Because You'll Never Meet Me

by Leah Thomas

  “But your father paused at every bed, every cell and container, to greet each and every one of them. He asked them for their names; when they lacked the ability or the organs to reply, he asked me to speak for them.

  “‘Hey,’ he told them, ‘I’m Seb. What’s it like to be you?’

  “Some of the children spoke to him. Some of the children reached for him, and he never flinched. Some of them betrayed their humanity for the first time. The ward became a nursery.

  “We both missed the staff meeting entirely. When we finally left the room, I followed in his wake. I could not think of what to say. In the face of his optimism, I felt like an infant—I felt ancient.

  “When we returned to my office, he gestured for me to sit down at my own desk.

  “‘Don’t think I’ve forgotten about you,’ he said. ‘What’s it like to be you, Dr. Auburn-Stache?’”

  Auburn-Stache paused to clear his throat. I stared at my hands on the bedspread. Wriggling feelers.

  “So … he got sick because he spent so much time with sick kids?”

  “We can’t be sure, Ollie.” Auburn-Stache sighed. “Cancer comes from so many places. Your father may have been sick even before I met him.”

  “I mean. I always assumed that he died because … I dunno? He and Mom volunteered for daring genetic experiments or something. In my head it was a lot more … adventurous.”

  You told me it wasn’t science fiction, Mo, but I wanted to believe in storytelling.

  “Your mother did undergo experimental treatment, Ollie. But only because she nearly miscarried in the early months of her pregnancy. Only because … there were signs you’d be unwell.”

  “What?” My heart beat in my ears.

  I didn’t think I would be able to keep you.

  “Seb—your father—told me that he had undisclosed motives for joining the lab.

  “‘The doctors say something might be wrong with the baby,’ he told me. We were in my office. ‘Maybe the same something I’ve got, probably something worse. Hard to tell.’

  “I remember that I sighed. I had thought your father was entirely selfless and here solely for the sake of the kids. But it was also for the sake of his own. I was disappointed, until I saw the tears in his eyes. ‘We need help, Greg.’

  “‘And you come to me,’ I told him. ‘I can’t promise that we’ve helped anyone here. You’ve met the children. You’ve seen how many of them suffer. We have no idea what the long-term effects are, on the subjects or their mothers. Think of your fiancée.’

  “‘Thinking isn’t my area. But Meredith and I have talked, which is something I am good at! People suffer everywhere. At least in this place, you guys are working on it, right?’

  “‘That … that’s right.’”

  “Your father had a lot of faith—a lot of hope in the initiative. He saw it as what it was founded as: a place that helped people. He wouldn’t have thought twice about using it to help his wife and son. He had not seen the gradual shift in purpose. Beyond that—he did not see failures as failures, only as people.”

  This story wasn’t the heroic one I’d wanted, Moritz. My dad really did sound just like … just like some big kid.

  “So Dad just gave Mom experimental treatment as if he didn’t care that she might get sick.” I clenched my fists. “He was an idiot.”

  “Don’t ever say that,” said Auburn-Stache. “It worked. He saved you.”

  “Saved me! Wow. Bully for the world.”

  “Don’t you dare sit there and shrug as though that means nothing! That is everything, Ollie! Every goddamn thing to your mother and me.”

  I had never seen Auburn-Stache like this. I had never seen him look so terrible and sad and scared and tired of it all, and I shut my mouth because I probably looked the same way. After a moment, I nodded.

  “Okay. Okay.”

  Auburn-Stache stood and walked to the window. His fingers flicked against the glass. “Your father spent so much time with the unknown, at his own expense. But when he got sicker, he was still smiling. He sat in my office and he asked me … when he knew that was it for him, when he aged before my eyes and strolled no longer, when the optimism left him empty … he asked me to look after you. Even though I was standing there with syringes and all those screaming children behind me, with countless experiments already done and nameless more on the horizon, your father trusted me with his unborn son. And after he … was gone, after you were born and I took you out to the woods, I knew what you were to me. Even while I was still working at the lab, I could visit you. I could visit your happiness. Your mom’s.”

