It had been a reckless mistake to spout her life history into this reel-to-reel and to watch her anxiety-stricken films and go tromping around willy-nilly in her past with such abandon. Something had come unstuck—some psychic retaining wall, if there were such a thing. After Will had shown her that note he’d found (had he made it himself to scare her?), her memory became impossible to corral, turning again and again toward the past like a crippled airliner spiraling to the ground.
Before the images overwhelmed her, Diane removed her goggles and found she had been struck blind. Panic clamped her chest. She ground her fists into her eyes but still they failed her. It wasn’t until she saw some sunlight leaking from behind her thick bedroom curtain that she knew the lightbulb had died. She fished around in her drawer for a flashlight and snapped it on.
Will had claimed that note was a prank, but why would he have accused her of writing it with such outrage? And there was something more troublesome about it. Turmoil. Such a strange word to choose. The kind of overwrought word Charlie would copy down from his dictionary to use after their great escape from Thunder Bay. Also, the printing itself had reminded her of the cryptic instructions Whalen would slip into the vents of her locker to schedule their secret meetings.
She went downstairs and found that Will had left. She made tea and took up her guitar to calm herself, but it lay dead in her arms. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t sustain any fingerpicking pattern for more than a few bars, so she put it down.
The house had seen better days: plants choking of thirst in their pots, underwear she’d washed in the tub dangling from the pothanger in the kitchen to dry. With most of the lightbulbs on the main floor out, too, and no Will around to change them, she’d been moving lamps from room to room, plugging them in with dish gloves on. The house had assumed the particular disheveled sadness she’d always associated with closed amusement parks.
This house. What would Arthur think of it? Unremarkable, she could already hear him say. Though she never told him, she hated architecture. Of course she didn’t hate buildings—how could you, especially if you’re a shut-in—it was more that she hated the everywhereness of architecture. That, like a labyrinth, it could never be escaped. That she must sleep and eat and raise her child within it. The very definition of oppressive.
Diane took a nectarine from the fruit bowl and began paring it with a knife, lifting the wedges of fruit from its edge with her lips. Then she realized the dangerousness of what she was doing and locked the knife in the drawer. She pulled back her elastic and snapped it soundly, the pain only further agitating her.
Who was she kidding? She’d never make it to that retrospective. She couldn’t even sit in the dark alone for a while without terrifying herself. They’d have to find another caged curiosity to trot out. She walked to the kitchen counter and crumpled the NFB director’s letter and dropped it in the trash. She would’ve burned it had the thought of fire not caught her breath and set her hands tingling.
She returned to her bedroom with a new table lamp but couldn’t yet dare to plug it in, even with her dish gloves on. She couldn’t risk another panic. She got under the covers and read by flashlight—as she had all those nights as a girl—and silently decreed her five pageturner limit hereby null and void. If the Relaxation Sessions had stopped working, these silly books were the only barricade left between her and ruin.
But after she’d read her eyes dry and sore, and her mind dipped toward sleep, a memory knifed up from the past: the bang that had lifted her from this same bed long ago. An apocalyptic sound she later learned was heard as far as fifty miles outside Thunder Bay. Diane took her father’s old truck, her bare feet on the rough pedals, over the tracks and down to the harbor. Men arrived in coats over their nightclothes, leading her to the loading bay, where an overturned railcar had dropped to its side, a thick support cable lying sheared and slack near a good quantity of spilled oil—she hadn’t known it was blood until she saw the way the others avoided it. A search of the area was conducted, men with naphtha lanterns slicing the dark, projecting the shadows of giants onto the towering concrete of Pool 6. After a few hours, in the very same water from which they’d pulled Theodore years previous, one of the men spotted something that belonged more to the lake than to the land. The men had no idea how it got there, with wounds too mortal to carry itself. She helped them drag twine nets through the harbor throughout the night, but her brother was never recovered in his entirety. Though Charlie and Whalen were the same size, had the same haircuts, and had worn the same canvas coveralls, and though the body was shredded by the frayed cable’s whip, the face a ruin, it was the terrible confirmation of Charlie’s fate—the expectedness of it—that convinced her that night of exactly who she’d lost. She knew her brother never would abandon her to the world if he could help it—a loyalty she never would’ve expected from Whalen.
