by Andrew Smith
“I’ll last,” I said.
“I came to ask you about things,” Henry said.
“The last few days, I didn’t think anyone was talking to me. Even my friends.”
Henry shook his head and sighed. “I need to hear it. How did you get here?”
I scooted out from beneath the rock, attempted to brush the salt and ash away from my sweaty body, and sat next to Henry.
We leaned our backs against the rough surface of the boulder. From where we sat, I could see Ben and Griffin standing at the top of the ridge on the lookout post above the opposite side of the clearing the Odds had camped in.
“It was you,” I said. “You sent me here.”
So for more than an hour, Henry and I shared each other’s stories. In some ways, it was like meeting for the first time. But in other ways, it was like we’d known each other for our entire lives, too.
Henry had been there for ten years; since he was a kid. He told me that he’d lived in the settlement, next to my house when I was only five or six years old.
Of course.
That was always meant to be.
Henry and I know each other everywhere, don’t we?
All these strings keep connecting, over and over, knotted together—things inside of things inside of still bigger things—me, Henry, London, Glenbrook, Marbury.
Not-Marbury.
I am the worm and I am the hole.
It was why I’d run into the same people and places again and again; even if, now, everything was slightly off, altered. Tilting. The knots were all unwinding.
And all arrows point to the center.
Here and there blur into one.
And the gap is gone.
Henry told me he’d “been back home” a few times, and that he always swore to fight the urge to return to Marbury, but, in the end, it was entirely out of his control.
Just like Jack.
This last time, he said, he’d been here so long that he began to believe that there was no other world than this; that everything else had been a dream, or some kind of psychosis; maybe something all kids imagine when they pass through adolescence.
He believed it until Jack and his friends showed up five days ago, after we crawled out from the Under.
“You know what?” I pulled at the threads unraveling from the tear on my right knee.
He looked at me and I said, “I broke the lens.”
Henry didn’t say anything, didn’t react at all.
“I shattered it with a hammer. Then we ended up here. But something’s wrong. Everything’s off. Every time I turn around, there’s something that’s changed, like it’s broken, too. And every time I try to get out of here, I end up somewhere worse. It’s always the same: It starts out looking like things are fixed, like it’s going to be okay or, possibly, even better than before, and suddenly everything gets fucked.”
I shifted uncomfortably.
My back ached where Frankie hit me with the rock. Across the clearing, where the string of horses had been tied, I could see the boy with the missing finger.
He was watching us.
Frankie had to know something was up, that Henry and I shared some connection that went beyond just trying to get across the desert, to escape the Hunters pursuing us. I could tell just by looking at the kid’s eyes that Frankie was smarter than most.
My hands were sweating. I wiped my palms on my jeans and rested my arms across my bent knees. I slipped my hand out of the filthy and stinking pocket I’d been wearing as a glove for nearly a week and raised my right hand, like I was holding something for Henry to read, directly in front of him.
“The lens cut me,” I said.
Henry stared at the mark in my flesh. Then he looked up at the sky. He didn’t need to say anything. I knew he saw the connection.
More tangled strings.
“I want you to show me,” Henry whispered, like we were keeping some desperate and poisonous secret from the other boys.
I thought about it.
Here I was in this complete reversal of roles, finally capable of fucking with Henry Hewitt the way he fucked with me when I was just a paranoid and unsuspecting kid wandering around London alone. It would be easy enough, I thought: Just open up the backpack, unroll the filthy sock, and
flip!
Good-bye, Henry.
Good-bye, Jack.
Fuck us both.
“I’m scared to do it. I messed shit up and now everything is coming apart. I have to believe things will fix themselves, Henry. I think we will see each other in London, just like we did, like we’re supposed to. But I have to do one thing first.”
Henry wasn’t looking at me. I thought maybe he was mad, like I was holding back a present and he wanted it bad enough to do something desperate. Or maybe he was thinking of some way to take it from me.
After all, that’s what Jack would do.
I didn’t so much as glance at my pack. I didn’t want to tip off Henry that there was anything inside it that might interest him.
But he had to know.
He was dying to find out.
And it was almost like I could hear those fucking glasses whispering my name, as though they had a heart and it was beating, pumping, and I knew it was going to make me open the pack.
Don’t do it, Jack.
Do it.
Come home, Jack.
I tried to breathe, inhaled deeply.
“There’s one more of us here,” I said. “A boy named Conner Kirk. He’s…”
And I thought, He’s what, Jack? The only person who cares about you? You love him? You love him and you know you fucked up his life forever? He’s what, Jack?
“I know he’s heading for Bass-Hove, too. He has the other part of the lens. I think we need to put them back together.”
“Is that what you think?” Henry said.
He wasn’t even trying to disguise the sarcastic tone in his voice.
“Yes,” I said. “That is what I think, Henry. What do you think?”
