Ivyland (21 page)

You'd appreciate a friendly face, the gray smudge said, though of course it could've been anyone who said it. His ventilator sounded, a symphony of baby buzz-saws, and smoke pulled apart to show bloodshot eyes, a sweaty brow and hair that matched the sterile prison. And at last DH recognized his father.

“Meet your half-brothers,” Kurt said above the whine of his ventilator, and this time his teeth showed first. “From the other family. Twins, though you can't tell. Much older than you, my secret baby boy, my little late mistake.”

DH's eyes were too numb to make tears.

“Wanted to meet you for ourselves,” a twin said.

“We're greedy things,” Kurt confessed, cigar tip pulsing. “I stayed with you as long as I could, to make sure you'd grow up in one piece. But I'm greedy for what's new. What's next. Is there desire like that in you?”

DH considered his question as the twin biohazard suits lifted him with care. The back of the non-transparent suit in front of him read LESS.

“Dreams where you drown and it doesn't hurt,” DH announced.

They carried him and laid him on a gurney.

“Yes,” a voice chimed. “That sort of flash, the ecstatic wisdom. What's the difference between eternal life and taking forever to die?”

“I don't know,” DH said as they pulled a blanket up to his chin.

“Nobody does,” they replied with small laughter.

“Sometimes I suspect there is no past,” Kurt said, his face dawning alongside DH's. “And people sprang into consciousness seconds ago, with artificial memories. That we're a quantum innovation, and some kinks will need to be worked out.”

DH fought sleep. He struggled to work his mouth. His eyes fell shut, and he watched blood cross the lids in orange fields.

I think about you every day, DH,
a voice or negative print of a voice continued.
I miss you and your miracles. You at a magic show, whispering to me how every trick was done. Nothing escaped you. So you must already know why I left. To carry the banner of sudden immortality's church, a nation of infinity, a molecular force for unshaping all things, stone and bridges and people and moons and someday even quasars and space. Mythology to square with what we've learned, said a lone man in three-part harmony, telling DH in a melted accent: a black hole, you go into a black hole, you never come back.

*

“Hec.”

“Len?”

“Thought you'd never come around. Look, they have
Jeopardy!
Here.”

Hecuba shed a tear for the baby she knew was gone. Who else would? DH lay nearby, snoozing in traction.

“There, there, little crying frog.”

“Happened to him?”

“His mother.”

All she could do was wince, but barely.

“What is Shamanism. O hey, check it out.” Lenny brandished an envelope stamped with an insurance company's insignia. “Time to collect. Officially retired.”

“Congratulations.”

“Have to give some credit to your old folks. What are phonemes.”

Hecuba gritted her teeth to make sure they were there. Somebody's dollars went negative on TV. DH stirred, his wires creaking in their pulleys. She wanted more than anything to tuck him in, cut holes in the blanket for his suspended limbs.

“What is the Whig party.”

“Ever answer right?” she struggled to say.

“Not really. Always first, though.” Lenny sliced the envelope open.

DH's eyes fluttered. “Is this jail?” he groaned. “Mom?” Lenny chuckled quietly, unfolding his letter.

“No, honey,” Hecuba said. “I'm so sorry.”

“Food was fine,” DH muttered. “Stop apologizing.”

Lenny shook the envelope, looking for a check that wasn't there and would never come. The letter requested an audience with him—just a few procedural questions.

A Daily Double was posed.

“What is a cryptozoologist,” tried Hecuba, to fill the silence.

“Beats me,” mumbled DH. “Was having such a good dream.” The show had already blipped off, breaking news claiming priority. But talk of a bridge collapse—Europe's first since the American rash—faded to sonic wallpaper in Hecuba's ears, which only now regained a tenuous hold on the wider moment: the grind of skateboards in the parking lot outside, an argument down the hall about kosher status of IV fluids, voices and beepings and idle clatter that would have been unbearable were it not for DH's delirious humming, a tuneless thing you couldn't be sure of.

