If I Fall, If I Die

by Michael Christie

  It took only ten minutes for him to realize he mostly distrusted nature: the wasted bits and pieces everywhere, the lewd odors, the imperfect edges, everything unfinished somehow, as though assembled hastily from what was lying around. Also, the ground was damp, and there was nowhere to nap if he got tired. He preferred the nature in books his mother had read him at bedtime: the ambulatory forests of Middle Earth, the sapphire bathwater seas of Jacques Cousteau. Still, he could sense the moose and bears and wolves in the woods that encircled their town, which she’d called Thunder Bay and that had always left her sullen to talk about.

  Will came to where the creek slowed and pooled. Water spiders flicked across the black surface, while insects of unimaginable variety cruised a foot above, each overcomplex as his wildest masterpieces of alien ships.

  He tightened the chin strap of his Helmet before placing his slipper on a wobbly rock at the shore and wondered how many Outside boys had already died doing exactly this. Hopping between some even more treacherous rocks, he decided to return later to stabilize them with smaller stones as a public service.

  Soon he came to a small bridge, where he climbed a purple-thistled embankment, emerging from the woods onto a street that cut over the water. Will stood with his toes on the curb for five minutes, looking left and right like someone at a tennis match until he found the courage to scurry across the road into a stand of pine.

  Again astride the creek, he knew he was nearing a highway because a shush-and-roar, roar-and-shush could be heard. Will wondered if he should be spooling out thread as he walked but settled on entrusting the neighborhood topography to his genius-powered memory. Sun seeped from behind a cloud and the creek lit like jewels poured down a flight of stairs. The highway, fenced off atop a berm, roared with logging trucks whisking whole forests away to Toronto, he figured, where his mother said he was born—to which he’d always jokingly replied, “Wasn’t it damp down there?” The creek ducked through a concrete tunnel beneath the highway; next to it a metal culvert was lodged in the berm, a passage for foot traffic.

  There he spotted some boys clustered around a large rock in an adjacent field of sun-crisped muskeg. They were tinkering with something, discussing it, intermittently guffawing. Will squinted, but the distance made him dizzy and he could not find Other Will in the wild blur.

  Will puzzled over something odd about the boys until he realized that none of them were wearing Helmets, and despite his dangerous lifestyle, neither had Other Will. Will grasped with shock that nobody in movies or any book he’d read had worn Helmets except warriors, people playing sports, and soldiers. Drawing a brave breath, Will reached up with pincered fingers to disengage the plastic clasp beneath his chin. The straps fell away from his cheeks as he brought his hands to his ears. He steeled himself, hoisting it from his head. A pleasing breeze kicked up in his hair, cooling the sweat that had dewed his brow thanks to his mother’s sweater. He set the Helmet behind a rock—noting where his mother had discreetly markered Cardiel inside the foam—and planned on retrieving it later.

  Will abandoned the path and crunched into some sword grass, half-enjoying the faint lacerations on his calves that he hoped wouldn’t bleed profusely. Closer, he could see the four boys were clad mostly in black and dark gray, their shirts like Other Will’s: pictures of zombies and fire, with writing in old-time fonts crafted of metal. They had long hair and resembled Vikings in a way that was as exciting as it was fearsome.

  “Hi, other kids,” said Will. “Are you making a masterpiece?”

  The boys turned briskly to regard him like deer to a rifle shot. All were still squinting as though they couldn’t hear well, while one busily enshrouded something on the rock with his jacket. They had a cooler, along with six or seven coils of garden hose, the bright green of a poisonous frog, stacked neatly behind them. Their skin was dark like Other Will’s, and a notion dropped into Will’s mind that these boys were Indians.

  “So what are you guys doing?” Will said, snapping the tension.

  “Do you have any money?” said a tall and gangly boy with an enormous bony Adam’s apple.

  “No,” Will said, ashamed. “I left our checkbook at home.”

  The tall boy nodded, as though this confirmed a universal expectation.

  “What’s through there?” asked Will, pointing his thumb over his shoulder to the culvert.

