The Lost Boys Symphony (24 page)

Henry let himself disappear into the brimming void.

When his eyes could see again, it was just after dawn. The boy was still underneath him, and he smelled terrible. A broad band of acne stretched across his forehead like the Milky Way. His mouth hung open and Henry could see his own teeth inside, a little whiter than he was used to and still lined up nicely from the braces he’d worn as a teenager. And then he remembered. The memories didn’t hit him with epiphanic force. They had always been there. Henry had lived them—he’d long since categorized and prioritized them, and they made up the story of who he was. But in another sense, in some old part of his mind, they were new, too.

He looked up to see 80 emerging from the darkened corridor around the western tower. The details of their plan came back to him, except now they were overlaid with his own memories of waking up in strange clothing in a pitch-black room in the Catskills. The moment was no longer just the present. It was the future and the past, too. It was all so confusing that it took Henry a moment to understand that he’d shifted himself back. He’d brought the boy to the right moment in time. And, more surprising, Henry suddenly recalled that it wasn’t remarkable that he’d done that. Not at all. He’d known how for years. He laughed just as 80 was finally tottering close enough to make his voice heard over the sound of early rush-hour traffic.

“Get him up,” said 80, his urgency matched by his volume.

Henry couldn’t move. His new past was still coming to him and his mind became a dark kaleidoscopic swirl of chaos that churned inward and inward.

“What are you doing?” said 80. “Get him
up!
”

Henry’s body responded. He grabbed 19’s hands and pulled his torso forward and up off the ground. The boy’s head lolled back so far that it looked like his neck might snap, so Henry lowered him again. He maneuvered his way around 19’s back and grabbed him underneath his rancid armpits.

“He’s deadweight,” said Henry.

They hadn’t practiced this part, and it made Henry feel stupid and utterly unprepared. If they’d forgotten about something as simple as their likely inability to lift 150 pounds of unconscious human, what else must they have overlooked?

80 rolled the wheelchair closer and put the brakes on. Clumsily, precariously, they got the boy’s prone body up and wedged it into the seat. Henry released the brakes and pushed 19 back toward New Jersey at a trot. 80 kept up, but he looked like shit, his colorless lips parting as he gasped with each step. “Was he awake when you first touched him?” he said, and then he breathed in and out, hard, before gathering enough air to speak again. “Did he see you?”

Henry glanced back at 80. “Just move,” he said.

They reached the western tower and went single file through the walkway—a left, two rights, and a left—then moved as fast as 80’s aged body would allow toward the car. Again the old man managed to draw enough breath to speak. “Are you curious,” he said, then took a jagged breath, “…are you curious about why we haven’t remembered anything yet?”

“No,” said Henry, and he walked faster. He didn’t know where the lie had come from. It was immediate, completely natural. He didn’t question it.

“Well,” said 80, “as soon as he wakes up, then, I suppose.”

“I suppose,” said Henry. “Move faster. We’re almost there.”

I
t started with
a single white hair halfway between his chin and lower lip. Gabe smiled when he first saw it in the mirror. It felt like the beginning of something, a glimmering beacon of maturity, but even so the urge to pull it out was simply too great. He found his tweezers amid the mess of rolling papers and mysterious knickknacks on Cal’s bedside table (the table itself was mysterious: an overturned clementine crate emblazoned with a green and white hornet and Spanish slogans). When he’d last seen the tweezers, Cal had been using them to dig deep underneath his large toenail. Gabe washed them with soap and water. Washed them again. Then he heated the tips with his lighter. Once he was satisfied that they were sterile, he leaned close to the mirror and dug into the undergrowth of his beard to locate the root of the offending hair. But before he could, it fell out on its own and descended into the toothpaste-grouted sink.

Gabe hadn’t felt anything—no pinprick, no tug to indicate that the hair had ever even been attached. He laughed at how much energy he’d put into the whole thing, then forgot about it. But two days later he saw more of the ghostly strands growing from the same spot as the first one. These fell out, too, and they were followed by others until within a week the bald spot had grown to be the size of a dime.

