a vagina, which couldn’t aim. Then, inexplicably as seasons changing, the Black Lagoon would relent, and she’d return to the foreclosed room as though nothing had happened.

  Still, the Black Lagoon would never surrender the Outside. Will sometimes pictured their house surrounded by crackling electric fences and froth-mouthed Dobermans, sheer cliffs falling from their doorstep to an angry sea. Though he’d never been in a church, he imagined they shared similarities with their house: keeping certain things in and certain things out.

  After a day of Destructivity Experiments, Will would try to arrange himself casually on the couch, limbs flung loosely, face careless as a boy who’d never been Outside, who didn’t have a friend who fired slingshots and feared nothing, who wasn’t already changed forever and only felt counterfeit and hollow. Later, while crunching into a piece of toast he’d puttied with butter, a flavor he knew as well as that of his own saliva, he couldn’t suppress the creeping suspicion that staying home was somehow unnatural, something people didn’t do unless they were certified cloistered wing nuts like Ms. Havisham or Boo Radley—characters in long books she’d read him that she enjoyed more than he did. He’d always thought his mother was enacting something heroic, like a knight or a navy SEAL, but also something complicated, like how the Vikings had a woman-god called Frejya, who was the god of Love, War, and Beauty all at once, which throbbed his brain to think about.

  Everyone went Outside, Will concluded. Everyone leaves. That’s easy. Only true warriors and heroes could overcome this weakness, could fortify the stronghold, sit tight, wait it out. But now that he’d felt his gooseflesh stand in the Outside air; now that he’d tempered himself with the true danger and beauty of the backyard and gathered unforgettable data with his Destructivity Experiments; and now that the scab on his forehead had grown dark as beef jerky and started to chip at the edges, Will knew that even though he was her guardian and her only son and their blood was the very same crimson hue, he’d never be as strong as she was.

  4

  A week later, on a day he knew was Sunday because the newspaper came fatter, Will took the deepest breath of his eleven-year life.

  “I think I’m maybe going for a walk,” he said.

  “Sure, just let me rinse the blender,” she said running the sink, “and we’ll set up the Ye Olde Strolling Course around London—”

  “No,” he said.

  “—we could even paint some fresh scenery to put up, like Westminster Abbey or something—”

  “Mom.”

  “—I’ve got that nice crepe paper you didn’t use for your masterpieces—”

  “Outside.”

  His mother stopped rinsing, as if Zeus himself had pointed his lightning-powered remote control at her and pressed Pause.

  “Out? There?” she said, half-laughing while also breathing distastefully, as though the air itself had spoiled. He could already see the Black Lagoon looming behind her, like a train that had jumped its rails.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Out there.”

  She set the blender down carefully, as one would a set mousetrap, then braced the heels of her palms on the counter and threw her head back to examine the ceiling as though hunting for a fresco of helpful words painted there. Then she turned and leveled a pleading gaze, her cheeks lavender welts. “You don’t have a coat,” she said, a shrill warble to her voice.

  “It’s summer,” Will said, in his mind a vision of Other Will crashing into the woods shirtless and surviving fine.

  “Exactly!” she said lifting and dropping her arms as though he’d just agreed.

  They waited, a gunfighters’ silence between them, while her face pulsed, her mouth a razored line. Water sucked through the drain, and her green irises made small ticking motions as though they had second hands trapped inside each of them.

  “I’ll be fine.”

  “Will?” she said, her face gone suddenly raw and flabbergasted as a spanked child’s.

  She’d surprised him with his name. She never invoked it, because of course she was talking to him. The only time he ever encountered it was when he signed his masterpieces, and it always looked strange, both too insignificant and too grand. Will broke away and commenced readying himself for the journey, unsure what it all involved exactly.

  In the corner of his eye, her thin frame commenced juddering like a shuttle flaming into the atmosphere. She snapped her elastic a few times. Then a few more. This was how it started.

  Her phobias were numerous: lightning, fire, electricity, water, accidents, vehicles, animals, the Outside, people. Except it was worse than fear. When the Black Lagoon came, when its bear trap was sprung upon her heart, her eyes went swimmy and blotted with white noise like channel zero on TV. Her body vibrated, convulsed, and burst with sweat, before buckling as if miniature charges had detonated in each of her major joints. Will recalled a thunderstorm and power outage weeks back that had caused her to collapse and pant on the candlelit floor for an hour. But worst of all, during a major episode, it was as though she’d forgotten him completely, as though the Black Lagoon had evicted him entirely from her mind—and this was what terrified him most.

