Hume read a bucolic villanelle that had been published in his alma mater's Gettysburg Review before turning the podium back over to Erin. Nine more poets read works ranging from sonnets to blank-verse to a cycle of haiku, ruminating on love, pride, hate, greed, justice, lust, charity, fury, courage, grief, and hope. It was the litany of vice and virtue that had played for a thousand centuries, strutting and fretting their hours upon a stage of human history.
And as ten o'clock neared, an elderly woman finished delivering a poem about losing her virginity. Erin stepped back to the lectern, glanced at her page, nodded. "Looks like everyone who signed up has read. Unless someone else wants to read a piece or anyone wants to go again, , I was thinking about rounding out the evening with —"
She broke off her sentence as she looked at me. I had stood. It wasn't something that I had decided to do, but it happened anyway. Erin's shocking green eyes flashed, and she grinned. Her smile really did look like Amber's as she said, "We have another fearless lyricist?"
"I don't know about fearless," I said. I heard laughter. It all sounded very far away. I wove between the clustered tables and teenagers, passed by friends and strangers and reached the podium wondering what I was doing. Erin stepped aside, gesturing me in. "Give `em your best."
I looked at her shocking green eyes, and nodded. Then I stepped to the lectern and considered. "My best."
I had written more than five dozen poems in my short career. Some were good. A few were great. But as I looked from one face to the next across a small bookstore crowd, every word of every one of them went scattering across the desolate wilderness of my mind like the dead leaves. In that moment, there were no words. I stood in front of two dozen friends and strangers, desperate for anything to tell them, and all I knew then was that I knew nothing.
I saw Amber, saw the look of compassion and fear in her caramel eyes. And I saw something else, something out of the dark recesses of my memory. It was an image I had seen that morning and would never, ever forget.
I leaned over the podium, gripping its sides. Hot fury flashed like heat-lightning, and I spoke to be heard. "Four rows back and eight rows in is an empty fuckin chair."
The room went silent like someone had hit the mute button. Maybe it had been silent, but now I felt the dark pulse of that silence, smelled its breath, looked into the cavern of its soul as it looked back into me. It was silence like peace. Silence like rest. Silence like death.
"I didn't see it yesterday," I went on, remembering, "because it wasn't there. Its raging orange plastic surface violates my eyes with barren purgatory glee—" I paused, briefly, and found what I needed as I continued "—with terrible surprise. This madness shouldn't happen here, to such a brilliant mind," I said, gripping the lectern. "`Cause now he'll never get to live the life that he designed."
I didn't look at the crowd, but I saw them anyway. I hated what I found in their wounded eyes, but I suppose that's the price for the truth. Winnie and Ben and Helen and Phil watched me like they didn't quite recognize me, and that might have been true just then.
But Amber recognized me. In my words she seemed to recognize the shadow of her own monolithic anger. I felt myself tumbling into the fragile eternity of those glittering caramel eyes. My mind broke free, shed its temporal bindings, and I went back. Back to the roof of the high school where Ethan still is sitting, still is sitting, perched upon the rampart with his back to the air.
I looked at Ethan as he smoked his herbal cigarette, and I told him, "How can this world survive in this uncommon prophet's wake? Can we persist when everything so easily can break?" He twitched a grin, and looked at me through time and the smoke that drifted off his cigarette. "There are no more insightful thoughts. There are no words to say," I told him. He nodded. He knew it was true.
"A senseless fuckin tragedy has taken him away. I see a monolithic pain in that empty fuckin chair as I contemplate the things that prove his parting wasn't fair."
I left the roof then, flung by the bitter breeze of my own memory, and went back further. Back to the beginning.
Back to the bleachers of Keller Vale Middle School's gymnasium, where nearly a thousand children huddled in the seats still bundled in their coats at seven o'clock on a February morning. Ethan was there, up in the bleachers, where he still is sitting. Still is sitting.
