The Danger of Being Me (27 page)

So when I threw the bolt, I huffed one relieved breath.  I thought of Regina.  I would have to thank her.  But the thought was knocked away as the door jostled in its frame a moment later.  Janice screeched from the other side of the wood, "don't you
lock
this fuckin door!"

"Fuck off!" I barked.  It was a command, a suggestion, a desperate plea.  I didn't jump at the sound of that voice.  Not this time.  I recognized it, and I embraced its glory and its hatred.  Because only in my own creeping darkness could I hope to stand against the darkness surging out of her, crashing against my door.  "We're fuckin
done!
"

The door buckled.  She must have thrown her entire body against the wood like a rampaging nose-tackle in roidrage.  I leaned against the wall next to the door frame, pressing my forehead to the cool paint, hoping the bolt would hold.  The door shuddered again, but the impact sounded weaker.  I blew out a harsh breath that came up like sandpaper and spoke hoarsely, barely loud enough to hear my own voice: "I am so fucking done."

Seconds passed.  I heard nothing from the hallway.  I opened my eyes, turned to see the pockmarked surface of the door.  It seemed too much to hope that Janice gone to bed.  I listened to the shallow sound of my own breath as I counted out five Mississippis.  Then I heard a dry brushing sound, like fingertips sliding across wood.

I imagined Janice leaning against the outside of my bedroom door, palms pressed against its grainy cedar surface, ear to the wood.  Waiting.  I shivered from my hair to my ankles.  Then her voice slipped through the crack between the door and the frame, low and tight.  "If you don't open this door, I'll burn this motherfuckin house to the ground."  And then she giggled.

I sucked in a breath, heard staggering footsteps moving away along the short hallway outside the door.  I pushed away from the wall, spun toward the room.  My bookbag lay crumpled under my computer desk, and I bent for it.  My wallet was still tucked into the zippered front pocket, and that was good.  I pulled the bag free, grabbed a pair of socks off the floor, stuffed them inside.  I almost started to contemplate what I was doing, and paused.

Drawers rattled in the kitchen as Janice yanked them.  Maybe she didn't know that the matches were stored in the cabinet above the refrigerator, or maybe the alcohol had just locked that particular memory away for the evening.  I grabbed my faded-green notebook off my desk chair, and that was when I spotted the untidy stack of neon-orange pages piled on the bottom shelf of my computer desk.  The top sheet read
Cecilia's Song
in large, plain font.

I stared at the manuscript, and time spun out around me.  The refrigerator banged open out in the kitchen, and the rearward chamber of my mind took the sound as a sign that Janice had forgotten her threat.  I grabbed that pile of neon-orange pages off the desk, jammed the manuscript into my bookbag.  If Janice did burn the motherfucking house to the ground, she wasn't going to destroy Ethan's work in the process.  I would not let her do that.

I packed my own faded-green notebook next to Ethan's manuscript, then scavenged across the desktop around my computer.  I found four disks scattered there containing my entire body of writing, and tucked them into the front pocket along with my wallet.  A door slammed out in the hallway.  My head jerked up toward the door, and I froze.  My mind took several seconds to place the sound.  It was the door to Janice's bedroom, opposite mine at the other end of the hall.  It might have seemed too much to hope that she had finally, mercifully, gone to bed to sleep off her intoxication.  But I was certain that it was true.

I climbed off the floor and dropped into my desk chair, the bookbag hanging from my hand.  The computer screen stared at me blankly.  I listened to the quiet of the house for several minutes, then ten more, then another five for good measure.  I never reconsidered the decision I had made, but I at least let myself believe that I did.

I spent twenty minutes listening to Janice's vicious words replay themselves inside the cavern of my memory.  Then I pushed myself out of the chair, crossed the room, paused at the door and listening.  There was nothing on the other side.  I swung the door open quietly, and Janice was crouching there in the darkness, her cheeks smeared with blood, grinning madly, and she launched herself at me, ripping my throat out with her teeth.

I shook my head.  The hall was empty.  I turned back to my room again, found nothing else worth taking, and flicked off the light.  I slipped out into the empty dining room.  The furniture sat in the darkness like set pieces.  I needed desperately to be anywhere other than here.