  I wanted to scream, but he looked so old with his head in his hands. Like someone’s grandfather or something.

  “I’ve spent so long trying to be a better person. I like to think that for you, I was. You redeemed me.” His voice was hoarse. “After he was gone, that was all I had.”

  “What about all the others? The other kids.”

  “Ah.” He swallowed. “Yes. I visit some of them, but it’s not enough, is it? Perhaps I haven’t actually done a decent job here, either.”

  “I’m fine.” Anger took too much energy. And no one had ever really talked to me about Dad before. That was something, I guess. Words are the next-closest thing to meeting someone.

  He winced and pulled the package you’d sent out from under his seat. “What’s this?”

  “It’s a womble. Supposed to be electricity-proof, I guess.”

  “Yes,” he said, peering inside. “We used to wear ones just like it.”

  “And you never thought to give me one,” I mumbled.

  Auburn-Stache’s eyes flashed with that old manic gleam. “Oh, I did think of it. You should see the solutions I designed for you, Ollie. Nonconducting bodysuits and rock wool caps to obscure the sensitive pressure points at your temples. Rubber headbands with skintight seals. I drew up plans for a translucent lotion that hardened into a second, insulated skin, and would ideally be invisible to those who weren’t looking for it. God, did I plot for you to live like everyone else. I plotted for you to leave here.”

  I sat up straight. “Then why haven’t I?”

  “Oliver,” said Auburn-Stache, “the risk went beyond your safety. I fear that you are just as likely to make the world tremble as it is to make you seize. So long as you’re growing, you lack control of your emotions. So long as you lack control of your emotions, you lack control of your electromagnetic tendencies. What do you think would happen if you got upset on a freeway and stalled every vehicle alongside you? What if you removed your womble at an airport and sneezed a plane from the sky?” Auburn-Stache smirked, but it was a dark smirk. “Other lads worry about their voices cracking. But, Ollie, you’ve never been other lads.”

  I tried not to think about the phone that hit Liz’s face. The power line, blown apart. Mom telling me I’d only hurt people.

  “You think I’d murder phones,” I said quietly.

  “I don’t think you’d ever intentionally hurt a soul on the planet. But fate is cruel.”

  “No Schicksal, Sherlock,” I said.

  Auburn-Stache lifted the arm of the womble, ran his fingers along its surface. “Why did he send it, Oliver?”

  “Because he loves me, I guess.”

  “Really?” He choked on a laugh. “Well, what do you know.”

  “And …” I slumped into my pillows again. “For a Halloween dance I’m not going to. Because dances are juvenile.”

  I could hear Auburn-Stache’s shuddery fingers squeezing the plastic, and his laughter was gone again.

  “Oliver, I need you to put this on.”

  “Go away.”

  Auburn-Stache held up the womble with shaking hands.

  “You need to put it on.”

  I didn’t want to hear it. I bit my lip and closed my eyes but heard it anyway:

  “Oliver. She may never leave the garage again.”

  Minutes after he left, I climbed out of bed, pieced it together, pulled
it on, and stood in front of the mirror.

  “Not a freak. Wicked.”

  Auburn-Stache waited for me at the foot of the stairs.

  “Will it work?” I said through the filtered mouth of the gas mask. Sweating, I lifted one heavy arm of the thick rubber–coated canvas suit.

  “It should.” Moistness in his eyes, fogging his glasses.

  It took a while to get the hang of walking in the suit, but Auburn-Stache helped me traverse the lawn, walking ahead and pointing me around dips in the grass as we approached the overwhelming red-gold luminescence of the garage. It was dusk and the building was glowing like some alien mothership. My breath caught in my throat as I stepped right into the light—

  I didn’t seize. The red electricity gently tickled the lines of my suit and let me be.

  Auburn-Stache held the door open for me.

  I entered the garage.

  There were things in there I’d known about: a freezer, her truck, a phone tacked to the wall. Rainbow bursts of color.

