A Neon Darkness

by Lauren Shippen

  “No,” I say, eyes stinging. “I didn’t know that.”

  “You’re still doing it, you know,” he says, looking at his feet as they burrow deeper into the sand. “I’ve gotten better at recognizing it and … I think you have too.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You can control it more now, can’t you?” he asks, swiveling his head toward me, his brow quirked nonconfrontationally. He should be screaming at me, punching me again, pushing me into the ocean—something—but instead, he’s talking to me like we’re on one of our little adventures. Like he’s just curious about me.

  “Yeah,” I say. “I can.”

  “Mm,” he hums. “Yeah, I can feel it. It’s more … intentional now.”

  The thought of Marley—or anyone—being able to feel those threads, feel the way in which my wants slither underneath people’s skins, sends chills through my body.

  “It scares you, doesn’t it?” he asks. “You keep pulling it back; it feels like a tide going in and out.”

  “I might be getting better, but I wouldn’t say I have control,” I snap. “Don’t act like it’s as simple as just … pulling back.”

  “But you can feel it, can’t you? When you’re making someone want something?”

  “Sometimes,” I say, sifting sand through my fingertips absentmindedly. “But it’s not that simple … it’s not like I just make up my mind and people do exactly what I say. Sometimes … I just want stuff without really realizing it and stuff happens and it’s too late for me to stop it.”

  “That’s bullshit,” he snaps.

  “I can’t stop wanting what I want—”

  “But you willfully got Neon to—to—to—kill Isaiah—”

  “She did that all on her own—”

  “You know that’s not true,” Marley says, more stern than I’ve ever heard him. “You made her do that, Damien, and you can either own up to it or not, but there’s not a third option. There’s no middle ground.”

  “God, Marley, that is so like you,” I groan. “Everything always a binary choice, black or white, when you constantly complain about how our justice system is fucked up and gray—”

  “It is fucked up and gray but there’re some things that just are fucking black and white!” he yells. “Committing murder? Bad. Committing murder by accident in self-defense? Complicated. Forcing someone to commit murder on your behalf—even if it’s in self-defense? Very, very, very bad. And I think you know that, Damien. If you don’t, you’re not the man I thought you were.”

  That hurts me more than anything else in a speech that mentioned murder three times. The idea that I’ve somehow disappointed Marley—that he had enough of an idea of who I was to be disappointed—cuts me to my core.

  “So what would you have me do?” I sniff. “You were lying when you said they’d forgive me eventually. If they won’t ever forgive me, then why do I care?”

  “Do you only care about us if we’re in your life, doing what you want?”

  “I mean … yeah,” I answer. “What do you mean? Of course I care about you because you’re in my life. I’m not saying you have to do what I want but—”

  “Okay, answer me this: If you knew you were never going to see us again, would you want us to be happy?”

  I sit there, staring out across the water, trying to absorb what Marley is suggesting. I’ve never been in this position before. The only people I know who are no longer in my life are my parents, and I resent them too much to want good things for them.

  “That idea has never even occurred to you, has it?” Marley says, echoing my thoughts.

  “I don’t … what’s the point?”

  “Why do you care about us, Damien? Why do you even want to be in our lives?”

  “Because you care about me,” I answer truthfully. “And because you make life … mean something. That’s all—that’s the only thing I ever want. Life is so long. So long and empty, just like every fucking road that brought me here to this big and empty ocean.”

  “You can’t demand meaning from other people,” Marley mutters, and I look over to watch him watching the waves. He’s squinting into the sun, his Cro-Magnon brow hanging over his eyes like a cliff face. He hasn’t gotten up and left yet, the tenuous strings still between us, keeping him here but accomplishing nothing else.

  “What can I do?” I plead. “What can I do to make it better?”

  “You can learn from it,” he tells me. “Don’t be the Damien that we allowed you to be—encouraged you to be. Let go of your ability. Use it just when you need to, when it’s not causing harm to other people. Be Robert Gorham again.”