I crossed the living room to the front door, bent to the small end table next to the loveseat.  A ceramic bowl sat there, a hideous thing that Regina had made in middle school.  It held a handful of change, a translucent red die with white pips, a paperclip, and on the top of the pile, a bulky keyring.  I picked the keys out of the bowl, removed the longest one with the black plastic head, and returned the keyring.  I even left my own keys in the bowl.

I pulled the door open, and its familiar creak sounded pitiful. Valedictory. It was the sound of a broken door on a broken home. I slipped out onto the stoop, pulled my bag onto my shoulder, locked the front door from the inside before pulling it shut. A sharp arctic breath flooded my lungs.  The scar under my arm and the two across my back tightened.  I smiled.  I cut across the grass, stepped into the street, rounded the scarlet Jeep Wagoneer and unlocked the driver's door, piling in behind the wheel.

I gripped the steering wheel, looking out through the passenger's side window at the house huddled in the darkness beyond the glass.  I was sure that I was seeing it for the last time.  On a whim, I glanced upward, toward the second-story window of Regina's bedroom.  Her window was dark, and that decided it.  Because Regina slept with her television on, every night, without fail.

She wasn't home.  She was somewhere else.  Safe.

I started the car and pulled away up the street.

CHAPTER FIVE

1.

My fingers tightened on the steering-wheel.

The leather creaked under my grip, and my knuckles felt full of hot sand.  I eased the accelerator, pushing the Jeep past 70 as it barreled down a blackened road to nowhere.  I took Highway 119 across the Sawmill Bridge, leaving Prophecy Creek behind, making my way along the Schuylkill Expressway.  I chased the stark headlights across the asphalt for nearly an hour, coasting across the Walt Whitman Bridge after two-thirty.  As the Jeep slipped over the watery border between Pennsylvania and New Jersey, I glimpsed toward the black river below.

I rolled out onto land again, and the vehicle fell back into the primitive darkness of some long-forgotten epoch.  Wooded hills rolled away into a deep haze.  I had done this all before.  I was sure of it.  In another lifetime, on another plane of reality.  In a terrifying nightmare in a dream.  In the world-from-before.  I looked out over that landscape, saw my own eternal Avalon regressing into a distance marked by varying gradients of black on black.

I entertained no concept of a destination.  My only thought was to drive until the land ran out.  Now, as the dashboard clock marched dejectedly toward three o'clock, a weary sort of logic reasserted itself, railing against the insanity that beat at my temples.  I had stolen a car.

This was an empirical fact that I had ignored, then denied, then rationalized, until I finally accepted it right around the time that I had passed through Fernhill Park.  I had stolen a car, and was now driving it across state lines.  I had no plan, limited money, and half-a-tank of gas, and I was pretty sure that my rebellious impulse had just turned into a felony.  If I continued down this blackened road to nowhere, I had no doubt that the story would end very badly for me.  I knew only that I couldn't go back.

I waded through the bucolic night, overwhelmed by this ancient landscape that might have been the foothills of the Poconos or the Paps of Fife above the Firth of Forth or the second moon of Endor.  I heard myself laughing.

I passed through this impossible topography without time or location, the absurd fiction of nations flaking away like paint peeling from the desiccated slats of a skewed fence.  And when that fence finally tumbled into the weeds and decomposed back into the Earth, the border it marked would be forgotten forever.  Those lines would never be redrawn, and that was just as it should be.

I laughed, and the sound of my own laughter made me dizzy. I laughed, because in that intoxicating delirium, the notion of nations was too intense and massive to be held all at once in a single brain.  I laughed, because there was nothing else to do.  I had looked into the unflinching soul of the universe, and it had looked back into me and seen itself.  It was absolutely absurd.  It was laughable.

And so I laughed.  Because curiosity is the greatest gift, and knowledge is the greatest curse.  It always had been.  And I had no one to blame but myself.  I had looked into the photosphere of a total solar eclipse, into the Ark of the Testimony, into the jar that Zeus had given to Pandora.  I had looked, and I had seen what was never been meant to be seen.  That indelible memory could not be unseen.

I would carry that knowledge with me forever.  I would treasure it, and care for it.  I would share it when I could and defend it when I must.  I would be mocked for it, revered for it, vilified and deified as a mad prophet by a society so high on its own ignorance that it waged war against itself and murdered its own people for theologies, ethnicities, politics.  Oil.  And justice for all.