AIDAN /// IVYLAND, NEW JERSEY

There's a rustle and a moment of phone lag before Phoebe's voice reaches me with an irritating echo attached.

“Aidan?” she says.

“Hey.”

“What's up? Can't cover a shift tonight.”

“It's about Henri,” I say.

I'm standing by the front door, phone pressed hard to an ear that's gone damp. The reception cuts in and out, static mixed with drumming rain and thunder. “I think he's sick.”

“Has he seen a doctor?”

“He says so.” Outside, a hundred umbrellas have bloomed into a circus tent of observance. The Virgin tree alone goes unprotected.

“Little confused as to why you're calling me, then. Trying to pick a get-well card?”

“I want to help him, but he won't let me.”

“Why do you suppose that could be?”

I don't have to suppose. He thinks I'm every bit as helpless. But I have the awful need to hear what I'm helpless against.

“He's building something.”

“Doesn't sound too sick. What is it?”

“I haven't looked.”

“Because.”

“I don't … I'm pretty sure he doesn't want me to see.”

I leave the window and let myself lie face-down on the floor. This was pointless. Got to make up for it. A curious but unavoidable thought gathers steam.

“I miss you,” I say into the carpet.

Forest of hiss on the other end, then the last word of a clipped-off sentence that never made it through, lost between satellites:

“—too.”

And I can't ask her to say it again.

“Chin up, Aid. He'll come round again.”

The connection drops out, and it's not worth calling back. Outside, some have put down their umbrellas and opened themselves to the elements, praying—how much prayer does a soul require?—while their kids stomp puddles. Budding thunder hasn't moved them to safety. And doubtless the conviction that they act in bulletproof harmony with nature is what scares me most. Nothing to do but march back upstairs. The door of Henri's attic sanctuary is closed, as I left it last.

“I need to know what's happening, here,” I tell him.

“Favorite songs have you ache all the right ways.”

“What?”

“Remember Halloween? Trading candy from the pillowcases?”

“Yeah. After Cal wouldn't trick-or-treat anymore.”

“Just us. And you liked all the candy I didn't like, and vice versa.”

“So The Trade.”

“The Trade.”

“What about it?”

“Like chicken or the egg. I wonder if we started out with the preferences or evolved a liking for what the other threw away.”

“I had to grow into
you
, certainly.”

“I'm an acquired taste,” he laughs, but the laugh without his smile plays badly. Isn't it too soon to be talking like this? It snuck up on me; we each became appendage to the other, fused and easier to ignore. World should have ended a decade ago, but people slog through the coda, bewildered by an accidental era that cannot close. So much untended history settles on our debts to friends, plagues a moment whose weightless calm ought to be enough.

“Having all these people here …” he starts.

“I'm taking care of it; they'll be gone tonight.”

“It changed things. I knew it was getting worse. Didn't know … so quickly.”

“The story of modern religion is a morbid affair?” I offer. Which seems the wrong tack. I hear soft purposeful movement, items being put away, maybe the bedspread getting tucked in. I can picture him cleaning up, thoughtless, alone.

“You have to tell me what's wrong.”

“No way to begin to say.”

Then a clatter, a sudden trashing of whatever order's been established, dry fluttering of book pages, the ceramic explosion of what must be the lamp.

“Henri? You can start somewhere,” I plead. “Please, this isn't you.”

“Every start is false. Me. You.”

“That doesn't make sense.”

“I know you think that. I always had it with you. Before the others.”

“Had what, Henri?”

There is that butterfly-caught-in-throat moment where a question proves unanswerable and words should be put aside. Life's been grabbed at either end and wrenched too tight, the last drops of relief long spent. It makes my forearm tingle where Cal would give me Indian burns, skin twisted in contrary wheels. Henri sighs.

“Back then, I thought
you
were doing it.”

