If I Fall, If I Die

by Michael Christie

  Something was dragging itself across the floor.

  “Hey,” Will said, approaching the heap cautiously. Rebar lay beside it, three pieces interlaced like pick-up sticks. A bearded man, barefoot in a dirty fur-lined parka, his thick jeans smattered with oil and mud, large lateral slashes in the fabric, the skin beneath a color past purple, before black.

  “Are you okay?” said Will.

  “Returning to the place. I spoke of that once,” the man whispered, his forehead pressed into pigeon droppings. The familiarity of his voice launched a flock of chills up Will’s spine.

  “Jonah, let’s go call an ambulance,” Will said, still unable to move.

  “No!” the man hissed with coals in his eyes, and both boys backed up. “This is an uncomfortable setting, Aurelius,” he said, twisting onto his back, sweeping the palms of his big-knuckled hands above him. “Those cruelties may revamp,” he added with a wheeze, then fought to rise, smearing more blood into his jeans.

  “Please don’t move,” said Will. “You’re bleeding.”

  The man chuckled. “The sound is perpetual. I’ve surrendered to it.”

  “Still bleeding, dude,” said Jonah. “You should get your legs elevated.”

  “I’ve surrendered to it,” he repeated, as though the middle syllable contained a special malevolence. By now the man had managed to stand, wobbly as a bear on a ball.

  “My quarters,” he said, eyes on Will.

  “What?” asked Will.

  “Sorry buddy, we don’t have any quarters for you,” said Jonah.

  “My quarters!” he howled, pointing his elbow at a door across the room. “Aurelius, invigorate your blood bank,” he said, now pointing at Will with a defocused expression.

  “I think he wants us to take him somewhere,” said Will.

  “He’s already there,” said Jonah.

  The man shambled forward, painting a bloody masterpiece of his progress on the concrete. He threw open a heavy door and lurched Outside. The boys followed cautiously through the doorway and onto the high platform they’d glimpsed from the ground.

  From this height Will could see all the way up the hill to his school and Grandview Gardens. Between this landing and the other tower was a rusted wrought-iron walkway and the man plodded out upon it. Will tested the bridge with his foot, trying not to see through its gaps.

  Jonah joined Will at his side. “So this guy wheezes like a busted vacuum and is not making too much sense. It’s him, right?” he said.

  Will nodded. “It’s the same voice. He’s got plenty of grain dust on him, but he’s not wearing the boots. We can follow hi—”

  “Will! This is crazy,” Jonah pleaded. “Maybe he deserved to get beat like that. Who knows? Let’s just go. This is plenty of information to offer up to your constable buddy. Or we could come back with my brothers and make him talk.”

  Will met Jonah’s eyes. “He could’ve broken my neck that night he grabbed me. But he didn’t. You heard the Bald Man himself say this guy was protecting kids. And he just said Aurelius. I remember my mom reading a book that was supposed to make her less scared of the world written by some emperor guy named Marcus Aurelius. What if the Wheezing Man thinks I’m Marcus? Or wants to lead us to him?”

  They watched the man continue over the bridge on wrecked legs to a faraway doorway, into which an immense black iron boiler was wedged, making the way impassable. He swung open the heavy door with a rusted wail. He stooped, then stuffed himself inside, fitting narrowly.

  “Come on, megapussy,” Will said, then bent his head, took the cold railing, and stepped out, without glancing back to see if his friend would follow. Frigid squalls launched themselves into his eyes, and the high, rusty bridge turned Will’s knees to gelatin. When he reached the boiler, he set his skateboard inside, then crawled through the soft ash and through the identical opening on the other side.

  He emerged, swatting ash flakes from his pants, into a grand room high above the harbor with huge windows and plank floors without an ounce of pigeon droppings. There was a scattering of old furniture and small rugs, a few plants. Judging by the large desk near the window and the shelving on the walls, it was probably once an office of some kind. No sign of garden hoses, or Marcus.

