Pull Down the Night (The Suburban Strange)

by Nathan Kotecki

  “We haven’t used it once since we moved in.”

  “I can’t imagine you’d suspect your parents of cheating. Your dad’s a minister.”

  “Well, if you watch the news, ministers seem to cheat more than the average population,” Bruno joked. “But no, I’d be very surprised.”

  “Your family is close. I like that. I’m closer to my mom than my dad, but I guess we’re all pretty close.”

  “How is it, being an only child?” Bruno asked him.

  “I don’t know any different. But I guess you become more self-sufficient. How about you? What’s it like being the youngest?”

  “Well, Sophia’s pretty much gone all the time now. Sylvio, I don’t know. I think in some ways I’ve felt like I was supposed to catch up with them, and since I couldn’t, I kept going in the other direction.”

  “I could see it being difficult, having him as an older brother,” Marco said. “But as much as you guys like to squabble, I think you’re closer than you let on. He’s only a jerk now and then, isn’t he? Or is he worse when we aren’t around?”

  “Not really. He thought I was changing who I was just to fit in with you guys.”

  “Which was only slightly inaccurate. You were changing who you were in hopes of getting Celia to like you.” Marco playfully punched Bruno’s shoulder. “I’m giving you a hard time. I know you well enough to be sure you’re better than that.”

  “So why did I do it, then? Buy all those clothes and start going to Diaboliques?”

  “I’d say it was the right thing at the right time. I think everyone hits a point—in middle school, in high school, maybe in college—where you start taking control of your life. You realize you can make your own decisions and start to become your own person, whoever that is. Maybe you try a few different options before you settle on the truth. Maybe it takes years to figure out. But that’s what it looked like to me. Your tastes might be influenced by your brother, and by us, too, but hey, we all have influences, right? And I can see where your tastes differ from Silver’s, too. What time is it?”

  Bruno looked at his watch. “Two minutes.”

  They stared around the tennis court, waiting. Marco said, “I knew Gwendolyn was pretty, but she was stunning at the fashion show. And it’s obvious she likes you.”

  “I know. I just don’t feel that way about her.”

  “So you’re ending the year at a net zero—your love is unrequited, and you are unrequiting someone else’s love. Such a tragedy. All this love lost.”

  “I think we’ll all survive,” Bruno said.

  “I am glad you’ve become friends with Celia, though, everything else aside. I would have felt bad about leaving her alone at Suburban next year. Now at least I know she’ll have you.”

  “And Sylvio.”

  “Sure. But she’s closer with you.”

  “We’ll miss you next year.”

  “Yeah. I wish we’d overlapped more than just one year. When I think about it, I’ve spent more time with you this year than with Celia or Regine.”

  “I didn’t think you’d want to spend so much time with me, just a first year.”

  “Maybe it’s a guy thing. Don’t tell Brenden I said this, but you’ve been my best friend at Suburban this year.”

  “You know, I’d say the same thing about you.” It was the first time Bruno had considered it, but it was absolutely true.

  “Not Celia? Forget the romance. You two have gotten pretty close in other ways.”

  “I guess we have. It’s weird, though. I mean, Celia and I are friends, but it almost feels like something else.”

  “What, like you’re business partners?” Marco chuckled.

  “Maybe the right way to say it is that we’re still figuring out what kind of friends we are. It’s been a little complicated.”

  “I can see that.”

  “You and I—it’s never been complicated.”

  “Not even when people think we’re dating?”

  “That’s complicated for them, not for me,” Bruno said. His mind was stuck on one thought, a thought that had been repeating itself since the moment he’d agreed Marco had been his best friend. It was so obvious, Bruno couldn’t believe he hadn’t realized it sooner.

  He turned to Marco, who looked at him curiously. Bruno leaned in and touched his lips to Marco’s. Then he sat back and looked down at his watch. Eight o’clock on the dot.

  “You’re a sweet guy,” Marco said quietly. “That really means a lot to me.”

