by Gregory Ashe
Chapter 34, Thursday 29 September
I glanced at the clock. 2 AM. Hard to believe I was still awake, but after what had happened between Mike and me, after the night at the cemetery, I couldn’t seem to turn my brain off. My thoughts whirled and circled, repeating events of the night, over and over again. Being caught by the sprawl and lifted in the air. The strange wave of heatless light that had saved my life at the end. Mike, bleeding and exhausted, healing me first and then disappearing. The look of hurt on his face.
Those last thoughts needled me, leaving a sore spot on my soul. At first I thought it was guilt over the way I treated Mike, but after a time, I realized what was wrong. Olivia. I hadn’t thought about her at all, hadn’t even wondered if she was ok. I found the cordless phone, punched in the hospital’s number, and after an almost interminable series of being on hold and being transferred, only to be put on hold again—each operator sounding grumpier than the last—I got a new response when I asked for Olivia’s room.
“It’s after two in the morning, kid,” a tired-sounding woman said. “Even if she were awake, I wouldn’t let you talk to her. Call back in the morning.”
Panic prompted my next words. “Wait,” I said. “It’s an emergency. Are her parents there? It’s a family emergency, I have to talk to them.”
There was a long pause and then a weary sigh. “God, kid, I’ll go check, but if they’re asleep, I’m not going to bother them. You can call in the morning.”
The wait was interminable, and I tried to think of a lie that would get her to wake up Olivia’s parents. Suicide attempt? She’d just tell me to call 911. Death in the family? Not really an emergency, I guess. Kidnapping? Terrorist attack? Natural disaster? My brain was misfiring, my anxiety making it hard for me to think straight. Was Olivia ok? Had she woken up? Would the recovery be instantaneous? Or would she recover at all? Perhaps what the grower had done to her was irreversible. Not knowing—that was the story of my life it seemed.
When the voice came back on the phone, it was no longer tired. It was sharp and concerned. “Who is this?” she said. “Who’s calling?”
In a sudden flash of insight, the kind that only true terror or pain can bring, I said, “She’s gone, isn’t she? She’s not there.”
“Who is this? I’m calling the police right now,” the woman said.
I hung up the phone. Something was wrong, terribly wrong. I could feel it in my bones. Olivia was missing from the hospital, her parents were not there. I called their house, then Olivia’s cell phone. No answer from either. I couldn’t seem to think straight any more. I called Mike’s house, but the phone just rang and rang and rang. Damn it! Why I hadn’t I asked him for his cell phone number? Where was he? Finally I hung up the phone.
I ran downstairs. Dad was still slumped over the counter, his even breathing cut short as my steps woke him. He sat up, drawing in a stuttering, waking-up breath, and blinked at me.
“Alex,” he said. “What’s going on? God, what time is it?”
“Dad, I need your keys.”
“What? Why? What’s wrong?”
“It’s something with Olivia. Dad, come on, keys. I need to go!”
“Alex, you’ve got a car sitting in the garage. Just use that.” He stumbled over to the sofa, sat down. “What happened to Olivia, anyway? What’s going on?”
“I don’t know, but something’s wrong. And I’m not going to take Isaac’s car, Dad. So keys, now!”
Dad’s green eyes were clear now, and he looked up at me. “Tell me what’s going on first,” he said. “What is this thing that you have to go rushing off to deal with? Have you been going to her house the other nights when you sneak out? What is this all about? No more secrets, Alex. It’s two in the morning; give me one reason I should let you go out of the house right now.”
“I . . . can’t, Dad. I’m sorry, but I can’t. But it’s an emergency, I promise.”
“Not good enough, Alex,” Dad said. “Go up to bed and go to sleep; you can go over to Olivia’s in the morning. Nothing is happening there that her parents can’t take care of.”
“This is ridiculous,” I said. “I’m not a child, Dad. You would have let Isaac go, if he’d asked you. You would have believed him! You can’t just send me to my room.”
“Isaac!” Dad said. “Isaac is dead, Alex. Why can’t you just be—”
I cut him off, furious. “I’m trying to be like him, Dad. Every day I wake up and think, ‘What would Isaac do?’ I try to be responsible, the way he was. I try to be normal, the perfect son, the one you and Mom doted on. I got a job, I got a girlfriend, I got a motorcycle. Hell, I even eat the cereal he liked. What more do you want from me? I’m trying, Dad. I’m trying!”
