Murmuration

by T. J. Klune

  Because what if it’s not there?

  Wouldn’t that just be the bee’s knees?

  Nothing like having proof in your hands that you’re looney tunes.

  He’s certain, though.

  Mostly.

  “Do it,” he says, and is shocked by how loud his voice sounds in all that Amorea quiet. “Just do it.”

  He does.

  The bell rings out overhead. It’s different at night. It bounces off the floor and the walls, and there’s no one behind the counter, no one behind the grill. No one calling out Hey, Mike or There he is or You here to see Sean? with a knowing smirk on their face.

  The photo isn’t that far from the door. Just a few steps, really, and he’s standing in front of it. It looks like it always has, but his eyes stray to the left, and he’s sure he can see the crease right near Sean’s arm where Nadine the African Queen is folded away. He tells himself just to do this and get it over with so he can go home and go to bed and tomorrow, he’ll show Sean, and they’ll figure it out together, they’ll do this right. His—

  —back hits the glass, and he’s a big guy, always has been, pushing two-thirty and muscles on top of muscles. It’s no contest what happens when he meets the sliding door. It shatters around them, the metal frame twisting and shrieking. It’s safety glass, so it breaks off in chunks, but he still feels little pinpricks on his back, like bee stings.

  He lands on his back on the floor of the balcony, glass sprinkling around them. The sounds of traffic below float up around them. She’s on top of him, looking dazed, the knife loose in her grip. He’s reaching up to knock it from her hand when she rears back, the tip of the knife pointed at his throat.

  He’s thinking, Holy shit, what are you doing, what are you doing, what are you doing?

  He does the only thing he can.

  He punches her in the face.

  Bone crunches under his knuckle. A flash of blood. She falls back, the knife nicking his throat before it clatters to ground. She moans, hands going to her face, and she’s sitting against the balcony railing, blood squirting between her fingers. Her eyes are dazed, but they’re still narrowed, like she can still hold on to the anger even after getting a fist to the face.

  He snarls, “What the fuck is wrong with you?” He’s panting, the pain sharp as glass continues to dig underneath him into his back.

  She says, “You broke my nose. I think you broke my nose. You hit me. You hit me.”

  He’s sick to his stomach, because yeah, he did just hit her. He hit his wife. Sure, she was coming at him with a knife and pushed him through a sliding glass window. And sure, she probably meant to stab him (really? did she really?), but he hit her. He punched her. She’s bleeding because of him, quite profusely. He’s not his father, he’s not his father, and his mom whispers, Sure you aren’t, bucko. But you sure as shit didn’t get that temper from me.

  And god, he’s so fucking angry.

  At her. At himself. At the situation. That it’s gotten this far. That they’ve allowed themselves to become this. His fist went into her face, but it’s been coming to this for a long time. She deserved it. She earned it. She’d come after him first, and he was just protecting himself. It could have happened sooner, but he’s a good guy, and he didn’t let it. He didn’t want this. He never wanted any of this. It’s on her. This is all on her. It’s not—

  “Oh my god,” he whispers, because he’s horrified. He justified it in his head like it was nothing. Like it made sense. Like it was okay. Like it was ever okay. He wonders if his father did the same every single time he raised a hand to his mother. And now Jenny is chanting, “You hit me, you hit me,” over and over, and her eyes are bright, and she’s bleeding.

  He says, “Why did you do this?”

  She says, “This is you. This is all on you. Like your dad. You’re just like your dad, aren’t you? Hitting a woman. Just like your dad. Just like your dad. Just like your—”

  And he’s distracted by what she’s saying, distracted by how true it’s ringing in his ears, so he’s not prepared when she moves quicker than she has any right to. He’s still on his back, still dazed by everything that’s happened in the last… god, has it only been a minute?

  So he’s not ready for her, not completely. She pushes herself off the railing and makes a grab for the knife. She’s got her fingers wrapped around the handle before he’s even registered she’s moving, and the balcony’s not that big. It was something they didn’t like, something they almost passed on the apartment over, but the Realtor said outdoor space in this part of DC was hard to come by, and anything more was going to be out of their price range. So they said yeah, sure, let’s do it, it’s small, but let’s do it. She was four months pregnant at the time, and he was… well, he wasn’t happy, per se, but he was getting there. He knew he could get there, and everything was going to be fine.

