The Lost Boys Symphony (23 page)

T
hey took every
possible precaution. Henry made sure of that.

80 didn’t share his conviction that they could avoid mishap through preparation, but the old man conceded that it couldn’t hurt and played along. For weeks they recounted each moment of that morning on the George Washington Bridge. They mined every recollection for details that might make their task easier and planned the extraction down to the second.

As for what to do with 19 once they had him, it was Henry’s idea to rebuild one of the downstairs bedrooms. They needed it to be ready for their young self in his own time, twenty years before, so they shifted back before carpeting the room, buying new furniture. Henry measured and cut drywall to cover the window. 80 objected at first, but Henry was adamant that the boy be introduced to his new reality slowly, each revelation carefully controlled. When they were done they went back to the bridge, shifted forward to Henry’s time, and found the room still in place. It was eerie. Dust covered everything but there were no signs of wear. Nothing had been touched or moved in over twenty years.

Henry didn’t feel ready. He insisted on covering every permutation they could imagine, every direction their past might take once 19 was in hand. 80 cooperated for several days, but eventually he’d had enough. Their plans were likely to be meaningless, he said, there were too many variables. They’d done all they could and it was time to act. They’d leave in the morning.

On the day of the extraction Henry awoke in the dark and put on his clothes. He walked down the steps, shoes in hand, careful to be as quiet as possible. 80 would have remembered creeping downstairs—it was impossible for Henry to do
anything
without his older self’s knowledge—but he hoped he would at least be left alone to say goodbye to the world as it was.

The sky was just beginning to lighten as he sat down on the top step of the porch. His bedroom had been silent, a soupy stillness containing only himself and his thoughts, but now that he was outside he could hear the distant sound of the creek. Birds chattered tentatively, as if whispering to see who else was up. He untied his shoes, loosened the laces. It made him think of how he’d arrived. Barefoot. A filthy robe draped over his shoulders. His feet raw from running on the asphalt and concrete of his neighborhood. Henry was not the same man he’d been when he’d arrived. That man was gone.

He stepped off the porch and began walking to the woods. He passed the boulder in the backyard and, as habit demanded, slapped his palm against its rough bulk. By the time he got to the bridge it was roughly sunrise but hard to tell. With all the hills around, Henry wasn’t sure what sunrise meant. Was it the theoretical moment when the sun would cross the horizon were he on a flat plain? Or was every sunrise truly in the eye of its beholder? How could something as irrefutable as the beginning of another day be so subjective? He sat down on the bridge just as he had the morning before they drove off to find 29. And, just as on that morning, 80 evenutally approached him from the forest and said nothing. He conjured the sound of time. Henry acknowledged the fear and nausea, the blood-boiling
everythingness
of the sound, but he let himself go until, for a timeless instant, Henry wasn’t anybody. He wasn’t even an “it,” let alone a “he,” and that was the best feeling in the world. But then he saw hands gripping a twisted steel cable and began to recognize them as his own. He was a man again, a single entity alone among all others, and he wondered why anyone would ever subject himself to something so terrible as that.

He stood.

It was the middle of the night. The dark forced them to take their time getting back to the house. A hundred miles to the south, their boy was still stewing in his bedroom. The seething green vibrations from across the street were packing his body tight with the sickening nausea of anticipation. For the first time since they’d hatched this plan Henry could sense 19’s proximity. It was comforting to know that soon his young self would be released from the pain.

They entered the clearing, passed the boulder—both of them touching it softly as they went by. They checked that the room was ready and gathered their gear. 80 had somehow procured the sedatives, a syringe filled with a wicked-looking milky liquid that Henry was scared to even look at. 80 had also bought clothes of the size and style he thought appropriate for 19, but Henry thought his choices were strange—a pair of pajama bottoms, an oversized T-shirt. Henry didn’t like thinking about how out of touch 80 was with his nineteen-year-old self.

They got in the car.

Henry felt a wave of panic and he imagined that he was an astronaut strapped to the point of a rocket filled with high explosives. It was too late to turn back, too late to do anything but grit his teeth and fly. He closed his eyes while 80 turned the key in the ignition, and they were off.