Dad leaned back in the sofa, his face pale. All my anger spread out in the air between us, making the room hazy, hard for me to breathe. I waited for the backlash, waited for the shouts, for all the hatred my parents had saved up for me. All their disappointment, all their frustration. All the things I felt for myself, all the things I knew I deserved, because even if I hadn’t killed Isaac, even if it wasn’t entirely my fault, I had a hand in it, and I could never escape from that.
And then Dad wiped his eyes. “Alex, why can’t you just be yourself? That’s all your mom and I want for you. You think we don’t see you doing these things? You think we’re blind? God, it’s a hundred times worse than losing Isaac, because every day we see you carrying him around with you, a weight that you’ll never put down. And we know it’s killing you. Let Isaac go, son. He’s your brother, and you loved each other, and that is exactly how it should be. But he’s dead, Alex. And trying to replace him, trying to be him—it’s something that can’t be done, and it will only bring us all grief. Be yourself, Alex. And please, be happy.”
I didn’t know what to say. Dad stumbled over, gave me a hug, and added, “We do love you, Alex. Now go upstairs and go to bed; I’ll drive you over to Olivia’s house in the morning.”
He stretched out on the couch and gave me a last look, letting me know he’d be there all night. Waiting to make sure I didn’t leave the house. I stumbled upstairs, not sure of what to say or do. Thoughts of Olivia had been pushed to the back of my head for the moment. All I could think about was what Dad had said to me. Be yourself, he said. Be happy. What did those things mean? How could I be myself when I had lost everything that night? What was left for me to be?
Answers popped into my head almost immediately. New friends at school—Wyatt and Shane, Taylor and, yes, even Mary. Maybe especially Mary, whom I felt I might have helped. And balanced against each other like weights on a scale, Mike and Olivia. That juxtaposition highlighted my dilemma. Isaac would never have been in that situation. He would have never lost his quickening, he would never have helped Mike. He would never have dated Olivia—she was too artsy for him. Isaac would have sought out the grower, fought him. He probably would have won; Isaac always won.
It struck me right then. I wasn’t Isaac. I could never replace him. We shared some traits—stubbornness, intelligence, loyalty. But we were vastly different. Dad was right; I had made myself a caricature of Isaac, trying to fit into his shoes, trying to do what Isaac would have done, but without the same likes or dislikes, without the same motivations, inclinations, hopes, dreams. I had made myself an automaton responding to some long-forgotten, outdated command.
So if I wasn’t Isaac, who was I? What was left of the person who had died in that abandoned subway station, only to awake in a hospital bed, a stranger to myself? I didn’t really have an answer; more importantly, I didn’t really want an answer. Not right then. Trying to figure out who I was, it was like being cast adrift on the sea, or finding myself hopelessly lost in a forest. Any path might lead me out, but any path might lead me deeper. But I needed to know, needed to understand myself, if only a little bit, so I could take the next breath, and the next step, and see another morning with some semblance of hope. So I sat down on my bed.
It had all started
with Christopher, this divergence from Isaac, this path towards non-being and the burden of non-existence. Maybe that’s where I was different from Isaac. The memory was still bright within me, no matter how many times I had tried to forget it, buried it under despair. That night in Grandfather’s workshop, experimenting with new foci—alloys, castings, designs. He had made one just for me, he said. A new one. Christopher wouldn’t tell me what it did, just made me promise not to wear it on my arm. Wear it around your neck, he said. That was one of his little quirks—insisting we didn’t need to wear the foci on our arms, that it was just a custom. He handed me the focus, the metal cold, our fingertips touching. Something kindled, heating the gold, as though a fire raged within it, flashing between our hands hotter and faster than any quickening. And that was when I gave up, gave myself over. I leaned in toward him, and there was nothing in the world but that inferno in the focus, scorching my fingers and my heart.