  The balcony’s rather small. Which is why she’s kneeling over him, the knife above her head, in a matter of a second or two.

  He reacts. It’s fight or flight. He does the only thing he can.

  He kicks his foot out. Hits her right underneath her breasts with his expensive Italian loafer. Something cracks in her chest and her eyes go wide, and she just flies backward, much farther than he expects. Her back hits the railing and there’s another shriek of metal, of bolts ripping from their moorings. The knife falls to the floor of the balcony, and there’s a brief moment when their eyes meet, hers wide, his panicked, and then the railing gives way nine stories above the streets of Washington, DC. One moment she’s there, and then she’s gone.

  He breathes and breathes and breathes until he’s—

  —gasping for air inside the diner in Amorea. It’s bacon and coffee and cigarettes and it’s home, because he knows this place. He doesn’t know the people in that event, doesn’t know how they could be so angry, how they could let so much rage settle over their skin. Except he can understand a little bit, can’t he? Because there’s residual fury flooding through him and he can almost taste it at the back of his throat, bitter and sharp. He thinks, How could she, oh my god, she’s my wife, how could she do this to me, and I punched her, I punched her, I punched—

  He gags, but nothing comes up but a thin string of bile.

  His head is spinning and he’s trying to get himself under control, but that pressure behind his eye is as harsh as it’s ever been before. He thinks his eye will probably pop out of his skull if it gets any worse, a moist little plop, and it’ll fall to the floor of the diner.

  Worse, much worse, is that feeling of slipping again, like it’s being pulled away from him, these things that he remembers that aren’t his to remember. It’s not as strong as it’s been before and he’s holding on to it, keeping the memories fresh in his head. He knows how it feels to have her (Jenny, he thinks, Jenny, Jenny, Jenny) on top of him, knife near his throat. He knows the terror that overwhelmed him when the man punched her in the face. The disbelief he felt when she disappeared over the edge of the balcony. He doesn’t know who these people are, but they’re mixed into everything, he’s sure of it.

  (Or it’s just another event, another notch on the schizophrenic bedpost, and boy, is Doc just going to piss himself silly over this. Funny little brain, he’ll say. Funny little crazy brain.)

  Mike shakes his head, trying to clear his thoughts, trying to focus on why he’s in the diner in the middle of the night to begin with. His wrist is itchy, but he ignores it. There’s enough light coming in through the window from the streetlamps that he can make out the photo clearly.

  He thinks, Maybe I shouldn’t do this.

  He takes the photo off the wall anyway.

  He’s here. It has to be done.

  The frame is the same one he’s always seen, which creates a weird duality in his mind, because he knows it broke, but he knows it didn’t.

  It has four little clasps on the back, one for each side of the frame. He flips them and pulls the cardboard backing out. If he’s right,
there should be the lovely dark eyes of Nadine the African Queen staring back up at him, folded behind the rest.

  And he’s right. He knows he’s right.

  Because if he is, then all the rest will fit somehow. All the rest will be—

  He looks down at the frame in his hands.

  The picture isn’t folded back.

  There is no black woman staring back at him.

  He says, “No.”

  He says, “No, no, no.”

  It’s a trick, he thinks. Just a trick. It’s there, it’s dark, and you can’t see her, it’s there.

  He pulls the picture out. There’s Happy. Calvin and Donald. And Sean, always Sean.

  But there’s no one standing beside him.

  In fact, Sean’s at the edge of the photo.

  It’s just the four of them.

  “It’s been torn,” he says. “It’s been torn.”

  It hasn’t been torn. The edges of the photo are the same on all sides, smooth and bordered white. The border is the same thickness on all sides, so it hasn’t been cut. And there’s a space between the border and the curve of Sean’s arm in the photo, a good inch, which probably translated to about a foot in real life.

  She was standing closer than that. He knows it. She was right next to Sean.