Val told him it didn’t matter, he looked fine, but that maybe he should go to the doctor. Gabe went to the internet instead.
Alopecia areata.
He concentrated on the parts of each article that focused on the autoimmune implications, the unknown source of the disease, and its various treatments. He skillfully ignored any passage detailing the ailment’s relation to stress and trauma.

He rubbed at the spot. He thought about it all the time. He watched strangers’ eyes to see whose would land on the spot before making eye contact. When a new colony of the offending hairs started to develop lower down on his chin, his heart started beating so fast that he thought he was going to throw up. He grew to be absolutely certain that the spots were a warning of some horrible tragedy to come. Cancer. Hepatitis. The tropical flesh-eating virus that made the news when he was a kid. AIDS.

Late one night he and Val lay awake in his bed. It had been four long days since the last time they’d been together, and neither of them wanted to waste time on unconsciousness. They fooled around, talked, fooled around some more. Apropos of nothing, Val said, “I want you to see a doctor.”

Gabe moaned in frustration.

“I’m going to go too,” she said.

Gabe furrowed his brow in the dark. “Why?”

“I haven’t been feeling that good either. Just little stuff. Like, I’m not that hungry. I just don’t really want to be near food at all, actually.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t know.”

“I was looking up some stuff about alopecia. Seems like it’s something that comes up when people are really stressed out.”

“Hm.”

“Same with my appetite,” she said. “I had this feeling right before I broke up with Henry. When I think about it now I feel stupid. Like my body was telling me something was wrong but I just wasn’t listening.”

“Are you saying you want to break up?” said Gabe. “Like I give a shit.”

Val pinched his arm and he laughed. He had hoped the joke would be enough to divert their conversation, but then she said, “We don’t talk about him. I don’t want to, not always. I know you don’t either. It’s painful. But it feels wrong, like we’re lying to ourselves. He’s been gone for three months and nobody is doing anything. Nobody is saying aloud the thing we all know.”

“There’s nothing we can do for him,” said Gabe. “That sucks but it’s the truth. I feel better about it when I’m with you.”

“Me too,” said Val. “But ever since that night, since what I did…”

Gabe threw his arm over her, pulled her close. “I just want everything to be okay,” he said.

She gently lifted his arm and rolled over to face him. “We don’t talk about Henry. And we don’t talk about what happened with me. It’s weird. It’s like ever since I told you that I cheated on you things between us have just been more amazing. Don’t you think we need to talk about it? It’s like neither of us wants to ruin this by bringing up anything bad.”

He rolled onto his back and held his breath. “I’m confused. You want me to be mad at you or something? I was. I still could be. But you’re with me. You love me. I’d rather just forget it, really, and I don’t know what’s wrong with that.”

“I think it’s making us both sick,” she said. “Literally, physically sick.”

Gabe let his body go slack. Dozens of sentences began in his mind, each one too confused, muddled, or unflattering for him to actually express out loud.

“The more time goes by, the more I feel like this could work. Like we could really be together,” said Val. “At first I was afraid.”

“I was petrified,” Gabe sang.

“Stop,” said Val. “At first, I think we were both just reaching out for something.”

“Maybe,” said Gabe. “But that was just at first.” He touched his lips to her brow, brushed them back and forth on her skin.

“What we’re doing,” she said, “if it’s going to keep working, this can’t be taboo, you know? We have to own it. That there’s still something really uncomfortable about all this. We have to just live with that and not be afraid of it or else it will just get so big that we won’t be able to deal with it anymore.” Val drew herself up on one elbow and placed her forearm on Gabe’s chest, her fingers scratching their way into his beard. “I mean, think about it. What if he doesn’t come back?”

“What if he
does
come back?” said Gabe.
What happens if he’s already back?

“It doesn’t have to be tonight, but we need to find a way to talk about this. There’s got to be a place for it.”

“Okay,” said Gabe. But it wasn’t, and they didn’t talk about it any further.

