I wanted to ask what the monster had meant by this time, but realized I was terrified that she would tell me. Instead I got up, and began to pick up the books that had fallen into the water, stacking them in the driest corner near the wall, carefully aligning their corners with the concrete. I couldn’t think of what else to do, just picking up and carrying cold, wet bricks of paper, cradling four or five in my arms at a time and building them into neat stacks.
After I had done three hip-height towers, Johnny got up and did the same, weaving around me to get books I had missed. Water oozed from the bottom books, compressed by the weight on top of them. Maybe the ones at the bottom would be okay in a few days, pressed flat like that, provided they didn’t go mouldy. The top ones would inevitably fluff and curl, blooming into illegibility. I wondered if Johnny knew how to fix them. Or knew someone who knew how. Or maybe she would just re-buy them. Morbidly, as I walked and stacked, I watched for one with a rusty smear on the cover, showing where it had cut her as it fell.
After we finished the books, still not talking—a painful, stretched-out silence, with me hovering just on the cusp of trying to say something comforting, and her simply locked into some wordless prison of grief and shock—she opened a closet filled with cleaning and aquarium supplies and began to carefully sweep the floor, piling everything into a jumbled heap of colourful fish and clear glass and dirt and torn seaweed and pieces of the ceiling and walls. I got another broom and started from the other side.
The artificial rock that had served as the castle in Ben’s kingdom rose nakedly into the gloom, illuminated by the few unbroken bulbs, like an ancient ruin lit up for tourists at night. I wondered if anything had survived in some tiny pocket of water caught in the craggy faux-stone. It didn’t seem impossible.
What did seem impossible was getting this debris, which I belatedly realized we had piled right over top of Ben, out of the room. We both leaned on our brooms and looked at it. Some of the pieces of plexiglass had been too big and thick to shift, but the rest looked like a sinister iceberg, where tropical fish sent their elderly to die. Water dripped ceaselessly from it. It would be a long, long time before this room was completely dry.
“How are we going to get all this out of here?” I finally said, my voice broken and too loud in the quiet.
“Rutger and I can do it with one of the mini-lifts,” she said. In contrast, her voice sounded startlingly level. I wondered if she was in shock.
“Johnny. I... I’m sorry about Ben.”
“Me too. He was a good octopus.” Tears started down her face now, slow and undramatic. Her shins were dyed black from his ink. “This is all my fault.”
“Don’t say that. You couldn’t have said yes.” I swallowed, reached out, pulled my hand back. She tugged her shirt up and dried her face with the hem. “You couldn’t have. It said...”
“It said They want it, not that They don’t want us to have it,” she said, and laughed, a slightly hysterical caw. “I think I know what They want it for. They think they can weaponize it. I bet that’s what they think. All that power... like the old Y’g D’bzan’ithot Ul-Nbdar. The strangest weapon that’s ever existed. A doomsday device. Like the one that destroyed Ur.”
“What?”
“It’s in some of the carvings in the cities the survivors fled to,” she said. “And it’s the same one pictured in Macchu Pichu, and Mohenjo Daro.”
“But the—”
“You should go home.”
I stared at her, mouth hanging open as all my gears clashed. “Go... home? Are you fucking kidding me?”
“Why would I be kidding? You want to stay and deal with, with...?” She waved her arm around the room, then flinched as if she’d just noticed she was hurt, without looking down.
“Yeah,” I said. “I do. And I don’t want to leave you. Not like this. Jesus, Johnny, it... it just... it...”
“I know.”
“Do you know that that’s the thing you say the most goddamn often out of anything and it is driving me insane?”
“Well I can’t help it if I know things!”
“You think what you know is always right! Except now! Now you just think you’re right! But you’re wrong!”
“How do you know I’m wrong? Are you going to take that thing’s word over mine?”
“It’s not a matter of words! It’s that it killed Ben! Right in front of us! Right in front of us! And now you’re telling me to just leave, like you can handle this alone, because you want to handle everything alone! Well look what’s happened now that you’re trying to do it alone this time!”
“I told you, I can get this under control! You don’t know the entire story!”
“I would if you would just fucking tell me! We used to tell each other everything!”
She caught her breath, and leaned her broom against the waterlogged armchair that had borne the brunt of the water, now pushed almost to the opposite wall. Her face looked slack somehow, dark, all the light gone from it. Hours seemed to pass before she looked up and spoke, just when I was about to apologize for yelling at her.
“All right. I’ll tell you. I should have told you years ago,” she said quietly.
It felt as if a wave of hot air washed over me, head to toe, physically staggering me. Nothing good had ever come from someone saying that, I thought. In the history of mankind, there was no more ominous sentence. I braced in the silence, listening to water drip from a broken pipe in the ceiling.
“It was better for us both if you didn’t know,” she said. “But I can’t protect you any more. Or so it seems.”
I felt myself bracing for impact, as if she might slap me. My stomach churned and gurgled, always my first and most reliable barometer of something going wrong.
“Drozanoth knows me because it was the one who... made me what I am.”
“Made you... what... what? What did it make you?”