  But she’s not now.

  And maybe, he thinks, she never was.

  He lets out a choked breath and thinks, No.

  Because he’s not crazy. He’s not.

  He drops the photo to the ground.

  He looks back to the remaining photos on the walls all around him.

  There have to be two hundred of them. Maybe three. All varying sizes.

  She has to be here. She has to be.

  “Somewhere,” he mutters. “That stacked honey, fo sho.”

  He starts with the ones nearest to him. He’s careful. At first.

  But every photo he takes apart gives him nothing but what he already sees.

  He’s less careful as time passes.

  He’s halfway done when he’s just shattering the glass on the tables and ripping the photos out from the frames.

  Mike’s hyperventilating, and out of the corner of his eye, he can see a starling perched on a lamppost outside, but he ignores it. He ignores it because she’s not here, she’s not in any of the photos, and neither is he, the man who smoked cigars and called him Mikey. He knows this man, can almost see his face, but he’s not in the photos, Nadine’s not in the photos, and he sees Walter in some, and Sean. Mrs. Richardson. The women in the book club. Calvin and Donald and Happy. Daniel Houle and George Kettner. Doc. Everyone else he knows, everyone else he sees every goddamn day. The people he passes on the street. The ones who say good morning when he comes into the diner. The patrons in his store. His neighbors. His friends. His community. He sees them all on the wall, they’re all—

  There comes a point in everyone’s life when the weight of everything gets to be too much. When the world around them begins to falter and crack. Mike Frazier knows this. He knows he’s been lucky, and that for the past three years, he’s been okay.

  But this is the moment he breaks.

  What do you know about schizophrenia?

  He’s tearing the photos off the walls. He’s not screaming, and aside from the scrape of frames being torn from where they hang and the shattering of glass as they’re thrown to the floor, there’s little other noise. He’s not thinking, not really, aside from What is happening to me, what is happening to me, what is happening to me?

  Remarkably, he doesn’t cut himself on flying glass or shards of wood. He doesn’t cry, everything too frozen in his brain to even really process what he’s supposed to be feeling right now. It might be a panic attack, it might be something more, he’s not sure. He just knows that the photos on the wall are lying, and he can’t have them up anymore. He can’t see those faces staring back at him, not really, not—

  “Mr. Hughes.”

  It cuts through everything. The storm in his head. The thundering of his heart. The pressure behind his eyes that keeps pulsing. The need to tear apart everything he can get his hands on. The rage he feels bursting deep within him. He knows what the man on the balcony felt like now. When the woman came at him with the knife. It’s not real, he knows, that event, but it feels real, and he understands the anger. He can’t ever imagine hitting anyone, much less a woman, but he can understand why.

  It makes him nauseous to know he gets it. That he can relate to it.

  He thinks, Oh my god. How have I—

  “Mr. Hughes.”

  It all snaps back into place.

  He’s standing in the middle of the diner. Broken glass is all around him. There are pictures still hanging on the walls, but they’re crooked. Most are on the floor. On the tables. Shattered, the pictures wrinkled or torn. The glass crunches under his Chucks. He can’t—

  “Can you hear me, Mr. Hughes?”

  There’s a bright flash of light. The diner is filled with it. It’s all-encompassing, and he raises a hand to shield his eyes.

  The light dies out. There’s residual flashes as the darkness descends again.

  All he can hear is the sound of his own ragged breathing.

  He’s—

  —on his back, he’s on his back and everything is grainy, and everything is loud, and he can make out shapes moving around him, and they’re garbled, speaking in grunts and groans, and the machines are screaming around him, and he’s Mike Frazier, he is, he is, but those grunts and groans say, “Mr. Hughes, do you understand me, Mr. Hughes? Are you sure he’s—”

  He wants to laugh. Somehow, he wants to laugh, because now he’s positive he’s crazy. Or it’s aliens. He’s been abducted because They Came from Outer Space and maybe they are on an island. Maybe that’s what this whole thing is. They Came from Outer Space and put them all on an island, an island called Amorea and they can never leave. They’re being experimented on and wouldn’t that make much more sense? It would. Because he’s not crazy, he can’t be, not after everything, not when he’s finally found something that belongs just to him, that he can give himself completely to. Especially after all this time. They’ve finally gotten to where they’re supposed to be. They’ve gotten their act together, and he’s thinking, Sean, Sean, Sean—

  (What if he’s not real?)