Val had to leave the next day after breakfast. Gabe went to the bathroom as soon as she was gone and stared at the growing colonies of strawlike hairs on his chin. He dug under the sink for the electric buzzer and reduced his beard to fuzz. Val always left a razor and travel-sized shaving cream in his shower. Gabe found them and lathered up.

Each stroke of the razor revealed another inch of his naked face, and once it was all gone he did feel a bit better. He could outsmart the disease. Beat it at its own game. He thought of the research he’d done, all the pictures he’d seen online of men and women with pink bald patches all over their scalps, and turned on the buzzer again. He didn’t think. He took a tentative jab at the side of his head and watched a thick clump of hair drop down into the sink.

“Oh,” he said. “Shit.” He laughed.

Ten minutes later, much of what Gabe had come to think of as his actual head was in the sink, clinging to his shoulders, or on the tops of his feet. He looked in the mirror at what was left. He was pale. Shiny. The continuous plane of bright white skin between his chin and the back of his head made him look like a worm. His lips looked bigger too, his eyebrows comically prominent. It was strange how changing the context could make those unalterable features seem so unrecognizable.

Still, he didn’t regret it. He felt clean and controlled. He felt new.

I
don’t understand,”
said 80.

The words represented the starting point of a conversational loop. Henry had allowed it to repeat five times since maneuvering 19 into the backseat and driving away, but now he was losing his patience. “Just wait until he wakes up,” he said.

“It shouldn’t matter,” said 80. “It was one thing with 29. We were in the same room, nothing changed until he saw us—that makes a kind of sense. But 19? He’s in the car with us.
That he will wake up and encounter us is inevitable, don’t you think?” said 80. “Our intervention has begun. We should be remembering something by now.” He tapped the door, looked to Henry, out the window, back to Henry again, glanced at the backseat.

Henry was glad to be driving. It gave him an excuse to avoid eye contact, to guard his own reactions until he’d had a chance to contemplate his next move.

“What if the dosage was wrong?” said 80. “What if he’s about to go into cardiac arrest? There has to be some reason we don’t recall anything new.”

“He’s fine,” said Henry. “Just wait. He doesn’t know that we’ve taken him yet. When he does, things will change. We’ll remember.”

In those first few moments on the bridge Henry had concealed the truth out of instinct. The more 80 talked, the more Henry appreciated that instinct. He knew the music now; he could take himself whenever he wanted to go. And for some reason that he had yet to understand, he could remember being 19 though 80 could not. He was in control, and that control was all the more total due to 80’s ignorance.

They were in the mountains by then, the broad switchbacks of the road soothing in their regularity. Henry purposely took each curve just a bit too fast. His stomach turned pleasantly, as if in free fall. 80 didn’t notice. He licked his lips and gazed unblinking at the dashboard. “Something’s really wrong,” he said.

“We’re almost home,” said Henry. “There’s nothing you can do but wait, right? I don’t know exactly why we don’t remember being him yet, but I feel okay. I’m calm. So maybe you should just try to remember how you felt when you were
me
. It might help.”

Henry took his eyes off the road momentarily, fought a smile as he watched the old man’s face screw itself into a look of barely subdued horror followed by a deliberate softening of his features, the first indication of the lie to come. Next 80’s jaw clenched, stretching papery skin around the bulb of hard muscle beneath his ear. He swallowed, dipping his chin. “Of course,” he said. “If I could be calm about this once, when I was you, I can be calm about it again.”

The remaining twenty minutes to the house passed in silence.

19 wouldn’t wake for hours, so Henry took his time experimenting with different methods of levering the boy’s body up onto his shoulders. When he found a hold that felt sustainable he carried 19 up into the house and through the doorway to the white bedroom. He and 80 tucked 19 in, then sat together in the kitchen to wait.

80 hadn’t spoken much since they’d arrived, and Henry didn’t press him. The earth had shifted underneath both of their feet, and now that Henry was on higher ground for once, he could watch and wait. For all 80’s talk about them being together, about trusting each other and acting with a single purpose, Henry was curious how the old man would play it.