  By the time Jonah wrestled himself through, the man moaned and collapsed to the floor, clunking his head soundly on a table leg. Will hurried to his side. He pulled his sweatshirt from his bag, unrolled the knife, stuffed the shirt under the man’s head, then stashed the knife back in the bag. Will got a good view of him now, mid-thirties, except he looked older and younger at the same time, his long hair graying, the skin around his hollow eyes thin as lavender petals.

  “Those two men did this to you?” Will asked. “Was it because you’re protecting Marcus?”

  “You’re right, Aurelius. They’re unconglomerated,” he said with the hollow gaze of a man recently subject to an explosion. “But you’ll be tacking in the rip soon,” he continued as his teeth hissed and chattered. Then he coiled with a violent cough, his legs smearing blood like a gory snow angel.

  “Why’s he shivering so much?” said Will.

  “He’s in shock,” said Jonah. “Textbook. We need to keep him warm.”

  Will surveyed the room and spotted an old woodstove obscured by a stack of old books. “I’ll start a fire,” he said, scanning for matches and finding none, vowing to stuff his G.I. Joe–torching barbecue lighter in his backpack the next time he went Outside.

  “This castle!” the man belted loud, straining up with a gurgle, “is full of gas—the grain, rotting. You’ll sail us to the ether!”

  Will regarded Jonah quizzically, and he shrugged.

  “Okay!” said Will, nearly yelling in the man’s face, hoping to lodge the words in his brain through sheer volume. “Do you have any blankets!”

  “Abysmal,” the man said, cinching his eyes closed.

  Jonah found a heavy-duty sleeping bag on a mattress set atop some pallets. Rather than risk getting too close by attempting to shove the man in, Jonah unzipped the bag and draped it over him. Soon the pace of the man’s shivering slowed. Will cracked the water bottle he’d brought and set it beside him on the floor.

  “Will, will, will, will you find me again?” the man called with a strange tenderness. “Is that my voice?” he said. “I’ve been eating birds for so long—” Then he began to retch. Will held the bottle to his lips, allowing him a long, desperate slug.

  “Pththththththt …,” he said spraying the liquid broadly, aerosoling it in the sunlight. “Pestilence!” he shrieked.

  With this rebuke the man seemed to have burned up a final reserve. His wheezing slowed before slipping into something near sleep, a rest unsettled by winces of pain and his mouth’s own involuntary workings, emitting sounds halfway between word and dream.

  Jonah put his fingers over the man’s wrist, then lowered his ear near his mouth. “His vitals are fine,” he said. “But looks like we won’t be finding Marcus tonight.”

  They sat cross-legged beside the man, collecting themselves while monitoring the buzzy, tortured lift of his breathing and listening to the bleat of gulls and the rumble of the occasional train that ran without stopping through the yard far below. Through the window they could see dozens of birdfeeders made from old oilcans fixed outside the window to the concrete. The air was thick with the tang of rust, the funk of wharf, iron, and blood. Will knew about iron in blood because sometimes his mother had claimed hers was low and made them steak, slow-cooked for an ungodly duration until it became something closer to jellyfish. Before long the sun dipped behind the hill and the sky ignited orange. The man’s sweat had already soaked his sleeping bag like a dishrag.

  “I think we should stay the night,” said Will, cutting the silence.

  “You’re kidding,” Jonah said.

  “What if we come back tomorrow and he’s gone? We won’t be able to ask him about Marcus. Plus they hit him in the head, too, Jonah. You know concussions better
than I do. What if we leave and he doesn’t wake up?”

  Jonah regarded him seriously. “One thing I’ve learned is that there isn’t enough help in the world for some people.”

  “Come on, Doc, you don’t really believe that,” Will said. “Or are you planning on choosing all your patients?”

  “It’s called triage, Will, look it up,” Jonah said. “I want to be a family doctor,” he added, “not a mortician.”

  For a quiet minute the boys watched little birds flit in and out of the birdhouses, brimming with seed and grain. Will had once believed Jonah was fearless, but lately he’d detected in his friend a coastal shelf of fear sunk to a depth to which no person could hope to dive.

  “Please, Jonah?” Will said, trying not to sound pathetic like his mother at the door. “You didn’t have to tell me to walk away that day by the creek or jump on that wolf. But you risked yourself then. And Marcus did the same for you the night he went missing. This might be our only chance to save him. But I need you. I have this feeling that we’ll be safe as long as we’re together, that nothing can really hurt us.”

