One For Sorrow

by Christopher Barzak

  He started to ask me a lot of questions after a while, as if I might know something he didn’t. I don’t know how long we’d been gone. Weeks definitely, but it felt more like months. Mostly he wanted to talk about the bridge. “Do you think there are only certain kinds of people who cross it?” he asked, but I could only shrug. “Do you think you need to be a good person to get across?” he asked, but again I didn’t know. It was like being back in English class with Mrs. Motes, talking about death and ad infinitum and other philosophical matters. She didn’t treat us like we had no ideas just because we were kids. She didn’t pretend like there were two separate worlds, adult world and kid world, or act like we should only think about kid stuff. Which was cool, even if it was difficult, because I don’t think adults have any good answers for things like death, so why would we? I still liked that she had asked, though, even if it hadn’t prepared me to answer Jamie’s questions.

  Or my own questions, really. I still didn’t know where Jamie had been going to, and I finally decided to find out for myself where he went before I’d wake up most mornings, why he was always leaving. So instead of falling dead asleep toward morning one night, I closed my eyes, pretending. And when I heard his feet on the floor beside me, stepping down from the altar, I opened my eyes a sliver, waiting for him to get a head start, then got up to follow him into the dark.

  Outside it was way early and totally quiet in this way that made it feel like no one else but us existed in the world. No cars, no people in the street. It was five in the morning on the clock of the Home Savings building and I was following far enough behind Jamie to keep him in sight. It felt like we’d changed places, as if it were me doing the haunting, following him, almost hoping he’d turn around and see me.

  When Jamie didn’t take the steps down to the valley of abandoned factories we’d come through that first night, and then again when he walked through the downtown and out of it, toward the east side of the city, I wondered where he could be going. I’d never explored that area of the city, with or without him, and he’d never shown any interest in it, so I’d assumed there was even less to see over there than the parts we stuck to. The roads led down and curved away from the downtown, which I’d thought was the lowest part of the valley, but I could see now there was a bottom to the place that I hadn’t discovered yet.

  We walked past abandoned strip malls, where the lots were fields of pavement and the parking light poles curled up and out of the cracks, unfolding like night-blooming flowers into three-petaled lamps at their tops. Farther ahead, I watched as Jamie turned down a side street, and when I reached it and turned too, I saw it wasn’t a real street at all, but the entrance to a huge, fenced-in parking lot full of semis.

  The front gate of the fence was open, its chains sagging to the ground. Jamie stood with his hand on the gate, his fingers curled tight around its links, looking at the trucks and the warehouse at the back of the place.

  I stuck to the shadows of trees that grew around the road and fence, taking a step or two forward when Jamie moved from the fence and into the compound. There were lights on in the main building, and I could see a few men in an office in there, frowning and talking a little, probably complaining about having to be at work at such an early hour. Jamie went straight up and looked through the window, his hands pressed against the glass. They didn’t notice him. They just burst out laughing at something one of them had said.

  Finally one came out of the office, shrugging his arms into a worn-out-looking high school jacket. There was a basketball patch stitched onto one of the arms. He’d probably been a jock who’d thought the rest of his life was already settled until he graduated and found out there were a bunch of guys who’d been thinking the same thing. Jamie followed him from the building to one of the semis, where the guy took a pen out and began marking things down on a clipboard. Jamie reached out to touch the man’s broad shoulders and said something I couldn’t hear. The guy looked up, turned his head one way then the other, as if he might have heard something, but quickly looked down at his clipboard again.

  Jamie moved to stand in front of him then, and placed his hand over the clipboard, looking up at the man’s face, saying something softly. I moved closer, but I still couldn’t hear.

  The man couldn’t see Jamie’s hand or hear him either. It was obvious by the way he kept checking things off and writing things down. He saw the paper and the words on the paper, not the fifteen-year-old kid standing in front of him talking, and finally he stopped writing and turned to open the door of his cab to climb in. That’s when I saw the rocket shooting into the sky stitched on the back of his jacket. And just above it, the name Marks.

  I didn’t need to see any more. I turned and went out the gate, onto the street, and walked back the way we’d come. I waited for Jamie at the foot of Hazel Street, in the shadow of the cathedral. When I finally saw him coming toward me a while later, his head down, hands in his pockets, the sun starting to edge around the corners of the buildings behind him, I said, “Hey,” and he looked up, blinking as if he didn’t recognize me.

  “Hey,” he finally said.

  “Was it for him?” I asked. “Did we come here for him?”

  Jamie didn’t try to pretend he didn’t know what I was talking about. “I was hoping he’d be able to hear or see me,” he said. “Like you and Gracie. Like my mom could.”

  I asked why he said could instead of can and he said, “She’s stopped listening.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “About a month and a half ago. I used to go to her when she prayed before bed. She always had something to say, usually that she was sorry. She always listened for me and I was able to make her see me this one time. But she can’t now. Or she won’t. She’s stopped trying.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s what people do, that’s all.”

  “What?”

  “Forgetting.”

  “And him?”

  Jamie shook his head. “No. He couldn’t even see me back when—”

  He looked away, back toward the direction he’d come from. “You know,” he said. “Before. He couldn’t see me then. I should have known he wouldn’t be able to now.”

