Hawkin could have killed Gunn then. He could have killed Victoria. He could have killed everyone in this building if he wanted. In the town, the state, the country. But he didn’t. He wouldn’t. He was just a boy, after all.
He fell to the floor. And curled into a ball. And wept.
For years, Victoria ran for exercise, but she gave it up after she couldn’t kick a bad case of plantar fasciitis. To this day, the pain lingers in her right arch. She’d had a slipped disc in her lumbar vertebrae years ago and it still hurts for her to sit for any length of time. Her triglycerides remain high, no matter how closely she monitors her diet. The vision in her left eye is starting to fade. She can’t smell as well as she used to. If she eats anything with onions or garlic, she’ll pay for it on the toilet the next day. This boy, Hawkin Gunderson, might be partially made of metal, but his body remained human, a sack full of chemicals you could poke holes in if you found the right vulnerability. The boy was hurt.
He might be ridiculously powerful, but she never saw him that way. He was afraid, sad, weary. Vulnerable. There was something about his bearing, even on a good day, that made him appear bruised inside. He was always wheezy with asthma. He was always fighting a runny nose. He never looked like he’d had enough to eat, and his skin was the same fluorescent yellow as the lights down here. And after Gunn slashed him, when she rushed to him, when she asked him if he was okay, his whole body shook with his weeping. He had wet himself.
“Get out of here,” she told Gunn. “Please.” She wanted to say more—tell him how he disgusted her—but she kept the words pinched inside. Gunn took his time, but eventually he did rise with a sore moan and scraped his feet across the floor and opened the lab door. “You have to understand what’s at stake,” he said.
“Please leave,” she said.
With that, the door clanged shut.
Only then did Victoria say, “Let me see.” Hawkin remained in a tight ball and shook his head. But she kept speaking soothingly to him and assuring him that she only wanted to help, and finally he loosened his arms and showed her his chest.
The wound had already closed up, but a thick blue scar remained that was hard to the touch. Her fingernail ticked against it. “Shh,” she said and petted his hair. “It’s going to be okay.”
“Do you promise?” Hawkin said.
She didn’t answer at first. She didn’t want to lie to him. But finally she resolved something inside herself—because the time for waiting and denial was over—and said, “I promise. But I’m going to need your help.”
* * *
Wade followed her to Nebraska. He followed her to Northfall. She knows he will follow her wherever she goes next. She sometimes feels guilty about his devotion. That the emotional math is off between them. On her less generous days, she sees him as vacant, happy not to work or think too hard. Like a golden retriever eager for a scratch, a ball, a sunbeam to lie in. But the rest of the time, she believes completely that he is simply a better person than her. Good and earnest.
He whistles when he washes the dishes. He hangs his golf scorecards on the fridge. He laughs at the sitcoms he streams on his tablet. He scratches down ideas for a historical novel he’d like to try to write someday. He pots mums for the fall and sets them on the porch. Every Sunday, without fail, he brings her the comics and says, “You’ve got to read this one.” Every day, he does something to display a small flourish of joy and satisfaction. He’s at the kitchen table now, a pen and legal tablet before him, humming as he tries to sketch a bowl of fruit. He wears a yellow golf shirt tucked into his jeans.
It isn’t in Wade’s nature to complain, but she knows he hates this place. They have no friends in Northfall. She seems always to be at work, and whenever she is home, she’s so tense her muscles ache. Ever since they moved here, he has struggled hard to make conversation and get her to laugh. He has to remind her to eat.
When she pulls up a chair at the table now, he smiles and sets down his pen and says, “I draw a pretty mean pear, but that’s a sorry excuse for grapes. Wouldn’t you say?”
“Wade.”
She takes one of his hands in both of hers and massages the knuckles. She has trouble making eye contact at first, and he leans into her and says, “Honey? Victoria? What’s wrong?”
“Every day, multiple times a day,” she says, “you ask if there’s something you can do for me. Rub my neck. Make me dinner. Iron a blouse.”
