Irreversible

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Irreversible Page 15

by Chris Lynch


  “Sorry, I forgot,” Kelly adds, with me now up to all fours. “And maybe now you’ll remember my name too.”

  He’s trying to follow me. Fuck him, fuck this, fuck it. He cannot follow me here. The Killer. After all that, all this, after everything, he still thinks he can follow me.

  And now I’m on my hands and knees on the football field, where the son of a bitch knew he’d find me.

  “Are you all right? Sarafian. Sarafian, are you injured? Can you get up? Do you need the stretcher?”

  Our team trainer is crouched looking at me from one side, the opposing squad’s trainer from the other. A few players are scattered about in the background, but it doesn’t seem to have much to do with me, beyond my lying here clogging up their field.

  “I’m fine,” I say. “Just got the wind knocked out of me.”

  I got a whole lot more than that knocked out of me, but I won’t be saying that to anybody around here.

  With the last remaining vestiges of my old football gameness, I spring to my feet in complete denial of any internal malfunctions I may or may not be enduring. I break immediately into a healthy jog to get back into position and wait for the next play to reveal itself. The day is almost over, as are any last chances to seize a spot on this team.

  I’m begging the universe to send Kelly McAvoy and the football my way.

  The universe obliges.

  It’s a stupid boring little dump pass, the kind you see a lot at the end of an exhausting workout. Kelly catches it with plenty of time to haul it in and square up on me.

  But it doesn’t matter. He’s screaming with rage as he aims for me, and I see he is out of control, and I always knew how to turn somebody’s failure of control into an advantage for me. I come at him straight, getting my sights on his thighs, going low, until he is close enough and I explode upward with pile-driver force.

  I glance off his chest and catch him right up under the chin guard. He is completely rocked as his legs go out from under him and I come right over the top of him, before slamming him onto his back, into the ground.

  “What was your name again?” I say as we are face mask to face mask.

  I thought he was going to laugh, I really did.

  I got that one quite wrong.

  unreachable

  Your dad phoned again,” Fabian calls as soon as I walk in. It’s late afternoon and the exact middle of the limbo zone, twenty-four hours since the final workout, twenty-four more till they post the roster.

  I’ve been too on-edge to talk about it with Fabian, or Joyce, or anybody yet.

  “Did you hear me, Keir? I said your dad called again.”

  “You answered my phone again,” I respond. It’s already a thing, a routine, a kind of comedy sketch we’ve been honing. Despite the fact that we’ve only been occupying this space together a short while. My previous roommate and my current one have spoken to each other more times than Ray and I have since I left home.

  They achieved that already by the time they had spoken once.

  I know the question. But I don’t know the answer. Of course I should call him. I should call him every day. He deserves that, and a lot more. He deserves better, way better. Better than me, is what he deserves.

  “You know, Keir, you really should carry your phone. There are lots of good reasons. It just makes sound common sense.”

  He deserves Fabian. I’m glad they have each other to talk to.

  “Sound common sense, Fabian? Like when a guy tells you, if you answer my phone again, I’m gonna choke you to death and so you then wise up and stop answering the guy’s phone? That kind of sense?”

  I don’t know what I’d do if he really did stop answering.

  He’s chopping up fruit salad at his desk. He’s got a skill there, no question. He’s fast and makes no mess, and the shapes of completely unrelated fruits like bananas and plums somehow come out in the same rectangular cubes. And he always shares with me.

  “That’s not what you said. You said you would throttle me.”

  “I used the word ‘throttle’? I don’t think so.”

  “Possibly not. But can’t you allow me to make little improvements here and there so I can pretend I didn’t wind up rooming with a jock?”

  I sigh, because this kind of remark also breaks no new conversational ground between us. But I like fruit salad. And against the odds, I like Mr. Fabian Delmonico as if he were my oldest, closest pal. And he seems to like me, too. Which helps immensely when two guys are having to coexist in a tight space when they have very different interests and no actual common history. One might be tempted to think that was exactly why they got along right out of the chute. He’s an oasis of new and unusual for a guy wanting to unknow the familiar past.