  “I still see you,” I said.

  He gave me that lopsided smile. “Yeah,” he said, “you still see me. Thank you, Adam. If you didn’t, I don’t know what would happen.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Just that,” he said, and started to walk up the street toward our burned-up church.

  We didn’t talk about his dad anymore after that. But he kept disappearing, going back there, still trying to get his dad to see him before it was too late.

  I watched him. I followed behind and stayed in the shadows, keeping my eyes on him, worried that if I ever stopped seeing him, he might go away for good.

  When winter had settled in deep, when icicles had formed on the eaves of the roof and even the church people had skipped two Saturdays in a row to stay warm inside their own homes, he came to me, his skin bluish-gray like one of Gracie’s pieces of marble, his eyes sunk deep in his skull, his teeth full of rot. “Adam,” he said, his voice barely a whisper. “Adam, I need your help.”

  I helped him up onto the altar so he could lie down with his head on the bag of potting soil, and asked what I could do. He didn’t say anything for a while, and I wasn’t sure if he didn’t know the words for what he needed or if he was just too weak to say them. “Jamie,” I said. “What can I do?”

  “I need something,” he said. “Just something small. I promise I’ll give it back if I can.”

  “Anything,” I said, and he tilted his head to look up at me.

  “I need some of your words,” he said.

  I didn’t say anything straight off. I couldn’t help but think of the man with no skin who had taken my I love you when I tried giving it to Gracie, and I didn’t want to think of Jamie like that. So I willed that memory away and nodded. It was the least I could give him.

&
nbsp; He told me to lie down beside him, so I laid down. Then he grabbed my hand. “It’s a little like dead space,” he said, “but you don’t have to worry about the men with no skin. Close your eyes,” he said, so I closed them. “Imagine a great white light and listen to my voice so you don’t get lost.”

  The longer he talked, the more his words grew far away, but I could still hear them. I imagined the great white light in my mind and suddenly I felt the pop! of coming out of the body. I opened my eyes, afraid I’d drift away, but I was still in the room with Jamie, who held my hand like a tether. My hand, not the body’s. The body lay on the altar like a dead dumb thing, its hand flung out to one side, its fingers curled inward. The body looked like it was sleeping peacefully and I felt a spark of happiness, seeing that. I hadn’t felt peace in a while and even though I still didn’t feel it, the body looked like it was restful. I felt like maybe I was next in line for peace or something like it.

  “How do you feel?” Jamie asked.

  I thought about it for a moment. I could feel his hand, his warmth, the texture of his skin, like I’d been able to feel in dead space. I could smell him. He still wore the jeans and old shoes and Cleveland Indians jersey I’d given him months ago. I thought we’d smell awful since we hadn’t washed our clothes in who knows how long, but he didn’t. He smelled like lilies of the valley and dirt and autumn leaves being burned. I thought his flesh would be cold, but it was warm. I thought his eyes would be sunken in and hollow, but they were blue all the way down. “I can feel you,” I said. “I can smell you again. The real you.”

  He leaned over and kissed me on my mouth and a great white light appeared without me imagining it. It blinded me for a second, and I blinked until I could look straight at it.

  It was the moon, I realized. A bright, blinding full moon, falling at me through the dark. It sizzled. It popped with cold heat, pulsing over and over. Then slowly it began to fade away as quickly as it had come into existence.

  Moonlight, I was thinking when I came to again. The word, not the thing itself. I set it up alongside sunflower and they looked like they were meant to hold each other up, or else to hold something between them, like they belonged together more than anything else in this world.

  I said, “Thank you,” because those were the words I felt, that I wanted him to have more than any others.

  “In my mouth,” he said. “Say them in my mouth.”

  I put my mouth over his and kissed him. I whispered, “Thank you,” into that hot cavern, and he lapped my words up, licked my tongue clean of them, and they were his then. His for the keeping.

  Later, after he’d begun to feel a little more like himself again, I said, “Why don’t we just stay like this? I like it better.”

  “Because you aren’t dead,” he said. “You need to go back in your body, Adam. You can’t stay out of it like this forever. You need to stay in it.”

  I circled it, considering. It wasn’t much. Just a sad sack of flesh. Just bones grinding, blood swishing and brains blipping. Machinery. Why was it important? Why couldn’t I live like him? Without it?

  “I know what you’re thinking,” said Jamie, putting his hand on my back. “But that’s not how it works. If you stay like this, you won’t be able to do a lot of things.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like go to school and learn new things, or eat when you feel hungry. Do you see me doing that?”

  “No,” I said. “But you don’t need to.”

  “Right. And there’s a reason. It doesn’t do anything for you when you’re—”

  He looked away, casting glances around the charred church before continuing. “When you’re what I am.”

  I didn’t say the word to finish his thought for him. I didn’t know if he needed me to remind him or if he just couldn’t bear to say it, so I said nothing at all. I slipped back into the body, a little angry with him for making me, back into that heavy overcoat, back to not feeling.

  When I was inside again, I opened the body’s eyes and said, “I don’t go to school anymore.”