Yet what drove her panic today wasn’t that her brother had died at the elevators, just as her father did, or that her mother died a young woman. It was that anyone did. Anywhere. That tragedy made no distinction. That it claimed equally those who invited it and those who didn’t. Those treasured, and those ignored. That there was no protection, no spell. It knew every face. Every address. That doom, as Emily Dickinson wrote, was a house without a door.
She knew she was supposed to be optimistic, was expected to hope, that hope was a mother’s great gift, and that she was betraying Will’s bright future if she could not accomplish this most basic self-deception. But what she felt was the opposite of hope. It was only a matter of time before he would break his little bones. Before he would become drunk, diseased, delirious, deranged, and one day—whether she was around to see it or not—he would become like Charlie: only parts of himself, undone.
If only there were some way to teach him that everything is lethal. That injury, sickness, calamity, death—these things follow us like a white moon whipping in the trees beside the highway. And that it is more insane to forget this, even for a second, than it is to remember.
17
That night in New York, Will shot up in his cot, his heart kicking like a bronco.
Grain dust.
It had been a week since he’d confronted his mother with the dusty boots and she’d said his grandfather and uncle were always covered with it from working at the elevator. It must’ve been what the Wheezing Man had left on Will’s coat after he grabbed him.
“I can’t believe we were so stupid,” Will said to a drowsy Jonah after he’d phoned and had Enoch rouse him from bed. “Everything points to the elevators. The boots. The dust. Plus the creek runs from where Marcus went missing right down the hill and empties into the lake exactly where the elevators are. The Butler must be using the creek to get around the city undetected.”
“The harborfront is the only place we didn’t search,” said Jonah.
“Maybe Marcus is hiding in one of those abandoned buildings down there. Or the Wheezing Man.”
“Or maybe the Butler is,” Jonah said sleepily. “But fine, we’ll take a look. We might find a dry place we can skate when winter comes.”
The next morning Will filled a pop bottle with tap water and dropped it into a backpack. Next, he went to Paris and retrieved the secret key from the top of the doorframe that he didn’t know about and unlocked the knife drawer. The selection was limited, but he took the wickedest-looking blade, a long serrated thing with a blunt tip that his mother used to slice her fresh loaves, and stuffed it into his hoodie.
“Is everything still okay, Will?” asked his mother as he was pulling on his skateboard shoes. She was in her bathrobe, her toenails long as teaspoons. Like half-buried jewels, her eyes had fallen deeper in their sockets during the past few days that they hadn’t been talking. “I’m worried about you,” she said.
“Imagine that,” he said, hitching his laces tight.
“You’re always in such a hurry these days. And that note, I just hope you and Jonah aren’t in danger—”
“Everyone
’s always in danger,” he interrupted while fixing his pants cuffs. The way they met his shoes had recently assumed great significance to him.
“Sure,” she said, retying the sash of her robe as though trying to cinch herself calm, “but are you in more danger than normal?”
“Are you in danger, Mom?” he said, standing. “Right now?”
She frowned. “That’s not fair,” she said. Her face melted, and she began to drip tears, again.
“Sure it is,” he said, willing himself to stone.
“I don’t know how worried I should be. Can you at least tell me that?” she said.
“I’ve got it under control,” Will said, flinging open the door.
“Being anonymously threatened is under control?”
“Better than you’re doing,” he said. “You don’t know who’s threatening you either.”
She went to say something angry but turned her head slightly to the side and shut her eyes. “You’re just … never home anymore, honey. I miss you. I miss watching you paint. I miss your voice in the house.”
Looking into her eyes that were green and bright as alarm clock digits, her yellow hair over the neat cockles of her ears, he felt the old Inside parts of him soften for a moment and ached suddenly for her to enfold him. “I miss you too,” he conceded.