"I flip the yellowed pages in my mental catalogue," I told him, and he smiled at the memory, because it was his memory too. His as much as mine. "And I find the oldest memory, that early dialogue between two boys, just twelve years old, that helped me make it through that frigid Winter morning back in 1992." A bell rang out, and nearly a thousand miserable children surged out of the bleachers. "His fluid Scottish dialect had fascinated me, and we had passed the time discussing baseball and rugby."
I left the gym, and even though I didn't know I could, I went back even further. All the way back to Philadelphia International Airport, and of course that wasn't possible. I had never been to the airport downtown. But Ethan had been there. This memory belonged to him alone. And he was sharing it with me tonight, and letting me see.
A procession of passengers emptied out of a terminal. I saw Ethan, eleven years old, walking between a man and a woman that I recognized as his parents. I walked beside them along the concourse, hauling their luggage. "I think of all the knowledge that will now remain unfound," I told this young boy who was destined to bleed to death on an abandoned highway at night. "And his boundless depth of wisdom that would have been profound."
Ethan had inherited his mother's crooked nose, but his eyes burned brightest across the years. He had his father's eyes. "I think of all the women that he'll never get to love," I told Ethan's father, who seemed to know, even from the dark recesses of this memory, how the story had to end. "They'll never know the most uncommon man I can think of. I think of all the brilliant schemes that rapidly dissolve, and how this greatest story could so terribly resolve."
I opened my eyes. I didn't remember closing them. It was probably around the time that I went back to the roof. I saw the audience, saw the compassion and the tears and the pain that I knew so well myself. I felt the sweltering scarlet veil swirling up around me, and I said, "I couldn't guess what lies ahead, or if a world exists where those who conquer Death will meet, and where the mind persists."
Winnie watched me, her grief so furious that it broke my heart. Her eyes burned a furious crimson that matched her hair, begging me to stop, needing me to finish. "I'm searching for a language," I said, needing her to hear my words, "that might properly convey my hope, my wish, my need to hope that I'll find a fuckin way to step across that Mythic Brink, and find him waiting there." I saw more tears, and felt my own on my face. "But I just can't make myself believe when that fuckin seat is bare."
8.
There was no applause. That was just as it should be.
I looked at each face, saw the effects of my words, and knew that I had told the only truth that mattered. They may not have been the most elegant words, but I had done something so much more impossible. I had buried my bare fingers into a bleeding wound, ignored the shrill echo of my own tortured howls, and dug out the fiery bullet before it could kill me. And I could see that I had helped some of these friends and strangers to do the same.
So I couldn't understand why Ethan was looking at me through the storefront window.
I opened my mouth. The crowd must have thought I had more to say. I didn't, but it took me a few seconds to figure that out. I stared past them, through the wide front window where a dead man watched me from the darkness beyond the glass. He wore a peacoat, the collar turned up against that frigid April night. An amethyst scarf draped around his neck, and his hair hung long and greasy.
His lips twitched into a complicated and unfathomable smile. I blinked, squeezing my eyes hard, expecting him to vanish when I opened my eyes. He wasn't there. Of course he wasn't there. He couldn't be standing on the sidewalk outside the Tetraplex, not at quarter-past-ten on thi
s Day of Fools. Not at all. No: that way madness lies.
But he didn't vanish. He stood there at the window like some postmodern Peter Pan come to reclaim his errant shadow, that knowing grin making him look ancient and impossibly alive. I heard Erin's voice beside me, breaking around me like I was underwater. She was thanking me for telling them the truth. I think that's what she said, and I nodded, or at least I think I did, and that was when I saw Ethan's breath fog the glass of the storefront window.
He looked at the smudge, and he smiled. Then he turned away, shaking his head.
Before I even got out from behind the narrow lectern, he had started up the street. I rushed across the bookstore and burst out the door into the frigid April night under the unforgiving glow of a streetlamp, panting and hysterical and contemplating insanity. I expected him to be gone, expected to find myself alone in this stretch of downtown Prophecy Creek, such as it were, looking frantically up and down this desolate street for a specter that had crawled up out of the flooded subbasement of my own fractured psyche. A fragment of an underdone potato, perhaps.