  Why should sad Ray have to be a casualty of that? Why can’t he be a beneficiary of it instead?

  He’s not dead. I’m not a killer. I’m no kind of criminal.

  “Fine, little improvements,” I say. “But don’t improve me so much I’m unrecognizable.”

  “Why would I want to do that?”

  I drag my chair over to his desk and sit close to the fruit piling up in the bowl. I snag chunks of mango in between knife flashes, and he shows no effort to slow down or make any other allowance for the fingers crossing harm’s way. That’s the deal.

  “So, you going to call Ray or what?”

  “You’re not allowed to call him Ray. I’m the one who is his son, remember?”

  “I remember. Do you remember? At least I take his calls.”

  “But nobody asked you to. In fact, you’ve been asked not to. If I wanted to answer calls, I would carry the phone with me. I have no interest in being reachable.” I chew the word out.

  “Don’t spit your contempt on the salad, or you will be asked to go back over to your side of the accommodation.”

  “I was just leaving,” I say, standing, grabbing a fist full of mango and cantaloupe to mess with his carefully plotted distribution of colors and textures.

  “Think of the balance, you Philistine,” he snaps as I squeaky-drag my chair across the floor and throw myself onto my slab of a bed. I ease bits of orange-spectrum chunks of fresh into my mouth as I watch him redress the balance problem with a barrage of tangerine replacements.

  Look at him. If there is one person who stands as a good example of just how far my life has mutated since only last spring, Fabian is that guy. He wears vests. It is just now striking me that he wears vests, every single day. He must have about eight in all. It’s playing across my mind like a strange micro-fashion show, but it’s actually the replays of the days when I was only half taking in the details. I’m noticing my friend now, in his details. Plaids, pinstripes, mostly not nutty colors or anything—though there’s an all-silk royal-blue one that’s really asking for it in daylight. Still, they’re vests, so if they’re worn as anything other than the anchor of a three-piece suit, then they don’t need to be loud in order to be freakwear.

  But the time or two when I was about to come out with some clever remark about the absurdity of whatever he happened to be wearing, he stopped me cold by reminding me with paralyzing sincerity that I could borrow any of his things anytime without needing to ask. I knew where they were all hanging, he said. I did. Cut me off at the knees when he did that.

  And he has a typewriter and not just for show. A manual one, that I can verify he actually uses all the time as if it was a normal, functioning student aid to coursework and not just a prop for the journalism department Halloween party. Although he is planning to use it that way too, saying he’s going as the ghost of newspapers past.

  “What are you staring at?” he asks sternly, following my sight line closely when I wasn’t even aware he was doing it.

  “Nothing.”

  “Not nothing. You are lusting after my typewriter, I know it.”

  “No,” I say. “There’s only one freak in this room and you know it.”

  “No, actually, I’m going to be the bigger man
here and admit that there are two freaks in this room. And one of them better keep his hairy football claws off my typewriter.”

  Football claws. They might not even be football claws anymore. If they aren’t, what kind of claws have I got? I stare at them, turning them over and back again, looking for clues.

  “No, actually, they both better keep off your typewriter. Man, that thing clacks. I can still hear it in my head way after you stop typing.”

  “Yeah,” he says, and no, he isn’t fooling, “it is a beautiful sound sculpture.”

  “No, it isn’t. It’s like living inside a tiny tap-dancing studio. It makes me borderline demented sometimes, just so you know.”

  He snaps his Tupperware bowl shut on the fruit and deposits it in his little fridge in between his desk and his closet. The fridge doubles as a plinth for the glorious typewriter when it’s resting. “Just help yourself,” he says, like he always says. Then he hops stylishly, like an old Hollywood dancer type, onto his bed. He’s already in sitting position with his hands clasped around one knee when he lands.

  “Listen,” he says, “okay, I will try to be more conscious and considerate of the noise when I work on the ol’ gal.”