“You’re growing up so fast,” she said, putting her cool hand on his cheek. “It’s like you don’t need me anymore. We used to take such good care of each other.”
Will felt these words bulldoze his heart, and he shut the door and fell into her arms with a great heaviness, a feeling not unlike when he used to stay in the tub in Venice until all the water had drained out, leaving him heavy, sedated, and blissful, as if he’d narrowly survived a drowning. They lowered themselves to the floor, coming to rest side by side against the wall. He tried to breathe again in the old way, in exact synchronization with her, but because his lungs had grown Outside, matching her breaths didn’t spin his head like it used to. How could he explain now that even though boys could trip and punch you, and wolves could feast upon your flesh, and blood could gush from your body and bounce on the ice, and some kids didn’t even have parents to worry about them, and a boy could disappear from the world and nobody would care, Marcus had been right—the Outside wasn’t all that dangerous. It was worth leaving for, if only to see it up close and to make a friend for a short while.
They sat like that for a spell. Then he rose, kissed the top of her head, threw his backpack over his shoulder, took up his skateboard, and again walked out the door. He was already late.
18
Will met Jonah in the parking lot of the hockey arena, amid the throngs of fathers shouldering corpse-heavy bags of gear and calling their sons “Buddy” while leading them inside.
“You’re going to roll around with that in your waistband?” Jonah said when Will covertly displayed the serrated knife he’d brought for protection.
“Good point,” Will said. He wrapped the knife in his sweatshirt and stuck the bundle in his backpack along with his amethyst and the Neverclear map.
As they started out, Jonah turned inexplicably angry. “What’re you going to do with that knife anyway? You think Marcus got kidnapped by a loaf of French bread? All kinds of things took Marcus,” he yelled over the cacophony of their wheels as they began bombing a hill. “None of them you can stab.”
Downtown, the fall cold had herded everyone inside the taverns, leaving the sidewalks barren. After kickflipping perfectly up the curb of a closed gas station and then improvising a magnificent ollie over an overturned trashcan, Jonah’s rage seemed to dissipate, or at least resubmerge. “I could see if my brothers could get us a hunting rifle,” Jonah said. Will liked the idea but figured it would be difficult to carry inconspicuously. Will asked Jonah if you could saw a rifle off like a shotgun and Jonah said he didn’t think so. “Maybe we’ll hold off for a while,” Will said.
The waterfront itself was the only section of the city they hadn’t searched by skateboard because it was all condemned industrial land, just broken concrete strewn with junk and rubble, impassable for their wheels. With boards in hand they crossed the tracks and discovered a deer path through a tough thicket of fireweed and brambles. They passed a rusting washer-and-dryer set that stank of putrid water, then followed a tangle of lesser rail tracks that ducked through a fence into a junkyard.
Hidden amid the landscape of discarded trucks and train cars and garbage were a few shacks and lean-tos, less sturdily built than Marcus’s had been, constructed mostly of derelict metal, plastic sheeting, and wood scrap. Two men were sitting near a steaming paint can hung over a smoky fire, one of them armless, the other weeping like a child while holding a tiny radio to his ear. The boys sighted some wolves or dogs—again they weren’t sure which—stalking the doorway of a distant burned-out shed across the yard, and Will’s heart ricocheted around in his chest while he cursed himself for forgetting to apply his deodorant that morning. But the wolves seemed otherwise occupied or at least didn’t catch his scent.
“So you think the Butler hides out down here?” Will asked, hiding his trembling hands in his pockets.
“My brothers said he’s rich, lives in a log mansion near the border. But he comes down to load Neverclear on trains and the occasional boat. So what exactly are we looking for, then? A big cage with Marcus’s name on it?”
“Anything,” said Will, scanning the bleak moonscape. “Everything.”
Soon they arrived at the foot of the largest of the elevators, twelve enormous concrete cylinders stood on end, all fused together like a pipe organ or a clutch of giant shotgun shells. Attached to the cylinders rose a towering structure connected by a bridge, looming two hundred feet overhead, high as the castles of Will’s encyclopedias. Painted on the side of the desolate structure in enormous flaking white lettering: SASKATCHEWAN WHEAT POOL 6.
