He hunkered down in front of McIntyre. “It’s because our universe is broken. Incorrect. Filled with false versions sparked by a single instance of understandable cowardice.”
His eyes locked with McIntyre’s. “James, what happened when you were eleven years old?”
A switch might’ve been thrown and the knot of pain in McIntyre’s brain exploded, drenching his head in pure white-hot agony. He shrieked, and fell onto his light, hugging it to his stomach.
Above him, he heard Jimmy: “Stop this! We don’t have time for this! Stop fighting this! ”
McIntyre’s lips peeled back from his teeth. “I’m not fighting … anything.”
“Bullshit! ” Jimmy yelled. “Do you know how many versions I’ve had to go through to get to this moment, over and over again, just to go rocketing back when you can’t take it? It takes me twenty years to reach you each time—and not just on any day during that twentieth year, but a special day. Do you remember?”
McIntyre opened his mouth, but—
(—whiff of hospital cleaner—)
—he shrieked again.
“We don’t have any more chances, James!” Jimmy yelled. “What happens after we’re gone, after this last chance is wasted? I don’t know. I’ve never been able to know.”
He put a hand on McIntyre’s shoulder. “I’ve run out of lifetimes,” Jimmy said. “You’re my last shot—our last shot—or it all ends. I brought you back to Traumen. I made it like a movie, hoping you’d see how fake it was. I pulled you off the soundstage and brought you here, to the core. I am out of options and out of time. You need to remember.”
McIntyre hugged his ball of dying light. “But I don’t … remember … anything.”
Jimmy’s hand left his shoulder.
“James,” he said, softly. “Look at me.”
He did, gingerly, and Jimmy’s face was inches away. Liquid arcs from their respective lights stretched towards one another.
“You don’t have that luxury, anymore,” Jimmy said, and shoved his light into McIntyre’s.
The world exploded white, swatting away the blackness, and McIntyre—
—is sitting in that goddamn orange vinyl chair, and you’re holding your mother’s hand as she lies comatose in the hospital bed.
You are Jimmy McIntyre. It is the evening of November 21, 1996, and you have to watch your mother die.
(NO NO NO NO YOU CAN’T MAKE ME YOU CAN’T MAKE ME SEE THIS)
But you can’t shake yourself free. This is what you’ve hidden from yourself for twenty years, what you’ve buried, what you’ve built multiple lifetimes to avoid. The moment that separates you from the boy.
Oh god, the weight is crushing. Sitting there, holding your mother’s hand, your fingertips over the prominent bones, the papery skin, it hurts to draw a breath. Your throat is narrowed to a straw. Your eyes boil, but you do not cry. You’ve promised yourself you would not cry. To cry out, to show the grief, would make it real. Your mother is dying.
Sitting there, marveling how the woman who was as close to god as a small boy could understand could make such a small impression under the sheets, you hold her hand, and she seems to hold yours back and you think of crossing busy streets. An I-will-protect-you-grip. An I-am-not-letting-go grip.
But you want to scream as the doctor pulls the breathing apparatus from her lower face, showing the damage that the hemorrhagic stroke, and the subsequent two-week coma, has wrought. Her skin looks waxy and taut under the fluorescent bar of light above her bed, rendering her eyes deep purple eye sockets. Her hair, already thin, looks like a tangle of old spider webs.
Her mouth hangs slightly open and you think—as much as you can think—she would’ve hated to look slack-jawed like that. The urge to shriek grows, but it doesn’t escape. It burns, a hot molten core in your heart.
Her eyes half-open, giving her a doped-look, and you straighten. Your grip on her hand tightens. Her eyes are black, but they see you, and, if she’s seeing you, that must mean it’s all right, right? Turning everything off doesn’t mean it’s over, right? You’ve seen episodes of E.R. Sometimes the patient just needs a jumpstart.
You swallow and your throat clicks. A hand grips your shoulder, the way it will at the funeral.
(STOP THIS NOW I CAN’T SEE THIS I WON’T)
You think her head turns, but it really doesn’t—her chest has just stopped moving. She’s still looking at you, but her eyes have become the eyes of a taxidermy product, glassy, molded to convey an emotion.