  Now she sat in a chair and entombed her face in her hands, silent tears ripping through her fingers and down her forearms. He felt the old rising of guilt, then beat it back. He ransacked himself for the true reason for publicly declaring this walk instead of just creeping out during Relaxation Time again, and all he could drum up was the word Adventure. It appeared in plenty of his books and upon the worn sleeves of his VHS movies, though he never lingered on it long enough to appraise its true meaning. He adored the sound of it, a thing to say with wide, mystified eyes. Anyway, it was only a walk. She had to allow it, if only because no forbiddance she could utter would not sound insane.

  As if she’d read his mind, his mother seemed to metabolize her fear into a kind of sad surrender, leaning on the drywall beside the closet, while he searched for a coat in the vortex of clothing and masterpiece materials. All he found were tiny jackets he’d long outgrown, goods they’d ordered and never unpackaged. When he extracted a pair of canvas shoes a third his size, he experienced a tattered memory of watching them shuffle and scrape along the scalding pavement of a big city.

  “These will work fine,” he said, pulling his slippers over his socks while she regarded his feet as one would twin ticking bombs. She followed him toward the landing.

  “Wait,” she said, pulling the oatmeal-hued sweater she’d knitted herself up over her head. He let her yank it down over his Helmet with a pop. Fully suited, he made his way to the door. She tried to follow but stalled a few feet back.

  “How about you go exploring like you used to in the basement?” she said, sleeve-wiping a few tears from her cheeks. “We’ll pretend I’m the Queen, and you can go forth, into the wilds, and report your discoveries back to me?”

  “Hmmm …,” he said. “Do I have to write anything?”

  “No, it can be an oral report.”

  “Is there a time limit for the speech?”

  “How about … one minute?”

  Will hated writing. But a spoken report wouldn’t be overly demanding, even if a minute was an eternity to talk uninterrupted. He snapped a salute and stood tall.

  “Do … do, you want to bring a snack—I mean supplies?” she asked shakily.

  “I just had a smoothie,” he said, reaching for the door handle. “Remember?”

  “Oh, you aren’t going out front?” she said, one of those suggestion
-questions that he’d only recently begun to classify.

  “Actually, I might go see what the creek looks like … not sure … I’ll figure it out,” he said, tacking on this final uncertainty to emphasize a notion he couldn’t put into words. He watched it reanimate something in her face—her eyes egg-soft in the middle.

  “But keep to our neighborhood, okay?” she said with a forced breeziness. “And be very, very careful near that creek.”

  “How do I look?” he asked when he was finally Outside, pirouetting in the white blare of sunlight.

  She peered through the doorway, still six feet back from the threshold, eyes flashing in the shadows like a burrowed animal. He’d never before looked on his mother from any distance, and it struck him now with a sudden force that she was beautiful. Her sharp chin, her coal-dark eyebrows and gilded hair that she cut herself by collecting a ponytail atop her head and shearing it crudely like a rope, hair that would sometimes channel morning sunshine from the window in Paris and turn so radiant to behold he could scarcely stand it.

  “You look good, honey,” she said, her mouth a tight tremble. “Bright.”

  He passed through the back hedge into the woods where Other Will had disappeared weeks earlier and gained his first glimpse of the creek that for years he’d heard from his window, feeble compared with the mighty river that roared through his imagination. Rusty-tinged water poured over gray rocks, jutting like foul teeth. After failing to spot any fish, Will decided to follow it upstream.

  From behind, the houses adjacent to his looked small and vulnerable, like the underbellies of turtles or someone with their glasses off. Their fences only extended so far, so he figured that keeping to the bank wasn’t trespassing.

  The air was fresh, exhilarating, dangerous as he remembered. A set of thin poplar lined the creek, their silver-dollar leaves whizzing in the breeze. Tiny birds zipped through the branches like paper airplanes with brains, and deadfall lurched with fluffy caterpillars and crunchy beetles. Reaching out into the bewildering distances for the first time, his eyes burned, and he was forced to lower them every few steps to rest them. Will plucked a waxy green leaf from a bush, stuck it in his mouth, and chewed, then gagged and spat the horrid, bitter mulch into the grass. Examining them now up close, Will decided he didn’t care much for trees. Too showy, too unruly, too large—things that had a shape and didn’t at the same time.