The house groans. Banshee winds bend around its frame. Lashing unreal wails. A splintering boom. Otherworldly heat blasts my face, which all but comes apart. It's something, my mind has the terrible peace to reflect, like a nightmare I've had. There's a light so vicious as to blind me, and I trip backward down the stairs in a Cubist blur, down and around the jagged spirals. My back unravels as I fall, shoulder blades grinding under flesh, trying to lacerate their way out. Muscle splitting and bone scrambled.

It stops. I run fingers over my forehead. The same faint ridges. On my back, at the foot of the stairs. Aside from the bruises and cuts, this body is intact. Eyes are quivering in their sockets, sight rimmed with fog-light halos. When they open they can barely align, too hamstrung to dart around.

The broken front window is now fully shattered, constellations of glass strewn in the carpet. Rain coasts lazily through the opening. Outdoors, shouts and cries and repeated words I can't translate. Breathing through my nose inflames things, a scorched sensation. I go shell-shocked through the front door; the screen is ripped from the frame.

The tree is a smoldering pit. Lightning forgets where it's already been. Or runs out of new coordinates. The congregation has been leveled, and those quick to recover shake others still sprawled in the flooded grass. No one dead or badly hurt, just rattled. The rain leaves tiny gray streaks on my clothes—ash of the exploded maple suspended in each drop. A siren yaws through the departed storm.

I look at where the Virgin once stood and wonder why I stayed far from it since Anastasio showed me what it was, avoided it like the epicenter of infection. I wanted it gone. So how can it seem stolen?

People are oblivious to the still-gnashing wind and water, pushing themselves off the ground. And though they ignore me, turning toward the revoked miracle, I know what their faces say.

I know because their faces must mirror Anastasio's, the only one I can see, aimed not at the charred remains but up at the house, at the attic window, agog with sadness, features defying his regal control, melted by rain into childlike wonder. A look that summarizes—
we will be alone again
. Then his eyes find mine, make me remember.

Henri.

My wet clothes weigh a million pounds. Knees will barely bend. But I throw myself into the house and up the staircase, step by unbearable dripping step, half-crawling, shouting his name, expecting him to come casually around the curve any moment and ask me what's going on, whether I'm okay, and if this whole week is not getting curiouser by the minute. Nearing the room, the stairs are tiny waterfalls of ash-water.

I don't know what was wrong with me,
he'd go.
I just haven't been myself.

“Henri,” I say so inwardly he couldn't possibly hear. “Henri.”

I reach the landing. His door has been blown off its hinges. The frame comes unfixed in space, swooning back and forth. I try to steady myself, to make the scene stop swaying. The broken lamp, the journals stacked neatly except for one sitting open in the center of the room: I notice the trivial things first. Ash everywhere. A pool of grayed water by the window, seeping toward me in bleak rivulets.

And something else curving out of the lake of ash, a great deserted mass that presses the breath out of me till I choke on new air. My legs give out. Lungs collapse, the spine dissolves. I fall to a kneel in the polluted water beside him. Some mournful calculus pushes towards the simplest absence, with weak smoke curling off.

When I touch his head, a red line eases out of his nose.

“It's my fault,” comes a sightless voice.

“O,” I say when I try to say “no.”

“Can go to sleep now.”

“You don't have to, Henri.”

“But I can go.”

He goes.

*

Aimless police patrol the house with blank notepads out. A white truck with men in white biohazard suits is gone. Vacate the house ASAP, they said, we don't want to be back here next week. Phoebe standing next to me, red-eyed. Anastasio called the monsignor. They sit on the couch across, hands folded, heads held stiffly. We listen to the murmur of Vince, the sergeant, on the phone. He tells his wife he'll be home at the normal time.

“He giveth and he taketh away,” the Monsignor thinks.

I
think
he thinks.

When I'm allowed upstairs, only ash is left, a faint outline where it collected around him. A cartoon: the pursued passes into solid rock, leaving a hole in the shape of his body.