He was disappointed but not surprised when 80 said, “I think I remember something.” The old man had just refilled his coffee mug, and he sipped with eyes squinted in concentration.

“Yeah?” said Henry.

“Yes. It’s not quite a memory. More like a feeling. I have this sense welling up within me that I’ve been in that room before, in the dark. That I heard voices through the wall.”

Henry thought about that for a moment. 80 was likely just making an educated guess. But it was possible, he supposed, that he was wrong about the old man.

The coffee in Henry’s own cup was cold, but he liked it. It reminded him of all the times he’d let coffee go cold before. It usually meant the end of an evening well spent, he and Val laughing about the day and the unbelievable things that Annie had said and done of her own spectacular free will. Back then it was decaf with lots of milk. After a few more minutes of silence, a less pleasant association occurred to him. Cold coffee didn’t belong just to his first life—it also belonged to his second and third, to his years spent wandering in the spaces of his mind, so overmedicated that time itself seemed to exist elsewhere. He spent hours sitting alone at the diner by his apartment near Lung-Ta. It was common at that time for Henry to start a thought and find that its conclusion—seemingly instantaneous to him—had taken five, ten, fifteen minutes by the hands of the greasy clock mounted above the diner’s kitchen door. When that happened, the contents of his mug would have gone cold as if, it seemed to him, by magic.

Henry snapped back to the present. A remarkable expanse of time had filled his memory the moment he’d touched 19. It was possible that the old man could remember nothing but the briefest impression of having been in a room and hearing voices through the wall. Perhaps it was 80’s age, or his general confusion at having lived so many times. Maybe he was suffering from dementia.

Much more likely, he was full of shit.

Henry took a deep breath and said, as loud as he could without yelling, “I think he’s awake.”

80 looked at him uncertainly.

“I’m pretty sure of it,” said Henry, even louder this time.

“Yes,” said the old man. “I remember it now. That’s so strange.”

Henry gave him a look with nothing in it, his face brutally indifferent. “We should go see, don’t you think?”

80 nodded slowly and looked down at his coffee cup as if there were answers to be found in its murk.

“You’re the one who opens the door,” said Henry. “Whenever you’re ready.”

From the room came the bubbling of 19’s laughter.

“I actually
do
remember it,” said Henry. “Sitting in there, giggling like an idiot.”

80 looked up from his cup and stared into Henry’s eyes. His face was half pleading, half defiant. He hadn’t put the pieces together, but he knew that the finished puzzle would not form a picture he wanted to look at. “This is cruel,” he said.

“Do you know why I was laughing?”

80 shook his head, his lower lip trembling like a baby’s. He looked down again, any pretense of anger now completely destroyed. He carefully folded his shaking hands around the mug.

“I laughed because when I woke up in that room I was sane again. I felt like myself for the first time in months. And I thought,
I don’t care that I don’t know where I am, or how I got here. I don’t care that I don’t know what’s coming next, or that the last thing I remember is the sound of the whole universe crushing me to death. None of that matters because here I am in a comfortable bed in total darkness and I feel like
me.”

80 was still nodding, the motion so small that it almost wasn’t there at all, an octogenarian tremor.

“Really, I was laughing because I thought things couldn’t possibly get any worse than they’d been. Somehow I’d escaped. Everything was going to be better, always.”

The legs of 80’s chair screeched across the floor as he pushed it back and stood up. “Let’s go in already.”

“It is funny, actually. I was right to laugh. It’s funny because I was so wrong.”

80 walked away from the table. Henry stood to follow him and, on the way through the kitchen, grabbed the dish towels that hung on the handlebar of the oven. 80 stood in wait outside the bedroom. He removed a key from his pocket and placed it into the knob, then opened the door, but just barely.

“You’re going to want these,” Henry whispered. He shoved the towels in to 80’s chest.

80 looked at him, eyes burning with disdain. “And why is that?”

Henry just motioned to the door.