  “I’m not—”

  “Of course you’re not. That’s why it’s so sweet.”

  They sat in silence for a while. Then Marco spoke again. “Well, if it’s not Celia and it’s not Gwendolyn, who’s it going to be? You’re too good-looking not to be dating someone, and everyone else in this group is either in a relationship or still climbing out of the wreckage of one.”

  “I guess I’ve had other things to worry about.” They got up from the picnic table.

  “Well, that was definitely unexpected.”

  OUTSIDE BRUNO’S BEDROOM WINDOW the light was fading and the air was fragrant with blossoms. He went downstairs to pick up the phone on the eighth ring, wondering where everyone else was. “Hello?”

  “Bruno?”

  He recognized Sophia’s voice instantly, and just as quickly he could tell she was crying. “What’s wrong?”

  “I’m so glad it’s you,” she said, her voice breaking. “I hoped it would be you.” She paused. “You remember that married man I told you about when I was home? Well, I’ve managed to break my own heart, and it’s nobody’s fault but my own.”

  “I’m sorry. What happened?”

  “I’m such a fool . . .” She sobbed. “I’m so embarrassed to tell you.”

  “You don’t have to tell me,” he said. “Are you okay?”

  “I’ll be okay,” she said. “I just wish I could get a hug from you right now.”

  Bruno thought about what he could do with a piece of paper and a pencil. About how easily he could connect his closet to Sophia’s, somewhere in Buenos Aires. How badly he wanted to put his powers to use, to comfort his sister. It made him crazy. Instead, he said, “Me too. I wish I could.”

  “How are you?” she asked.

  “I’m good. I was in a fashion show.”

  “You were? Really?”

  “I told you about Marco, and how he makes clothes. Well, he got to do a fashion show at school, and—Do you really want to hear about this?”

  “I would love to hear about it,” Sophia said. “Tell me everything, and I’ll try to imagine I was there.”

  “There are pictures somewhere. I’ll send them to you.”

  “You have to!”

  Bruno did his best to describe the show to his sister, the clothes everyone wore, what it had felt like to walk on a runway in front of everyone. But his heart kept pushing against his chest, willing him to use his power, while his head reminded him that was impossible. He thought the tug of war might pull him apart, and he hated it. So he concentrated on his story, and listened for the life that slowly returned to Sophia’s voice.

  “When are you coming home?” he finally asked, when she didn’t sound quite so raw.

  “You know, I was going to stay through the summer, but I think it might be good to spend some time at home,” she said. “I don’t even know what home is, at this point.”

  “We’re your home.”

  “You are my home.”

  “WE NEVER HANG OUT, just the three of us. We never get to talk about the things we have to keep secret from everyone else,” Celia said.

  “What are you going to do?” Bruno asked Tomasi. “About the agon?”

  “I’m going to try to stop.”

  “Stop dating?”

  “No, stop being one of the Kind.”

  “Can you do that?”

  “Well, it hasn’t been a picnic anyway. First I was told I had a learning disorder. Then my parents thought I was into bl
ack magic and sent me off to my grandfather’s labor camp, commonly known as his farm. Now I find out my relationship with my girlfriend is against the rules for Kind and Ambassadors, which sounds pretty ridiculous to me. It just doesn’t seem worth it.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I’m trying to avoid it all, as much as possible. I’ve stopped traveling between books. I walk over to Celia’s house now. I can’t stop seeing books the way I do, but most of the time I can suppress my ability to see the books and letters in people’s bags and pockets. I’m not going to try to fulfill any more admonitions.”

  “Is someone going to get mad or something?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t fulfill a slew of admonitions at the beginning, and no one came after me—just the next admonition. But right now I don’t care. I’m trying out being a normal guy, dating a girl, nothing crazier than that, and so far it feels pretty good.”

  “Okay,” Bruno said. He understood, but he was disappointed. Tomasi wasn’t going to be a comrade as Bruno explored being Kind.