“Did Henri seem different—depressed or unstable recently?” Vince asks. Ed and Bert, who I can't believe are still cops, stand around in the hall awaiting dismissal and don't hide their snickers.
Wouldn't you be
? I swear one whispers. He couldn't have said it—Vince doesn't even flinch.

“He was keeping himself holed up in here.”

“Avoiding going out? Trouble engaging others.”

“I know why you're asking this,” I say. “And where they took his body.” I don't want to imagine those final wild shifts, his brain bending at deadly angles. “But if you heard—it was still him in there.”

“H12 can leave people highly functional,” Vince says. “Right up till a hemorrhage.”

“He had VV.”

“You still see infections now and then, especially long-term incubations.”

“It isn't that simple.”

“It usually is.”

“I,” I say. But there's no way to paint the force that diced me as I lost him. I put two fingers to my upper lip and they come back red.

“Sir, might want to get checked out yourself.”

“That's not all,” I stammer, wiping the blood from my nose.

Vince sighs. From the sound of it, the assholes in the hall are leafing through one of Henri's journals.

“I'll tell you what. We'll leave this one open for now. You get some rest. Think about what led up to this and tell me your opinion—nobody knew him better than you,” he says. “Maybe go over those notebooks.”

Casually, his voice betrays a wound.

*

I start with an open journal on top of the stack. I sit on the squeaky bed and let the book lie open across my palms.

 

Went riding with Grady to the duck pond again. Couldn't stay as long. Always reminding me of the day with Aidan, running from crazy old gun-toting Clafter. Somehow after making the connection I owed Grady something. His past makes it hard.

 

I skip ahead.

 

Grady's bad Hallaxor reaction was horrifically delayed. Seemed the VV had been a success. Soon after, a classmate has a birthday party at MexiLickin'SurfHog. Playing in that kiddie ball pit, Grady, fine till now, starts convulsing, puking, bleeding from his nose, and the other kids start clambering helplessly through the churning colors to get away from the freak. Grady's vigilant father sees this from his table, charges into the tube entrance of the ball pit but gets stuck at the waist and is reaching desperately out to his sick kid, saying Grady, Grady, Come To Me, with a dozen kids trying to beat him back through the blocked opening. Grady licking at his nosebleed, wiping fluids on the plastic balls. Soon other crazed mothers and fathers are pulling Grady's dad out of the tube by his kicking legs, but he's is clawing at the mix, yelling to a son who now sits dazedly, half-buried, watching the war of parental adrenaline; he's telling him they can stop for ice cream on the way home, if he'll just crawl out of there.

 

Did he steal a file from the Harvey House? Make it up? No one would've told him the story. Grady was certainly unable. I pick up another notebook and open it at random.

These radio transmissions between cops, sometimes truckers, sometimes something else in a technical jargon I don't get.

Tin foil hat on a lark. Maybe schizos on to something.

——Didn't work. No sleep.

 

Doctors told him there was nothing wrong. Brain scans turned up clean. No evidence of H12, though at first he was sure he had it. No symptoms he could describe, only dissolution of cause and boundary. The affliction went unnamed.

 

That accident in the car with Aidan. Imagined it the day before.

 

He slid toward two-way paranoia, blaming himself for distant errors and matters of chance. Thought choice and control were illusions except in his particular case.

 

Coverage of the moon mission I didn't like the sound of, downplaying the secrecy and apparent blackout on mission chatter. Thought better than to tell Aidan. He wouldn't worry, or think it concerned me. Still. The insomnia, trying to will myself to sleep, what I overheard, and now no contact. I can't be capable of that. Please say I can't have done this. I can't make these things happen. I'm an accidental antenna, perhaps the only free agent left. My signals ripple outward impossibly. All blame redirects here.

 

Nothing is spared.

 

Aidan homesick for Phoebe. Want badly to say they can be happy but know there is that toxic strain in it.

 

I pick up the final journal, flip through to the last written page, upon which there is one muted howl, scribbled in haste without punctuation.

 

not alone as I look the unquiet