  “Ol’ gal?” I say. “You two go back a long way, do you?”

  “Well, here’s the story,” he says, as he says when he’s winding up to spin me a tale off a small and innocent inquiry. “The ol’ gal and I do go all the way back, to orientation. I rescued her from this teaching assistant in the English department, who is always talking about authenticity in writing and saying things like it extends to everything, the clothes you wear and the coffee you must refuse to drink. And he says it with a really, really straight face, like, a pencil of a face is what he has. And so he’s going to put on some kind of clinic of live, in-person, authentic writing at the front of the class because he was just too distractingly inspired by this typewriter he found at a yard sale the day before. Got himself all set up for some macho freewriting, which he was going to then subdue us with by reading when he got to the bottom of page one. So, to make a long story a little less long, there was a complete riot of laughter in the class as the TA was in a fury, sweat and hair oil stuff streaming down his face because the E key was as much of a stiff as he was and fought him every step of the way, causing him to use up a solid fifteen minutes between abusing and coaxing the old mechanics into finishing just the one word ‘steampunk,’ before quitting and punching the typewriter repeatedly in front of everybody. And while I’m sure the ol’ gal would have eventually come back to win the fight as well, I had to jump up and intervene. I was told to get the thing out and never let him lay eyes on it again. Didn’t have to tell me twice, that’s for sure.”

  “And you type something like a thousand words a minute on the thing.”

  He shrugs. “A little bit of the right grease in the right places, you can get almost any non-carbon-based life-form to do what you want it to.”

  I shake my head in a big mad-cow toggle of admiration. I flash for a second on how people I knew, somewhere and sometime back, would have smutted all over that greased-life-forms bit. And I thought of how Fabian, right over there staring back at me from the other bed—because in this mutated life I have a roommate such as this—how he would have been just exactly the type of character we would have taken wicked, rabid pleasure in hunting down and fucking up. Thinking up newer and ever more savage ways to humiliate him and expose the most vulnerable—

  I stop myself. It was silent, just in my own head I was thinking the words, and then I heard them, and they had to be cut off. They were wrong words, all wrong, and now they are stopped up in there, jammed up. My head suddenly weighs about an extra ten pounds, and I lean forward with my elbows on my knees and the heels of my hands pressed as hard as I can make them go into my temples.

  “Keir?” Fabian says, sounding concerned. “Hey. Hey, are you all right?”

  I can hear from the noise of the cheap creaky slats that he’s coming off his bed to check on me. “No,” I say—more like snap, unfortunately. “I’m good, though, man, thanks. Just really tired all of a sudden, so I’m going to, to lie down now.” I promptly do that by falling straight back onto the pillow.

  “Okay then,” Fabian says, sounding not noticeably less concerned than before my assurances.

  “Right,” I say. “Thanks, that was a great story. Another one. You always tell such great stories, and you tell them with greatness. I don’t know how you do it.”

  “Well, you know, English department. All we do is study the art of making stuff up all the time. Bound to rub off on a guy eventually.”

  “Excellent. It suits you. I will want to hear more, but tomorrow maybe.”

  “Sure, Keir.”

  “Would you mind, Fabian, if I asked you to turn off the big light?”

  “Sure, Keir. Sure thing.”

  Sure. And then the click of that light, bringing on the darkness, feels like it saves me from something. An awful, horrible something.

  “Thanks again, Fabian. I love your stories. I look forward to them.”

  “I’m glad,” he says through the dark, in a strange old voice for a glad guy.

  if you could only see your funny, scary self

  You cannot just love me, just like that, Keir.”

  “Why not? It sounds like a superb idea to me.”

  “I won’t allow it, for one thing. It’s a bit crazy. And, hold on, idea? It’s an idea? Like something that occurred to you this morning when you got up out of bed and started planning out your day? Go to the gym around one o’clock, then, hey, here’s an idea. . . .”

  This is not at all the way it’s supposed to go.