But the irrational hope doesn’t die; you still have the hand, holding yours, gripping yours, and that means she’s still there, right? She still knows you’re there, right? It can’t be too late if she can still hold you. Right?
“She’s holding my hand,” you say.
The owner of the hand on your shoulder squeezes in a way that’s supposed to be comforting and isn’t. “It’s muscle memory, Jimmy,” the owner says, his voice thick. “Her hand muscles are responding to the pressure of your hand.”
The words fall like bell tolls on your ears. Your head burns, your chest flattens, yours eyes bulge and scald and the scream is just behind your lips, dying to be let out, and you bear down mentally: I will not do this, I will not, I will not—You can’t make this real. Even now, with the truth in front of you, you can’t let out that which makes this real.
And then the burning … cools. The scream retreats. The weight in your chest lessens. It all … dwindles, until you feel almost nothing at all.
You’re still holding your mother’s hand, but the grip is a lie, just like her intense I’m-seeing-you gaze, and the loose skin—the dry skin, the thin skin—is all you can feel.
“I’m sorry, Jimmy,” the man says and his voice is all snot and closed-throats, full of an emotion that you suddenly can’t feel. It is at this moment you and the boy separate, the boy stuck in his hellish frozen instant and you going on with your pale half-lives.
And, inside, the you remembering all this screams and screams and screams, until the light comes again, until you’re yanked and—
—he lay on his side, cradling his ball of light, now gray and dim. Jimmy stood in front of him.
“Pain is a bridge,” the boy said. “Who you are on one end is not who you are on the other. You experience the pain and you cross and it changes you. But, with us, somehow, it didn’t. I got stuck on one end and you—you all … jumped. You didn’t feel any pain, but you weren’t alive the way you should be.”
He knelt beside McIntyre. “You need to accept it, James. You need—”
McIntyre couldn’t breathe; his nose was clogged, his lungs filled to capacity. The pain was gone from his head, replaced with a hot buzzing that reminded him of cicadas. All he could see was his mother’s dead eyes, all he could hear was the sound of her not breathing, all he could feel was the thin skin of her hand—
—and he shrieked.
It boiled up from his core, rolling up and out and into the ringing nothing. Just a great animal bellow of pain and grief, rolled over and over with interest, not just for twenty years, or twenty times twenty years, but for all of them. Every half-life. Every pallid dream, every false continuation of the man known as James McIntyre. His throat shredded. Every muscle, every nerve, every cell, cried out into the darkness, reaching higher and higher, dissembling the pieces until nothing was left.
And then the scream built McIntyre back up again even as it dwindled to a rattle, assembling his form, cell by cell, imbued not with the falseness of his lives, but the passage of the pain—even as he knew it wasn’t finished yet. He wasn’t finished yet.
And then, finally, silence.
And James McIntyre opened his eyes.
McIntyre held his dying ball of light between him and the boy. They watched it ebb and flow, ebb and flow, each fluctuation fainter, until only darkness remained and McIntyre’s hands held nothing at all.
He stood and the boy, a silhouette limned with the faintest etching of light, looked up
at him.
“The end,” he said.
“Not yet,” the boy said. “One final step.” He saw the boy’s silhouette turn his head and McIntyre followed his gaze.
Far away, a single light burned.
The final star was the boy’s. The true star, the true core.
“Are you ready?” Jimmy McIntyre, both eleven years old and impossibly ancient, a ghost of an unlived life, asked.
“Yes,” James McIntyre, both thirty-one years old and not alive at all, replied.
The boy offered his hand and the false-man took it.
And, together, they walked towards the light.
CODA:
The star explodes in rays of creamy light, with the core becoming the horizon.
Sound—the distant beep of pagers, the almost syncopated deet of many machines doing many jobs, the opening piano chords of a Top 40 hit song.
Smell—cafeteria food and Latex and hospital cleaner. The scent of vanilla perfume that the false man will always associate with middle school girls and the boy will have no association for whatsoever.
