If I Fall, If I Die

by Michael Christie

  “And may I introduce Will Cardiel,” said Mr. Miller when the announcements concluded. “Will comes to us from …” He scanned down his sheet. “Where do you come to us from, Will?”

  “Home,” he said, and the man jumped. Will realized instantly he’d yelled it. He had no clue how loud he needed to talk in this big Inside for so many people to hear him, how to make enough sound to feed all those ears.

  “No, I mean which school,” Mr. Miller asked while folding his arms.

  “Oh,” said Will, in what he realized was a whisper. Kids were torqued in their desks, and Will hoped they could make out the forehead scar Marcus gave him enough to admire it. That morning, his mother had cautioned him on revealing too much to Outside people about their living situation. “Um, you wouldn’t know it,” he said, juicing his memory for places he knew about. “It’s in San Francisco.” This conjured an image of him cuddling with his mother in their bed, and just as quickly he drove it from his mind for fear everyone could tell.

  “Well, well. All the way to old Thunder Bay from Californ-I-A. Aren’t we lucky,” replied Mr. Miller. “Why don’t you say a little about yourself?”

  Will was unsure if he was allowed to stand, but talking loudly while seated would feel gross in his belly, so he tried to rise and rammed his kneecap into the metal bar that fixed seat to desk. He lurched to the other side and managed to get upright.

  He considered reciting a poem, something his mother taught him by this woman she liked named Emily something. Yet like a burglar in a vacant house, Will’s mind found nothing to grab and commenced tearing the place up.

  “Whenever you’re ready,” Mr. Miller said.

  Desperately Will unearthed from his pocket the masterpiece blueprint he’d drawn of his ideal school. She’d called it visualization and said it helped with stressful situations. “But I’m not stressed, Mom,” he replied, to which she knowingly said, “Not yet.”

  Will heard himself describe the blueprint’s features, holding it high so all could get a look, especially at its extensive legend, which curved because he’d run out of space at the edge. Mr. Miller was holding a ton of air in his chest as though about to cough. Will raced to sufficiently describe the varying depths of the indoor wave pool he’d included.

  “—Okay, Will,” interrupted Mr. Miller.

  “Okay?” Will said. He hadn’t even described the sniper tower yet.

  “Very creative, great, and we’ve plenty to get through today.” Mr. Miller turned and padded in soft shoes over to his desk as Will’s classmates smirked into their laps, shoulders bucking.

  “How about I drink chocolate milk out of your skull?” Will said to his teacher, but only in his mind, with black acid foaming in his chest and a hateful heat over him like a hood. Will vowed to burn the blueprint but knew he couldn’t do it publicly, which would be the incident’s perfect comedic conclusion.

  Mr. Miller then commenced a speech about something called the Canadian Shield, which wasn’t at all an energy force that protected the entire Outside from alien attack. Will quickly lost track of the speech, instead imagining a shield erected over his house, sheltering it from both meteors and the Black Lagoon. When the bell rang, children launched from their desks like pieces of toast. Will retrieved his coat and followed them Outside. He stood for a while near the doors—the sky huge and ruffled with high cloud—awaiting further instruction. There was only one teacher, a pallid middle-aged woman in a wool beret, covertly smoking behind a playground structure. He stood near her until she shot him an uncomfortable smile, stepped on her cigarette, and walked off across the grounds.

  Boys from his class swarmed the rough tennis court, where a road hockey game congealed around an orange ball that sounded hard as ceramic. Will stood at the chain link, unseen, imagining it wasn’t because nobody cared about him but because the visible part of him was still Inside and would soon catch up. Then some retarded kids led by another teacher walked past, all wearing Helmets, and Will tried not to think about what cruel comparisons the hockey players would draw if they ever found out he’d only just yesterday stopped wearing his own at home.

  Now Will turned from the fence and stood near the doors, where some toddlers trotted in figure eights, screaming at some pretend disaster. Because his house was his way of measuring time, a giant sundial they lived inside, without it Will felt like he’d been at school for weeks. He’d expected more people for him to befriend here, not less, and he wondered if this achy sensation at the back of his skull was what people called loneliness and how long it would last. Already he missed the crisp thwack of his mother turning pages in her reading chair, the jet-engine scream of her morning vacuum, how they tangoed expertly around each other through the hall of London.

