Breaking the Fall

by Michael Cadnum

  Nothing else lifted me like this. This, I saw, was what I really wanted. Smells were fresh, sounds were vibrant. This was what it was to be alive—alive as cats were, and hunting hawks, alive like the owl, gliding, seeing everything.

  It was easy. Jared stood on the gas meter and worked at the window with a long, thin shaft I recognized only after a moment as a screwdriver. He didn’t need to break anything—the metal blade was only a lever. The window sighed upward, and then it froze in place.

  Jared jumped down and said, “Worm in, Stanley.”

  Too easy, I wanted to say. I even took in a breath to say the words, “It’s a trap.”

  His voice was a slap: “Be quick.”

  And I agreed. The danger didn’t matter—if anything, it made me more keen. The window sill had been recently painted with a glossy, slick white that let me slide easily. I snaked, worked my arm and shoulder, and then my entire upper body into a room that smelled of laundry detergent.

  The floor creaked under me. I caught my breath and listened.

  There is no feeling like it; I was where I did not belong. The thought was like a second heartbeat: Wrong. This is wrong.

  The washing machine reflected the bad light, and seemed to glow. A laundry basket, a skeletal tub made of woven plastic, rested beside me on the floor. There was a breathy presence somewhere off to my left—a water heater.

  I opened the window even wider. It shimmied upward, chattering in its wooden runners. Chill air seeped into the warm room. Jared climbed up and in, and his hand sought mine in the half-dark. I gripped it, and steadied him as he sprang to the floor.

  The floor did not creak. It made no sound at all.

  The linoleum floor had been waxed, and it glistened with a light from somewhere off in the house, a light so bright it leaked all the way to the washer and the dryer, making it easy to see.

  He melted to the doorway without a sound. He turned to find me with his eyes. “In a situation like this,” Jared said, panting just a little, so that his words were breathy. He was not whispering, daring the house to overhear him. “In a situation like this, we have to be very quick.”

  He stooped, tucking in his head. He heard something.

  We both listened to the purr and sudden silence of a refrigerator. The unseen appliance, far off in the kitchen, gurgled.

  He put his hand on my arm, lightly, the kind of touch he might use to soothe a nervous animal. “You stay here.”

  Prove yourself to Jared, my mind said. He thinks that you are not equal to this.

  My voice was still, but he knew my thoughts. His eyes glittered in the bad light. When he spoke next it was a command, devoid of any humor or kindness, but supported by what both of us knew was the truth: “Don’t even try, Stanley.”

  Arguments flowered in me. I could do it. I knew it. He was being unfair. On the other hand, there were hundreds of other houses. There were other nights.

  He twitched around the corner and was gone. My body followed him into the kitchen. He did not seem to hear me. When he turned to see me, there was a new look in his eyes, nothing I had seen before.

  He was intense, awake. His eyes looked at me not as a friend, not as someone he knew, but as a potential problem, a threat.

  I did not read fear in his eyes. It was something cold and even unkind. He didn’t want me there. He knew I would slow him down, entangle him in my own inexperience. This look alone was enough to make me shrink to the cold hulk of the refrigerator.

  Then Jared’s attitude shifted, his wariness melting for a moment. There was the glint of a tooth. He was smiling. He lifted a finger to his lips, and crouched in the doorway. He motioned me forward, and indicated a place in the corridor ahead of us.

  A house has a smell, a distinctive atmosphere, and a sound, the nature of the hush the walls throw up against the undercurrent of traffic. I saw nothing. Carpet. A distant doorway, and the feel as well as the sight of the living room that had nearly trapped me as I fled the thudding footsteps.

  I felt blank and heavy with stupidity, beastly dumbness, and could not imagine what Jared was trying to tell me.

  Then I saw it.

  There on the wall was a single, hard red point of light. A bright tiny red star, more scarlet, more fake-gem bright than anything natural. The star glittered alone on a square plate of stainless steel. A key was thrust into the steel plate. A ripple of sensation swept my skin, a feeling nearly like pleasure. I could not name what I saw, but I understood what it was.

  Something knew we were there.

  11

  Jared put his hand over my mouth, stifling what I was about to say.

  His lips met my ear. “They are already on their way.”

  I shivered, all the way through my body.

