Molecular joining.
And as soon as he was plugged in, he let it happen on his end too.
Together they walked around in Marion’s brain.
The dimension of Your Mother Is Dead.
It was a bleak one. Who hugged you in this dimension? Who kissed your face when it had acne and no girl your own age was going to kiss it for years or at least until you had a good car?
Who made you cocoa in this dimension? Who touched your forehead when you had a fever?
It was a dry, dusty cratered moon of a dimension, and Heck could hardly breathe in its atmosphere.
Heck imagined Marion as a six-year-old. Let’s play, he would say to Heck.
I can’t breathe here, Heck thought into the airless space.
Stay and play.
“Come out here and play,” Heck said. He had to get out. There was something in Marion’s brain worse than a Johnny Craig comic book, something that scared Heck.
The six-year-old looked away.
“It’s okay, I’m your friend.”
But that wasn’t the microverse they were in now. Heck felt so sorry about that. He hugged the six-year-old, and he vanished, and Heck was hugging the big, real Marion.
He let go. He and Marion were molecularly joined.
“We’re friends, right?” Heck said, and his voice said it the way his heart meant it.
Marion nodded slowly. He picked up Heck’s paint-stained hand, held it in his two hands like he’d done before, like Heck’s hand was something he’d found on the floor. Heck didn’t pull away this time.
“Don’t think you didn’t do a good thing for me,” Marion said quietly. He smiled, a one-dimple smile. “The best thing.”
Heck’s eyes stung and his throat hurt, and his teeth knew he wasn’t painting anymore.
Marion’s smile faded. “But it’s still May 5.”
He dropped Heck’s hand and undid his top coat button.
“You’ll see,” Heck said.
“Help,” Marion said, undoing another button.
“We’ll get help. We’ll stick together …”
Marion undid the last button. His hands were trembling and tears were streaming down his face. He was wearing a gray T-shirt underneath his coat. There was something naked and appalling about that T-shirt.
“Hey, Marion,” Heck said, putting his hand on Marion’s shoulder. “I have an idea. How about if we just take the spores to Spence’s house and release them from his bedroom window. Or keep them. I’m pretty sure Spence has a lot of pocket lint.”
“No.” Marion had his headlight eyes on, and they were crying, but then he smiled. It was the biggest thirteen-dimple smile Heck had ever seen. “Thanks. Thanks for playing with me. You’ll find your mom, Heck. The spores told me so.”
Heck saw it in slow motion, what happened then.
He saw it frame by frame, as Marion flung his jacket over the wall, over, gone, and in a single bound mounted the wall and jumped after it.
As if he could fly.
Heck ran down the stairs to the street below. Marion was on his back, bleeding out of his ears, and still. His eyes were open.
“Help!” Heck screamed. “Help!”
He jumped to his feet and waved his arms at a passing car. The car stopped. The driver took one look at Marion and reached for his cell phone.
Heck went back to Marion. “Pulse. Pulse,” he whispered. He pressed Marion’s neck, his wrist. Maybe he wasn’t doing it right. Heck could hear himself making a strange “uhn, uhn” sound. He tried to stop but couldn’t. The blood was draining out of his brain and filling up with negative space.
“Are you breathing?” Heck said, giving Marion a shake. “Breathe! Uhn, uhn.”
He put his mouth over Marion’s and breathed into it. Should have seen it coming, should have … He breathed into Marion’s mouth again. Again. Again. All the rage in Heck’s lungs stormed into Marion’s mouth. Again. Blink! Why don’t you blink!
He could hear the steps approaching. Heck jumped up, roaring. “Help!”
It was the police.
“Help,” Heck gulped. “He fell—from up there …” His heart was ticking like a bomb. It was going to explode if Marion didn’t blink those headlight eyes.
One of the officers knelt down while the other radioed someone.
“What happened here?”
“He fell …” Heck breathed into his mouth again, forced air into him.
“What’s his name?”
Breathe. “Marion.”
