The afternoon was starting to feel even more distant and unreal, and he kept glancing over his shoulder at Mark, who somehow looked reassuringly normal and boring, laughing as the TV glow flickered over his face.
Later that night, half-asleep in bed, David heard his voice:
“David,” Mark said, standing in his doorway, framed in light, “What did you change?”
“Huh?” was all David could reply.
Mark stood there for a moment, not answering, not moving.
“Never mind,” Mark said. “Go back to sleep.”
He turned off the hall light and David slept.
He hit the snooze button on his alarm in the morning, then turned it off completely, and stayed asleep. He woke up around 10:30, a couple of missed calls from work on his cell phone, and he thought, I’ll tell them I, I’m sick, hungover, anything, and he padded carefully down the hall until he was sure it was silent, sure Mark had gone to work, and then he ran into Mark’s room and lifted the notebook out of its hiding place.
What did you change?
It didn’t necessarily mean anything. It wasn’t a confession. He might just have noticed that David had been in his room, hadn’t put everything back perfectly.
But David found the note he’d written yesterday, and a new, even smaller note next to it, in Mark’s handwriting. “Homeless man tells David about the notebook,” it now read, “but dies before he can tell him how it works.”
Hours later, David sat in a diner, a cold and half-touched omelet sitting on a plate he’d shoved to the side. The notebook was spread out in front of him and he had a cheap spiral-bound notebook of his own next to it.
He’d been taking notes, copying down long sections word-for-word, in case he never saw the notebook again.
He still couldn’t figure out why Mark had put it back where he’d found it in the first place, if he knew David had seen it. Mark was a creature of habit, though. He probably had just put it back there because that was where it belonged, whether it was still a secret or not.
“Can I bring you anything else?”
“I’m sorry? Oh. Just — just more coffee, please. Thanks.”
The thing is, why was this a secret?
David flipped through an old envelope of photos he’d brought with him. Old parties, camping trips. He found the appropriate page for each one in his notebook, slipped them between the pages.
He was starting to be able to see it. He had to look quickly, like catching something out of the corner of his eye, but —
“Excuse me,” he said to the waitress, “but can you tell me what you see in this photo?”
She looked at him, looked at the picture on the table, and smiled uncertainly.
“You and two other guys out in the woods somewhere?”
He found the right line in the notebook where it said, “Camping trip with David and John,” and added, “but John had the flu and couldn’t come.”
“And now. Now what do you see?”
“Same thing.” She looked at him. “You and some guy. Why, is this supposed to be a magic trick or something?”
“Something like that.” He stared at the picture himself. It was just him and Mark, but a moment ago, hadn’t it been different? Couldn’t he see some kind of afterimage fading away?
She laughed. “Well — keep practicing.”
He closed the notebook and stared at its blank dark cover.
This was — everything. This was their entire life, past and future. Mark could control all of it. So could David now.
So why never say anything about it? They’d shared everything since they were thirteen. Why not this? And why — this was what was killing him — why did so many bad things happen to him and not Mark?
His sister. His failed relationships. Three wrecked cars. Jobs he couldn’t hold down. All of it was lovingly detailed here.
Had Mark just secretly hated him all this time? Is that what this was about?
David hadn’t even bothered calling in with some excuse when he’d noticed that the notebook had him getting fired from the convenience store next week. Why bother trying when it was all here in black and white?
All he knew was that he couldn’t go home after this. It wasn’t safe. He desperately wanted to get some kind of explanation out of Mark, but Mark wasn’t safe to even talk to. He needed somewhere to go, but there wasn’t anywhere.
He tapped the notebook with his pen for a while, then opened it. He went back a couple of months, then wrote: “David moves out into his own apartment.”
He sat and stared at his food for a minute, trying to remember what he’d just been thinking about.
He shook his head, stood up and shoved his plate away, then headed for the register.
“Hey — ” the waitress called after him, “Don’t forget your — ”
She stopped and stared at the empty table, no idea what she’d been about to say.
David’s apartment was freezing. The power had been out for nearly a month since he’d gotten behind on his bills. He pulled another blanket onto his bed, and wished, not for the first time, that he’d never moved out of Mark’s place. Mark had always been good about covering for him —
Something wasn’t right.
He looked at the phone. It was ringing. And it wasn’t ringing.
He could hear it, but it wasn’t making any sound. And outside, the wind was whipping through the trees, and it was perfectly still; the room was pitch black, and the bright full moon was framed in his window and the phone kept ringing and not ringing —
He stood, dizzy and swaying, and his nose had started bleeding again. Again? When was it bleeding before?
He didn’t move and he reached for the phone. One bright day in the middle of the night, he thought, Two dead boys got up to fight. He couldn’t remember the rest of it.
He answered the phone. “Hello?”
The voice on the other end said, “Come downstairs. I need to talk to you.”
“Mark?” he said, but the line had gone dead.
Mark was parked outside, his engine idling. Nice car, David thought as he got in. Did he always have such a nice car? Was this new?