  “You’re sounding more like Marcus every day,” Jonah said shaking his head, half-smiling. Then he grimaced with disbelief at what he was about to agree to. “Won’t your mom be worried?” he said.

  Will laughed. “Naw, she’ll be fine,” he said.

  “Well I’m not crawling into one of those,” Jonah said, gesturing to the remaining sleeping bags on the mattress. He took a drag from an imaginary cigarette, then blew a puff of frost toward the ceiling. “We’ll need heat,” he said. “There’s plenty of burnable wood down there.”

  “But do you think what he said about the gas from the grain is real?” said Will. They both regarded the man again, his rough mouth hanging wide and loose, his skin papery with scars and caked grain dust.

  “I don’t think so,” said Jonah. “An elevator blew up down here like forever ago. But we’d know about it if it still happened.” The boys marched back downstairs and returned with an armload of scrap wood, Jonah passing it to Will through the boiler.

  “Maybe they haven’t blown up because nobody is in them, except people like him …,” said Will, thinking of his dead uncle Charlie as Jonah was loading the stove, cursing himself for not paying more attention to Mr. Miller’s history speeches.

  Jonah stood with his lighter held up in the air, thumb poised. “Ready?” he said.

  In an instant Will was looking at the match bomb Marcus had set off in his front yard, the life-changing bang that had started it all, and he realized now that if he’d learned anything, it was that the Outside was one gigantic Destructivity Experiment. “Do it.”

  Then came a raspy flick that made Will’s scalp prickle and his throat swell like a stepped-on balloon. Jonah waved the flame aloft and made the sound of a roaring crowd. “Thank you, Thunder Bay!” he said, then killed it with a quick puff.

  With the stove lit and the windows mostly intact, the room grew warm. For a while the boys talked in the glow of the small fire, mostly about skateboarding—tricks they were amassing the courage to try, legendary falls they’d withstood—in an effort to normalize the situation. Will knew that boys their age would default into a discussion of girls at these moments—a comparison of their respective kisses with Angela, perhaps—but this subject never arose between them. Lately at school, a few girls, weirdly entranced by the boys’ apartness, their withdrawal, their griminess and scars, had been slipping notes into their desks. Though sometimes just a glimpse of a girl’s velvety collarbone under her tank top strap was enough to force Will to tuck himself discreetly into the waistband of his pants, Will and Jonah tore the notes to bits. While Will retained a secret loyalty to Angela, having an actual girlfriend seemed an unjustifiable risk, if only because she could turn out like his mother.

  Before long, Jonah drifted off near the stove, his head propped by his skateboard and neatly folded jacket, his breath precise and easy. During the Wheezing Man’s patchy sleep and fugues of muttering incoherence, sometimes his eyes would bolt open and fix blankly upon Will as he called out strange names. He murmured of birds and ghosts, of cables and wires binding him, of ships and trains, of blood and water, of people being hurt, healed, and hurt again. Will lay there, remembering all the times he’d coached his mother down from the panicked summits of Mount Black Lagoon, the times he’d found her babbling on the floor in Venice, baffled with terror, her nightgown soaked in her own urine, and he detected the familiar tenor of her voice in the Wheezing Man’s raving, a sound that was oddly comforting. He thought then about his Outside life—how vividly he could conjure all that had happened so far, how at night his dreams were dazzling carnivals and his days lasted years—and felt so lucky that he nearly exploded. Even if his mother was right and the Outside was unthinkably dangerous, he was desperately in love with all of it.

  After a while, Will gave up on listening and let the man’s words flood over him. And as Will’s own eyes drooped, he felt as though he could be just as easily thinking these things himself, the man’s pained dreams tinting his own like paint upon his palette, now sitting so far away in New York.

  19

  The boys woke in the chilled morning, the Wheezing Man still chloroformed with sleep.

  They loaded the stove silently and lit it. Parched, they considered drinking from Will’s water bottle, the same one the man had sipped from and refused the previous night, but decided against it because of AIDS. Jonah stood watch while Will examined the man’s things but found nothing he could imagine had been Marcus’s.