“That’s a girl’s name.”
Heck started to cry. The “uhn, uhn” sound turned into big, ugly boy-sobs. Breathe. Breathe! “He’s crying!”
The officer knelt down. “That’s you, kid. Your tears.” He turned to his partner and made a half shake of his head.
Mutant–human relations—never good. Heck could hear an ambulance siren. The policeman joined his partner. Heck could hear them talking but couldn’t hear what they were saying. He felt a hand on his shoulder.
“What’s your name?”
“Heck. When is the ambulance going to get here? Is that his ambulance?”
“Leave him, Heck. We’ll take it from here.”
“Just one more—”
“We’ll have to ask you to move aside.”
“He’s just a kid! Someone should be taking care of him.”
“Hey, look who’s talking.”
The two policemen took Heck by the arms and pulled him gently away while two paramedics worked on Marion. They opened his shirt and checked for a pulse. His chest was so white it was blue in the moonlight. Sorry, Heck thought. Sorrysorrysorrysorry …
“Cervical splint?” one paramedic asked the other.
“For practice. Do a tube, too.”
Heck hiccuped. “Marion …”
One of the policemen looked suddenly interested. “Marion? Marion Ewald?”
Heck nodded. His whole body jerked with the force of a big, gut-wrenching hiccup.
“Marion Ewald. I hear this kid’s been caught on just about every high place in town. His father said he was trying to jump. I guess he finally got his wish.”
Heck just stood there hiccuping uncontrollably. He wanted to explain about the alien spores, but one of the officers said, “I think you better come with us and tell us exactly what happened here.”
Speedlines.
Speedlines … but there was no power in him to move.
They began packing Marion into the ambulance.
“They’ll be able to help him in the hospital, right?”
“Heck, I’m sorry, but the best thing we can do for Marion is find out what happened to him. So you tell me, okay?”
Heck’s teeth were knocking so hard he thought they’d shatter like cracked glass. “It was the n-night Marion had to re-release the s-spores so they could c-catch their asteroid,” he said between hiccups.
The police officer said, “Uh-huh.”
“That’s what Marion said. That’s what he was doing at the parking garage, releasing his po-pocket creatures. Can I come with him to the hospital? I’m his only fr-friend, and maybe if he hears my voice …”
“I don’t think that would be a good idea, Heck. I’m sorry.”
Heck heard the ambulance worker say, “We don’t need lights and sirens. He’s dead.”
The next hiccup wrenched his whole body.
“Hey!” the officer called to the ambulance driver. “Can you keep it down?”
Heck’s whole body was shaking now. He tried to clamp down on it, hold himself still, but that just made it worse.
Dead.
As in dead.
That was a word that didn’t stay in word bubbles. It was too heavy and real for cartoons, took up too much space for a two-dimensional being like himself. Heck swallowed the word. It hurt going down. He gasped with the hurt of it.
He felt like he’d jumped off fantasy land and smashed face first into reality. He was as flat as the microverse poised betwe
en eternal expansion and imminent implosion. Marion was dead, and it was his fault.
“Where do you live, Heck?” the officer asked.
“I don’t know. I lost my mom.” Time and space were curving, bending. “Can I call my friend, Spence? Spence Carter?”
“We’ll call him for you, son. What’s his number?”
Strange—Heck couldn’t remember his number, and then everything went black.
FRIDAY, MAY 6
It was strange to wake up from some black place where you weren’t there—where you didn’t exist, like you were dead.
Like Marion was dead.
Heck moaned.
Everything was clear now. Spence was right. The Good Deed was a figment of his overactive imagination. No, it was worse than that. It was an errant weapon that had killed Marion.
Someone had ripped up the fabric of space-time. He could see the whole stringy microverse before his eyes, he could see that he’d been making up his whole life so far. He was no hero. He was just a kid, a kid who was trying to save his mom from hypertime when he was in it himself.
He was so flat his heart was a collapsed star and everything was very clear. He was in the null zone, and as far as he could see, there were no events on his event horizon.