I heard him take a deep breath. He nodded his chin out toward the circle of clearing between the boulders. “Me? I think it doesn’t matter. This is always the world. Home. We may be the last people remaining, but this is what we do.”
He shrugged. “We cross deserts looking for others who may be left behind, too.”
Henry sounded just like he did when he tried to explain about Marbury to me; the night when I was so sick, after I’d lost the lens in Blackpool and we sat together at The Prince of Wales.
“You told me that you weren’t sure whether this was the beginning of the world or the end of it.”
He looked directly at me. “Let me see the lens, Jack.”
My hands shook.
“Jack.”
I began to sweat. I could feel droplets as they rolled down my skin, tickling, insects.
And I was so thirsty.
Across from us, there was movement along the top of the boulders where the Odds had been posted on lookout. They raised their arms and pointed off, across the desert in the direction Henry’s little toy compass told us was the way out.
“Show me.”
I couldn’t stop myself.
My hand shook so bad. I dragged my fingers through the ash.
I tried telling myself that maybe this was the key.
Maybe being with Henry could make things right.
I didn’t look.
My hand found the backpack and I dragged it out and placed it between my legs.
Don’t do it, Jack.
“Not the lens,” I said. “It kills things now. There’s something else. Another way.”
Henry grabbed for the backpack. He was acting like a drug addict, desperate to get his fix.
“Don’t!” I grabbed his hand to stop him from opening the pack. “Listen to me. Wait.”
Henry tried to wrestle the pack open.
I twisted his wrist.
The kids on the rim began shouting.
They saw
something in the desert.
Henry was sweating, panting.
“Listen to me! It’s something else. It doesn’t even work for Ben and Griffin.”
Because they’re dead and inside a fucking trash barrel.
I said, “It might not be anything for you.”
“Let me see it.”
* * *
I can’t stop myself.
On the rim, Alex, or maybe it is one of the other assholes, shouts Henry’s name.
“Henry! Come look!”
It is always thrilling. My chest heaves. It’s a nervous rush, like having sex.
I am excited and terrified at the same time, and I know Henry feels it, too.
Zip.
My fingers fumble through the folds in my sock.
Fuck you, Jack.
I keep my nervous hands working inside the pack. I have to hide what I am doing from the other Odds. I unravel the dirty sock. I flash on a thought, but it is gone before I know it: Should I feel sorry for what happened to Quinn Cahill?
I can see a glint of the blue glass, the small eye of the outer green lens that is flipped away.
“A rider!”
Someone calls from the lookout.
“Henry! There’s a rider!”
Henry sits beside me, so close we lean against each other. I can feel his body quaking.
I say, “Look.”
Then I flip the lens into place.
twenty-six
There is a thrashing noise.
It comes clattering in drumbeats, arrhythmic, like a fight. Someone is kicking something.
My shins ache.
I am lying on a dirty wood floor and I’ve been bashing my legs against a doorjamb.
It’s not shaking. It’s jerking, convulsing, like electric current is shooting through every muscle fiber in my body; killing me.
My legs do not belong to me.
Quit it.
I kick the wood frame again.
Nice.
Welcome home, Jack.
Now where the fuck are you?
I smell cigarettes.
They aren’t burning now, but wherever I am someone smokes here.
* * *
It was always like this.
Every time.
I lay there in a doorway, half in, half out, staring at the little creases in the jamb’s wooden frame, the finishing nails, a spot where the varnish didn’t soak into the surface, the uneven texture of the plaster wall at the baseboard. Nobody cares about those parts of walls; they are always canvases of imperfection. I heard an electric hum and bubbling water. It struck me as funny that I was lost again, in a dimly lit room, and wherever it was, there was an aquarium in here with me.
And cigarettes.
I swallowed.
Good. My throat still worked.
My legs stopped thrashing on their own, but my shins ached like fire.
I moved my eyes, tracking along the surface of the floor and into the room where my head was. I saw something. It took a while—maybe ten seconds—for the words to come into my head, but that’s how it always was.
A rusted radiator heater stood against the far wall.
I marveled at the perfectly slatted ribs, how they were coated in thick green paint—an entirely nauseating color—with small cuts of tarnished rust showing through. I counted the ribs. I don’t know why. Maybe it was the only thing I was capable of doing at that moment.
Counting.
And watching.
Then I moved my hand.
It was a remarkable thing.
It was almost as though I had forgotten I had arms—or a body—at all.
This is my hand.
I had to think again—right or left?
I couldn’t remember.
I spread open my fingers above my eyes, a bloom, a firework.
My palm was cut.
Bleeding again.
Drip.
I didn’t even flinch when the blood dropped, warm and heavy, onto my lips.
It tasted good.
I squeezed my hand shut and ran the other one over my body, feeling—what I was wearing, if everything was still connected.
Jack always did that, too.
Inventory time: a T-shirt. My fingertip snared inside a hole over my belly. I could feel my skin. I felt smaller, empty. Jeans. I ran my hands over the thick metal buttons.