“Do you need something now? I’m happy to help.”
“I know you are. I know. And I don’t think I’ve made it clear how grateful I am for that. For you.”
He shrugs and smiles. “Oh, hey. That’s sweet. Thanks. I’m grateful for you too.”
“You’ve been worried about me.”
“I have.” There is a moment’s silence when he studies her and his eyes water and crinkle at the corners. “I’ve been real worried about you. And I’ll be honest”—he seems to give this next part a good deal of thought—“I think you need to seriously consider quitting your job.”
She almost says something, but he holds up a finger. “Now, I’m sorry to be bossy, but I need to say something. I hope you’ll hear me out. I know you can’t tell me what’s going on over there, but it’s clear it’s not good. It’s not what you hoped it would be. I don’t care if it’s groundbreaking. I don’t care if you win the gosh-darn Nobel Prize. It’s not worth it.” He taps the table with finality. “There. I said it.”
“Thank you. For saying that.”
“You’re very welcome.”
“You’re right, Wade.”
“I sure think so. I’m glad you think so too.”
“The question is, what are we going to do about it?”
He leans forward eagerly. “I can’t tell you how glad I am we’re having this talk.”
“You want to help me.”
“I do. Of course I do.”
“That’s good. Because I need your help.” Her throat feels dry. She tries to swallow but has no spit. “But I want you to know . . . it’s okay if you say no.”
“How could I ever say no?”
“You might need to. Maybe you should. This is your life. Not just mine.”
“This is our life.”
“Wade. Listen to me. You can say no. Do you understand? This is a conversation. And I don’t even know . . . exactly what I’m asking yet.”
“Tell me. We’ll figure it out. Together.”
She releases his hand then. There are red marks where her nails bit into him. She puts a finger to her mouth, indicating the need for silence. His forehead creases. And he looks around as if he might be able to spot those who might be listening. He mimics the gesture—Shh—and nods, understanding they might be monitored.
She reaches for his pen. He flips to a fresh sheet of paper and rotates the legal tablet toward her. And she begins to write.
25
* * *
Jenna does her best to keep up appearances. In the bathroom, John finds a brightly colored shower curtain and a vase full of dried flowers and a cheap blue candle sputtering in a pool of molten wax. But that can’t hide the linoleum bubbling up or the mold spotting the ceiling. In the living room, a painting is hung off center in an attempt to hide a dent in the wall that looks like it came from somebody getting shoved hard against it. The futon is broken but braced by a dictionary and a Bible. He finds a framed family photo—Dan crushing Jenna and Timmy into a hug—laid flat on a shelf.
In the same way, she puts on a show of hosting him. Touring him brightly through the house, with a special focus on Timmy’s bedroom. Insisting on a meal of spaghetti, Caesar salad, and garlic bread. But her constant smile seems to tremble. And her laughter comes a little too easily, as if she’s trying to convince him that the chain-link fence outside is actually made of white pickets.
He can’t help but feel distracted by the music blasting across the street and he goes often to the window to look out at the men. In response, she drops the shades and puts on a
Police CD. “‘Every little thing she does is magic,’” she sings along with Sting and then says, “Remember?”
He is peering through the slats in the blinds when he says, “What?”
“Remember how you wrote that to me? You used to leave me sticky notes. On my car. On my window. In my purse. You put that one on my timecard at work.”
The slats snap together and he turns away from the window. “I was pretty corny, wasn’t I?”
“Everyone’s corny when they’re a teenager. But you just felt everything to the extreme. It’s like you were always either all the way pissed or all the way happy or all the way in love.” She adjusts the volume. “Nothing was ever halfway. That’s what got you into so much trouble.”
“I’m not that guy anymore,” he says.
“Maybe,” she says and studies him for a long moment, and he shoves his hands deep into his pockets and leans into them as if he could follow.
Timmy walks into the room and says, “What are you guys doing?”
“Just catching up,” Jenna says.
“But you’re not saying any words. You’re staring at each other.”