Marion was dead.
That was the one clear, clean thing in his mind. It was a hard fact that he could hold on to, that grounded him. From that fact he could construct a whole reality.
Heck’s ears were filling up with tears. He could hear people talking, but he couldn’t understand what they were saying. The hospital room could have been at the bottom of a swimming pool.
Heck wondered if a person could suffocate on his own snot. Here lies Heck Superhero, asphyxiated by snot. He imagined all the kinds of death he knew about: drowning, burning, cancer, car accident. Falling. He decided that death by snot was no worse than any other.
It felt good not to move. It felt good to just lie there. He wasn’t hungry. Maybe he was dead and his spirit was just too Hi-Ho Stupid to get up off its smoky little butt and fly to heaven.
No.
His teeth hurt.
He was alive, and his teeth hurt.
His heart hurt, too. Or at least, it hurt where his heart would have been if he weren’t a soulless cyborg who sent people to their early deaths.
Thanks, Marion had said. Don’t think you didn’t do a good thing for me.
Yeah, sure, a good thing. A Good Deed. He’d Good-Deeded Marion right over the railing and …
You’ll find your mom, Heck, he’d said.
“AARGH!” Heck cried aloud.
Heck’s arm was attached to an IV. He pulled the tube out. Blood started dripping from the part left in his arm. He ripped the tape away and pulled the rest out. He stumbled into the bathroom and looked in the mirror.
There were black shadows under his eyes and his face was white. He’d morphed into a ghoul.
He opened a closet, found his clothes, and started dressing. They smelled bad, but he had to get out of here, go to Spence’s, go to school. His legs shook as he put on his pants. His sketching pencil was in his pocket. It felt strange, like it was too small for his hand.
He stepped into the hall and looked both ways. No armed guards. There was someone in a wheelchair a little way down the hall to the right. To the left a patient was shuffling along, muttering to himself. Heck ducked back into the room to wait for the all-clear.
Heck thought about what he’d say when he got to school. “Mr. Bandras,” he’d say, “sorry I’m late.”
Or maybe he would say, “I saw someone die.”
No. He would say, “I saw Marion Ewald die. I saw my friend die. He was just a kid.”
And Mr. B., he’d probably say, “Where’s your portfolio?”
Mr. Bandras had to have that portfolio. He wouldn’t forget about it. He’d come looking for Heck. You didn’t want to make him mad. Mr. Bandras would say, “You’re late.” He would say, “You’re not going to believe this Mrs. B. made me peanut butter sandwiches today she knows I hate peanut butter sandwiches you’d think after twenty-nine years of marriage …” He would say, “Where’s your assignment?”
It felt good to think about Mr. B. and assignments, as if he were just some ordinary kid. Not a superhero, just an Ordinary Kid who needed help. Whose mom needed help, bigger help than she could get from her Ordinary Kid. He’d seen something in Marion when he painted him, and again in the molecular joining. He’d seen that Marion needed big help, but he’d just kept right on pretending with him, pretending he was some kind of superhero who could save Marion, when all along he was just an Ordinary Kid. Spence was right. There was no molecular joining. If there were, Heck would have been able to see what was going to happen.
In the microverse of Ordinary Kid, it was … Friday. Friday, the Day of Portfolios Due.
A portfolio due meant you didn’t have time to think about alien spores that dragged kids over walls to their deaths. Having a portfolio due meant you might be an almost normal kid in school.
Yes, he had to go now, now while the police were probably on coffee break. Soon they’d return, and find that their prisoner had escaped. He peeked out again and retreated. Someone was right outside his door.
He should stay anyway. He would stay. He wouldn’t run away. He’d tell the police about his lost mom. He would go to jail, pay his debt to society, spend the rest of his days on death row …
“Heck?” It was spoken so softly he could barely hear. But he heard.
He turned.
“Heck, honey?”
There she stood, born late and late ever since, the most beautiful mother in the world.