Where is this, Jack?
You’ve been here before.
Think.
Everything felt clean, not like it was after scrambling out from the Under and then surviving for days on horseback in the desert. And I became aware of my feet, that I was wearing shoes without any socks.
These were not Jack’s clothes.
A phone began ringing.
Double rings.
I knew this sound.
I was in England again.
Somebody pick up that goddamned phone.
I moaned, tried to sit, but my head weighed as much as a fire truck.
Something crashed to the floor. The phone.
The noise was so loud it almost hurt, but at least the ringing stopped.
And somewhere, Henry said, “Fucking hell.”
“Henry?”
“Where are you?”
I put my hands down on either side of my hips and pushed myself up, so I sat with my spine pressed into the doorjamb.
“On the fucking floor.”
Every day is just like being born again.
I looked at the smear of blood I’d wiped across the floor beneath my palm. I was in Henry’s apartment. In London.
Sitting in the doorway between the bedroom and the toilet.
And it was raining outside.
Maybe this was it, I thought.
Maybe this was really it, and Jack was home.
And maybe I’d step outside into a wriggling mass of those fucking worms.
The clothes I wore belonged to Ander, Nickie’s younger brother. I remembered how I’d shown up at their house, soaked from the rain, and he’d given me his stuff—jeans, a T-shirt, tennis shoes, and a jacket—so I had to go barefoot inside his shoes, with no underwear, too, and Nickie took all my clothes from me, so she could launder them.
Ander’s black T-shirt that said THE RAMONES on it. I stared at a small circle of pale skin where there was a finger-sized hole over my belly.
This had to be it.
I was home.
And that night, maybe it was tonight when I showed up drenched from the rain at Nickie’s front door, I remembered that I had the lens in my pocket. Lost and found, after Conner and I got into a fight on the beach in Blackpool.
I could feel it there now.
This had to be it.
I was home.
Henry’s feet moved, covered in sheets and blankets, twisted around on his bed.
“Are you okay?” I said.
His hand swung over and dropped onto the small stand where he’d knocked down the phone.
“Fuck. I need a cigarette.”
Paper and cellophane rumpled in Henry’s hand. For some reason, the sound turned my stomach. Then came the grating friction wheel of a lighter, and I could almost smell the metallic spark that preceded the flame, before the sucking sound, the burning of paper and tobacco. And all this over the sickening and constant percolation from a bubbling, lukewarm aquarium.
I had to throw up.
Welcome home, boys.
I leaned forward and dog-crawled to Henry’s toilet, tracking a smeared palm print of blood along his floor.
When I got up, I washed my face. I wound a strip of toilet paper around my hand and squeezed it shut, but the bleeding didn’t slow at all. Then I went back to the bedroom.
The place was a mess. I stumbled over the canvas jacket I’d been wearing—Ander’s—and kicked it onto a pile of newspapers. There were clothes, food wrappers, trash, scattered everywhere around Henry’s bed. The room looked like a place where junkies had spent the last few days cooking their brains out
.
It was night, and through the rain-smeared panes of curtainless glass I could see rows of lighted windows from the apartments across the street, yellow rectangles blazing against the featureless silhouetted masonry of row housing.
I knew where this was.
The aquarium sat bubbling on a low dresser with three wide drawers. Its inner glass was so overgrown and blackened with algae that I couldn’t tell if there was anything at all swimming inside it.
Henry sat on the bed with his feet on the floor. He faced away from the window, smoking.
I shook my head. “How can you do that right now?”
“What? This?” Henry held his cigarette out in front of his eyes. I could see how pleased he was smoking it. It must have felt like years since he’d had the last one, even if it may have only been half a minute.
“Cigarettes stop me from puking. You should try one.”
He inhaled again.
I tripped over something, took two steps toward the bed, and sat down.
“Is this it? Are we done?”
Henry looked around, taking stock. I guess we all did that.
“This is it.” Henry nodded. “Home. Thank you, Jack.”
I ran my uninjured hand over my legs, pulling the denim away from my thighs. I didn’t want Henry to notice the shape of the lens in my pocket. Maybe he couldn’t go back now, anyway. Maybe neither one of us could.
And I didn’t want to ruin it for him. Henry was relieved, happy as he sat there smoking his cigarette, but I knew something had to be wrong. I expected it. The lens was still broken. And my hand was bleeding.
And something else.
I was supposed to have my cell phone in my pocket.
I remembered it being in the pocket of these same jeans the night Nickie hung up on me. I knew exactly where I sat—on a greasy bench in the Green Park Station—when she told me to leave her alone. I felt my pocket, but I knew my phone wasn’t in it.
Henry watched me. “What’s wrong?”
“I thought I had my phone.”
I looked at the jacket I’d kicked on the floor, calculating the distance, the number of footsteps. It was difficult to coordinate my arms and legs. I wanted to lie down.
Something was wrong.
Henry stood. He was a mess.