The Danger of Being Me (6 page)

And she knows.  Of course she does.  She always knew.

She feels me watching, and looks at me with those caramel eyes that take my breath away.  She cocks an eyebrow at me, the corner of her lips flickering into an intricate little grin.

I smile.  Then I step into the shower with her.

We drive to the high school in warm silence.

We spent half-an-hour digging the Liberty out of the snow, and another twenty minutes crossing town.  The plows ran all night, clearing and salting the streets of Prophecy Creek.

At a little after seven in the morning, I twist the steering wheel to the right.  The Liberty rolls around the corner, down the curving two-lane driveway, and into the student parking lot behind the high school.  The blacktop glistens under the cold clarity of the glacial light, entirely abandoned.  Every school in Wenro County closed down today because of the nor'easter.

I pull into a space at the sidewalk, overlooking the courtyard at the bottom of the wide stone staircase.  We sit in the stillness for nearly a minute, staring out through the windshield, and even behind the veil of that blistering swirl, the lush Scot's Pine stands proudly in the courtyard.  She sighs.  Then I shut down the car, and we both climb out into the frigid Spring.

No one cleared the sidewalks and courtyard and staircases.  We pick our way carefully across the glittering breadth of snow, trudging down the upper staircase through knee-deep drifts to the concourse and the brick island that stands there.

We are both panting by the time we make it around to the eastern face of that island, our breaths gushing out in shifting white bursts that mingle into the dancing snow.  And we grin madly at ourselves, laughing at all the trouble we've gone to just to come visit a tree, and a rock, and a memory.

The Scot's Pine once stood just twelve feet tall, and now it towers more than forty.  I pull my jacket tighter and crane my neck to look up into its soaring branches.  This tree should never have survived here, should never have thrived here.  Not here.

Except that it did.  Of course it did.

I feel her hand on my arm.  I don't know if she's offering comfort or seeking it, but I do know that it doesn't matter.  I look down at her hand, and I look up at her face, and I know somehow that the universe has bent to my own infinite will.  Because she is here, with me, and that is the only truth that matters.

I laugh.  She flashes her beauteous smile at me, not getting the joke but content just to hear me laugh.  Especially today.

I turn back to the Scot's Pine.  In the mulch at the base of the conifer, I find the 42-pound chunk of soapstone, engraved with a name and dates.  A dusting of snow drifted beneath the lowest branches of the tree, and I reach for the stone to brush it away.

I cannot make out the letters etched into the pearly surface of that cenotaph.  I know the name, though I do not know the name.  It blurs, and I know that for all of my laughter, I am crying.

All I can read is a date. 22 March 1998. Fifteen years ago.

I give up trying to decipher the name and stand away.  The girl beside me looks up the tree and into the sky.  "The sun is too bright," she tells no one in particular, and she's right.

I look up into a bleached sky and the frozen light that scatters off each twitching flake, and I blink against the unfiltered light of a supernova.  A bitter breeze slices across the open grounds.

Someone to my right says, "I never thought that anything more than weeds would ever grow here."

When I turn, I find Ethan standing beside me, looking at the Scot's Pine rising up from that brick island.  He wears a Campie Primary School windbreaker, his hands buried in the pockets of his jeans.  Snowflakes glitter in the greasy curls of his hair.  I don't know when he got here, but it's good that he's here.

Especially today.

He looks past me, nods, gives a short two-fingered wave.  "Hey," he says.  The girl at my right smiles and nods back.

Ethan looks at the tree and the stone, at the name and the dates.  He shakes his head.  "Has it really been fifteen years?"

"Yeah," I laugh bitterly, and shove a brackish tear off my cheek with the heel of my hand.  "Fifteen fuckin years."

The girl leans close to my right ear, flooding my lungs with the warmth of her breath.  "I'm going to go back to the car," she tells me, and glances to Ethan.  Her eyes meet mine again, and she smiles, and the sadness in her face breaks my heart.

She presses her lips to mine, then starts back up the stairs to the parking lot.  I watch her pick her way through the storm, and watch my own streaming breath.  The sun burns too bright.