  “Right, okay, sorry, I shouldn’t have used the word ‘idea.’ ”

  “You shouldn’t have used the word ‘love,’ ya nut. ‘Idea’ is a perfectly fine word, not terrifying at all, go ahead and use it all you want. ‘Love,’ my goodness, is a massive meteor of a word, a dangerous, powerful thing.”

  “Exactly,” I say with more brightness than I feel, “so you do feel it too.”

  She sighs, stretching it out long enough for me to start wondering whether it’s an exasperation sigh or a relief sigh and what it means for our future in either case.

  “That’s better,” she says, clearing things up a little. “It’s good that you can see the funny side anyway. Women can’t resist a good sense of humor, you know. We’ll keep it light for now, huh? Don’t get so serious and scary.”

  My instincts in this area aren’t incredibly trustworthy, but I don’t suppose the whole love business is up for debate. I should be qualified to weigh in on the subject of me, though, right?

  “I’ll take serious,” I say seriously. “But I don’t think I’m especially funny or scary.”

  And in the latest twist in this long and winding road of surprises that maybe shouldn’t be, Joyce seizes me in a warm full wrap of a hug. “Oh, Keir,” she breathes right in my ear, which is now my favorite, luckiest of all my body parts. “If you could only see yourself.”

  I’m hugging her right back, naturally, and trying to gauge the exact right amount of pressure to use, to hold on with serious intent but without scariness.

  “I’d really rather just see you,” I say. “If I can see you, then that means you’re with me. And if you’re with me, then that means I must be pretty all right, and I have no need to see myself to know that.”

  “You are. You’re pretty all right.”

  “And you’re with me.”

  “I would have thought that was evident, but okay. Yes, Keir, I am with you. I have to say, for a football player you’re not exactly roaring with self-confidence.”

  Except that I am not a football player officially until I see my name posted on that roster in the gym in another five hours. If I see it.

  And if I don’t?

  It’s the last cut. It is, isn’t it? The final remaining tangible evidence linking one guy and his open-sky future to another guy and his
nonnegotiable past? That’s the finality of it right there. But football was going to be the one link between my old life and my new one. Without it . . . I don’t know if I could create another whole new everything without football to root me.

  “Joyce, if I tell you that I’m scared, will I look like some kind of freak? Some kind of wimpy freak?”

  She looks at me all leery, eyes flitting between me and all other directions for potential escape routes.

  “Please, don’t look like that,” I plead.

  “Come on, Keir, you’re not exactly an open book with that kind of stuff. I should be allowed at least a look of moderate surprise.”

  I nod my head yes, and I hold up my hands—stop—but the words that will say it all much clearer come all sticky and slow, a molasses river.

  “I don’t think my confidence has been affected one way or another, but I’m not a football player anymore if a sheet of paper posted in the gym in a few hours doesn’t tell me I am.”

  She smiles, broadly and knowingly. It’s the kind of look that should reassure a person, but I’m not able to get there.

  “How could they cut you? They recruited you, for heaven’s sake. That’s absurd of them to give up on a scholarship athlete after such a short time. You are going to be fine.”

  “I can’t think that way. They probably saw how desperate I was and cut me the minute I left the field.”

  “Oh, right. And you say your confidence is unaffected. . . .”

  This is more painful than I thought it would be. It is laying bruises on me beyond what Kelly and the rest of them could manage in full contact down on the field.

  “I can’t remember a time before I was on one team or another. This thing, the games, the routine and discipline of practices and workouts, it was a big part of what helped me have an idea of myself. It let me identify me to myself when sometimes I would drift toward the feeling that I didn’t know anything about anything. I’d see my teammates, lift weights with them, suit up with them, and they would remind me by the way they saw me. Slap my helmet. Pound on my shoulder pads. I would see the stats, see how many points I’d accumulated between field goals and point-after conversions. And there it would be on the sheet, complete, in plain numbers that needed no interpretation to tell me who I was and how good I was at it.”

 

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