“It feels like something is ending,” said Henry.

“What do you mean?”

“You don’t remember?”

“No,” said 80. “I’m barely awake.”

Henry reclined his seat a little and settled in. He tried to imagine forgetting this strange feeling or divorcing it from this monumental moment. But then he thought of Val, how he had held her hand as she pushed Annie out into the world. The long labor before was undoubtedly filled with strong, disorienting emotions, but he could only guess at what they actually were. Those hours were gone, obscured by the brilliance of what came directly after.

“What
do
you remember?” he said to 80.

The old man seemed not to have heard him. He squinted out into the bright circle painted by the car’s headlights. Then, when Henry had almost forgotten that he’d spoken his question aloud, 80 said, “I remember seeing him from afar, when I was you. Watching him pass through the gate to the walkway on the upper level.”

“And then, what? We turned around?”

“We know what that memory’s worth.”

The road was suffocated in the deep country darkness of a moonless night. Henry wished he could see into the forest on either side.
One last time,
he thought, but he didn’t know why.

“We’ll be back through here in just a few hours,” said 80. “You’ll see what this is like. Watching yourself sleep in the car. Nothing like it.”

“I know.”

“You saw 29. But this is different. You’re going to have to talk to this one. You’re going to remember having already heard every word you say. Or some of it, anyway.”

“We’ve talked about this,” said Henry, not sure why he wanted 80 to shut up. It was an urge that he didn’t care to examine.

“We’ve talked about the psychological effects,” said 80. “I’m just talking about how it feels. You’ll find a lot about it to like, I should think.”

Henry pondered that and watched the darkness roll by.

Dawn came looking like an old watercolor, its tints faded and washed out. Downtown Fort Lee glowed colorlessly in the gathering light. More than half of the storefront signs were in Korean. It added to the otherworldly feeling of the place. It was a town built on the banks of two rivers, one of water and one of cars, neither of which ever stopped flowing. The entrance to the George Washington Bridge was like a great asphalt heart. The on- and off-ramps the left and right ventricles, all the looping underpasses and overpasses the arteries. Henry knew he should be concentrating on 19, on what he was about to do, but he was overwhelmed by memories. The bagel shop he came to with Gabe on Saturday mornings when they were in high school. The twenty-four-hour diner where they’d stop on their way out of the city after a show. His old drum teacher who lived at the bottom of Grand Avenue and who was even then asleep in his bed exactly as Henry remembered him.

They parked in a little gravel lot directly across from the entrance to the pedestrian walkway. Above their heads hovered the beginning of the bridge itself, and in front of them, across four deserted lanes of local service road, was a wide path leading directly to the chain-link fence that kept people off the bridge between sunset and sunrise.

“I hope we have the right day,” said 80. He put the tip of his thumb against his front teeth and chewed.

“It’s the right day,” said Henry.

A police car parked on the sidewalk across the road. The officer that stepped out was tall, widely built, his gut hanging over his leather belt. Henry and 80 watched as he sauntered to the gate, unlocked the padlock, and pulled the chain through. It rang the fence like a triangle until it got stuck. The cop pulled lightly at first. When it wouldn’t budge, he set his feet at shoulder width and pulled hard. When the chain came free he jolted back and just barely stayed on his feet, then swore at the chain as he kicked it with the toe of his boot.

Henry laughed through his nose, a single exhale of amused disbelief. “I don’t remember that.”

“Me neither,” said 80.

The cop put the chain in the trunk, lowered himself into the driver’s seat, and drove away with his siren on.

Henry focused on the long road to his right. It led up a gentle incline to a stoplight about a hundred yards away. As if willed into existence by his gaze, there appeared in the distance a teenage boy. The boy jerked as he walked, and the toe of one of his shoes scuffed the ground with every other step.

Henry looked on with a glimmer of a smile on his lips. There was no stone. 19 was kicking at nothing. It made perfect sense, but Henry hadn’t known that before. It was sad but strangely empowering.

“How do you feel?” said 80, whispering.

Henry didn’t answer, but he acknowledged the question with a short, choked moan and a deep breath in. He exhaled until there was nothing left.