Jenna claps her hands together and says, “How about let’s make some food already? I’m starving.”
“What are we having?” Before she can respond, Timmy spots the box of Barilla noodles on the counter and throws up his arms and says, “Baspetti!” He points at John. “I get to put the noodles in the pot, but you can take them out of the pot.”
Jenna raises her eyebrows at John and says, “How do you feel about that?”
“Put me to work.”
* * *
Timmy brings his dinosaurs into the sunlit kitchen while they cook. He sets them on the table and loudly lists off each of their names—spinosaurus, stegosaurus, brachiosaurus, and so on—and then arranges them into different formations and mutters their cartoony voices as they fall in love or charge into battle or debate what to watch on television. Counter space is tight, so while Jenna cooks the spaghetti, John sets up the knife and cutting board beside the boy. He hacks his way through a head of romaine, then scoops it into a colander.
At that moment, Timmy smashes a T. rex into a stegosaurus, and the stegosaurus strikes the knife and sends it spinning off the table and onto the floor—where it stabs John’s foot. He nudged off his shoes when he came inside, so the blade lands, tip first, on his big toe.
There is a harsh chirp, the noise two swords make when clashed together.
Jenna and Timmy stop what they’re doing and look at him.
“Oh my God—John?” Jenna says and rushes over even as he holds up his hands and says, “I’m fine. I’m good.”
Timmy’s face goes red. His chin quivers when he stutters out, “I’m s-sorry.”
John snatches the knife off the floor. “Really, I’m fine. It just missed me.”
“It was blue,” Timmy says and points at him. “I saw blue fire!”
“Are you sure you’re okay?” Jenna says. She’s trying to look at his foot, but he keeps pivoting away from her.
“I’m positive,” he says and returns to the table and picks up a toy and floats it in front of Timmy’s face. “Don’t worry about it, buddy. Okay? Now, what’s the name of that dinosaur? A fartosaurus?”
The boy says, “I saw . . .” But then the creases of his suspicious expression go slack and he says, “Fartosaurus?” He slaps his hands over his smile and says, “Fartosaurus!”
“Yes,” John says. “That’s how it hunted its prey. With its deadly poisonous farts. Didn’t you know that? I obviously know way more about dinosaurs than you do.”
The boy laughs in a shrieking way—saying, “No!”—and John hurries the knife to the sink and drops it in before Jenna can note that its tip is bent and blunted.
* * *
When John left Northfall five years ago, he wasn’t trying to kill himself, not exactly. But he wanted to suffer. He wanted to find the edge.
He avoided people. If he was alone, he could hurt only himself. He slowly dialed up the intensity of his experiences. First hiking the Pacific Crest Trail. Then free-climbing Smith Rock. He camped in the Alaska backcountry and wandered unmolested among the grizzlies. He dived the Yongala and the Thistlegorm and wormed his body through the rusted guts of the shipwrecks and sometimes stirred up silt and lost his sense of up and down. He hang-glided off the lip of Kilauea, and the updraft of the red sulfuric pit pushed him thousands of feet into the air and melted holes in the craft’s nylon.
Sometimes his body scared him. He hiked more than thirty miles one day, and when he pulled off his boots to soak his feet in a river, he discovered they were blue. The glow extended raggedly up his calves, as if he were suffering from frostbite. Another time, while climbing, he startled a nest of swallows and lost his grip and fell fifty feet from a cliff side. He didn’t remember the impact, but when he awoke he was lying in a crater that had not been there before with rubble strewn all around him.
And sometimes he had dreams. More vivid than any he had known before. Visions might be a better word for them. In one he was floating in an ocean as red as blood with black lightning veining the sky above. In another he was falling into what he believed to be a star until it blinked and he realized it was an eye. In another still he was coughing, coughing, coughing until what looked like an organ unfurled from his mouth. But when it began to curl, he saw that it was a tentacle. There were whispers in the dreams, but the whispers didn’t sound like words so much as a complicated wind. Or breathing.