  With still no sign of Marcus or his gang, Will reached into his pocket and retrieved the amethyst. He had to resist the urge to smash it into his forehead in exactly the same spot, in the hope the wound would become a beacon that drew Marcus to him, and he’d invite Will into his pack and teach him how to survive the Outside.

  Back in class, Mr. Miller’s speech was almost the same, but this time it was called history. To sum up: the French and the English and the Indians all fought bitter battles when Canada wasn’t even Canada, and the Indians didn’t win much, no matter whose side they took. Then came lunch. Will ate his slow-cooked vegetarian chili silently in the sunless lunchroom. Afterwards he was shooed out for yet another recess, depressingly identical to the first, except for when an excited girl sidled up beside him.

  “Hey kid, I’m Angela Gallo,” she said.

  When he told her his name, she asked him where he lived.

  “Just down the hill,” he said. “How about you?”

  “County Park.”

  Already he could feel the schoolyard gaze turn upon them. His only other conversation with a girl was long ago, when two pretty Girl Guides came to his door bearing boxes of chalky cookies. After sampling them, Will suggested they try his mother’s recipe for the cookies she made in the breadmaker, but they left in a huff. This Angela looked nothing like those girls or his mother. She had overlarge eyes that didn’t properly close, flat black hair, and teeth that fanned out like a magician’s fingers casting a spell. But the ache in his skull was gone, and there was some faint slippery sound in her voice that he enjoyed, so he kept talking.

  “County Park’s through the culvert,” said Will, proud of his growing Outside knowledge.

  “No shit, Sherlock,” she said, then, pointing to his forehead, “How did you get that?”

  “I fell in the creek,” he lied.

  “Huh. Why are you so white?”

  “White?”

  “Your skin? It looks like skim milk.”

  “I don’t really know what—”

  “Here’s the deal, Will. I know you didn’t move from San Francisco or whatever. My brother was your paperboy, and your mom paid him to play LEGO with you.”

  Suddenly Will had a dead porcupine in his throat and a burning under his scalp. He turned to flee, but she grabbed him by the shoulders and spun him around.

  “Look, I don’t care about that,” she said. “But can you do me a favor?” Her eyelashes fluttered like the legs of an overturned beetle.

  “Okay?” he said, recovering.

  “Get me some stuff from the desk you’re in?”

  “Like what stuff?”

  “Oh, papers, but not books. I’m interested in artwork. Drawings.”

  “Isn’t it another kid’s desk?”

  “Duh.”

  “Jonah?”

  She rolled her eyes. “Yessss.” Will noticed that Angela ended all her sentences exhaustedly, as though she was about to faint.

  “Uh …,” he said, stalling. “Why isn’t he in school?”

  “There was a fire at his house.”

  “How did—”

  “People say he started it, but he didn’t!” she said with exasperation. “It’s because he’s Native. Even my dad says if you
build Indians a house, they’ll have burned it for firewood by noon the next day. Jonah’s brothers are actually criminals, but they didn’t do it either. It was an accident!”

  “Oh,” said Will, imagining his own house in flames, his mother sitting in a smoke-swirled chair, hair smoldering, content to burn. “Do you know a boy named Marcus who went missing?”

  “Yeah, his foster home is on my street. Marcus and Jonah used to skateboard together. But nobody ever knows where Marcus is. He’s always playing tricks and stealing things and running away. He’s nothing like Jonah, who’s the swee—”

  “—Marcus and Jonah are friends?” Will interrupted. “Would Jonah know where he is?”

  “No,” she said peevishly. “They don’t hang out together anymore for some reason. Maybe because Marcus hasn’t been to school for, like, years, and Jonah pulls straight As even though he’d rather die than ask Mr. Miller a question. Look, can you do it?”

  “Why don’t you just grab them yourself?” Will said.

  “Because people will see and he’ll know.”