  He was concerned, too. Deep down, he didn’t believe Tomasi and Celia’s problem could be solved that easily. If Bruno knew anything, it was that his new life embraced complexity, not the obvious choices or the simplest answers. “I hope it works.”

  “I hope so, too, but I know what you’re thinking, and I wonder the same thing,” Celia said. “We’re going to try it and see what happens.”

  “If you ever need help, for any reason, I’ll do whatever I can,” Bruno said. “I’m still really new to this, so there’s not a lot I can do, but . . .”

  “After what happened this week, I wouldn’t say that,” Tomasi said. “But it means a lot for you to say it. Thank you.”

  VAN CAME UP TO BRUNO after the last gym class of the year. “Can I talk to you?” he asked, and Bruno nodded. They hung back from the rest of the guys walking out. “I . . . I think I’m going crazy,” Van said quietly. “I’ve been blacking out, and then I can’t remember what’s happened for ten or fifteen minutes, sometimes longer.”

  Bruno tried to think of what he could say. “Have you gone to the doctor?”

  Van nodded sadly. “They’re testing me for a whole bunch of things, but I’m sure they won’t find it. Please. You know something. You know what’s wrong with me.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “Because whenever I remember something from this year—and there are so many things I’ve forgotten, but every once in a while I remember—it’s always something I can’t ex- plain . . . and it always has something to do with you.”

  “What are you remembering?”

  “Some kind of passageway under the stairs over by the cafeteria. Talking to you at that bookstore, and then flying—” Van said the word in disbelief. “Finding myself in a classroom with you and Celia and having no idea how I got there. Did those things happen?”

  “I don’t think so . . .”

  “Don’t do this to me!” Van said, and Bruno thought the poor guy might cry. “Everyone else looks at me like I’ve lost my mind! They want to put me on medication; they think I’m schizophrenic or something! Please, you know that’s not it—it’s something else, isn’t it?” Van grabbed Bruno’s arm desperately.

  No one else was nearby, and Bruno kept his voice low. “Okay. It might be true. Those things might have happened. You may have been given secret power at the beginning of the year, and when you got on the wrong side of some people, your power and all your memories of it were stripped from you. And you may be having flashbacks to those times, which make you black out until they’re over. But I don’t know how to help you. I don’t know if anyone can do anything to make this better.”

  “Please,” Van said again, his voice weak with despair.

  Bruno looked him in the eye. “I’ve heard there are ways to get back, once you’ve gone to the Unkind side, but I don’t know anyone who knows what to do, or how it works. I’m sorry.”

  In the middle of the empty lobby, Van’s eyes filmed over and his face went slack. Staring into the distance, the monotonic voice from his trance in the classroom returned, and he said, “A dark wind has been rising toward you from somewhere deep in your future, across years that are still to come. And as it passes, it will level whatever is offered to you at the time, in years no more real than the ones you are living now.” Then he walked like a somnambulist in a straight line out the front door and across the street to the field on the far side, never looking back.

  BRUNO WAITED UNTIL THE appointed day—a Sunday—was over, and the last new moon before the summer solstice had passed. The deadline given by his admonition was at hand. He knew there wouldn’t be any strange new feeling, like a ghost limb felt for the first time. But on several mornings recently he had woken with the remnants of recurring dreams still flowing through his body, and he had a hunch about what to do. He sat down at his desk with a new sheet of drawing paper alongside the smudged plan of Suburban he’d drawn back in the first semester.

  On the wall above his desk Bruno had pinned copies of a dozen Piranesi etchings. Many nights he had stared at them so long, he wouldn’t have been surprised if they had opened up the way the drawings in the huge You Are Here books had, allowing him to step inside. He contemplated them for a long time, preparing himself. The boundary between reality and imagination was as thin as a piece of paper.