  (No, he thinks. No, no, no.)

  (What if they take him away like Nadine the African Queen?)

  (They can’t. They can’t.)

  (She loved a man. You could see it by the look on her face. She loved a man, and he called you Mikey, that’s fo sho. She was a stacked honey, and he loved her, and you know it. You know him.)

  (Oscar, he thinks. His name is Oscar and he was my friend.)

  “Mr. Hughes,” the garbled voices say from above him, and he wants to answer them, wants to scream at them, what do you want, what do you want from me, why are you doing this, how could you do this to us, we’re people, we’re human people, but he can’t. He can’t make a noise beyond a choking, wet gurgle, and there’s something constricting his throat. His panic escalates, but he’s not moving. He can’t move, and he doesn’t know what they’ve done to him, how they’re doing this, but it’s all—

  “Mike?”

  He opens his eyes.

  Sean’s there. Sean’s in front of him. Sean’s in front of him looking soft and sleep-rumpled and confused. He’s wearing plaid sleep pants and a white shirt. He’s wiping an eye with his hand and yawning.

  “What’s going on?”

  Mike doesn’t know. He doesn’t know how he got here, standing at the front door to Sean’s little bungalow in the middle of the night. One moment he was destroying the diner and then They Came from Outer Space, and now he’s here. With Sean.

  He doesn’t know what to say. He opens his mouth and is startled when a broken sound falls out. It’s harsh and grating and he tries to swallow past the lump in his throat, but he can’t quite get there.

  “Mike?” Sea
n sounds much more awake now. And worried. A hand falls on Mike’s arm, and it’s real, it’s more real than anything that’s happened tonight, so he doesn’t stop himself from reaching out and pulling Sean to him. He buries his nose in the crook of Sean’s neck, holding on and breathing him in. He feels Sean’s arms wrap around him, hands rubbing up and down his back. Mike’s shaking, and it’s not as if he’s cold, but he doesn’t know how to stop.

  He doesn’t want to move, and Sean’s not letting him go, so he waits. Waits for his heart to stop racing, waits for his mind to clear. Through the fog, he hears Sean whispering in his ear, and he’s saying, “Yeah, big guy. It’s okay. I’m here. You’re here. You’re safe. I’ve got you. I’ve got you now, big guy. It’s okay.” And it’s enough to pull him back from whatever edge he was hanging over, enough to stop those terrible shakes. His face is wet, and he knows he should be embarrassed (and probably will be, when this all blows over), but for now, it’s enough.

  EVENTUALLY HE calms down enough for Sean to take him by the hand and pull him inside the house. It’s dark, but Sean maneuvers Mike deftly through the den and down the hall to the bedroom. He closes the door behind them, and Mike wonders vaguely who it’s supposed to keep out.

  He’s standing next to the bed, feeling useless. Helpless. He doesn’t know what to do. What to say. How to explain everything. How he came to be here. Where he was tonight. Everything he’s seen. Everything he hears. He doesn’t want Sean to look at him like he’s crazy. Worse, like he doesn’t believe Mike. All the words are stuck in his throat, and he can’t get them out.

  Sean’s in front of him. “Don’t have anything that will fit you. You’re like two of me. But those jeans can’t be comfortable, so I’m going to help you out. You okay with that, big guy?”

  Mike takes a moment before he nods.

  “All right. I’m not trying to get fresh with you, so no ideas.” He kneels down in front of Mike, almost as if in veneration. He’s untying Mike’s shoes, and it’s precious, this simple act. First one, and then the other. He taps Mike’s left leg and Mike lifts it, watching as Sean slides the shoe off before doing the same to the other side. He sets the Chucks off to the side, next to the bed. He stands, knees popping. “We’re gonna get those pants off, okay?”