“Hey!” Will exclaimed, “I think the Wheezing Man said something about ‘swimming in pool six’ when he grabbed me that night.”
“Okay,” Jonah said, craning his neck upwards. “We’ll start here.”
After tracing the perimeter of the elevator, they found an unblocked entrance near a covered area where the tracks spanned over a massive steel grate amid some brutish, disused machinery. “This’s where they unloaded the grain, I think,” Will said.
Jonah walked out over a rusted metal grate. “No bottom,” he said, peering into the black beneath his feet, setting Will’s stomach aflutter.
Inside, the floor was heaped with something strangely soft underfoot like moss, sweet-smelling in an unsettling way. It wasn’t until Will heard the burbling of thousands of pigeons overhead that he realized it was a carpet of droppings. Giant concrete pillars suspended a vaulted ceiling that sprouted with various mechanisms, sheltering their nests, while, below, a battlefield of metal scrap was scattered on the floor, all of it rusting, as if a great demolition derby had taken place long before either of them was born.
Everywhere was the smell of bricks, oil, metal, and wood, coupled with the stench of spilled beer dried to stickiness. They investigated a few doorways—control room, bathroom, locker room—and the instant they stepped inside, a hundred pigeons whooshed upward like dirty phoenixes to the closest smashed-out window. In these secluded nooks Will spotted half-busted bottles of fortified wine and malt liquor, a few limp mattresses that stunk of Neverclear, scattered with rank morsels of food.
Pressing deeper, climbing over broken-down doors, through ribbons of metal and wire, around open grain chutes in the floor that disappeared into nothing, the boys came upon a set of foursquare wrought iron stairs leading upward, high enough to vanish. Sunlight slashed through the shattered windows of the stairwell, illuminating rusted vents and hundreds of galvanized pipes that snaked about like a jungle canopy made of dead iron.
“Why did they have to build this thing so big?” said Jonah. “It’s like a demented cathedral.” As Will agreed, there came the sound of heavy footst
eps on the stairs.
Will froze, as though the embodiment of the Black Lagoon itself was at this very moment cascading down toward him like a herd of demonic horses. Then a hard tug on his shirtsleeve as Jonah dragged him into a crouch behind a large overturned table.
“Think he was telling the truth?” They heard a gruff voice echo through the staircase. “That he did what you told him?”
“Who can say,” came another, softer voice, enunciating like someone interviewed on television. “But I truly regretted that. Unfortunately, words really aren’t much use with old Corpsey.”
“Maybe another of those kids has it? Like the one who left his helmet?” the other voice said. “I checked the phone book for that name like you asked and came up empty. But I bet Corpsey knows where he is. So why’s he protecting them?”
“He’s got a soft spot for the younger set, it seems,” the soft voice said with a sigh. “Corpsey used to be such a good resource. But I’m afraid he’s overshot his expiry date.”
When they passed, the pungent smell of Neverclear wafted behind them. Will riskily peered at their backs and could make out a short bald man, accompanied by a slender one, white hair, at least a foot taller.
“Were you able to see their boots?” said Jonah after they were gone.
“There was too much bird shit on the floor,” said Will. “But that was definitely the Bald Man from the schoolyard. And my guess would be the other was the Butler.”
The boys made their way to the stairs. After the shot of adrenaline and the stair climbing, Will’s heart seemed to gear down into an unstable and dangerous cadence. Exhaustion soon tugged his face into a grimace, The one who left his helmet replaying in his mind mercilessly. They must’ve looked up Cardiel in the phone book, but of course his mother kept their number unlisted. Will’s stomach contorted, and he drove back tears as they crested the stairs and emerged into an enormous chamber that contained more droppings and disused machines. Huge windows lined the walls, providing a view of what seemed the entire world. Over the braying wind Will heard a groan and then a choked wail, halfway between a laugh and a shout.
If I Fall, If I Die Page 20