But he wasn't gone. I wasn't alone. He waited a block up at an intersection, under the sane light of an all-night convenience store. I saw his shadow thrown out crookedly across the concrete, stitched neatly back to his feet. He had buried his hands in the pockets of his peacoat. Pale breaths curled off his lips, scattering thin shafts of moonlight.
He had come back. I was certain that he had something to tell me. And I meant to hear it, even if I had to trade my brittle sanity for the knowledge. It seemed a fair trade. I took long strides along the sidewalk to the intersection, reached him too soon. He looked into my face as I stepped up to him, into my brushed-chrome eyes deepest of all.
"They cut your hair," I told him in a whisper.
That seemed to delight him. He smiled, throwing his head back in a silent laugh that made my entire body break out in electric goosebumps. He was dead, buried under a yellowed lawn in Meadowbank, and he was standing here in front of me, laughing on a street corner in Prophecy Creek because his hair had been cut. I laughed then too, and though the sound was soft and perfectly sane, I was certain that I'd finally lost my mind.
There was a measure of relief in that. Ethan's infinite amusement subsided in a few seconds. He shook his head again, but that unfathomable smile never left his face. He watched me with great expectation, as if I had been the one to defy Death by visiting him from the other side of that Mythic Brink during the grand opening of the Tetraplex.
And maybe that was true. Maybe I had asphyxiated in my sleep with a primary spontaneous pneumothorax and ten milligrams of hydrocodone in my veins. Maybe I had spent the last nine months as a specter that had crawled up out of the flooded subbasement of Ethan's fractured psyche. Maybe I was about to be born into something else, something further, something more. Whatever it was that came next. Or maybe I would simply wink out like a flame in a stiff breeze. There was a measure of relief in that.
Ethan mimicked another silent laugh, looking down at the ground between us, grinned when he saw his shadow stitched obediently to his feet. Then he brought his eyes back up to my face, and they were his father's eyes, and I was appalled at myself for never having seen it before. I felt myself suffocating on the thought of what an abysmal friend I had turned out to be. And I couldn't even make it right. Because there were no more tomorrows.
I looked into his father's eyes, and I knew that he knew. Of course he knew. He had reached the last syllable of his recorded time, and he knew, and he seemed to resent me for it, just a little. As if my monolithic grief was anchoring him here when all he really wanted to do was merge back into the universe and be at one with all things.
His eyes softened then, and any resentment I may have imagined there faded. I had seen his truth, and he knew. It was the only truth that mattered. My lips twitch into a smile that was sadness all the way to the bottom. Because he had always known. He had done impossible work with an infinite will, defying Death to find me on a street corner in Prophecy Creek. And now I knew as well.
He started to open his mouth, then stopped. I watched him watch me, perhaps considering whether my mind would explode like a supernova if he actually spoke to me from across that Mythic Brink. He seemed to have some message to pass along, some instruction to give. Tell them I said something witty, he might tell me, or perhaps instead, be excellent to each other. Maybe just Eat at Joe's.
Instead, he looked over my shoulder. Whatever he saw there satisfied him, because he closed his mouth without a word. He looked back to me and flicked his eyes as if to say that I should take a look for myself. But before I got a chance to, I heard a familiar voice behind me.
"Michael?" Her voice so quiet that I almost missed it.
I started to turn, hesitated. Because I knew that once Ethan was out of my sight he would be gone forever.
But he turned me away, pushed me around with the unseen force of his infinite will. He had the decency at least to make it seem like it was my own decision. My vision adjusted, and I spotted Amber standing in the shadows between the streetlights. I couldn't imagine guess long she'd been standing there, because I couldn't guess how long I'd been standing at that intersection.