I laughed, because the alternative was to turn back and drive this Wagoneer off the Walt Whitman Bridge into the icy relief of the South River.  I reached to the dashboard, snapped the radio on, twisted up the dial to drown out my racing thoughts.  A graceful tumble of piano chords rained at moderate-4, and Billy Joel told me about a kid working in a grocery store, saving his pennies for someday.

It seemed such a waste of time.

So I laughed.

Half-an-hour later, the fraying ends of my sanity whipped in the bitter breeze slicing through the open window.

A litany of classic rock had carried me through New Jersey.  Jimi Hendrix's operatic guitar rang out under an exchange between a joker and a thief, and I eased the radio up to full volume.  I jammed the gas pedal, delirious with the fiery taste of my own immortality.

The Jeep crested a gentle rise, and a neon sprawl of steel and glass and concrete monoliths sparkled out of the darkness.  I shook my head, blinked hard, tried to clear away the kaleiscopic hallucination.  But the City persisted, huddled against the fringe of the Angry Sea, the tarnished gem of the East beckoning with the cries of the Sirens.

The expressway widened.  I stared thunderstruck into the cyclopean eye of Atlantic City.  Screaming sodium-arcs crowded the hem of the road, casting a colorless glaze over the eight-lane thoroughfare.  I eased my foot off the gas, coasting down that shadowless urban tract.

Extravagant shrines towered into the troposphere, glorious tributes to the postmodern deities of decadence.  Kinetic spires of commercialism flickertwinkled like shattered glass, all glitz and no substance.  And of course that was the point.  The City was just a glittering lure.

I stared into that corporeal mirage, and a sudden splash of red-and-blue and red-and-blue flashed in my rearview, jittering across the interior of the car.  I glanced up at the mirror, saw the front-end of a white Crown Victoria and the unmistakable shape of cruiser headlights, that crimson-indigo screaming from the bar lights on its roof.

"Fuck," I spat, easing the breaks.  I tried to recall where my mother hid the registration as I reached for the handle to roll the window.  I even started concocting a cover-story to explain why I was driving an out-of-state car that did not belong to me at this late hour.  A family vacation, and a drug-store-run to get aspirin.  Mom was too tipsy.

It sounded good enough inside my head, but I never got to test it.  The cruiser pulled by me and shot along the straightaway into downtown.  I watched the squad car, blinked as its tail-lights flared, and tried to consider my unimaginable good fortune.  I couldn't do it.  That much luck was too intense and massive to be held all at once in a single brain.  The distinctive tone of a police siren rang out once, and then the cruiser disappeared into traffic.

I laughed out loud, then pulled back into traffic.

I steered the Wagoneer for another fifteen minutes.

Lurid showpieces stood out against a velvet backdrop.  That tawdry sideshow played on an endless loop for my infinite amusement, and I was suddenly sure that I was the only real character in someone else's nightmare.  Ethan's perhaps.  If I glanced into the rearview mirror right now, I might even find him sitting in the backseat, grinning up at me with that complicated, unfathomable smile.

I looked, secretly hoping he would be there.  Because that would mean that I had burned away the last vestiges of my sanity.  There was a measure of relief in that.

But he wasn't there.  Of course he wasn't.  I was not insane.  I was only pretending to be.  A few blocks later, I twisted the wheel right, rolling the Jeep down a forgotten side street between two brooding casinos.  The garish cabaret winked impotently in the rearview before fading as I slipped out into the stark fringes of the metropolis.  A half-mile farther from the arterial freeway, the broken road rose before ending against a crumbling dune.

I rolled to the end of the sandswept lane and stopped.  A fistful of sandstones clattered against the undercarriage.  I stared into the bruised nimbus of one last lamppost slouching in this furthest outskirt of humanity, an alien relic marking the edge of a decaying landscape.

I threw the door open without thinking too precisely on the event.  Better to act than to think.  Or so I've heard.

The briny bouquet of the Angry Sea flooded my lungs.  I sucked in an icy breath.  The crashing voice of the end of the world grumbled from the far side of that crumbling dune, beckoning me with the cries of the Sirens.