  “County Park,” said another, older than the others.

  “Oh,” Will said, wondering what park would have such an imposing entrance. “Are you guys friends with a boy named Will?” he said. “I gave him a garden hose just like those. We’re friends.”

  Trucks bellowed past on the highway, intermittently washing away the sound of the creek. “I don’t know anyone named Will,” said the tall one, his throat bucking.

  These Outside boys all spoke too slow and said too little, as though suffering from some collective hearing deficiency, perhaps brought on by the highway’s roar. At home, Will’s mother had cautioned him against rushing through his sentences, so he described Other Will loud and slow, his hair, his scars, his slingshot, highlighting the coincidence of their sharing a name, enunciating the way he did for foreign deliverymen.

  “Marcus didn’t steal anything from your stupid yard, so you’d better shut it,” the tall one barked.

  “No, no, I gave it to Other … I mean Marcus,” Will said, unable to grasp how his friend could possibly get his own name wrong.

  “It doesn’t matter because our friend Marcus left town a while back,” the tall one said. “So it couldn’t have been him.”

  “No, I think you guys may have a hearing problem. It wasn’t very long—”

  The tall one made a nauseated face. “That a joke, Will? You hurt my feelings,” he said, palm to heart.

  Will had only been officially Outside a short time and was stilled by the idea he’d already done another boy wrong. “I’m sorry—”

  “Hold this,” another boy with big ears said warmly, passing Will something, as though this little gift was the antidote to everything. Will turned the object in his hands. A ball of electrical tape. There was a small hole on top, and it was faintly warm like the biscuits his mother baked in the breadmaker. A ball for some sport, Will concluded.

  The other Twin—he saw now they were identical—began flicking matches from his thumb into the dry grass. Beside the cooler and the hoses were scissors and a heap of matchbooks. Though he adored fire—the unpredictable leap of heat, the way it whittled things down, the very thought of flaming arrows—Will had never lit a match before.

  The others were still watching the ball he was holding.

  “Look, I’m pretty good at art and building things and stuff,” Will said, wary of tooting his own horn, “so maybe I could help you guys out with—”

  “—Throw it in the bush!” the boy who’d handed him the ball yelled, half-laughing, staring at Will’s hand.

  “What?” said Will.

  “Shut up, Ritchie,” the big Twin said and Ritchie tightened his mouth.

  “Really, what?” Will repeated, keen to align himself with the joke.

  “Don’t worry,” the other Twin said, “he lit it an hour ago and it didn’t go off, so it’s probably definitely not going to.”

  Will squeezed the ball between finger and thumb. “This is, like, a bomb?” he said, half-serious, the smoking wasp-nest husk in his front yard returning to him now.

  “Just a little gunpowder and a thousand match heads,” the big Twin declared nonchalantly.

  Will shuddered. He whipped it to his feet and cringed backward. He would’ve picked it up to hurl it farther, but his muscles were locked. What would his hand be now had the bomb gone off? He remembered how forceful the bang Outside his house had been, how sharp and violent. Will pictured a plate of his mother’s slow-cooked spaghetti at the end of his arm and it only looked cartoonlike, silly.

  The boys broke into peals of unsmiling laughter.

  “I can’t believe you did that
to him!” the big Twin said, pushing Ritchie jovially.

  “You should punch him,” the smaller Twin advised Will.

  “You want to punch me?” Ritchie said. “I understand.”

  Will couldn’t fathom why Ritchie said that. But an understanding had grown in him that these boys did not say what they meant, a trait he’d only previously attributed to his mother, who claimed to be fine, even with tears boiling from her eyes.

  “I don’t want to punch anyone,” Will said thinly, having never struck anything in his life except snow globes with a hammer and pillow dummies with homemade nunchucks.

  “But he likes getting punched,” the small Twin said. “He thinks it’s funny.”

  “Funny?” Will said, relieved to arrive upon the oasis of a friendly word.