  But there was also a lot more.

  What was in the garage was a hospital bed, IVs and monitors and cabinets full of medication. A sink and a toilet and a hazardous-waste bag. And a leather chair that I recognized as being the sort of place people sat during chemotherapy.

  “Mom,” I whispered.

  She was lying in the middle of the setup, entirely bald and thin and looking like a child, tubes in her arms and in her nose, and I wondered whether her brain was still in her head or if it had finally been eaten away. The light of the machinery she was attached to shrouded her in half the color spectrum.

  She blinked at me a bit blearily as I approached. I wanted to hug her, but I worried I would dislodge a tube or hurt her or crush her—why didn’t I hug her the day she told me summer was over? Why was I awful to her? Why didn’t I wear the coat? It was raining and she was just worried about me, but I was so—

  Focus, Ollie.

  “You’ll knock her dead with that costume,” she gasped. “I made a corsage for you to give her. With a fiery chrysanthemum. In the freezer.”

  “Mom … I shouldn’t have said—I mean, I know you’re trying to help me.”

  “Tch. It’s old hat. And the dance starts soon, right?” She clenched my hand in hers, a skeleton grip on my rubber gloves.

  There was no way I was going to the dance. But Auburn-Stache stepped forward with the corsage in hand. The orange mum was framed in maroon aster petals. She’d spent a few months last year arranging flowers. Another lost hobby.

  “Mom. Dances … they’re something. I mean, dances are juvenile.”

  But her tears slipped down the canvas on my arms and she shook her head.

  “I promised I’d let you go.”

  Right then, I didn’t want her to.

  “What did you used to do on rainy days, Mom?”

  She smiled. “Puddle-hopping, Oliver.”

  We took her truck, whatever color it was.

  We approached the broken power line and I held my breath. But with the womble, I almost hated how easy it was to drive under it. I breathed a sigh into the mask when we passed unhindered below the limp tendrils. They were as threatening as spaghetti noodles. They didn’t mean a damn thing, Moritz.

  I could see enough through the goggles and the windshield to know that the engine was propelling us forward at speeds my bike could never achieve. I didn’t seize, despite the dizzying bouts of color that assailed me as he drove. I had never looked out car windows before, but I didn’t enjoy it much. I kept thinking of how Mom tried to smile as we pulled out of the garage. She tried, and it hurt to breathe when I thought about it.

  But at least I wasn’t seizing. Either the womble was working or I had fooled myself.

  We pulled onto the main roads of town. Piercing cobalts and ceruleans swarmed around billboards, jabs of amber lashed out from streetlamps. Congealing browns overtook us as we passed other drivers. I didn’t appreciate it like I should have.

  Auburn-Stache kept glancing at me, as if looking away might puncture the suit.

  When we pulled up in front of the school, I struggled to breathe. There were people out there, heading from the darkness to the colors of the flat-roofed building.

  I almost whimpered. “This is crazy. What are we doing?”

  “Sometimes you have to take a plunge. For better or for worse.”

  He helped me out of the truck and tucked a wad of cash into my hand. “For tickets.”

  “Oh. Yeah. Money. That’s a thing.”

  “It is.”

  “Come pick me up at ten, okay?” I tried to sound confident. I thought I was hallucinating.

  “There are all kinds of adventures in the world, Ollie.”

  I stumbled into the school alongside other monstrous shapes, flinching away from lightbulbs overhead, twitching at the sight of phones in hands and the feel of the beat emanating through the floor. Both my fists were closed; I handed a mummy at the ticket table ten dollars. He gestured to the double doors that said “GYM.”

  That room was sensory murder. The usual pain wasn’t there, but I could feel the weight of electricity suffused around me. The colors were unbearable. I could hardly see the dancers and the DJ through the clouds in the air around them. Individual shades, individual auras were impossible to pluck out. They were tangled and smeared together in a seething mass that circumvented dozens of laughing kids.

  It could have been worse. I think it was easier for me to see witches, superheroes, and vampires through womble eyes than it would have been to see normal teenagers through my own.

