by Gregory Ashe
Chapter 2, Friday 19 August 2011
After that brief shock of thinking I had seen Christopher again, I sank back into my stupor; it was easy, offering a few mumbled answers about New York until they left me alone at lunch and I was free to zombie my way through the last classes. Then I walked home.
If you’ve never lived in the Midwest, let me give you an idea. Late August. Afternoon. Sun hot on the back of my neck. That part’s like any other place in the rest of the world in summer, I guess.
Here’s the difference: imagine it all underwater. Or, ok, not underwater, but with so much humidity that it might as well be. Like some great refracting lens distorting everything; even the heat waves are slightly off. And the way it presses against you, sticking to your skin like a permanent, invisible second layer of clothing, squeezing every drop of water from your body. If I’d believed in sympathetic magic, then I would have found evidence for it in Midwestern humidity. Why does a stone fall to the ground, and all that. Too bad real magic isn’t anything like that.
West Marshall Senior High School sat at the very end of Lilburn Street, where it curved west and met its death at Mason Road. Scenic: industrial parks, a half-demolished row of townhouses, and—of course—the railroad. Not a good, East Coast railroad that takes people into the city. No, this was the kind that sent cattle and corn careening across the countryside, riddled with hobo gangs. The railroad. Not the cattle.
Halfway up Lilburn, the patched asphalt ended in an uneven row of worn brick, each piece stamped with a different brickmaker’s mark. The beginning of old downtown. The buildings changed too; the convenience store up the street, instead of its usual green and white brilliance, hid inside a brick-faced storefront, the only concession to its modernity a neon sign buzzing quietly as I walked past.
Past downtown, past the black iron chains that marked the quaint sidewalks with quaint shops (or shoppes), and I continued north, until I reached asphalt again, and a couple blocks further, I saw it. On the hill to the left, the kind of pseudo-Victorian monstrosity that would have given poor Frank Lloyd Wright nightmares. Lion House.
Home.
Two stone lions, their heads coming up to my shoulders, sat at the top of the stairs, and another pair sat at the end of the path, right before the porch. They were as ugly as anything, but grandfather, for all his good qualities, had not been a man of refined taste. He probably didn’t have time to cultivate it—not with spending all his time hammering his two grandchildren into weapons, hunters, killers. Not our father, no. He didn’t have any quickening. Not a drop of magic in his veins. But first Isaac, and then me. I think it was the best thing that ever happened to the old man. Two grandsons who could take over for him, policing other quickeners, because there was no one else to do it.
It didn’t matter, anymore. Grandfather was dead. And quickening—well, I pulled my thoughts away from that.
Through the front door, always unlocked—a concession to local custom, Dad had said—and then the foyer and staircase. The beetle-click of Dad’s typewriter echoed in the foyer; his office door was slightly ajar. And that was home. A blast of refreshing, numbing coolness; high-ceilinged rooms; and, in spite of all the furniture and decorations, a whole lot of emptiness. Enough space to scream and never bother anyone. Not the neighbors. Most certainly not my parents.
I dropped my backpack in the great room, just past the foyer, and collapsed onto the couch. The kitchen was behind me, it opened onto the great room, but even having skipped lunch, I wasn’t hungry. Did hungry feel like a pit that opened up onto nothing inside you? Maybe I was hungry. I don’t know. I flipped on the channel, turned it to one of those teen music channels, and let the electronic descramble of noise, the unending flicker of twenty-four perfectly captured frames per second wash over me. Buoyed up on that heart-attack pulse of light, I could turn everything off, drift away, tethered only by my body. TV was the next best thing to sleep.
Mom came in from the garden later, when the sun had sunk low enough to throw a glare on the TV. Dirt stained her fingers, a smudge on her chin almost invisible against olive skin. I think we talked; I’m not sure. If we did, it was one of those conversations you can fill in for yourself. First day of school. Make any friends. Hungry. I just stared at the dirt on her hands, as dark as her eyes. People said I got my eyes from my mom. Was that what held us together now? Fifty percent of my genes, a random assortment, mixing and matching, and then we were tied forever. When she left, I could see the shadows under her eyes. I wondered if mine looked the same.
“How was school?” Dad asked, passing me a plate with a pork chop and fresh green beans with bacon bits. Not quite what a normal Jewish family might have for dinner, but then, we were lapsed. Josué León was what you might expect from someone of Spanish descent. Green eyes. A strong European nose. The curly hair that had half-infected me, but his sprinkled with gray and receding. Was that what held us together as a family? Me, some kind of neutral ground where competing parties could meet. Hair and eyes traded for peace. Had we felt like this when Isaac was here? He had gotten the better parts of both our parents; maybe he had been the Treaty of Paris, and I was Versailles.
Each bite was a rubber chew-toy in my mouth. I worked it over and over, untasting, unseeing, until I could bring myself to swallow and feel each particle of meat slide down my esophagus and land, like a dying fly, in my stomach.
“Good.”