  “Look,” Ritchie said, drawing his hand back and whacking himself in the face, making a terrible cold-cut noise with his cheek. He unleashed a lush grin while the white flower of his handprint bloomed beside it.

  “Oh, man,” the previously silent boy groaned from behind them.

  “It’s okay, Will, punch me,” Ritchie said, almost tenderly.

  “I … won’t,” said Will.

  “You won’t, Will?” the big Twin said mock-sweetly.

  “You’re a megapussy,” the small Twin said.

  “Will you, Will?” the big Twin said, his face now lifeless.

  Will had never observed such false, indecipherable expressions on deliverymen, and it finally reached him now—he would not come through this safely.

  “I’ll punch you then, okay?” said Ritchie, stepping closer.

  Will’s breath went full Black Lagoon as his thoughts veered to the Helmet he’d left in the grass and now longed for on his head. Little good would it do, though—this boy would drill him square in the face, liquefying his nose—but at least he wouldn’t have shattered his head on a rock when he dropped.

  Ritchie swayed before him, fists clenched, while trucks stormed obliviously past on the highway. It came to Will that he’d never been more than thirty feet from his mother and tears crammed his eyes. When she Black Lagooned, Will could taste his mother’s fear if he rested his face in her neck, like tinfoil and salt. If dogs could smell fear, these boys were almost harvesting it from him. He’d spent his life designing weapons, staging intricate acts of toy-on-toy violence, but for this unfathomable injustice he was completely unprepared.

  Ritchie drew back his arm slowly, almost as though he’d never used it before.

  “He’s freaked, Ritchie. Do it,” the small Twin said excitedly.

  With his legs too sapped by Black Lagoon to be coaxed, Will shut his eyes and set his jaw. His only hope was that he would not die in an overly embarrassing manner that Marcus would hear about, wherever he was.

  “Walk away, kid,” the quiet boy said from behind them, and the others erupted in cheerful argument as Will turned on rubberized legs and made for the footpath, breath whirlwinding in his throat. Emerging from the woods, Will launched into a dangerous half run, half walk, his slippers flying off every ten steps until he settled on carrying them. His lungs shrank and his head swam with stars. He’d done plenty of exercise biking and had often run the loop around Paris-Cairo-London-Paris but had never jogged any straight distance in his life. He could so easily faint and smack his head on the sidewalk, and he cursed himself again for removing—and now abandoning—his Helmet. Coming up his street, he prayed he’d recognize their house from the front, but luckily it was the weekend, and theirs was the only one without a car in the driveway.

  He found her in London, pretending to straighten his masterpieces. Her face drained when she saw him doubled over on the porch, his head naked, his hair blown back, and—he realized too late—his forehead scab exposed. She caught him in her arms like a drowning woman would a life preserver.

  Relaxation Time

  Of course she’d read books. An entire shelf’s worth. Agoraphobia. That word. One thing to call it. She’d considered doctors, but that would only mean sedatives, psychotropic drugs, insulin treatments—each cure dropping her a rung lower. A psychiatrist would declare her overdevoted to Will. She needed more relationships. Any relationships. Needed to grieve. Arthur. Her mother. Her father. Her brother. Needed hobbies. A career—that word she’d banished for so long. Get out more. Make another film. Go snowshoeing. Play bridge. Friends. Men. But the truth was she wanted less. Less world. Less talk. Fewer demands. Less danger. More inside. More herself. More Will.

  So she’d tried alternative approaches. Visualization. Flooding. Skinnerian desensitization. A hundred ridiculous diets. She assembled an arsenal of complex breathing techniques to employ at key moments of panic, Olympian-worthy routines of reassurance and relaxation.

  None of it worked.

  Because here was the ruthless truth, a truth that had cornered her like an animal and would never free her from her cage: to fight panic is to panic.

  She’d succumbed to this law only after years of struggle and had been obeying it dutifully ever since. Because when something not only can’t be beaten but can’t even be fought without strengthening it, when something is so absolute and baseless and mechanical, like death, it can only be avoided, feared, ignored, sunk, buried, deliberately erased.