Ethan squints up into the sky, then digs a green box out of his pocket.  He flips the lid open, pulls out what looks like an ordinary cigarette, removes a pack of matches.  He sets the cigarette between his lips, strikes the match, touches the flame to the end of the cigarette.  He shakes out the match, drags off the cigarette, blows out the smoke, and looks back to that chunk of soapstone set into the mulch at the base of the conifer.

He laughs.  "I told you these things wouldn't kill me."

"Yes you did," I say, remembering.  I glance back over my shoulder, up at the rampart along the roof of the school.  A dizzy déjà vu floods through me.  It passes, and I laugh.

"You going to the Serenity Tavern tonight?" he asks.

I nod.  "Just like last year.  Just like next year."

"Drink to life, and drink to death," he says, reciting the toast that we've given fourteen times already.  The toast that we will give until every last one of us has crossed that mythic brink.

"Drink to remember," I finish.  "Drink to forget."

He smiles.  "That's what I like to hear."

I laugh at that.  I can't help myself.  An arctic breath races across the courtyard, and I hear that muffled beeping.

It's been here the whole time, since this morning, since I woke up with dawnlight splashing through the blinds.  I'm sure of that, but I can't remember hearing it before.  Ethan looks up at the tree and into the sky, and cuts me a sidelong glance, blowing out smoke and twitching his impossibly knowing grin.

As if he's known all along.  I laugh.  Of course he has.

I pull my jacket tighter around myself as the snow churns in a shifting haze, beating its fury against the world, and I can't hear anything but that lethargic bleating.  A car alarm, pleading its monotonous tone from the student parking lot.  Running off a dying battery from the sound of it.  Seconds pile up in the space between those plaintive beeps.  A child mashing a button on a telephone pad, over and over again.  The sun burns too bright, and that beeping glides out of the morning over the horizon beyond the student parking lot.  The only sound for miles.

I turn to ask Ethan if he hears that sound, because surely he must, and I find myself alone.  Of course I am.  Ethan never really came here, and the girl with the caramel eyes never really came here.  I did not come here.  My own name lines that chunk of soapstone in the mulch at the base of the conifer.

I am certain of it.

Frozen sunlight reflects blindingly off the snow, and terrible whiteness engulfs me, standing alone at the center of the universe beneath a towering Scot's Pine whose boughs hold up the heavens, whose roots burrow down through the earth into the deepest catacombs below the darkest pits of Tartarus.

And that doesn't trouble me.  Doesn't even really surprise me.  Because a moment later all that blinding light erupts, and there is nothing left to hold out the creeping darkness that wraps itself around me like the delicate breath of my own mortality.

8.

Then the tree and the snow and the courtyard disappear.

And that didn't trouble me.  Didn't even really surprise me. I listened to that plaintive beeping.  I laid in a hospital room.  I remembered that now.  I blinked.  I dreamed the medicated dreams of a dreamer that is dreaming.

I woke into shadows.  A braying spotlight swept past the window again, flooding the room with the unfiltered light of a supernova.  Then it disappeared, and the windy pulse of a helicopter thumped off into the darkness.

A nurse sat in a chair at the foot of my bed, reading a battered magazine.  "Am I going in for surgery?" I slurred.  My voice sounded hoarse and impossibly far away.

"You're done," she said.  "The operation took a little less than four hours.  You've been out ever since then."

I barked out a haggard laugh that promptly broke apart into a gravelly cough.  The nurse closed her magazine.  She stepped to my bed, hovering over me, her face intimately close to my own as she checked my pupils and pulse.

"How'd it go?" I asked.  The enthralling scent of vanilla drifted around me.  I ignored her dizzying curves, refusing to watch her breasts rise and fall with every breath.

She wrote on my chart.  "Like clockwork.  Dr. Chandler is the best cardiothoracic surgeon in the Northeast."

"That's what I like to hear," I said, closing my eyes.  A dizzy déjà vu struck me, and I coughed up another laugh.

Her scribbling stopped and she returned my chart to its binder.  "We just need to make sure that the anesthetic has completely worn off and your plumbing is working."