“You broke something,” Mark said. He hadn’t even said hello. “You changed something that doesn’t work and I’m not finding it.” He tossed the notebook into David’s lap.
“Wait — ” David said, “is this — I’ve seen this. I don’t — ”
“Yeah. You’ve seen it. Except now I think you didn’t. And that’s kind of a problem.”
David had never seen Mark like this before. There was a tense, almost desperate edge to his voice.
“What am I looking for? What is this?”
“You wrote something in here; I need you to find it. I keep looking, but — ”
“Homeless man tells David about the notebook? This is my handwriting, Mark, what — ”
“No. Not that one. I already fixed that one. There’s something else, it’s like having fucking cancer and knowing they didn’t get every last bit of it and I need you to find it right now.”
“Mark, just calm down and tell me what’s — ”
“Wait. Wait.” Mark grabbed the notebook back. “There, right there, that’s your handwriting, right? Oh man.” He laughed. “I must have looked at this page a dozen times.”
“David moves out,” David said. “Mark, what is this? What’s going on?”
“I’ll tell you. I’ll tell you everything, okay? Just — okay, yeah. That makes sense. ‘David moves out.’ So you found the notebook at some point, and you wrote that, but then if you had moved out, you never would have found it. So, yeah. That’s the contradiction. Okay, look. I can’t cross that out — you figured that out already, right?”
“Mark, I don’t have the slightest idea what you’re talking about.”
“Just shut up and listen. I can’t cross it out, but I can change it. Here, two weeks later, I’ll write ... ” He grabbed a pen out of the glove compartment. “Mark talk
s David into moving back in.”
“Yeah, so? I mean, that’s why we’re here, right? To get the last of my stuff.” He frowned. “Wait. That’s not right, is it?”
“It is now. But you remember? You remember finding the notebook, and — ”
“You can change things.” David grabbed it back. “I do remember.” He stared at it, afraid to open it. “How long? How long have you been doing this?”
Mark took a deep breath. “About six years. I can show you how to do it. We can figure out who you’re going to do it to.”
“Wait, what? Do what to?” He stared at him, and then said, “That’s right. That’s right, I figured it out. You — all the shit I’ve been through while your life has been perfect — you did it. You did all this to me. All of it. Everything!”
Mark reached a hand toward him. “David, it’s not .... ”
“Don’t fucking touch me!”
Mark sighed. Reached for the keys, and killed the engine.
“It took me a long time to figure it out,” he said after they’d sat in the dark for a while. “There’s got to be — there’s got to be balance. That’s what the first notebook I found said. Somebody wrote all this down, how to make the books, how to use them. There’s got to be balance. You can’t just write down good things, or they don’t come true. It doesn’t work. There has to be bad things, too.” He held the notebook face down in his lap, running his hand over the spine. “It’s been so hard not talking to you about this.”
“Go on,” David said, barely keeping himself calm.
“I figured out,” Mark said slowly, “that — the bad things didn’t have to happen to me. It could — be someone close to me. Someone I cared about.”
“Oh. You care about me,” David said. “You’ve been using me as a dumping ground for all the shit that should have been happening to you, so that, what? You could be president? Is that right?”
Mark sighed. “David, this hasn’t been easy for me —
“Sure! Sure it has! It hasn’t been easy for me, Mark. It hasn’t been easy for my sister — you remember her, the one you killed?”
Mark blinked. “Oh. David, Megan always had a weak heart. I just — she just died a little sooner than she would’ve, that’s all.”
“That’s all? That’s all?”
“I know you must be upset. I’m going to make it up to you. You just — we’ll make you a notebook. It’s easier than you might think. Then you can have any kind of life you want. All you have to do is — ”
“No. No. I’m not letting you — you used me, all this time. I thought we were friends.”
“We are friends. This wouldn’t have worked if I didn’t care what happened to you.”
“Stop saying that! You’re done, you understand me? Give me that notebook!”
“David, it’s not that simple — ”
“Give it to me!”
He tried to pull the open notebook out of Mark’s lap.
Mark grabbed hold and pulled back —
Something happened. Something that struck like lightning, that nearly tore the car apart.
David woke first. There was a hum in the air, a smell like ozone. His head was screaming in pain, a pain that pulsed in time with his heart. His fingers danced with sparks as he pulled off his seatbelt.
Still clutching his prize, he fumbled the door open, took one last look at his best friend, and ran off into the night.
“David,” Mark said on the phone days later. “I’m — a little surprised to hear from you. I don’t recognize the area code.”
“Michigan,” David said. “Don’t bother looking it up. I’m not going to be here long.”
“When are you coming home?”
“I’m not.”
“We need to talk about this.”
“We are. We’re talking right now.”
“That’s not what I — ”
“Mark, just shut up. I’m just calling to tell you. My half still works.”
“Really.” Mark held his ruined half in his hands, fingers trailing along the ragged edge of its broken spine.