  Of course I recognized her, even in costume. Liz’s dress was black with glow-in-the-dark bones on it; her torso looked like the model skeleton in my room. Her face had been paled with makeup. She’d put shadows under her eyes, beneath her cheekbones.

  She looked like me, only beautiful.

  But she wasn’t standing alone. She was attached to a blond boy dressed as a knight in foil armor. If I kicked him between the legs, I’d probably be kicking homemade chain mail.

  I trudged to her, pushing against dancers who swore at me. The suit was working, but it wouldn’t for long. The hot perspiration, the flashing from all sides, and the din of voices that I was unaccustomed to, the onslaught of light … I was being smothered.

  Colors swallowed me as I reached for her.

  My glove wrapped around her arm. She pulled away. “The heck?”

  “Hey.” Martin Mulligan squinted at me, half smiling. “Who’s this? Brian? Great costume, man!”

  I unclenched my other fist and pushed Liz’s corsage and music player into her hand. I’d cleaned the blood and water off. She frowned at it. Then her eyes looked straight into my goggles.

  “Ollie?”

  “Liz!” I spoke as loudly as I could. The heat was excruciating. I pointed at the DJ. “Electronica?”

  “Ollie, what—how—?” Through the haze I think I saw her eyes widen.

  “No … biggie.” My legs gave out.

  Martin Mulligan caught me with cardboard arms. “Man, you’re hyperventilating. Take that thing off!”

  “I … can’t.”

  Martin misunderstood. He thought he was helping me. That was the worst thing—knowing that he really was a decent guy. Maybe I would have liked him after all, the bastard.

  “No!” cried Liz.

  “Here,” said Martin Mulligan, and he yanked my gas mask off.

  My head exploded. A barrage of malevolent electricities stabbed me in the eye sockets. It was beyond pain—it was concentrated anguish at the base of my neck, expanding and searing as I waited for my brains to splatter onto my shoes.

  I screamed as blood vessels in my eyes burst, as my hands started flapping. I screamed twice as loud as I ever had until the sound reverberated up to the gymnasium rafters. And when I fell to the floor, I screamed even louder, and my skull threw itself against the wood.

  I screamed.

  The world ended.

  And I wa
nted it to end.

  Because it was finally too much. And I mean all of it was too much, all of it was swirling through my skeleton and nerves until it was imploding inside me in this twisted spiral of pain or something so much worse, and I swear that lights switched over in my eyes and then I saw more than Liz beside me, horrified in the gym.

  I saw my dad tripping over his untied laces, but all the wriggling feelers stretching out of incubators were ready to catch him. I saw daylilies sprouting from dilapidated birthday cake no one ever ate. I saw the fishbowl in shards painted redder than blackberry juice. Liz’s hand getting sucked back into the cardboard television. Joe flying right back up into his tree. The automobile bones in the junkyard creaking and standing up on huge metal stilts with feet at the ends. I saw Dorian Gray lit with electricity and I saw us wearing layers of mud puddles as thick as winter coats and I saw planes go down because I sneezed and I saw, I saw, I saw all sorts of things I could never see and the weight of it all was pulling me under and I could have happily fallen back into the feelers of the things in incubators, too, right? That seemed easiest.

  But then I saw you. You were in the deer blind again, Moritz. I saw you, smiling with holes in your face, reaching down into the collapsing chamber of things that held me, saying only “It was never your fault!” and pulling me up and out and closer to you.

  It was almost like I met you, Mo.

  And the thought of that was enough to send all of the imploding mass of horror spinning out of me ALL AT ONCE in a roaring scream that no one heard, that no words, no ALL CAPS, could capture.

  So the world only ended for the DJ. All his speakers blew out in the exact instant that his laptop died. The lights above sputtered, went out. Phones sparked and people dropped them. All that was electric died with my scream.

  I made the world convulse instead.

  I was on my back. The sound of stampeding, costumed teenagers shouting in the dark shook me to the bones.