  “Know what?”

  “That I’m basically in love with him?”

  “Isn’t that stealing? Like real stealing?” Will fought to differentiate this act from all the times Inside he’d hurriedly mashed brown sugar into butter and stuffed the blissful glob into his mouth before his mother checked up on him. “Why can’t you ask him?”

  “Oh, my god, he doesn’t talk!”

  “In class?”

  “No, he doesn’t talk. Ever. Look, can you do it or not?” She cocked her hips, tossing her hair even though it was too short to generate much movement.

  Will had the sudden notion that Angela was the only person other than his mother or Mr. Miller he was going to talk to all day. “I’ll see,” he said.

  After recess the teacher gave more senseless speeches and squiggled tired diagrams on the board in bleary gray chalk. The first day wasn’t even over, and Will had already jammed his frequency completely, like a stealth bomber to enemy radar. To bury time, Will discreetly picked through the desk and removed some papers. A pencil-drawn masterpiece of a skull. The feathery shading, the deep-sea depth of perspective, all done with such acuity to reality he was robbed of breath. It was miles better than any masterpiece he’d ever done or could do. He unleafed another: a perfectly rendered boy on a skateboard flying over a filthy dumpster. Then a less impressive one, what looked like a crudely drawn grid with a number of Xs on it. Will slipped them all into his backpack.

  After the bell rang, Angela cornered him in the hallway.

  “Did you get it?” she said.

  “This is all I found,” Will replied, holding up the grid, his least favorite, the one he couldn’t imagine Jonah would miss.

  “I love it,” she said, fawning wickedly, snapping the paper from his fingers and pressing it to her flat chest. “You’re the sweetest.”

  Studying the drawings later that night, Will knew each of Jonah Turtle’s masterpieces made his own resemble enormous unfunny jokes told with paint, all stacked in the basement, kept for posterior. He recalled how many his mother had sent off to galleries in real New York and Paris over the years and nearly imploded with embarrassment. He vowed to hide Jonah’s masterpieces from his mother. If she saw them, they’d shrivel, weaken, close over like his forehead, like all wounds when exposed to air. He made a promise to himself to return them to Jonah’s desk in a few days, but for now, their mystery, like all his adventures Outside, would remain his alone.

  Relaxation Time

  She always knew he would go to school, eventually, but she hoped he might be sufficiently gifted to skip all the schoolyard heartbreak, the punch-ups, the crushing report cards, the cruelties and disappointments and failures of life in a Thunder Bay public school—just leapfrog right into a good, safe university or fine arts program when he reached eighteen or so. Juilliard took homeschooled kids, didn’t they? As did Berkeley? It seemed like something they’d have to do, for ideology’s sake.

  But now, given Will’s curious nature, he’d soon be retrieving painful morsels of her past like a terrier with a mouse in its jaws. Though perhaps he wouldn’t? It was so long ago now, Thunder Bay so different, the hollow ghost of the mythic place she loved as a girl.

  She’d hoped it would be impossible to enroll Will so late, but the school secretary said classes were all running at half capacity for lack of students. In Diane’s youth, the schools had teemed with children, and she’d loved every dead wasted minute, only because school was slightly more stimulating than the tense drudgery of home life. Though eight-year-old Diane and Charlie weren’t exactly popular before their mother, Iola, had been struck by a delivery truck that lost its footing on the ice, afterwards the tragedy clung to them like grain dust to their father’s work coat. Their schoolmates began to claim the twins slept together, which they did, sometimes, especially in the blurry weeks after their mother’s funeral—a day Diane remembered only for the preposterousness of men weeping and the brass-buckled shoes on her feet—but of course not in that way. After Iola’s death, Charlie, who’d always been modest and mild mannered like their father, responded by dominating their classroom. He thrust his lightning-quick arm at each of the teacher’s questions like the reigning champion of a high-stakes American quiz show. He found numerous addition errors in the scoring of his tests, about which he was outraged. Always a thin, bookish boy, Charlie took up sports for the first time, but his asthma would leave him gasping, furious as a kicked beehive, the rage of competition and unaccustomed proximity to other boys often leading to shoving matches with opposing players. Diane remembered how their mother often sat up at night with Charlie, rubbing mentholated ointment into his spasmodic back muscles with soothing words and songs to lessen his gasping panic and how, after she was gone, Diane would lie awake listening to her brother’s lonely struggle for air, afraid, unsure how to help him, alleviating her guilt by sketching horses under her covers by flashlight.

