The Fading

by Christopher Ransom

‘Did it come back? It did, didn’t it?’ She held his face in her hands, staring into his eyes. ‘I can see it in you.’

  ‘I’m the same,’ he said with no strength.

  ‘No. Not at all. I’ve never seen you like this.’ She released him and stepped back, crossing her arms. ‘You got control of it. I know you did.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  Julie looked at her feet. ‘Are you going to stay?’

  ‘Do you want me to?’

  Another plane fluttered down, tearing the sky in half with sound.

  ‘I want you to do what you want to do,’ Julie said. ‘Because anything else won’t work.’

  ‘Yeah. I don’t think I’m welcome here.’

  ‘Your dad misses you, Noel. He always has. He just needs some time to get to know you.’

  ‘Do you miss me?’

  Julie thought it over, grinning. ‘Sometimes. Sometimes not.’

  ‘I miss you every day, Julie.’

  ‘No, you don’t. Besides, I’m not that hard to find.’

  ‘Then I will find you again,’ he said. ‘Soon.’

  Julie looked frightened, and he saw her guard going up. ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘The important thing,’ Noel said, closing the distance, taking her hands, raising them, kissing her fingers, ‘is that you know. Whatever we do next, wherever we go, whoever you’re with, whoever we are to each other. If you need anything, anything in the world, I will help you get it. I will do anything for you, Jules. I promise.’

  She seemed confused, trying to smile but sad despite it all.

  He kissed her cheek and whispered in her ear. ‘Thanks for the ride.’

  She was crying. Whispered back. ‘I’m sorry I left you there. I’m sorry, Noel. It was the worst thing I could have done to you and I hate myself for it.’

  He clutched her, held her face and looked into her watering eyes.

  ‘You saved my life, Julie Wagner. Believe it.’

  He backed away from her. She watched him go, shaking her head, reaching a hand out, then letting it fall. When he got to the curb near the street, he turned and trotted across the road, onto the median, and further, looking back every few steps.

  She waited, watching him, arms crossed as another plane screamed down to earth.

  Noel jogged across the field for a few hundred feet and looked back. Julie was climbing onto the hood to watch him. She stood up and shouted something but he couldn’t make out her words.

  He jumped and caught the fence, digging the toes of his crocodile-skin shoes into the chain link, and when he was straddling the top, he paused, looking back at her. Julie had a hand over her mouth and she was standing on her toes.

  He made it last for her, the coming sunset over the Pacific lighting him like a torch before he gathered the rays into himself and quenched the flame with a final burst of color going black as nuclear ash, then only his silhouette, and then nothing more than a blown kiss he hoped would reach her in due time.

  When he hit the ground, his ankle held. He jogged toward the terminals as another plane thundered down and caressed him with its jet wash, and this time he did not look back.

  43

  At a bank of payphones inside the international terminal, Noel used a calling card from the newsstand to dial a number he had never written down but had committed to memory. The line rang through eight times and he didn’t think she was going to answer until she did.

  ‘Hello?’ She sounded somehow annoyed and aloof at the same time.

  ‘Rebecca?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Hey, Mom.’

  ‘Who is this?’

  ‘It’s me, your son. Noel.’

  The line was quiet for a few seconds and he thought she was going to hang up.

  ‘Noel? Is that you?’

  ‘It’s me, Mom. I’m sorry to bother you. I was just thinking about you and it’s been a long time. Too long. How are you?’

  ‘Well, for Pete’s sake, Noel. Where are you?’

  ‘I’m in Los Angeles, Mom.’

  ‘How old are you now?’

  Noel laughed. ‘Depends on how you count it. I think I’ve only had five or six birthdays, so I guess I’m still just a kid.’

  This made her happy. He knew her sigh. ‘Honey, are you okay? Do you need money? Are you in jail?’

  ‘I’m fine, Mom. Safe. I’m happy.’

  ‘I miss your face,’ she said. ‘Isn’t that funny? Sometimes I think I miss your face more than I miss you. What a terrible mother I turned out to be.’

  ‘No, Mom. Don’t ever think that. That’s what I wanted to tell you. You were right. You did everything right and you were never wrong. Do you understand?’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘You believed in me when no one else did. You always knew, and you never let go of that. You weren’t wrong about any of it. Don’t ever let anybody tell you otherwise, okay?’

  ‘Oh, Noel.’ Her voice changed. When she spoke again she sounded like an enchanted girl in a fairy tale, not at all like any mother should sound. ‘Always going away. Where no one can find you. Hm, my boy? Where do you go? What do you do?’

  ‘I’m here. I’m right here, Mom.’ Noel swallowed, closing his eyes. ‘You just can’t see me when it happens. No one can. But I’m always here, and you’re always with me.’

  She giggled and began to hum with delight.

  Noel wiped his eyes with his thumb.

  ‘What it’s like?’ she said with dreamy longing. ‘Tell me, Noeller Coaster. What’s it like to disappear?’

  Noel swallowed. ‘It’s beautiful, Mom.’ He bit his fist. ‘The most beautiful thing in the world.’

  ‘Yeeessssss. I’m so proud of you. My miracle boy.’

  ‘Thank you, Mom. I’m proud of you, too. I love you. I have to go now, okay?’

  ‘Be careful, Noel. There’s monsters out there, and in here, too.’

  ‘I know. I will.’

  ‘Promise?’

  ‘I promise.’