“A prodigy. A genius. Smarter than the average bear. Whatever you want to call it.” She laughed, a dull noise, still staring at the floor.
I stared at her. All I could see for a second was that Time magazine cover, her beloved face under the crisp, familiar typeface. Person of the Year. When she was nine. And now she was saying that that thing, that groping tentacle-tip of a clamouring pack of monsters, had... had caused that to happen? “I... how?”
“It came to me when I was very young. Before you and I met.”
“But—”
“I was about three. It made the offer, I accepted; it gave me what it wanted to give: the memory, the processing ability, the speed, a few other things. Then it came back a few months later, when I was working on my wormhole book proposal, and said: Do you want to keep it?”
“So you...”
She nodded, the barest movement of her chin. “I asked it what it wanted in exchange, and it said time. We hammered out the details of the covenant. It took days.”
“...Time.”
“Can’t get something for nothing. But I didn’t have anything to pay with. So I buy my empire in time. One to one exchange rate. Every minute I allow myself in prodigy mode, in the grip of Their gift, is a minute off the end of my life.”
“Holy shit,” I breathed. I thought I might faint. “Jesus Christ.”
There it was.
More even than the covenant, that was the secret: her payments. She could have told me the first part and left out the second, I thought. Could have spared me that. We had known each other long enough. And hearing that it was magic would have been no barrier, after today. I wondered if she knew exactly how long she would have had, and could pace herself accordingly. Or if they had just... just made the agreement, left it at that. Not saying that she would be killed by a bus at thirty. Die of cancer at sixty. Something like that. Something you’d never know, and one day she’d simply run out of time. What then? Vanish, on live TV? Collapse to the ground and die like anyone else?
I realized I was shaking. “Can... you go back on it? Be normal now? Would t
hat get rid of—”
“A covenant is unbreakable. Just hope you never get offered one.”
“I...”
“You think you can say no. And then it comes and you... can’t.”
I nodded, head moving as if on autopilot. I just couldn’t stop picturing it, how horrible it would have been. All those years. Clicking it on and off like a light, trying to do as much as she could on her own, surely, to save that time, but as a child, with the mind and stamina of a child. Exhaustively researching articles and books and then going into prodigy mode for an hour or two, eyeing the clock obsessively, worrying. All those years not knowing which would be her last.
“John...”
“I’m sorry. It changes everything.”
Of course it did. I held down a wave of revulsion and said, “It doesn’t change anything.”
She looked up at me uncertainly, tears bright in her green eyes, more blue than green down here, in the flickering lights.
I thought: I was wrong. If anything has formed between us, it isn’t love. And it isn’t that... vast, empty chasm I thought it was, with no bottom, and us looking at each other across cliffs of impossible heights. It’s an ocean, huge and deep and polluted with monsters. Yet it could be crossed. Either of us could build a boat and cross it. Neither of us will, since it’s easier not to cross than to cross, and what do we have to spare, in terms of time, wood, canvas? We have nothing, not one thing. We will never sail to meet each other.
But both of us wept into this ocean. That’s our salt in there. There is a duty that remains, if not love.
“You didn’t know what you were doing,” I said.
“Please, no platitudes,” she said. “I knew precisely what I was doing. That was what the deal meant: that I had full knowledge of what saying yes would mean. Of what saying no would mean. I accepted knowing that the lives I would save outweighed mine... qualitatively, quantitatively. That more people would live better. That even if I said no, I would still be... still have a good life... like...”
“A little blonde princess,” I said. “A Disney princess, with everything you ever wanted, and no one ever saying no to you. The money, the jewelry, the dresses. Maybe even the castle. I mean, look at what your mom lives in. And she’s got her MBA; your dad’s a professor. You’d still be brilliant. You’d still be special. You’d still be beautiful. You’d still be famous, even. You would still have changed the world.”
“Yes.”
“But you wanted to save it.”
“They gave me the chance,” she said. “You’d have said yes.”
I was still shaking; I wondered when it would stop. Out of the corner of my eye I still seemed to see Drozanoth raising its feeler, moving it towards her face. All I wanted to do was turn and run. It didn’t matter where. Just out of the stupid white house, away from the smashed glass and water, out into the street. Helter-skelter down the middle of the road.
I restrained the impulse and said, “You could weaponize a nuclear power plant too. And there are lots of those.”
“This weapon is not like that. Trust me.”
“So it... could be made into that? You were lying?” I swayed, and sat down with a squelch on the soaked armchair, re-soaking my pants, which had just begun to dry. “Jesus Christ! Johnny, how...?”
“With the amount of potential destruction available to it because of the amount of power it could generate, yeah. They could hang that over our heads and ask for anything They wanted. The main thing that humanity has learned from thousands of years of dealing with Them,” she added, “is that only evil comes from evil. That They only give with the expectation—not the hope, the expectation—that Their gift will always go wrong. I knew that, and I knew this day might come. I still said yes.”
“What are we going to do now?” I said, after several minutes of trying to work through that and failing.
“What’s this ‘we’ business?”
