“Imagine that it’s night,” he said.
The sky was bright and bled beyond the branches that cut across it. When he thought of Laura, he had to tell himself, These are her eyes, and picture her eyes. He had to say, This is her nose; this is the curve of her cheek.
Points of light began to strike the inside of his skull like static against a screen. His skin was alive with itch, and when he scraped his nails along his arm, he thought he’d rip it open.
“Let’s go,” he said. “I can’t sit here.”
Dylan was up, peeing against a tree.
“Don’t!” Eddie shouted. He stood and went to him but couldn’t judge the distance, bumping his knee hard into Dylan’s back.
“You peed,” Eddie said. “You let it out of you.”
Dylan stood back.
“That’s okay. You had to.”
At the path, the sun flamed at the top of its descent. It blinded Eddie to look ahead, and he hit the guardrail and stumbled against it.
Dylan sat and hung his head. The light had turned him into a few loose sticks of glare and shadow. His face was gone; the tips of his fingers bled out into the hot yellow air.
“Dylan,” Eddie called, and then he said the name softly, testing his voice. He couldn’t tell if he’d spoken out loud.
He went to him and lifted him to his chest again, entwining his fingers beneath the boy’s rear end to keep him up. Voices around him made W sounds and H sounds. Then they began to shriek, but Eddie told himself they weren’t there. Dylan shuffled in his arms as Eddie ran. Though the sun was in his eyes, he felt the closeness of the guardrail with his legs and he followed it as it turned.
“You track stars,” he heard Laura saying. “You never get out of shape.” He loved that she loved his body because it wasn’t her own—that he was able to seek the mystery in hers. He loved that no matter how long he loved her, she would always be a separate person—that love’s limit arrived before two people could press together into one.
Another voice was at his chest. Eddie ran harder when he heard it.
“It’s there,” the voice said.
He opened his eyes. The sun had dipped to the side of the woods, and up ahead was the great skeletal arch of the bridge.
“There.”
Eddie’s legs began to float, and though he couldn’t feel them, he knew that his arms and head, his whole body, all of it, had lifted off of him like a shirt. He didn’t care about his body—it was nothing to him—and so he ran.
There were tollbooths ahead, and the highway widened to accommodate the additional lanes. To the side of the booths, the sun was seeping through a stand of bulrushes, and beyond that the land broke off and there was sky. Eddie couldn’t see what lay beneath it. There were people there in front of the bulrushes. They milled about in the deepening light as though they were neighbors to one another.
Eddie’s mind, too, began to float above him, as if it longed to reunite with his floating body. It was different from the marathon he’d run his senior year—the year he hadn’t trained. At the end of that race—having run too far, too fast—he’d thought that he might die, but knew he probably wouldn’t. Now, with his mind high above him, he could only think of living.
Dylan was no longer a weight in his arms, but a buoyancy he clung to in the vast sea of air around him. The people stood, hands on hips, in T-shirts and in shorts, with hats or blown hair. As he approached, he saw a woman whose eyes caught his and were full of laughter, until they widened and her eyebrows peaked. The sun dipped and was gone and he let himself fall because there was no weight and he was floating.
He woke feeling something hard press against his lip, and then a warmth on his teeth.
“Drink,” the woman said, and Eddie opened his mouth and let the water pass down into his throat. He coughed and heaved and rolled to his side to catch his breath.
“Easy,” she told him, and tilted the glass to his lips again so that he could sip more slowly.
He closed his eyes and opened them. The day filled him in the way light leaps into darkness—a sudden clarity illuminating the shapes around him. Something had extinguished deep inside him, and he felt the hiss in the looseness of his mind, saw steam floating in thin gray columns that flattened and broke and disappeared along the horizon.
“The helicopters won’t miss us this time,” the woman said. “Not with those going.”
Eddie tried to stand. They were on the ridge of bulrushes, and down below them bonfires burned. It was the smoke that he was seeing, but his eyes weren’t right. He waved his hand as if to catch himself, but he was feeling around for the boy. Beside him was air so warm and thick he could have let himself tip over and still remained aloft within it.
“Easy,” the woman said again.