  ‘You know, for such a tall drink of water you’re a good kid.’

  ‘You should know,’ he said. ‘You made me.’

  She sighed again, breathed heavily for a few seconds, then was quiet. Noel held the receiver until the monotone beeping signaled for him to put it down.

  Behind him, in one of the gate lounges, dozens of people were staring up at the two televisions where one of the twenty-four-hour news channels was reporting on an escalation in the situation that had ‘captivated the nation’. A blonde reporter was standing on a ridge near a canopy of foliage with rolling emerald hills in the background. The sky was a tropical heavy gray and a slight breeze was forcing her to hold her adorable black felt beret under a sheaf of papers to keep it from flying away.

  Noel walked closer to hear, but the sound was off and he could only read the scrolling, descending captions of white text for the hearing impaired.

  It said:

  … according to reports coming in from two former members who remain anonymous and who recently risked their lives to escape the community, which federal officials are now calling a religious cult with possible mass suicidal tendencies, including some seven hundred and fifty-eight or more members and devotees, including as many as sixty-two children inside what has been coined by the media, The Alexander Brighton Crew in reference to the 1978 tragedy in Jonestown, Guyana, and which others are calling The Brighton Beach Club, though we should note we are some two hundred or more miles inland from any beach, where members who have spent the past two years living inside the compound where reports of physical and sexual abuse, psychological torture and forced indoctrination, and even, if you can believe it, Robert, executions and the consumption of human flesh, yes, reports now of cannibalism have surfaced, shocking the world as the former businessman from St Petersburg, Florida, who served as a missionary for several churches in the late nineteen eighties appears to have now, wait a minute – incoming reports now
suggesting ‘the moment of final ascendency’, as it’s being called by survivors in protection of Interpol and the Federal Bureau of Investigations, Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, who have surrounded the compound, believed to be heavily armed, as protests and international cries for non-violent confrontation alike threaten the stability and likelihood of a safe rescue, we are told we may be just days or even hours away from unimaginable tragedy …

  Half of the screen filled with a photo of the primary suspect behind all this good fun. He was one and the same glossy-faced slug with geek glasses Noel had seen on a car TV earlier today. Alexander Brighton, forty-eight.

  Noel stared into the man’s pixilated eyes and mouthed three words.

  I see you.

  Six hours later he boarded the 747, fully faded, only to find all but a dozen of the seats empty and no Continental personnel preparing the cabin for take-off.

  Anlun had his own row. The rest of his colleagues were several rows back, seated, reading reports and conversing on cellphones.

  Holding himself, the passengers and most of the terminal in his blinding grip, Noel took the empty seat next to Anlun.

  ‘Nice to see you again,’ Anlun said.

  ‘You can’t see me,’ the empty seat responded.

  ‘You would be surprised what I can see.’ The non-agent retrieved a dossier from the briefcase between his legs and handed it to Noel by dropping it over his lap.

  Noel stopped it from sliding to the floor. ‘How did you know?’

  ‘I told you on the last flight,’ Anlun said. ‘You’ve graduated to the big leagues. You’ll never be happy playing farm ball again.’

  ‘This isn’t play. I’m not doing this for me.’

  Anlun sipped from his bottle of water.

  ‘Did you hear me?’ Noel said. ‘This is your fault. If you hadn’t showed me that video, I – I’m not promising anything. I’m your scout, a pair of binoculars. Nothing more. This is one time and one time only.’

  Anlun looked toward the eyes he could not see, squinting, as if by concentrating he could read them. He gave up.

  Said, ‘I was the fourth man on the crime scene, you know. In the steam bay where you left Dalton.’

  ‘Your point?’

  Anlun blew air from his cheeks. ‘Six-point-three million. That must have hurt.’

  The seat belt halves undulated from beneath the armrests and rose up like a pair of curious cobras which kissed briefly before merging as one.

  Noel slipped Anlun’s water bottle from his monstrous hand, savoring the surprise of the deed a moment before drinking his fill. He swallowed.

  ‘The things I’ve lost,’ Noel said, handing over the last of the water, ‘cost so much more than I ever took.’

  The jet taxied away from the terminal. The engines gulped vast amounts of air and fuel to hurtle them down the runway. The nose of the aircraft was up before he knew it, the landing gear was shuddering, and for a moment, between sky and ground, heaven and hell, womb and grave, Noel Shaker weighed less than the molecules of air he breathed and disturbed.

  Acknowledgements

  I’d like to thank my editor Daniel Mallory for basically saying, ‘Yes, go write that’ after I emailed him three or four rough sentences describing how I woke up one morning thinking about the emotional horror of invisibility and the ways in which the condition had not yet been addressed in popular fiction and films. I doubt many authors have an editor who makes the leftovers from their nightmares seem brilliant, but Dan is one, and his early and consistent support for my work makes a huge difference in the pleasure I take from this job.

  Major thanks are also due to my agent, Scott Miller, who had several keen insights into how I could further develop the relationship between Noel and Theodore Dalton, and for his astute inquiries into the nature of the deceased characters throughout the novel.

  My friends and fellow scribes Eric Miller, Bob Lagier, and Craig Wolf also read the manuscript and provided a little ass-kicking in the precise areas I most needed one, reminding me time and again how the little things are also the big things.

  I appreciate the ongoing dialogues, both online and over burgers and tacos, with all of you guys. You are all serious readers and writers in your own right, and I am lucky to have your time and brain power to augment what little I have of my own.