Finally, sight—the rays of light becoming the angles of the hallway, top-bottom-left-right, with color filling in the gaps: speckled white for the tile floor, beige for the walls. Wide doorways swim into existence, wheelchairs standing guard.
At the end of the hallway, just before it opens into the wide central area of a nurse’s station, a small boy sits in a wheelchair, holding a book.
The false-man sees with no surprise whatsoever the boy sitting is the exact twin of the boy whose hand he is holding.
They approach. The boy’s hunched over his book—Insomnia by Stephen King, the false man sees—but isn’t reading. He glares at the red-and-white dustjacket.
The boy holding his hand lets go and walks over to his twin.
“One final step,” he says again and the expression on his face is one of weariness. “Are you ready?”
“Are you?”
Instead of answering, the boy touches the exposed back of his twin’s neck. There’s a soft flash of creamy-white and his hand sinks into the other boy.
He sits down where his twin sits, becoming more intangible with each movement. Before they connect, the boy offers the man a single final look that the man has no problem discerning.
Don’t let us down, it says.
And then the boy is gone with another soft flash of creamy light and it’s just this ghost and the boy in the wheelchair. Behind him, the Counting Crows goes into its first chorus of “A Long December”.
The man reaches out, hesitates, then touches the back of the boy’s neck. Immediately, the aftertaste of Ho-Hos fills his mouth. Instantly, weight gets added to his chest.
His hand sinks into the boy’s neck with more creamy-white light and he feels pulled, drawn in. He almost yanks his hand back, but the boy’s last glance at him—don’t let us down—keeps him going.
He turns himself around and sinks into the boy, that pulling sensation intensifying. Memories, twenty years’ worth, whistle through the remaining second of his half-life, but, again, they recall nothing for him. They aren’t his.
Before he full submerges, he looks back one last time, where he and the boy had come from, but sees only darkness, held back by the light.
An apt metaphor, he thinks, and disappears.
Jimmy blinks as disorientation sweeps through him. He has the odd feeling of both sitting down and getting up. The nerves in his legs twinge, confused.
“Stupid,” he mutters, rubbing his eyes, but he freezes. To anyone looking, he would be some kid wiping his eyes because he’s crying, because he’s mourning, because he’s about to become a dumb fucking orphan and all he can fucking do about it is cry. They’d see him and be so full of sympathy, as if that could do anything about his fucking—
(don’t say it don’t say it)
—dying mother.
He grinds his teeth until his jaw aches and drops his hands. No one would see him cry. He would not cry. He would not give in.
But, Jesus Christ, who would’ve thought this would hurt so much? The weight he feels on his chest. He’s had the air knocked out of him a few times, but this is nothing compared to that; it feels, instead, like he’s clamped into one of those table-vices in shop class and some malicious bastard is turning it and turning it.
His vision shimmers as his eyes grow hot.
“Jimmy,” a man says from behind him.
He looks up and John is standing there, his tie loosened, the bags under his eyes making the rest of his face paler. He’s ten years Jimmy’s senior but, right now, he seems twenty or thirty.
“They’re turning her off,” John says and his voice cracks on the last word. His eyes are cherry-red-rimmed. “You need to say goodbye.”
Jimmy nods. It feels like his throat is closing.
He picks up his book and stands on legs made of Silly Putty.
John steps aside, allowing Jimmy to enter first. “Are you going to be okay?”
HOW CAN YOU EVEN FUCKING ASK THAT? he wants to scream, shriek, bellow, but he doesn’t. He won’t. He won’t even look at John. It’s stupid, but a part of him believes with a childish fierceness that if he doesn’t give in, she won’t go. She’ll have to stay. If he stares at John’s face for too long, thought, he won’t be able to hold it back. Can’t he see the truth on his brother’s face?
He steps into the doorway and stops.
The room is dark except for the single shaded fluorescent bar above his mother’s bed. A trio of machines stand to one side, science-fiction doctors brooding on their failure. The human doctor, so unimportant that Jimmy immediately forgets him, stands back a respectful distance.