She smiled sadly, the way she might over a horse with a broken leg. There was a hard and trembling grace in her eyes, and Eddie waited for her face to twist into something necessary—for the shot to ring out—as she put him out of his misery.
Slowly, she reached out her hand to him, but his heart released, and he unwound, bolting away from her and running into the dry woods beside the tollbooths.
He ran deep into the leaves until their raucousness beneath his feet forced him to stop and strain to hear that he was alone.
“Dylan,” he said, but only softly. He didn’t look behind any of the trees. The only thing moving in the woods was him.
His legs had worked too quickly and were as limp as dangling wire. He walked back to where the trees met grass before the asphalt of the highway.
Below him, the land dropped off to a beach where the fires burned, and great cement stanchions held the bridge where it lifted free from the land. Beyond was what he hadn’t been able to see from the rise, where he had seen only the woman and the smoke in the sky.
It was the bay, full and wide, pierced along its breadth by the deep legs of the bridge. Close to shore, the water browned like a spill into the blue-gray surface and rippled beneath a wind Eddie was protected from among the trees.
Tangled piles of driftwood were mounded on the beach, and a wheelbarrow heavy with split logs from someone’s yard sat with its wheel pressed halfway into the sand. Men and women tended the fires, and a propane tank had been cut so that its two halves could be propped up on legs like cauldrons above the flames. There was some kind of contraption over top of them—corrugated plastic peaked like a roof, with gutters off the ends.
One of the men stood shirtless with his back to Eddie. The muscles around his shoulders pinched and depressed when he pointed at one fire and then the next. The others carried driftwood in their arms and heaped it at the bases of the fires. At the waterline, a group in shorts and pants rolled to the knee waded in with metal buckets and pickle tubs. They walked up the beach with their shoulders straining and the water sloshing over the lips of the buckets that knocked against their thighs. One woman expelled a laugh so sharp and sudden that Eddie jerked his head to see if a bird had fallen from the sky.
He watched as they helped one another tip the water into the tanks atop one of the fires and stood back as a man removed his T-shirt and knelt and fanned the flames with it until the smoke billowed up around him and the fire licked the metal black and blacker still. The steam gathered strength beneath the plastic ceiling and was as thick and white as paper. They stood next to one another and spoke words Eddie couldn’t hear.
Beneath the gutters were plastic bins, and when the fires had settled, and the steam died down, they lifted one bin and tipped it so that a thin stream of clean water broke over its edge into a jar.
Eddie squinted through the twilight. There were tents and children on the beach, and he scanned their faces, looking for Dylan. In an instant, he faltered and stopped his search, squeezing his chest to keep it from caving in where panic had blown a hole. He tried to remember, but couldn’t—couldn’t remember what the boy had looked like.
The harder he pressed his mind, the more the memory faded.
Two little girls sat cross-legged on a towel on the grassy rise beside the tollbooths. They were closest to him, and he walked over the asphalt of the highway to them on shaky legs. The wind knocked grit against his ankles. There were plastic cups and scraps of paper all around them, and the girls warbled back and forth like parakeets.
Eddie stood above them, invisible for a moment against the sky before they craned their necks to see him. He tried to find his voice.
“Where are your parents?” he said.
“Over there,” said one, pointing down at the beach. She had blond bangs, and her hair curled gold where it touched her shoulder. “It’s a sleepover,” she said, “with all the neighbors.”
“Have you seen a little boy?”
She nodded.
“Where?” Eddie asked.
She pointed down toward one of the fires where a shirtless boy stood in dirty red shorts.
“That’s her brother,” she said, bopping her companion on the head to demonstrate the connection.
“Not him,” Eddie said. He stared at the two of them as though they’d vanish if he looked away. “A different boy.”
“I know a boy at school,” said the other. “Aiden.”
“He doesn’t share,” said the first. “That’s why he doesn’t get stickers.” Her shirt was marred with fingerprints. Eddie watched her pluck an empty two-liter bottle by the neck from off the grass and place it in her lap. Her friend reached over and patted the plastic, saying, “Good kitty.”
“What are you doing?”
“Pretending she’s a cat.”
“A cat named Button,” said the second.
“Where are your parents?” Eddie asked again.
“I told you,” said the first, flopping down and slapping the grass in exasperation.