  Eventually, his eyes shot open and he struggled upright. “I reckon I can commence smoking tobacco again,” he said when he noted the coals flickering in the stove. He tried to stand, then looked down at his legs and seemed surprised by them. “Some specter put a crushing on me a doctor wouldn’t forget,” he said.

  “It was the Butler who beat you,” Will said, approaching him cautiously. “Because you helped Marcus, and he thinks you know where he is, right?”

  Some kind of confusion took him when he saw Will’s face. He managed to nod.

  “Do you know where Marcus is now?” Will said, speaking slowly.

  The Wheezing Man shook his head. “Met Aurelius scurrying around this structure. Exploring, he termed it. Took a shining to him. Sheltered him for a spell. Gave him some tribulations. Hauling, shoveling. Paid him staunchly for it. One day he said he had a thing to accomplish. Promised to resurface before he set out. But since then been no word. No dissertation. Nothing,” he said before shutting his eyes and murmuring incoherently into his pillow.

  “So he could come back anytime?” Will said excitedly. “But what if the Butler finds you here? You’re helpless.”

  He shook his head. “Doesn’t survey this little dwelling. His wolves drop the scent over that bridge and the ashes in the boiler. That doesn’t mean you boys shouldn’t vacate.”

  “His bleeding has stopped. And he doesn’t have a concussion,” Jonah said.

  “Do you have food? If we leave you?” asked Will.

  The Wheezing Man glanced at the window near the birdfeeders. “I’ll do fine,” he said. “But what’d keep me propped up, boys, would be some unblighted for my substrates.”

  “Un … blighted?” said Will.

  “Lakes aren’t all one water,” he said, dragging himself up over to the window. “This cove is all taint. Solely rats and sicknesses imbibe themselves here. You boys trample up the shore to where the factories and the wharves discontinue. There you fetch me some unblighted.”

  Will looked at Jonah and Jonah shook his head.

  “Okay,” said Will.

  “And then we’re gone,” said Jonah. “There’s a science test this afternoon, and I need to go over my notes.”

  Back Outside at the foot of the towering elevator, the boys halted beside a rusted-out car near the shore, in which, judging by the blankets and cardboard pad, people were recently camped. Beside the car the lake water foa
med slightly with a rainbowish film.

  “Let’s just use this,” Jonah said, dipping the bucket the Wheezing Man gave them.

  “I think he meant pure, Jonah.”

  “You think he can taste it?”

  “You think he can’t?”

  “Whatever,” said Jonah, dumping the liquid from the bucket.

  The boys continued down the shoreline, lowering their gazes when they passed a mean-looking man hanging a slippery skinned animal from a leafless tree, then an Indian couple locked unconscious in each other’s arms beneath a torn tarp propped up by some old skis stuck in the dirt.

  When they returned to the elevator an hour later with water from at least a mile up the shore, the man was asleep. They set the bucket beside him and left.

  Will approached his house from the creek and snuck in through the back door. His stomach stewing with hunger, he tiptoed into Paris to fix a snack. At the table sat his mother, both palms pressed against a steaming mug of tea, beside her Constable MacVicar.

  “And look who it is,” said the constable, as though speaking to a girl who’d had her birthday party canceled. “Out for some overnight mischief, like I said.”

  Slowly his mother looked up from her mug, her face blanched and drained. “Is that you, Will?” she said, her voice croaky. “You’re here?” For the first time Will noticed white strands surfacing in her hair. But her eyes were still leaf-green, and he resisted another sudden boyish urge to crash into her arms.

  “In the flesh,” said the constable. “And where were you, Will?”

  “Jonah’s,” said Will. “We fell asleep watching horror movies. Sorry, Mom.”

  “Jonah Turtle?” asked the constable, quickly.

  “Yeah,” said Will. “His phone wasn’t working, so I couldn’t call.”

  “Okay,” MacVicar said, perturbed for a second, before he reattained composure. “Well, you’re fine now. Home. Safe. That’s what matters.” He clapped. “Anyway, Diane, I’d better be going. See me to the door, Will.”