  On their daily walk home from school, Charlie soon began to fight recklessly with boys twice his size for comments about Diane that he once would’ve let whistle past or perhaps even laughed at himself. When he wasn’t fighting, he tightrope-walked the railing of the footbridge over the creek, stopping Diane’s heart. After dinner—now mostly small mountains of heavily buttered potatoes boiled by their father—he ceased watching their favorite programs and sat in a hardback chair to memorize the Oxford dictionary he’d found at the church thrift shop, a stack of recipe cards kept in his pocket for recording unusual words he fancied and pictured himself using to great effect in a courtroom someday. He badgered their father to buy expensive faux-gilded encyclopedia sets, even though there was no money for such things.

  When the twins were ten, their father rotated onto a new shift, and with no money for afterschool care, they were forced to walk to Pool 6, the grain elevator where their father worked, to wait until he got off at seven. They assumed the chore of bringing his supper in a tin bucket each night, his vegetables and meat mixing as they walked. With the bucket often frozen by the time they arrived, they’d set it to warm on a donkey engine still used to draw water from the lake. For dessert, Theodore ate two hardboiled eggs whole, unpeeled.

  Because of the twins’ loss, the men on their father’s shift never once bemoaned their presence in the workhouse, even though it meant curbing their swearing and nipping at bottles of grain alcohol on breaks. But soon Charlie hated the elevator even more resoundingly than he hated Thunder Bay and would skulk at a table in the corner like a boy doing penitentiary time, seething over his dictionary while Diane sat sketching, stealing glances to watch the men sip inky coffee as they discussed machines, the vagaries of international shipping, proper bin ventilation, the moisture content of grain, and dreams of summer fishing excursions on secret lakes. She heard them spin complex webs of loyalty and hatred, mostly based on accusations of effrontery, incompetency, or the worst accusation of all: laziness. The elevator workers we
re mainly sunburned Scotch-Irish or Ukrainian farm boys who’d taken one step up the supply chain or recent immigrants without a word of English that wasn’t a curse or a description of grain. Though their father never smoked, Theodore’s breath rattled, and he coughed up great whopping solids that he expelled from the window of their truck or into the sink. “Down the wrong pipe,” Theodore would say. “Man wasn’t born to breathe bread.” After years of grain dust exposure, most of the workers wheezed, and the older men’s eyes had hardened to something comparable to amber. Back at home, Charlie would bat the grain dust from his clothes before returning to school the next day, scolding Diane if, after her washing, any dust remained on the pair of Brooks Brothers oxford shirts he’d found miraculously in the thrift shop, shirts he wore alternately each day like sacred robes.

  Unlike many at the elevator, their father had a steady, even manner and never competed or quarreled with others at Pool 6. He loved the paintings of Breughel, often staying up late to leaf through the expensive art books their mother had once sold her baking every weekend to buy him, the only books in their home other than the telephone directory, Charlie’s dictionary, and Diane’s sketchbooks. He took neither coffee nor alcohol—only hot water from a thermos, which he claimed as Science’s greatest triumph. But from the workhouse the twins witnessed bare-knuckled fights and daredevil contests of every sort. Men jumping across dizzying spaces between grain bins and iron walkways a hundred feet in the air, balancing sharp pitchforks on their chins and timing reckless dodges through the jaws of the death-dealing machinery. For these reasons and others, Theodore forbade the twins to venture outside the workhouse. The harborfront was a dangerous nexus of furnaces, cables, factories, boilers, switching tracks, shipyards, and extreme cold that came in from the lake like a wraith, and he often spoke of Wheat Pool 5, an elevator that had exploded when its venting systems failed.