“Does yours?”
“Well.” Mark actually smiled. “I don’t know, do I? We’re not going to know until, let me see here, next April.” He went and stood at his window, looking out at the world. “What did you change?”
“Nothing important. None of your business.”
“David, you have to be careful.”
“No, you have to be careful. You have to know that I have just as much power over you as you have over me.”
“You don’t have to turn this into a war.”
“It already is. A cold war. You don’t dare change my future as long as I can change your past.”
“David, you can’t use the notebook. You don’t know what you’re doing. This isn’t about you and me. If you change too much, if it doesn’t make sense anymore, you could break the world.”
“So you’d better promise me, then,” David said, his voice sounding weak and distant.
“Promise you what?”
“You leave me alone. I leave you alone. Put the notebook away and never look at it again.”
“Even if I promise, how will you know?”
“What?”
“I can’t do anything with my half that would affect you until next April. I could have already killed you and you wouldn’t know until then, so what good would my promise do you?”
There was nothing but distant crackling silence.
“David?” Mark said.
He heard a dull laugh. “I’m just going to have to trust you, aren’t I?”
“David, please come home. We can — ”
But he was talking to a dial tone.
Months later. April 9th. The day his half of the notebook ran out. David sat in a bar, nursing the last cup of coffee he could ever afford. He wasn’t even sure what state this was.
He hadn’t slept at all last night, and was sure that he looked terrible. Not that sleeping in the car had been doing him that much good.
The TV over the bar was talking about the war. It was talking about a politician resigning after a sex scandal. It was talking about people in New Orleans who still didn’t have homes to go back to. David sat and watched it all.
You could break the world, Mark had said. But right now it looked pretty broken anyway. If the world went away — would anyone miss it?
What was his life going to be like after tomorrow? He’d gone over it again and again in his head, and the only answers he kept coming up with were that Mark would kill him right away, or make him wish he had.
Today was the last day. The last day he had any power at all. Had his finger still on the trigger.
He stared out the window for a long moment, watching cars drive down darkened streets. He wondered if he could still see the stars if he stepped outside; he wondered if the stars would still be there when he was done.
The bartender asked him if he wanted anything else; he asked for a shot of bourbon, and a pen.
He pulled the notebook out of his dirty bag and set it carefully on the bar. He turned to the first page, took the shot, and uncapped the pen.
“Mark burns the notebook,” he wrote.
ONLY MONSTERS
She busied herself, unused to company, unsure what to offer the young boy. Looked out the window at the boys who stood outside her broken gate, young eyes staring up wide and worried at the house they had thought was abandoned. At the house that had been abandoned until she’d found it.
She stoked the fire up, poking and prodding at red and dying logs with the metal poker, watched the boy with his glittering eyes staring back at her, and wondered how she must look to him. Something out of a fairy tale, she supposed. Her skin was just beginning to line and crack with age, and her hair was only streaked with gray, dry and fine, pulled back in a tight frazzled bun. But still, she knew how she must look to this pale young frightened thing.
“Those your friends out there.” Her voice sounded od
d. She’d meant that to be a question, but her voice had been dead and flat; it wouldn’t rise at the end, wouldn’t take flight. She’d left it silent too long.
“Yes, Ma’am,” he said, quiet, respectful. Afraid.
She smiled, and even that felt strange after so long with no one to smile at. “Did they dare you to come up here alone?”
He hesitated, but answered her true: “Yes, Ma’am, they did.”
“Afraid of strangers around here, then. Well, that’s good. That’s a good thing to be. Sit down.”
She gestured to a kitchen chair, one of two that remained in the set. The others had been broken a long time ago, long before she ever found this house. The boy took the chair. She took the other and watched him.
“What’s your name, then?” she asked her visitor.
“Toniele.”
“Pretty name for a pretty boy. Mine’s Jasper. At least, that’s what people call me.”
“Oh.”
“No; you say, it’s nice to meet you, Jasper. Or if you want to stand on ceremony, you say, it’s a pleasure to make your acquaintance, Miss Jasper.”
“ … It’s a pleasure to make your acquaintance, Miss Jasper.” He said the words slowly, carefully, as if he thought they were magic, as if he thought this was ritual. Maybe he did, she thought. Maybe he did.
“So what brings you fine young boys out all this way?”
“Raishaillion says there are people in the abandoned places who know things. He says that’s why grownups don’t want us coming out here.”
“Raishaillion?” There; that was a proper question. Her voice was remembering things, now, broken wings mending and stretching.
Toniele just gestured one bone-thin and delicate hand toward the window. One of his friends.
“Ahhh. If he’s so smart, why isn’t he the one up here asking me questions, then?”
Toniele had no answer.
“Maybe he’s smart enough to know better than to come bother an old woman like me. You think so?” She was smiling as she said it, and Toniele started smiling, too, against his better judgment.
“So.” She leaned across the table. “What is it you want to know? What kind of things do you think I know about?”
Slices Page 8