Finally, Jimmy looks at his mother.
Something shifts within and the strangest sense of déjà vu hits him. He thinks two thoughts, equally nonsensical and impossible, simultaneously: I’ve been here before and I can’t go through this again!
He reaches out and grasps the doorway, leaning like a drunk. He senses John behind him, but Jimmy sees only their mother, lying there, dwindling there. His throat hurts, as if he’s already been screaming. That sense of déjà vu gets stronger, becoming an odd, horrible form of vertigo.
I’ve been here before, he thinks, but on some level doesn’t think it’s his voice at all.
I have to live this again, he thinks and his throat burns, his chest closes. He blinks and his eyes are wet.
He wants to call out to her, something that would appear dramatic but couldn’t match the wrench of emotion twisting in his chest, but he can’t, can’t even open his mouth. The air is locked in his throat.
Behind him, John says, “Jimmy—”
And the old voices say together, Get it out. Get it out, finally.
He puts a hand on Jimmy’s shoulder and, this time, it’s comforting. He feels something give inside, and the weight … shifts.
Jimmy McIntyre, eleven years old and thirty-one years old and impossibly ancient all at the same time, finally screams, finally makes it real.
Surviving the
River Styx
EVEN DOPED-UP, Riley knew getting on an ocean liner wasn’t a logical extension of immersion therapy.
Andrea and Hogan stood, elongated, before him, the only clear things on the crowded dock. The curls of Riley’s wife’s hair were rusted horseshoes, Hogan’s beard a writhing hive of ants. Andrea’s eyes twinkled and Riley tried to remember the last time that had happened. Before the trouble with his company, surely.
His view was a pastel panorama that ran like tie-dye. Far off in the bay, the Queen Victoria III ocean liner squatted like a marshmallow in the steel-wool Atlantic. Voices washed over him, a meaningless tidal roar, pressing him further into the wheelchair. His arm tingled where Dr. Hogan injected him. Nothing else did, though. All numb.
His eyes moved slowly over the liner. Each incision of the various decks transformed the ship into rows of gleaming teeth. The boat that would take them to it bounced over the gre
y waves, approaching, and vertigo bloomed like a flower in the center of Riley’s head. All that water.
Surrounded by all that water.
His heart pounded enough to make him hiccup.
I can’t do this! How can they expect me to do this?
Riley heard a scream. He passed out before he could tell if it was him or someone else.
Unconscious, he felt calm; he felt himself. He was everything he knew Riley Christopher McCarrick, millionaire software whiz-kid, to be. The quaking ruin that reality thrust upon him—too scared to be in the shower for longer than five minutes, cringing if an errant raindrop smacked his face—was banished.
Sound began to filter in, growing louder as the darkness lightened. The sounds smoothed, separated into Andrea’s and Hogan’s voices.
Andrea: “Can’t believe how long security took.”
Hogan: “Be glad they didn’t take us back to the port.”
“That guy tried to rip someone’s throat out with his teeth.”
A sound of a hand across fabric. Hogan rubbing Andrea’s back? Riley’s stomach tightened. When was the last time Andrea had allowed him to do that? “The man’s gone. An isolated incident.” A dry chuckle that sounded like dead leaves rattling. “Maybe he was aquaphobic, too.”
Why is that funny? Riley thought.
Soft footsteps, then Andrea said, “He’s waking up, Derek.”
How do you know his name?
Hogan’s said, loudly, “Are you with us, Riley?”
He opened his eyes and Hogan’s face hovered just inches above him. Riley cringed and Hogan stepped away.
“Are you okay?” Andrea asked. She stood beside the bed.
“How are you feeling?” Hogan asked. He pulled an unmarked vial of piles from his blazer pocket.
Riley ignored him. Their cabin was standard mid-level hotel fare … just on the water. A sliding door led to the balcony on the right, covered by a near-sheer curtain. The smudge-line of the horizon peeked in and he turned away, his stomach a ball of discomfort. Who in his right mind puts a man phobic of water …?
Bones are Made to be Broken Page 15