One of those pregnant silences that threatened to give birth to something terrible barged between us. I stirred the green beans on my plate. Isaac’s favorite dish. I didn’t like them; green beans made me gag. I shoveled some into my mouth; it’s what Isaac would have done. It’s the least I could do for my parents.
The bacon grease and the salt covered up the flavor for a moment, and I had them halfway chewed before the real taste hit me. I coughed and choked, pressing my napkin to my mouth; only a miracle, a glass of water, and a sudden burst of willpower kept me from emptying my stomach right there in front of my parents.
When I looked up, I could see it in their eyes. The way my father let his fork fall onto his plate. The way my mother pressed too-clean nails, like they’d been soaking in bleach after the gardening, to her forehead, leaving a row of five angry impressions when she turned her head. If she wasn’t crying, she was close.
But I’m trying, I wanted to shout. I’m trying to be like him.
“Asa,” Dad said, picking up the fork and stirring the beans on his plate, his eyes locked on the food. “Why can’t you just—”
That was it; I couldn’t hear him say those words. I was a fractured piece of glass, and those words, the breath that forced them out, gave them shape—it would touch me, that indoor-voice breath, and I would shatter. I pushed my chair back, scraping it across the wood, before he could finish.
“May I be excused?”
Mom just nodded, still looking away, and Dad stopped talking. He looked tired more than anything. I carried my plate into the kitchen, scraped the food into the trash, and loaded it in the dishwasher. Then I went upstairs.
The house had three bedrooms. Three. Despite my parents’ efforts to hide the third, burying it in cardboard boxes, draping it with names like ‘craft-room,’ or ‘work-room,’ or ‘sewing-room.’ The abundance of names, their eagerness to name and conceal that space, was what gave them away. There were three bedrooms. My parents in one. Me in another. And a great void, drawing everything into it, forcing us apart, in the third.
I had unpacked when we arrived, and so my room was neat, orderly. A few posters of bands that I had liked, but none of the ones that Christopher had given me. A dresser with clothes. A closet with even more. A desk with my computer. No books, except one, tucked away in a chest under my bed. The rest were in the study; I did not want them. Dad was the literature guy.
I lay down on the bed. The ceiling was the best part of the room. Heavily textured, rough and uneven, it had a thousand lines I could follow with my eyes. I lay there, and I retreated to
that little space that was somewhere behind my heart, behind the breath I drew into my lungs, where things didn’t hurt quite as much. And I watched the ceiling, following the lines, letting my mind rush along the gouges and cracks like channels for a flooding river. Staring at the ceiling was the next best thing to sleep.
Darkness is a strange thing. It grows on you, in you, by degrees, and you go adjusting bit by bit. Thinking, “I can adapt, I can go on. I can still see. I can still live.” But by the time you’ve thought that, the darkness has already moved on, deepening, thickening, until you’re blind and you don’t know it, drowning and far from shore. That was how darkness entered my room, the sun setting without my attention. And I realized I was staring up into shadows.
I rolled off the bed; it was late, late enough that I should do my homework, if I cared, or probably just go to bed, slip into nothingness. Nothingness broken by dreams. And then another day tomorrow, and a day after that, and a day after that.
On my knees, I pulled a polished oak chest out from under my bed. A gift from my grandfather. One of the few that hadn’t warped me permanently. I undid the lock with a key around my neck, the metal the temperature of my body, and threw open the chest.
My eyes avoided the book of their own accord; in this much, at least, we were agreed. I ran my hand across the foci, the metal talismans—copper and silver, gold and platinum, even a few of titanium and steel—sitting in neat rows on velvet-lined trays. And there, at the end of one row, the silver ground, given to me by my grandfather when I was twelve.
I pulled it out, set it against my palm, where it was designed to go. It covered perhaps a third of my hand. I didn’t bother with the leather cords to tie it in place; there was no point. I could feel the silver only the way everyone else would feel it—cold metal that was quickly warming to my touch, but otherwise dead. Nothing responded to me in it. No quickening.
That was the worst part, though. Not losing my brother. Not losing Christopher. Losing my magic. Losing the quickening. And I knew I was a terrible person for thinking it, but it was like someone had taken who I was, the defining part of me, and cut it away, and now I was nothing but a cardboard person. How do you recover from that? How do you rewrite the entire narrative of your life?
I set it back in the chest, locked the box, and slid it back under the bed. I climbed on top of the bed, still dressed. I would fall asleep eventually. If I didn’t, well, it made no difference.
Then I felt it. Like lightning over the horizon, unseen, but still felt. The almost-invisible hairs on my arms stood up in response. I could smell the ozone in the air.
Purple-white light broke the darkness outside, flooding my room. I blinked, trying to clear my eyes, and stumbled to the window. A heartbeat later, I saw another flash, blinding me again.
It didn’t matter; I had seen it. Lightning out of a clear sky. Twice. And the way my body responded.
Quickening.
There was a quickener in town, and it wasn’t me.