“I already said I can’t let you deal with this alone.”
“And I already said that you have to.”
“Sucks to be you then.”
She sighed, running her fingers through her wet hair. “They know how to find both of us. And They will, if that’s what They want. So I’m gonna sleep here. Go home and see if you can get some sleep. No, don’t look at me like that. I’m not sending you away so I can sneak off and do something stupid. I’ll have a plan in the morning.”
I waited for her to say something else, then gave up and left, just walked back to the car, my shoes squelching, smelling of fish and death.
I should have guessed. I should have known. How else could she have known so much about Them if she hadn’t been dealing with Them her whole life? Thinking about her watching me watching her all those years, knowing I could never be told, was too dumb and ordinary to be told. Once, just last year, I had watched her walk away from me at midnight and had paused teetering on the corner, on the verge of sprinting after her and begging forgiveness, when a police cruiser had come by; and all I could think about was the light, watching the light. I thought I had changed but I have never changed enough, and all I will ever be is the boy on the corner waiting for the light to change. And I thought she was a hero. But could you be a hero under those terms?
This wasn’t like Clark Kent getting his powers from a yellow sun. This was bargaining with the Devil, like in that play we’d gone to, The Black Rider. How she must have been laughing at me inside, knowing what she knew. That she was a made thing, no different from that young clerk with his handful of magic bullets. Except he’d done it for love, and she’d done it for... what? Power. Dealing with the Devil deliberately, consistently, willfully, for years and years and years. More power than anyone on Earth had. Maybe more than anyone should have.
Remember. Don’t forget. Remember the day Johnny told me the story, remember that I didn’t doubt her credibility, too young to know the word, only the word ‘prodigy,’ know that it meant she was better than me, had been born better than me, that the only thing joining us at first had been that bullet, and that nothing should have joined us when we got out.
Coming home that night, I scrubbed at grass stains in the shower and ran my fingers around the puckered edges of the scar. The way the surgeons had fixed mine, it looked like a frowning mouth, not like Johnny’s. A crescent rather than a disc. Like two phases of the same moon. Maybe because it had hit her first and hardest, as nothing else would ever do again.
Shivering in the warm water: not remembering but imagining the bullet spearing through the door, then through her, and then barely slowed, lubricated with blood, into me, like a wild animal darting into a dark place to hide.
CHAPTER EIGHT
WHEN I PARKED at home I had taken so many twists and turns on the back roads and gravel highways past the grain elevators, trying to make sure nothing was following me, that it was past dinnertime. I knew even before I walked up the steps that I was in trouble; a shadow loomed behind the screen door.
I opened it partway and waited for Mom to get out of the way. Her face was pinky-red, gleaming with angry sweat. I opened my mouth; she cut me off.
“Where have you been?”
Shit. Forgot to call. “I took an extra shift,” I lied. “In Seafood. I was so busy I didn’t have time to call and say. Sorry.”
The deep rut between her eyebrows got even deeper. “You were supposed to be home at noon. What the hell did you think I was going to do with the kids? On goddamn Canada Day, when everything’s closed? Huh?”
My stomach sank. “Sorry, I—”
“—You didn’t think? You weren’t thinking! That’s what it is. What did you think we were gonna do? You didn’t! I had to leave them alone while I went to Gold Rush! They thought they were gonna go downtown with you and do Canada Day shit at City Hall!”
Oh, shit. Shit. I felt actually sick now, my guts making alarm noises that I tried to ignore, like the stench of the fishy water still drying from my clothes, heat rippling up and down my face.
Canada Day was our big day, had always been our big day after Dad left; we’d take the bus down to City Hall in St. Albert and get flags and temporary tattoos, make the masks or crafts they laid out, eat hotdogs and ice cream in the sun—every year, year after year, all of us, often Johnny too—and then home for even more junk food before heading back out for the early fireworks at ten. Just us, a little brown blob amongst all the white families, waving the same flag as everyone else. This year our very presence would have been half a protest.
And I had missed it. And I couldn’t tell her why.
“Look, I couldn’t turn down the shift,” I said weakly. “They didn’t have anyone to cover for—”
“Neither did we! That was just selfish of you, it was just selfish. And thoughtless. Like you never think at all. Just a complete lack of consideration for other people.”
Each word was delivered flat and hard, like a slap; I couldn’t meet her gaze, was staring around the living room at the scattered toys and books, drawing paper, candy wrappers, dirty plates. What the hell had those three been doing? Mom would have gotten in less than half an hour ago and banished them to their rooms, whatever it was. Moping, probably mad at me. For a moment I wondered if they were listening to this, believed her because they’d heard it so often: Dumb Nicky. Never thinks.
No reply ever ended these arguments. Silence meant you were giving her ‘the treatment.’ Talking back was ‘giving her lip.’ Trying to reason with her was ‘disrespect.’ I knew what came next: who was the parent and who was the kid, who did all the work in this house, and so on, the same script we’d heard even before Dad left. That me thinking my paycheque made me a provider in the house, a big man, when I was just off with that goddamn girl all the time instead of being a real provider...
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