  “This is true,” said Jamie, blinking sadly. “This is very true.”

  Take me. Could you. If. A long time ago. Do you remember when? Shh. Listen. Look at me. Close. Closer. Tell me what you see. What’s the word for that? What’s the word for me? Can you give it to me?

  I gave him what I could. After that first time, whenever he began to weaken and forget himself, he’d ask me to give him more. Sometimes a word. Sometimes a sentence. Something he could live on for a while. Something that could make him warm again. Once I gave him an entire story. I made it up while we lay on the altar side by side, watching the dark gathered under the ceiling. I don’t remember the story much. Only that it was about two boys living in a church like we were. But these were normal boys. They ate meals and slept eight hours. They took showers and wore nice clothes and the church wasn’t really a church, it just looked like one. Every day they sat on the altar together and prayed that the church would burn down, and then one day a fire actually happened and they died inside it, and what became of them no one knew. In the end, they both lived happily ever after. There were details, but I gave all those to him, hoping they would keep him with me longer. But no matter how many I gave him, he’d eventually begin to fade.

  He disappeared for a few hours, sometimes for days. Once he was gone for almost an entire week. And the longer he was gone, the more words he’d ask for when he came back. I wanted to be able to not care about him not being there, but I cared. It was terrible, the way his absence made me feel like my mother going on like a crazy woman whenever my dad went on a binge and didn’t come home. I didn’t like feeling that way, but it helped me understand her more. It helped me understand how much my father needed her. And even though I still cared about Jamie, after a while I started to wonder why I needed him at all.

  But I didn’t want to answer that question. I just wanted him to stay.

  One day I curled up on the floor of the bell tower, my knees tucked against my chest, my arms wrapped around my legs. He’d been gone for nearly a week, and I wondered what words he’d ask for when he came back this time. I was starting to get protective of them. I’d already given him so many. Right, wrong, shut up, go away, go ahead, please, please don’t, thank you, can you, will you, may, may I, fight, brave, keep, always, danger, faith, and he’d always need more. I was beginning to not understand a few things myself now. My head resting on the dusty floorboards, my eyes wide open, I waited for him to come back, his eyes pleading before he even spoke. I hadn’t slept in days and after three nights without closing them, my eyes were sore from too much seeing.

  So in the middle of some week in the middle of some winter month, I got up in the middle of a day and left without knowing where I was going. I couldn’t stay there anymore without him, so I walked away hoping wherever I ended up would be an answer, a sign telling me what to do, which direction to run in.

  Where I ended up was the north side of the city, going back toward home, toward Liberty, where Gracie had told me all the Jewish people in our part of Ohio lived, where the country roads turned into city streets and the Victorian houses had all been chopped up into apartments for university students, where Wick Park and the building that looked like it belonged in Greece still stood, reminding me of the night Gracie tried to take me to a place I’d never been. How long ago had that been?

  I was losing count of days. When I looked, my mental calendar was full of blank squares that I spent my time trying to pretend didn’t exist. Something was happening. Something in me was changing like the night my blood changed and death began to run along the twists and turns of my veins and arteries. I couldn’t smell, taste or feel anymore, but I could still sense something in me disintegrating. I understood how the buildings and houses falling in on themselves felt, the way their walls buckled, the way their porch roofs sagged with too much weight. When I hung from the jungle gym in the park by my knees that day, looking at the world turned u
pside down made sense to me.

  A man passing by while I hung there stopped and asked if I wanted a ride. “My car’s around the corner,” he said, scanning the park to see if anyone was watching. I looked at him without speaking, and reached inside his shadow. “Death is coming,” I whispered to his shadow, “death is coming,” and he ran off, spooked, as if he’d seen a ghost.

  My shadow had grown tall and dark without me noticing. It spread out under me as I swung on the jungle gym bars. I tried talking to it, but it wouldn’t answer. It had turned its back on me for good. It was giving me the cold shoulder. My shadow had grown to the size of three of me so that when I walked I dragged it like a sack of rocks behind me.

  As I started back to the church, believing there’d be no more signs to watch for, I came across a small shop called Dorian Books tucked into the first floor of a building just past the dormitories. Inside I could see all sorts of funky lamps on tables where people could sit and read something from the rows and rows of bookshelves. The lamps lit up the front window and everything inside the place looked warm. I remembered a little bit how that felt right then, warmth, and got the idea that I should go inside and find the book I’d read in Gracie’s closet. Maybe it would remind me of then, a time when I was still pretty alone but not so lonely, when Gracie was still just on the other side of that door, sleeping or defending me in a screaming match with her father.

  When I opened the door, I heard a dull tinkling noise somewhere. The door had been rigged to jingle a bell when it opened, and a guy came out from behind the counter ready to help me. I was about to tell him I was just looking when I noticed that no words came out when his mouth moved. “I’m sorry,” I said. “What did you say?” But he only moved his mouth again without speaking. His hair was salt and pepper and he wore a pair of jeans, a blue button up shirt and black socks, no shoes at all, as if he were in his own home. He wore black-framed glasses and a kind smile, but for the life of me, I couldn’t hear him.