Heck stared.
Was he seeing things?
Was he making her up?
She just stood there in a hospital robe, staring back at him. She looked like a little girl who’d just gotten out of bed. “I’ve been waiting for you to wake up,” she said softly.
He’d never thought of looking for her here.
He stood staring at her, so full of words he couldn’t think which one to put first. At last he said, “Mom.”
He put his arms around her, and she put her arms around him weakly, as if it took all her strength to do it, as if she’d forgotten how.
“Are you okay?” she whispered.
He nodded, and then he shook his head, and then he cried like a stupid little baby and not even like a boy—just a baby, waa waa. Not a superhero, not even a flat superhero, just a round little baby. He thought of Marion’s thirteen-dimple smile, just before he—
“Mom.”
“Sorry,” she whispered. “Sorry.”
The police officer came down the hall. “So I see you found each other,” he said. He cleared his throat while Heck wiped his face with his sleeve. “We, uh, we haven’t told your mom the details.”
His mom glanced at the police officer and the nurse, then looked back at Heck.
She waited for Heck to speak, but the officer spoke first. “The boy’s half starved, ma’am,” he said.
“Dehydrated,” the nurse said coldly.
“There was an incident with one Marion Ewald, indigent. Committed suicide. Your boy here has had a pretty traumatic time of it. We spoke to his friend, Spence Carter, who tells us Heck’s been sleeping in a car for a few days.”
His mom looked down. She said nothing.
Heck could see it coming. The officer felt sorry for him right now. Everyone felt sorry for him right now, poor little victim of cyclical bad parenting. But any minute now, when they saw he wasn’t going to turn in his mom, they’d all walk away, throw their hands in the air.
The nurse must have gotten tired of waiting for Heck’s mom to speak up. “Heck, your mom was found wandering in the early morning hours disoriented. We didn’t know who she was at first.”
Of course they would bring her to a hospital, Heck thought. They wouldn’t know who she was. She wouldn’t have been carrying a purse. A purse was too complicated an
item for her. Money, bus pass, and lip gloss in her pocket were all the weight of the world she could endure.
He could see his mother’s throat quiver. “I thought we made arrangements for you to stay at Spence’s,” she said softly. He could tell she wasn’t okay. Her voice sounded sore, wounded. He noticed that her watch was three hours off.
“Yeah,” Heck said. “Spence’s.”
Her eyes thanked him and she turned to the officer. “I thought it was all arranged,” she said.
“Yeah?” The officer jerked his chin toward Heck. “So why weren’t you there?”
His eyes were already giving up. Heck looked away. He felt sorry for the cop, for his mom, for the nurse who’d had to take off his dirty socks, especially for Marion, for everyone in the whole freaking world …
The officer said, “Excuse me,” and left, and the nurse followed.
Heck’s mom took her ring off and put it on the other hand. Then she changed it back to the previous hand. She did it again, and then again. Heck put his hand over hers to stop her.
“They’ve decided to give me some new medication,” she said to her hands.
He held her hand. It was cool and dry and small.
She looked up at him, right into his eyes. They’d been molecularly joined for so long he couldn’t even remember when it had happened. They didn’t even have to try.
Looking in her eyes like that, he remembered that she’d never learned the difference between a.m. and p.m. Like a kid who has to translate English for his immigrant parents, he’d always had to help her with left and right, and north and south, east and west. He had to help her fill out forms and use a banking machine.
He remembered, too, all the great things about having a mom like his. She was the kind of mom who would sometimes sit down with him in front of the TV at 8 a.m. and play video games with him all day. She didn’t know that mornings meant cereal and supper meant macaroni. Meals were interchangeable, sleep time was negotiable, and homework time was optional. She would bake cookies for him at 3 a.m. if he had a bad dream, and never complained when he turned his music on at 5 a.m. because that was when he liked to draw and paint.
“I love you, Mom. I was worried about you,” Heck said.
“You’re my hero, hon.”
“No.”
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