I buried my hands in the pockets of my jacket. I tried to think of something I could say that might make sense, but thinking hurt, so I gave it up. There were no words. I just watched her, and waited. She took a step toward me, stopped. Maybe she sensed how close I was to the border between the living and the dead. Maybe she sensed that I straddling the faded line between sanity and madness. Or maybe Ethan had left some psychometric wisp clinging to my aura, glistening in the moonlight in a way that thrilled her, filled her with fantastic terrors never felt before.
Then she took another step. "He's gone."
I laughed. It came out sounding like a thick sob, so I bit it back and blew out an icy breath. I knew that Ethan was gone. Dead. Buried. I knew that. I looked down at my feet, and saw his shadow thrown out crookedly across the concrete, stitched neatly to my feet. It had been my own shadow after all, and of course I had known that too.
And I didn't need to glance back over my shoulder to see the intersection where Ethan had laughed silently at the news that his hair had been cut. He wouldn't be there. He had never been there. But I looked anyway. Because just knowing was never enough. I had to see.
Ethan was gone. That was the price I had to pay for looking when I already knew what I would find, and I had inflicted it on myself. He hadn't been standing in the sane light of an all-night convenience store, and he hadn't been standing at the window of the Tetraplex. He was dead and buried, laid to rest under a yellowed lawn in Meadowbank overlooking the Firth of Forth. I was chasing a specter that had crawled up out of the flooded subbasement of my own fractured psyche, following it around the desolate streets of downtown Prophecy Creek. Such as it were.
I turned back to Amber. The silver moonlight cast a dazzling heliograph off her caramel eyes. She took that last step to me, folding one arm around my waist and the other up my back to my shoulder. She held onto me there, pressing her face against the curve of my neck.
I wrapped my arms around her shoulders, memorized her gentle russet curls and the lightness of her smell. I held her on that frigid April night, and I fought against the creeping darkness that threatened to rise up against us. I don't know if she was offering comfort or seeking it. All I knew was that this girl set the world back into motion.
I hadn't realized that we were so well matched until I felt her breath warming the soft flesh of my throat. Her fingertips rested gently against the back of my neck, the irrefutable cadence of her heart beating through four layers of clothing. A sharp arctic breath flooded through my lungs, and my scars tightened. I feared that I might sink into the murky tar of human darkness that had flooded the subbasement of my own fractured psyche.
Except that this girl held onto me. She kept me above the surface. She kept me alive. I felt her breath, and her f
ingertips, and her heart beating against my chest. I stood in the shadow of my own monolithic grief, and even that was okay. Because she held me up. I grieved, and felt her grieve with me, and I felt the undeniable power of being and existence, because the dead do not grieve.
I shook my head, laughed. The sound was soft and perfectly sane. "I want to go home," I whispered.
"Okay," she said into my throat.
Neither of us moved.
"Okay."
9.
Amber took me home in her mother's Mazda MX-5.
It was almost eleven by the time we made it back to her dramatic Queen Anne in Brookshire. We made popcorn in the microwave, then settled into the living room couch. Amber curled against my side, her head on my shoulder, her gentle russet curls brushing against my cheek, and I knew what it felt like to be her derivative. Lying tangent to her curves. She fell asleep on me five minutes into the first quarter of the Sixers' game, and almost immediately after I realized it, I was asleep too. I had no dreams.
Her parents let us sleep, and midnight had come and gone by the time I woke up again. The game had ended; Philadelphia had beaten the Wizards 112-91. Now Rich Eisen and Stuart Scott debated whether Allen Iverson's 30-point game had been more impressive than Derrick Coleman's. I traced the gentle curve of Amber's hip, and marveled at my staggering fortune.
Amber woke then as my fingertips trailed across the delicate skin above her jeans. She tilted her head up to look at my face for a moment, then flashed her beauteous smile and climbed over me and off the couch. She pulled her sneakers back on.
"You can't stay here overnight," she explained.
I sat up, dropping my feet to the floor. "Fair enough."
"It's not that I don't want you to," she said, then trailed off. A scarlet flush crept out of her collar, but she turned to me once her second shoe was on. "House rules."
The Danger of Being Me Page 19