  “I hated being Robert Gorham,” I grumble.

  “But Robert is a person. He’s someone that I actually kind of liked.” Marley is smiling sadly at me now, and tears start to gather at the corners of my eyes.

  “But Damien is a guy that made me knock him out with a crowbar,” he continues, the frown overtaking his face again. “And that’s not the person I want to be. I’m not the bully people assume but I’m also going to do what I have to to protect the people I love.”

  “That’s all I want to do too.” I sniffle, wiping away the tears as surreptitiously as I can. “I just want to protect you. I don’t want to have to let that feeling go.”

  “Yeah, well, I don’t see a world in which we get over this,” he sighs. “I’m honestly not even sure that the four of us will be able to stay friends, with or without you. We buried a body together. Maybe the best thing we can do is to all go our separate ways.”

  “I never wanted that,” I say. “I never wanted any of this.”

  “I know. But it’s what we have. I think maybe the best thing you can do is to put it all behind you—that’s what’s best for all of us. Start over. Find people who understand you. Try to remember the good times.”

  Marley says it like it’s easy. Like I’m going to be able to walk into a new bar tomorrow and find people who get me the way that the Unusuals got me. People who could love me, who I don’t have to hide from. I refuse to accept that resignation and running away are the only options in front of me.

  “I think I have a better idea,” I say, and I feel Marley tense beside me.

  “I don’t think—”

  “Call them,” I cut him off. “Tell them to meet us. Here.”

  “Damien—”

  “You’ve got a cell phone, right?” I ask, looking sharply at him. He nods. “Then call them.”

  The rope pulls taut again and I know that I have him.

  * * *

  “Thank you for meeting me.”

  Neon and Indah are standing ten feet away, digging their bare feet into the sand. Marley stands between us, like some kind of referee.

  “We didn’t have much choice, Robert,” Indah growls. “We’re all accessories to murder. Whether or not you’ll use it—”

  “Which I’m sure he would,” Neon spits.

  “—you have blackmail on us.”

  “That’s not what I’m trying to do here,” I say, bringing my hands up in surrender.

  “Just say what you’re gonna say,” Neon says. “I hate the beach.”

  “I’d never seen it before,” I admit. “Not until this morning. And I thought it’d be nice to meet here. Neutral territory and whatnot.”

  “No territory is neutral with you around,” Neon says, her blue-lined eyes narrowed.

  “How’s Blaze doing?” I ask, feeling like I’m in a play, following a script.

  “We don’t really know yet,” Indah says. “We need to … we need to find him help. Real help, from people who actually know about Unusuals. A regular hospital isn’t going to be able to save him.”

  “Save him?” I repeat. “Is it really that bad?”

  “He keeps going up in flames,” Indah explains. “It stops pretty quickly, but it happened the whole way home, and the pain … he’s been screaming a lot.”

  I spare a moment to try to feel something for Blaze but come up
hollow. Blaze isn’t my concern right now. It’s inconvenient that he’s not here, might create a loose end, but honestly, that presumes he’ll wake up and remember anything that happened last night. As for the past few months … it could be a drug-induced hallucination for all he knows.

  “I’m sorry,” I say, following the next line in the script. “I never meant to hurt you, Neon.”

  “Yeah, well, you did,” she says, her arms crossed, her power back. She’s straight spined and steely eyed and suddenly my plan seems ill advised, uncalled for. I should be focusing on getting Neon and the others to forgive me, damn what Marley says, and bring me back into the fold. “You’ve taken something that I loved about myself—something that was just mine—and ruined it. I don’t know that I’ll ever be able to…”

  She trails off, the confidence cracking, a single tear escaping down her cheek. I should soldier on, just get everything over with, but my curiosity—my need for them to love me—is too strong in that moment, overpowering any practical solution I had planned.

  “Here’s what I propose,” I start, voice shaking. This is the last-ditch effort. If this doesn’t work—doesn’t convince her that we can get through this—then I’ll have to go with the original, ill-advised plan, and I’m not even sure that will work. “We’re stronger together. If we stay together, the secret stays with us, which is where it’s safest.”