Eddie left them and walked toward the bulrushes where a woman was standing by herself.
He saw that it was the same woman who had caught him, and he stopped where he was, but she beckoned him closer.
“You came back,” she said, teasing just a little.
“There was a boy with me,” Eddie said.
“A boy?” she said, leaning on a hip to consider it. “I didn’t see a boy.”
Eddie touched his forehead with the edge of his fist, and the pressure there was soothing. He closed his eyes and felt again what it had been like to float.
“It’s worse back there, yeah?” he heard her say. “We’ve pretty much held it together here. We’re a close community, so that helps. We all know each other.”
“He was with me,” Eddie insisted. “The boy,” and when he opened his eyes, he saw that her face had hardened around the deep concern that she was holding for him.
“No,” she said, firmly this time. “You were alone.”
Eddie looked out onto the bridge. There were shapes moving there, but they were blurry and could have been anything—a shadow from a passing cloud just as easily as a little boy. He could look out into the coming evening and twist those shapes into anything he wanted, but none of that twisting mattered.
His insides wouldn’t settle. Pain and ease flashed through his guts like light and dark on the water, but from the outside—to the woman standing right next to him—he must have appeared perfectly still. From as far away as the bridge, he was likely invisible above the shore, both real and unreal, there and without dimension. It didn’t matter that all of this was happening to him.
“My wife,” he said, and his tongue was thick again, but he collected himself.
The woman looked down at the grass that covered the short distance between them. She was silent for a while.
Then she said: “It’s brackish water, you know? It has a salt content. Maybe that’s why it’s still here. We’ve got a couple of geniuses on our side. My husband’s an engineer. If you boil it and let it condense, you can drink it. It’s distilled.”
Beyond the fires, the Bay stretched full and smooth beneath the two spans of the bridge. The sun was going down and the water was gray, but to the west it was bright as neon where the light was touching it.
“Look,” she said, motioning to the fires and the people tending them. “All this in just two days. A day and a half, really. The human mind is really something when you need it to be.”
She glanced beside her and squinted against the last of the sun. The two little girls had gone off somewhere, and the grass was empty.
“When my kids were little,” the woman said, “they used to love when the power went out. We’d read to them by candlelight.”
She looked at him and her face softened to accommodate what must have been devastating his. She was standing nearer to him now. She hadn’t touched his hand, though he felt that she would—that she would take it and hold it without thinking it a kindness.
Then she closed her eyes, as if letting the evening settle over her, and together they stood and faced the expanse of darkening water.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would not have been able to write this book without the friends and family who read and reread its earlier drafts. Many thanks to Andrew Ewell and Hannah Pittard, Nick Soodik, Dr. Alex McQuoid, Patrick Somerville, H. Jerry Cohen, Jerry Gabriel, Mark Rader, John Watt, Rob Roensch, Ari Lieberman, Jeff Klein, Cathy Chung, Mikail Qazi, John Moses Jr., Thor Polson, Murray Warner, Dara Warner, and the Warner I live with, Joanna.
For their continuing collegial support and willingness to discuss books and writing, I’d like to thank Michael Downs and Andrew Reiner.
For her keen eye, attention to detail, and equanimity in working with a first-time novelist, I’d like to thank my editor, Lea Beresford, and the team at Bloomsbury USA for whipping this book into shape.
I’m also grateful to Christy Fletcher and Sylvie Greenberg at Fletcher & Company for their intellectual generosity and dedication to my work. Thank you both for seeing something special in these pages.
And, of course, a thank-you to my folks, Rona and Steve, who not only taught me and my sister to read and write, but with infinite patience did the same for middle school kids across the state of Maryland. For forty years.
A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR
Benjamin Warner teaches writing at Towson University. Thirst is his first novel. A Maryland native, he lives in Baltimore.
Bloomsbury USA
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First published 2016
© Benjamin Warner, 2016
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ISBN: HB: 978-1-63286-215-0
ePub: 978-1-63286-216-7
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Warner, Benjamin.
Thirst / Benjamin Warner.
pages cm
ISBN 978-1-63286-215-0 (hardback) / 978-1-63286-216-7 (ePub)
I. Title.
PS3623.A86248T66 2016
813′.6—dc23
2015015311
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