  So her revised goal became to prevent herself from falling too far—each day something to survive. And since it was thinking that tipped her into heart-pounding spirals, her strategy was to quell thinking altogether. She tried pills—Anafranil, Valium, Ativan, Xanax—but their unknowable clockwork of control only made her terror flare more intensely. She tried drinking, big sweaty magnums of white wine, even some of the old grain alcohol Charlie had left in the basement from his days at the elevators, but she worried about her liver, imagined her blood thinning in her veins. Besides, waking with a ringing head to a boy clamoring for cereal and a LEGO partner wasn’t exactly anxiety reducing.

  There were less intrusive methods. She traded coffee for black tea and read the entire Thunder Bay Tribune each day, circling typos she found with a red pen, a shockingly busy activity. She played guitar, sincere old folk songs that charmed her despite their cloying lyrics. Though she never stooped to daytime television, she allowed herself five page-turners per week. Mysteries, romances, spy thrillers—the trashier and more inane, the better. Sure, they were formulaic, wooden, predictable, but they sheltered her mind from itself like nothing else on earth: the softly buzzing pages and freedom from literary interpretation and ambiguity were a comfort. Something about the burning question of whether a person was to be found—whether for purposes of justice or marriage or revenge didn’t really matter—inoculated her from dread, at least temporarily. Really, the books were only a reason to sit and breathe long enough to watch the sun’s orchestral walk through the house from back to front.

  Another of her most durable strategies was watching Will paint (she’d tried it herself, but her mind feasted upon itself whenever she shut her eyes to visualize her subject). The way Will’s face tensed in concentration as his brush lisped over the canvas always soothed the spastic hive of her thoughts and left her spirit thick and warm. She’d once watched The 400 Blows with Arthur at the University Cinema in Toronto, which contained a shot of an audience of rapt children, mouths agape, watching either a puppet show or a magician—it escaped her now, but the image struck her then as the most beautiful ever put to film. Afterwards, when Arthur was filling a chipped mug with Calvados at his endearingly disheveled apartment, she arranged those children’s faces lovingly in her mind, and it was then, she later suspected, that her long-held commitment to childlessness was revoked.

  Along with her guitar and her books and Will’s creativity, she had other tricks to diminish the terror. An agoraphobia expert had suggested the wrist elastic in one of her mostly unhelpful Take Back Your Life!–style books. According to some suspect research, it snapped away catastrophic thoughts, like the arm of a clapboard dropped to end a frightening mental scene. And it did. Sort o
f. However, she suspected the benefits were mostly side effect: the sting brought a vague annoyance, and the repetition was addictive, which somehow deactivated her brain and held the volcano of fear at bay.

  Then last month she’d ordered this Relaxation Machine on a lark from the back of a magazine. Manufactured by a company called NeuroPeace Labs, it was advertised to quiet the mind and “restore cat-like balance to the consciousness.” She hadn’t expected miracles and chuckled at the ridiculous goggles when she first put them on, with their little lights inside like a toy robot. When she clamped the headphones over her ears and began the Session, however, instantly she unstuck from herself and swam out into the bliss of mental oblivion, her mind light and empty as a balloon tied to a child’s wrist.

  She’d used it every day since and had found the ambient whine of fright in her life greatly reduced. But lately, however, long-sunk memories and unwanted recollections had been intruding upon her Sessions, like water seeping into a hole she was digging with her hands. Even with the volume up to a white roar and the lights set at a dizzying strobe, she couldn’t entirely flush the intruders from her mind. What had eased things slightly was using her old reel-to-reel to record herself describing the thoughts that came, in the hopes of turning them loose. Best of all, in the surf-racket of the headphones, she couldn’t even hear what she was saying, which was preferable. Much of the contents of her head she wanted little to do with. And maybe one day, when she could stand it, when she was stronger, less panic stricken, better, she would listen to these tapes, to this voice of hers that she’d couldn’t hear, to this stranger telling her own story to an empty room.