  He whisper-answered a question I had not asked: “Silent alarm.”

  I had guessed that it was a silent alarm, of course, and felt a tickle of resentment. He must think I’m really inept, I told myself, to go explaining something like that.

  But the feeling in my belly was no longer anything like pleasure. The tiniest bit of pee leaked from me, and I felt it blot into my underwear. I groped for him, and tried to hang onto him, drag him away.

  He cringed just far enough to avoid me.

  I sensed his laughter. His voice was a whisper, but it was a statement that canceled every thought in my mind. “I’ll be back in ten seconds.”

  Come away with me, my soul called, as though he were already someone who could be reached only by prayer. Please, Jared.

  He was gone.

  I had always known he was like no one else. But now I understood what a rare creature he was. Jared could feel no doubt, and no fear. He was like no other human being.

  And he had left, to escape from the ordinary company of a person like me. I felt what Jared must see in me: how common I was, how unsure of myself.

  I should have held him, wrestled him, made a noise to force Jared out of the house. Even now I could call out, and wake up the sleeping strangers.

  There was a whisper of footfall on the stairs, a sound I sensed more than heard. There was, more than that, a silence that spilled upward, into the second floor, a nonsound that I knew was Jared’s presence.

  I held my breath for a moment, imagining—knowing—that he must be in the bedroom now, must be creeping toward the dresser with its dimly lit personal treasures.

  I huddled, my heart beating so hard, each beat rocked my body, my throat so constricted I nearly could not breathe.

  It ended quickly.

  Brakes moaned outside, and a car door made a metallic cough as it was flung open. There were two cars, and steps on the pavement—crisp, hard noises that were at the very edge of my hearing.

  Yet a third car sighed into place somewhere in the street, beyond and far away and yet right there, right inside me, each quick footfall, each creak of clothes or leather, sounds not heard so much as felt, like the mutterings of my own body, the clicks and whispers of my insides.

  The fanged voice in me said: let’s see you turn invisible now.

  Tires crackled on the asphalt, and a car jockeyed to a new place in the night, perhaps to block the street, and as it worked into the position a light flashed red, splashes of vermilion blinking off and on.

  The scarlet warning flashes lasted for only a few heartbeats, and then someone, an unseen hand, snapped it off.

  But the blunder had been made.

  Wooden floors made the softest click. Jared was on the stairs. I straightened, lips parted, screaming in my mind: run!

  But Jared was there in the hall, his silhouette blocking sight of the little red star for an instant. The sight of him spun me, freed me to escape because I knew he was right there, behind me as I ran. I skittered briefly on the waxed floor, plunged into the laundry room, and snaked my way through the window.

  I did not fall. I clung, gasping, to the sill.

  A flashlight worked the dark. The beam swung toward me and missed. It pooled on the brilliant b
lades of grass, then swung from tight circle to oblong. It pulled back toward me where I squirmed, dangling from the window.

  I fell.

  What you have to do, Jared had said, is roll, lowering your shoulder, tumbling into the fall. That way you can’t get hurt. I have injured myself before. I lost time as a sophomore, having to study at home because I stepped funny on second base.

  My mouth filled with warm water. I was all over the grass, one arm far away, by the fence, the other hand squashing an ice plant. My skull was in fragments, all wet and leaking, the crushed bits of it rasping as I jerked my head.

  Jerked, and then woke.

  I plunged upward, onto my feet, and staggered. I tasted blood, and ran a ragged, drunken course to the back fence, barely aware of what my legs and arms were doing as they fought the back fence, punched it, kicked it, found some purchase in a knothole, a splintery grip at the top edge.

  I windmilled over the top of the fence, and half stumbled to the gritty pavement. I lunged onward through the dark, and then I saw it.

  It was the distinctive shape of a police car, that brute-vehicle menace that means: power.

  I stopped myself, bent double, and knelt. The ground swung back and forth around me. Nausea flashed on and off.

  Jared was nowhere.

  I had left him behind.

  I put my hands to my hair, feeling above my ear for the stuff that had leaked from inside my head. It was wet and gluey. My fingers moved gingerly, and I knew that a brain infection was what I deserved for abandoning my friend.

  Back. I have to go back.

  I stood up slowly. My hand felt for support, and found a cinderblock wall. I was going to throw up, and then, just as surely, I wasn’t.