  Across the top of the blank sheet he carefully wrote Suburban High School in block letters. Then he began drawing, first the main hall of the school. “It would be better if the science wing were here,” he murmured, drawing the wing branching out in a new place from the main hall. “And the Chancellor Wing should be here.” The technology wing, the pool, the gymnasium, the auditorium—Bruno fit each one onto his new plan for the high school in ways that made them easier to navigate, less like a sprawling maze so contorted it made everything even farther away than it actually was. In his bones he thought he could feel the steel and bricks shifting around six miles away.

  He did the library last, tucking it into a new space near the center of the plan. Only a front door, no back door. Thick walls on all sides, solid and dark. There were fifteen aisles of bookshelves in the stacks and no more. Bruno wondered whether he was destroying the You Are Here volumes in the process, and whether he might come to regret that. But he was resolute. A high school library had to be a place where books were always where they were supposed to be, where the lights reached into the farthest corners, and where people didn’t get lost in impenetrable sections that left them scared and despondent—or worse.

  Bruno finished his drawing and sat back to look at his work. Suburban was still a large school, but it wasn’t a confusing school any longer. He picked up his pencil and drew a few more small rooms at the ends of the main halls. “Janitor’s closets. How could I forget?”

  Finished, he wandered out of his room and downstairs, where he found his father in the study.

  “What’s new?” Mr. Perilunas asked, looking up from his paper.

  “I wanted to ask you something. When you have time.”

  “Now’s fine. I’m finished with this.” He set the paper aside. “What’s on your mind?”

  Bruno sat down in the wingback chair across from his father. “I wanted to ask you . . . Has there ever been a time when you weren’t sure whether you believed in God?”

  “Do you feel that way?”

  “I don’t know. I just don’t understand. It’s hard to explain. I just don’t know what I believe anymore.”

  His father looked at his hands. “I always thought it would be Sylvio. Sophia is brilliant, but I don’t think she spends a lot of time wrestling with stuff like this. When Sylvio started changing his style and listening to strange music, I wondered if it was coming. Who knows what he thinks or believes, but he’s never talked to me about it.” He shifted in his seat. “I’m not going to be any better at talking about this than you are. Because there’s a point where words don’t say enough, you know?
What you believe, what you know to be true without having proof—or the things you don’t believe, the things of which you can’t convince yourself—those things can be very hard to describe.

  “Faith is such a strange gift. And I think it is a gift. For those of us who receive it, it is the best gift we could ever hope to have, and it is so tempting to assume everyone has it, or to wish it for everyone else. And when we meet someone who has lost it, or maybe never even had it, it’s so tempting to say, ‘You must ask for this gift, pray for it, because it will comfort you, and help you through your life, the way it comforts me and helps me through mine.’ But that’s condescending, isn’t it? To tell someone they should ask a higher power in which they don’t believe to help them to know something of which they are skeptical, and to do it without any tangible proof. It’s absurd.

  “I believe you can live your life without religion, even without faith, and be a good, strong, upright person. I’ve seen many people do it. But I also will pray for you, because if you can be at home in your faith, I think your life will be richer, and even more meaningful.”

  Bruno nodded. “I’m sorry.”

  “You don’t have to apologize for anything!” His father looked at him lovingly. “I will be happy to talk to you about this whenever you want.” He stood up when Bruno did, and hugged him close when Bruno stepped into his arms. “I did most of the talking, didn’t I? Ministers—we’ll preach at the drop of a hat.”

  IN THE CAR WITH SYLVIO the next morning, Bruno was more nervous than any other time he could remember. Had it worked? Could he really have done such a thing? Was he insane?

  From the road he could see the difference. He swallowed hard and felt his heart swell in his chest. Suburban appeared just as he had redrawn it: Wings had folded back into the building, and the sprawl had been squared off into a shape that was equal in size to the old school but laid out in simpler lines, with shorter distances among all points.

  In the lobby he wondered whether this was how architects felt the first time they went into a newly completed building they had designed. He saw his handiwork in three dimensions around him. One thing hadn’t changed: To enter Suburban was to agree to its terms, even if they included curses, ghosts, and storm clouds on the ceiling.