19 reached the fence. He was beautiful, Henry thought, with his small body framed by the impossibly large towers of the bridge. He had come here to escape the bright green spastic low vibration, to outrun the end of the world. But now his world really
was
going to end—Henry and 80 were there to make sure of that—and it made Henry sort of sad.

Henry and 80 opened their doors and eased out of the car. 80 went around to the trunk. Henry joined him and together they pulled a brand-new folding wheelchair from where it was stowed. Henry opened it, unlocked the wheels. 80 gripped the handles. They waited, watching, as the third Henry trudged his way to the now open gate and walked through it, the invisible stone pulling him along as it had for hours.

The rest went quickly. By the time Henry and 80 reached the gate, 19 was well ahead. The boy had already lost his stone guide companion and he was looking out over the railing that separated him from a two-hundred-foot free fall. Henry recalled the concentric rainbow circles, but just like the stone they weren’t really there. 19 faced the other end of the bridge. He looked up and cocked his head.

The first clarion tone of the music hit Henry’s eardrums like a lance. 19 started to run and as Henry ran after him his feet pounded out the driving rhythm of the bridge’s anthem just as they had years before. The theme was so powerful that he couldn’t believe he’d ever forgotten it, so complex that it was ludicrous that he’d ever tried to re-create it. As he ran Henry felt lifted out of his skin, as if the vital part of him was shedding its human shell and rising into the sky, carried aloft by the noise. 19 was past the first tower now. The walkway angled around that tower in a switchback so the boy was out of sight. Henry ran harder. He struggled, out of breath, but the pain seemed to belong to someone else. He reached the tower and made a quick right turn into the steel-encased corridor. Two sharp lefts and another right later, he was spit back out onto the long middle expanse of the bridge, and there in the distance was 19. He’d fallen and was struggling to get up. Henry kept running with the music until he reached the spot where the boy lay in a haphazard pile of limbs. Henry was supposed to have taken the syringe from his pocket. According to the plan, he was meant to have jammed the thing into 19’s thigh and depressed the plunger the instant he was able to. But he’d forgotten. Of course he had. Momentum carried him forward and he fell. His hands touched the boy and the music bled to white.

There was a sound like the ocean.

It whished and whirred before resolving into the familiar beat of cars on concrete. Beneath Henry was a body. Its face was his own. 19’s. He looked to be at peace. The sun was an afternoon sun and there was no chill to the air.

Henry lifted his head. In the distance, he saw a person walking toward them from the New York side. There was very little time. Henry had to either rouse 19 and get him standing or take him back to the time they’d just left. They could not be confronted by this stranger. He took the syringe from his pocket, removed the cap, and sank the flared tip through 19’s pants and into his thigh. The boy didn’t move as Henry depressed the plunger. Too late, he realized his mistake. If he couldn’t get 19 back to when 80 was waiting for them with a wheelchair, he would be stuck with a sedated body instead of one that might have stood up and walked on its own. He couldn’t lift 19 alone, and even if he could it would attract attention. That left only one option. He needed to get back to the morning. He needed 80 and the car. Most of all he needed that wheelchair.

Something big, most likely an eighteen-wheeler, passed underneath them on the lower level and honked its massive horn. The sound was momentarily overwhelming—deep and full like an ancient battle horn reverberating off the walls of a cave. Henry held on to the sound. It was such a simple thing. Instead of allowing it to fade into the distance with the truck that produced it, Henry simply kept the noise in his body. A car passed in the nearest lane. Its high, airy
whoosh
rose and fell, and Henry found that he could stretch the sound indefinitely. It wasn’t just the one car. It was all of them. Henry let their collective sustain build and build. He tapped his fingers against the cement next to 19’s head and heard the deep resonance of the bridge. He didn’t question what he was doing or why, and he wasn’t overly excited by it either. It was familiar, totally natural. He pictured the gray-blue morning and the car. He focused on 80 walking toward him and the wheelchair and the storefronts of Fort Lee, their neon signs just beginning to blink on. The images piled onto one another, then blended together to create a single, infinite expanse, a bright and audible shine that grew and grew until the present could no longer hold it.