80 grimaced. He knocked softly. “Henry? I won’t hurt you. You have to trust me,” he said. “I want you to close your eyes until I say. Are they closed?”

He opened the door slowly, the light from the hallway illuminating first the side wall and finally the corner where 19 sat staring at them through eyes wide with horror. The boy’s mouth curled into a grotesque crater, his lips trembled as he sat up to get a closer look. Then he bent forward, heaved, and went slack.

“Do you remember how long he’ll be out?” 80’s question was monotone, void of any subtext. He just wanted to know what would happen next.

“We’re going to give him some more sedatives,” said Henry. “He’s barely slept in days. You’ll change him, clean up the vomit, get his clothes in the wash. And I’m going to go to bed. He’ll sleep through the night.”

80 nodded his agreement.

“Don’t worry,” said Henry. “You’ll have plenty of time to lie to him in the morning.”

“I’m going to die,” said Henry. The dark of his bedroom had no answer.

Downstairs, the boy slept. 80 might have been sleeping too, though Henry doubted it. But asleep or awake, 80 was still downstairs. He hadn’t ceased to exist, and yet Henry himself would never become him. The link had been severed, and if not by death, by what? It was the only explanation that made any sense.

“I’m going to die,” he whispered. Repeating the phrase in his mind didn’t seem to have the effect he was looking for. He was saying it aloud in the hope that he could somehow force the idea into his psyche.

He sat at the head of the bed, his back leaning against the wall. The vinyl paint stuck to his bare skin.  Tomorrow he would leave 19 and 80 behind—that’s what he remembered from when he was nineteen. In doing so, he would be making sure that 19’s life was essentially destroyed. Henry remembered the years of treatment ending in failure. How 19 would never get over this experience in the Catskills, how he’d never cease believing in its truth. That insistence would guarantee his institutionalization. It would separate him from everyone in his life until one day, fifteen years into 19’s future, he’d walk out onto a bridge over the Connecticut River in Northampton, Massachusetts, and hear the song he’d been yearning for. He’d become immersed in that song. He’d use it to seek oblivion.

If Henry took 19 back right away, he could perhaps improve the boy’s future. But he wasn’t going to do that. He wanted 19 to be free for a while, free from the responsibility of being crazy among people who wanted him to be well, free from the pressure to lie, even to himself, about what he knew to be true. 19’s time with 80 would be a vacation from the hell that his life would become.

He thought of Val and then, inevitably, of Annie. Her small face was always smiling, proudly displaying the ridiculous spaces between her teeth. Those spaces were still waiting to be filled when he’d erased her. 80, though—he remembered a woman. Henry envied him. He hated him. Then he thought of Gabe. His only friend, one who had proven three times over that he would choose his love for Val over his love for Henry when the opportunity arose. A familiar anger seeped into Henry’s body. It filled empty spaces, expanded blood vessels. Val and Gabe would carry on without him. Once he disappeared, their bodies would fly together and adhere like magnets. It was the only consistency between all of his worlds.

But that was not
exactly
true.

Since touching 19 on the bridge, Henry remembered that in the world as it was now Val and Gabe would come together only briefly. Their loneliness would push them into each other’s arms for a time, but then, when Henry returned, they would break it off. After a few years, Gabe would tell Henry all about it. He would confess, expecting forgiveness, maybe even appreciation for the sacrifice he’d made for Henry when he let Val go.

So now, finally, Henry had destroyed everything. It had taken lifetimes, but it was all gone. Annie had never been. Val’s love for him diminished with each new past he remembered. Gabe grew more distant. And now even the connection Gabe and Val had with each other had been reduced to nothing but a mistake, an inadvisable hookup.

Henry felt he could come to terms with the fact that he’d die. It was much harder to accept that he would leave the world as broken as he was. He wouldn’t accept that. He didn’t have to.

With exhilarating ease he came to a decision. He knew where he would go the next day. He knew why 19 had to be gone from his own reality for so long. And he felt at peace, a kind of confident calm that he hadn’t experienced since his days spent gathering noise with Annie.

He knew what he had to do.