If it had started that night, it had ended in the subway station, where the person I was burned to ash, fluttered away on dark, subterranean winds. Isaac, arriving late, sensed what Christopher was doing almost immediately. He saw the massive focus, tried to stop Christopher. But Christopher was just as talented, just as skilled, and much more inventive than Isaac. They fought, and while they fought I just stood there, begging them to stop, and neither listened to me. That had been my moment of failure; if I had acted then, perhaps things would be different. But I was paralyzed by indecision, and then Isaac had fallen to the ground, screaming. When he stopped screaming, the sudden silence choked me. Then Christopher had grabbed my arm, his ground pressed against my wrist, and he was trying to apologize, trying to tell me it would be alright. That with the new focus, he would remake the world. Isaac would live again. Christopher’s mother would live again.
That was when I finally acted—when I felt reality tearing around me, shifting in great pieces as Christopher’s focus sought to rewrite the world. I could feel it all ending around me, crumbling to pieces. I could feel the power running through Christopher, through the ground pressed against my wrist, through the earth beneath me, and I was afraid. Not for the rest of the world. I was afraid for myself. And so I acted, in a moment of insight, perhaps of madness, sending all the energy I had left through Christopher’s ground. Refined energy. Energy that the ground was not meant to carry. The ground burned my flesh, branding me for my betrayal, but I succeeded. Christopher died. I won, and I lost everything.
When I awoke, weeks later, in the hospital, the burn had healed substantially, but I couldn’t quicken, couldn’t even feel the energy in the world around me. I had died too, that night in the abandoned subway station.
But I forced myself to think; I had moved past much of that guilt, thanks to Olivia, thanks to my parents. Thanks even to Mike, in part. Looking back on that night, I realized I had been in a terrible situation, but it had not been all my fault. Still, there was one thing that I regretted, and that was my indecision. And I realized that I was doing the same thing now. Letting myself be carried along by events. Letting my life be determined by what people did around me. Failing to choose, when I needed to make a choice.
And so that night, sitting in a room that had never really felt like mine, in a house that had once been heavy with unspoken words, I made a choice. I chose to live. I chose to love. And I chose to act. There was something else I needed to decide, something else I needed to choose, that fragile equilibrium of balanced hearts and souls, but I pushed the decision away for now. Perhaps the decision had already been made, I tried to convince myself. After all, Mike had made it clear what he thought of our friendship. Perhaps there was no balance, no choice to be made. Perhaps there was just Olivia.
In that moment, thinking of her, of what she meant to me, I felt the world tightening around me. The universe compressed, my blood surged in my ears, singing some ancient, unheard song of exhilaration. I was alive. I could love. And there was someone I loved, dearly, desperately, who was in danger. And in that moment of infinite contraction, where everything existed in the span of a heartbeat, when I contained the new life of worlds and suns and souls within a breath of wild joy, I understood.
Christopher had understood quickening better than almost anyone; he had seen it in the fullness of its majesty, in all its possibility, always stretching out, a limitless horizon. And he had told me about it, about what he saw at the heart of quickening. Transformation. The ability to take one thing in, and let something else out. Transforming a thousand lonely particles in the clouds into a bolt of lightning. Transforming sand into glass. Transforming the world.
But he had missed something, I realized. Quickening was about transformation, there was no doubt about it. But it was also about connections. Connecting light and dark, heaven and earth. Connecting heart to heart. That was what he had never understood. And standing there, in the darkness of my room, alone with salt on my cheeks and lips, I finally understood. Grandfather had been wrong; Christopher had been wrong; God bless him, even Isaac, in his desire to protect me, had been wrong. And I had been the most wrong of all. With Christopher, with Isaac. With my parents. With Olivia. With Michael.
But now I understood. Quickening was about connecting, person to person, heart to heart. It was about transformation, the way a thousand little movements, uncounted words and looks and smiles, bridge those long, lonely gaps that separate all of us. It was about love, the love that draws us close, binds us tighter than the space between words, between flesh, between souls, defying a universe that is always expanding, spinning us into darkness, farther and farther apart with every breath.
And in order to love, I realized, I had to let myself be loved. No matter what I had done, no matter what I thought of myself, I had to lower those walls, because they kept me in as surely as they kept others out. Because that was the only way to live in this world without going mad, without withering up and dying inside long before my heart stopped beating. And when I realized that, something crumbled inside me, and I felt warmth stir in my chest, coiling up, relaxing tensions I had not realized I carried, as though I were waking from a long sleep. And I felt something I hadn’t felt in a long time.
Quickening.