He eventually learned to close off that part of himself. It was like trying to believe in God or spinning the dial on a radio that played only foreign and scrambled stations: He could keep questing. Or he could give up.
At first he wore sunglasses to hide his eyes. But he found he couldn’t eat at a restaurant or drink at a bar without somebody making a comment or giving him a shove, so he switched to colored contact lenses. The luminescent blue of his eyes were masked by plain brown.
Someone told him about the Salt Cathedral, a natural formation over a thousand feet high, and he decided to climb it and BASE jump off. He had himself smuggled over the border in the trunk of a car, then he hiked deep into the Syrian Desert. On a steppe bunched with brittle grass, he saw the convoy of Jeeps and trucks approaching long before it arrived. They sent up a miles-long wave of dust that dirtied the sky. He didn’t run or try to hide. And even when they circled him, driving around and around and around until the world was a gray-brown nothing, a cyclone that bit him with its grit, he did not react except to pull the keffiyeh more tightly around his mouth and nose.
He didn’t speak their language, but he nonetheless understood the meaning of the orders they barked at him. He raised his arms to show he meant them no harm. He would not drop to his knees, not until they forced him to by kicking the backs of his legs. They pulled a black sack over his head and tied his wrists and ankles and hurled him into a truck bed and drove for hours over rutted roads, stopping once for a piss break and another time for a brief rattle of gunfire, until his body went rigid and numb.
When they finally parked, the engines ticked and wheezed and the men unhitched the tailgate. They told him to get out, but he could not stand without help, so they dragged him out of the sun and into what he believed to be an inhabited cave system. He could not see, but the floor was a stumbling mess of stone and sand, and the air was cool and damp and smelled like guano, like shadows. He heard voices echoing all around and computers bleeping. A door yanked open with a rusty shriek and he was thrown to the floor.
They ripped open his backpack and dumped its contents. They picked through his pockets. He carried a wad of cash, but no identification; this he had stashed in Turkey beneath a loose tile in a mosque. They wanted to know who he was. They wanted to know what he was worth. But he would not say.
“Why don’t you just tell them?” a voice said to him later that night. It came from across the hall. A man with an accent he couldn’t place. Somethin
g Eastern European.
“Because I’ve been enough trouble to my family.”
This got a laugh out of his neighbor. His name was Anton, he said, and he was a mercenary working for Academi. His unit had been ambushed. Three killed by the roadside IED, another two by gunfire. Of the four who’d survived, he was now the only one left. “They kill me soon. They kill you too.”
“I don’t care,” John said. He wasn’t trying to be defiant. It was the simple truth.
“Well, then,” Anton said. “You have come to right place.”
The next morning, his cell door opened and three men ripped off his hood and arranged him on his knees and held up a cell phone to record what happened next. He couldn’t see at first. He had been so long in the dark. But he heard the machete swing with a whistling rush.
It should have taken his head off, but the metal only clashed against his neck. And a blue light shone suddenly, like someone had thrown open a window. The blade lay on the ground in two pieces. And an energy pulsed through him, as though circuits were lighting up, currents sizzling. This only grew when the men cried out in alarm and called him devil and emptied several rounds into him with their pistols and the bullets fell clinking to the floor.
He didn’t know how to describe it any better than this: He felt full inside. But more than that, busy. Churning. Like a shaken soda. Something needed to spill out or he would explode. He had lost his temper many times before, and this was a little like that, only the sensation was purely physical. There was no rage, only a need to unleash. Less than a minute later, his bindings were torn and three men lay dead on the floor.
He stumbled out the door and into a carved sandstone passage with buzzy lights strung from its ceiling. There were crates stacked in the corridor. Shelves crammed with old radios and dead computers. Other passages branched off into the distance. One of them was colored with sunlight. He was about to head in that direction when he heard a familiar voice say, “Help me.” It came from behind a rusted metal door. Two bloodshot eyes peered at him through its food slot. “Please. Help me,” Anton said. “And then I help you, friend?”
The Ninth Metal Page 19