  I can see Neon wanting to jump in, cut me off and walk away, but either I’m holding her here with my wants or the threat of the secret hanging over all our heads is enough. Good. I can use that.

  “We go back to the loft,” I continue. “We go back to normal. And I’ll let you shock me, whenever you want—lightly,” I emphasize when I see a glint in Neon’s eye, “and then you guys don’t have to worry about me influencing you. You can keep me subdued, just enough.”

  “I just told you,” she whispers. “I’m not sure I can ever—I don’t know that I want to use my ability ever again. You’ve made it something … something dirty. Dangerous.”

  “I’m sure with time, you’ll bounce back,” I tell her, and she snorts at that, wiping another tear away.

  “Goddamn it, Robert,” Indah scolds. “Could you be more insensitive?”

  “I think this will work—”

  “Even if it did—even if Neon chose to use her ability—what about when she’s not around?”

  “We can work out some sort of system,” I suggest. “A rotation of sorts.”

  “Or you could just … try not influencing us,” Indah counters, her voice dripping with disdain. “Did you ever think of that?”

  “I don’t think I can,” I admit. “This is just the way I am, but you can fix it, Neon.”

  Her posture stiffens again, the hurt and pain in her eyes turning to cold anger. She clenches her jaw, her gaze piercing right into me, and a thrill of fear goes through my body.

  “So, let me get this straight,” she says, taking a menacing step toward me. “You want me to become like some sort of weird, electropathic caretaker for you? Following you around, keeping you from controlling people—”

  “I don’t control people—”

  “Damn right,” she spits. “You don’t control me. You don’t get to use my ability to kill a man and then turn around and ask me to use it to make you a better person.”

  “I’m not asking you to make me a better person!” I shout. “But you’re the only one who makes me normal! Who makes me a person at all.”

  “That’s not my job, Damien!” she yells back, throwing up her hands. “I’m a person. And you’ve never—you don’t see that. You don’t care. What you did—what you made me do. I can’t ever forgive that. That doesn’t make me unreasonable.”

  “But you can stop it,” I plead. “You can stop me.”

  “Not if you don’t want to be stopped,” she says quietly. “That’s the thing about you. No matter what, you always have the trump card. The house always wins, and I can’t afford to lose anymore. None of us can.”

  “So that’s what this is about, huh?” I growl. “Being friends with me means losing?”

  “You tell me,” she snaps. “You’re the one who made us your friends.”

  My blood turns to ice.

  “No.” I take a few steps back, my feet sinking into the sand. “No, that’s not true—you cared about me, genuinely cared about me. I didn’t make you do that.”

  “Are you absolutely sure?” Neon asks. “Because I’m not. I thought I was—I thought I knew who you were—but you’ve made me second-guess everything I’ve done and thought since meeting you. That’s your superpower. Doubt.”

  “Indah?” I peer over Neon’s shoulder to look at Indah, who has her arms wrapped around herself, one hand rubbing the tattoo that climbs up her arm, tears rolling down her cheeks. Seeing that, the broken expression on her face, sets me crying in earnest too, for once unashamed of my tears. “You care about me, don’t you? For real?”

  “Of course I do, Robert,” she says, weeping. “But that’s not enough. Loving someone isn’t enough.”

  “How?” I cry. “If that’s not enough, what is?”

  “Loving someone and having them love you back. You don’t love us—”

  “Yes, I do—”

  “Control isn’t the same thing as love, Robert,” she cries. “I don’t know, maybe you do love us—”

  “I do,” I sob, letting the tears fall freely.

  “But that doesn’t change the fact that you want to control us. Maybe … maybe things could have been different. But love needs trust and I’m not sure we can ever trust you again.”

  I sniff, pushing the tears off my cheeks with my palm, nodding resignedly. I look at my three friends—the only three people I’ve ever really, truly cared about—and see genuine regret in their faces. All four of us are crying—even Marley, slow steady tears cascading out of his eyes in perfect streams—and I know that I’ve broken things beyond repair. I can’t erase what’s been done, but I can wipe the slate clean.