I opened my eyes and stared at her.  After a moment, she told me, "We need to make sure you're urinating."

I sighed, swallowed.  "What if I'm not?"

"If you're not," she repeated, tucking my binder under her arm, "then we'll have to administer a catheter."

I blinked blankly.  "What's that?"

"A tube inserted up the urethra into the bladder to—"

I cut her off: "A hose up my dick?"

She nodded.

"Oh, no," I said, fully lucid.  I fought off a woozy wave of vertigo as I pushed myself up.  "I'll take care of it."

Then next evening, Ben and Phil visited before dinner.

I muted the television bolted to the ceiling in the corner of the room.  Ben crossed to the chair at the foot of my bed, grabbed the battered magazine, and dropped into the seat.  Phil glanced out my fourth-floor window to the highway below, then turned and leaned back against the sill.

"How'd you two degenerates get in here?"  I laughed.

Ben flipped the pages of the magazine without looking at me.  "I had to work my charms on one of the nurses."

Phil rolled his eyes and grinned.  "Your mom signed us in."  I glanced back toward the door.  Phil shifted, crossing his arms over his chest.  "She said she had to meet up with a couple of coworkers, but she'll be up afterwards."

The magazine crackled as Ben turned another page.  I coughed once, then hacked out a humorless laugh.  Phil smirked.  I said, "At least I don't have to listen to her bitch about how much this is going to cost her insurance."

Ben snorted a short laugh.  Phil glanced up at the silent television, watched Steve Wilkos struggle to separate two brawling transvestites for a moment, shook his head.  "So," he said, looking at the TV.  "Just a bruised rib, huh?"

I shrugged, smirked.  "Nothing serious."

"Your mom said the surgery took seven hours."

I laughed, inhaled, enjoyed the simple pleasure of a full breath.  "My mom tends to exaggerate," I told him.

Phil nodded.  He thought a brief moment, and grinned.  "You missed Ben trying to pick up a 31-year-old redhead at the Morris this afternoon.  It was a sight to behold."

I shook my head.  "Giving up on Erin already?"

Ben flipped the magazine forward and glanced over the pages at me.  "This girl and I have common interests.  She teaches creative writing at The Hill School."

"Guess what her name was," Phil said, grinning.

Ben shot Phil a slanting glare as he told me, "No, don't guess what her fucking name was."

Phil strained to hold his laugh.  "Go ahead.  I'll give you three guesses, and the first two don't count."

Ben laid the open magazine against his chest.  "What's in a name, really?  Would a marigold by any other name smell any less like the honey of morning's breath?"

"Her name wasn't Marigold, was it?" I asked.

Phil shook his head.  "Sherry Redmond."

I blinked at him, then laughed.  "Shut the fuck up."

"I shit you not," he said, and his laugh spilled out.

"Both of you can get bent," Ben said, grinning.  "`Cause I got her fuckin number.  How you like them apples?"

"You let me know how that goes," I told him.

"
Vaffanculo
," Ben told me, his grin widening.

I laughed.  "You missed me kneading at my bladder through my abdomen with my fist for forty-five minutes just to squirt three ounces of piss into a cup so some nurse wouldn't have shove a hose into my dick."

Ben went silent.  He turned to me, and blinked.  Then he barked out a loud laugh.  Phil jumped at the noise, and that made him laugh, and the sound of the two of them got me laughing hard enough that the steel strap tightened against my chest again, just a bit and just for a moment.

I flinched, coughed until the feeling vanished again.  Phil watched me, his laughter falling away.  Ben's smirk didn't falter as he made a point of watching the sky outside my fourth-floor windows.  I drew a long breath, held it, then blew out the hot grit that had collected in my lungs.

We sat in silence for a long moment.  The transvestites continued their wordless pantomime on the television in the corner until one tore off the other's wig and they threw themselves at each other again.  Phil watched them.

The door opened.  A nurse wheeled a table across the room to my bed and slid it into position so that my dinner hovered over the bed in front of me.  She smiled warmly at me, regarded Phil, ignored Ben, and left without a word.