  “What if we could start over?” I whisper. “Do you think you could love me again?”

  “Life doesn’t work like that,” Marley says. “We don’t get fresh starts. Trust me.”

  “What if we could?”

  The three of them trade confused looks.

  “Here’s the thing about that,” I continue. “I can make people forget.”

  “What?” Indah gasps.

  “I do it a lot. In small ways, like staff at a bar forgetting they didn’t card me, or in bigger ways, like a real estate agent forgetting they didn’t actually sell me that house. But if I want to stay under the radar, want to disappear from a place without a trace … I can make people forget that I ever existed. It’s what I did with my hometown. As far as they know, Robert Gorham never lived there.”

  “How…” Marley’s eyes are wide and shining. “How do you even do that?”

  “I want it.” I shrug.

  “And you…” I see the moment it clicks in Indah’s brain. “You want to do this to us. You want to make us forget and start over?”

  “Just last night,” I say. “It’d be so easy. None of you would have to remember what we did.”

  “No.” Marley is shaking his head vehemently, his fists clenched at his sides. “You can’t do that. It isn’t right—the things that happen to people, our pasts, they make up who we are.”

  “They don’t have to.”

  “No way.” Neon vigorously shakes her head. “You can’t just erase things. Not remembering is not the same as something never happening.”

  “It’ll be the same to you,” I promise.

  “You’re talking about messing with our heads,” she snaps, then her eyes go wide. “Oh my god, you probably already have … what have you already done to us? What have you made us forget?”

  “Nothing, I swear.”

  “How are we supposed to believe that?” Marley asks. “This is why we can’t trust you—”

  “I’m not asking yo
u to trust me,” I say. “I’m not asking anything.”

  “No, you’re telling us,” Neon snarls, lip curling. “Isn’t that right? You’ve already made up your mind.”

  I don’t answer her but the lack of response seems to be enough confirmation.

  “Robert,” Indah pleads, her voice quiet and breaking. “Robert, you don’t have to do this.”

  My eyes move from Indah to Neon to Marley. Each of them is standing still, frozen, unable to leave until I release them. There’s a mix of fear and loathing on their faces, a sheen of sadness over it. But mostly, they’re staring at me in disgust. Like I’m a monster and they’ve only just seen my true face.

  How dare they. Everything I’ve done these past few months has been for them, for their own good. And now I’m offering to take all the bad stuff away—stop the pain—and they don’t want me to. They want to continue living as messy, untamed things and they want to do it without me.

  “Please, Robert,” she whimpers one last time, and I look back at her crying, terrified face.

  “My name is Damien.”

  * * *

  The Plymouth purrs as it turns onto Sunset Boulevard. Late afternoon brightness streams through the open roof, making the driver wince. His face, glowing orange from the sun, turns once more to get a glimpse of the Pacific before he permanently puts it to his back.

  Driving past the rock clubs that freckle the strip is like strolling through a graveyard where every tombstone reads “Robert Gorham.” Los Angeles is where Robert Gorham died. He’s six feet under now, in a crude, hand-dug grave in the woods, never to be heard from again.

  Los Angeles is where Damien was born. He grew here, took his first steps, made his first mistakes. But Damien isn’t someone who makes mistakes. He can’t afford to make mistakes anymore. If no one can accept him, if everyone he meets wants to make him out to be a controlling monster, then fine, that’s what he’ll be. He takes what’s his, just like this city taught him.

  There should be a clear moment when the black convertible leaves the city—a marker of some kind, the sound of a door slamming shut, the road changing. But the urban sprawl never ends, it just keeps spreading out, morphing and shifting subtly and then starkly, until suddenly, there’s desert again. The open, endless road. Infinite roads to go down, each and every one of them open. That’s the beauty of being Damien. There isn’t a single road in the world that he can’t drive on.