  I knew where I had to go.

  I sprinted back toward the fence, one of my knees so weak I ran with a crazy limp. But I was fast.

  Until I realized that my body had grown heavy. I was slow and fighting something. I was struggling to overcome a strange, ungainly weight. I was struggling against a shadow that clung.

  It was a human being.

  My adversary’s grip was on my shoulder, and pulling me back by one arm.

  I went down.

  Caught.

  12

  So this is what happens.

  The law had me, the law and all it involved, things I could imagine only as blank-faced authority, loveless and without mercy. I saw it now. How could I have forgotten? The gray world, adult and without life, was always going to catch me. It catches everyone.

  There was the splash of a thought, a pain more than a memory: my parents. This will be an ugly surprise for them.

  I tried to stir, and I was, to my amazement, able to move my arms and legs. The arms that held me were not strong at all, not nearly as strong as I was. They trembled.

  He was laughing.

  “You ran like a crab, Stanley.”

  I tossed myself free and stood. I spat blood, panting.

  “Like a crab,” he said. “All bent over.”

  “What happened to you?” I asked before I was aware of being able to speak.

  His foot splashed a puddle. He was gone, and I followed, over another fence, and across a pile of rattling boards, dim and warped in the darkness. A dog was upon us, wagging its tail and growling, exposing its teeth and leaping around us, wanting to kill us and play with us at the same time.

  Jared spoke to it, ran a hand over its back. The dog continued to growl, but pranced away as we flung ourselves over a gate and out across another dew-slick lawn.

  He ran much better than I did. My own legs had grown new joints, which swiveled as I ran. There was a numbness in my skull that would, I knew from experience, ripen into pain very soon.

  Jared vanished through a tangle of fennel, down into a culvert beside an electricity substation surrounded by a chain-link fence with barely visible HIGH VOLTAGE signs. The equipment within made a quiet sound, a sneaky, galactic hum.

  I crouched, sweating and cold. Jared shook out a cigarette and I accepted it. We shared, for a moment, that almost sexy leaning-together over a match. He shook it out, and smoked with the glowing end cupped inward, toward his palm, a method I copied at once.

  Would I throw up?

  He looked away, distracted. From far off there came the mutter of a cop radio. The stabs of static drifted, and faded away.

  I was trembling, queasy, and the chain-link fence spun up and down, and then from side to side. Closing my eyes made it worse. The earth swung away from beneath me.

  “I walked out the back door,” said Jared. “Unhooked the chain. I took my time.”

  I bit my knuckle. I had abandoned him.

  “It was easy,” he said. Then, as though I had expressed disbelief, “It really was.”

  Of course. Ash trembled off the end of my cigarette. It had been entirely easy.

  For him.

  The stalks of the fennel around us, and the old, cast-off stalks we were sitting on, gave off a fragance. The air smelled of licorice and tobacco. One of the white metal signs on the chain-link read PELIGROSA. There was a picture of lightning striking a human figure. The fence was old, a black net made of metal, and sloppy rolls of barbed wire festooned the top rail.

  “And I brought a really rare prize,” he continued. “It’s something pretty unusual. Which I give to you.”

  He tossed me something warm and round. I handled it for a moment, feeling the lightweight lump, fibrous and foreign in the bad light. Then I let it drop. I didn’t want to touch this stolen object. It was something medical, I sensed, something repulsive out of a person’s body, a hairball or a weird tumor.

  He drew on his cigarette and laughed. “You wear them,” he said, “on your feet.”

  I drew the smoke in all the way, so deep it burned, and let it out, pushing the entire shame out of my lungs until my breath came out clear, empty, and clean. “I’ll do it right,” I said in a little, dry voice.

  He smoked.

  “Next time,” I said clearly, “I’ll do it right.”

  “You’ll have a chance. There’s something I didn’t tell you.”

  I let the smoke out in twin streams through my nostrils. The smoke was having an effect on me, making me feel separate from my arms and legs, and the nausea was completely dead. Jared leaned forward, waiting for me to ask. So I gestured with the glowing cigarette: what?

  “They weren’t home.”

  I woke feeling dead.

  I did not move for a while, and when I began to find my way up, away from the pillow, I sat up quickly, clutching the sheets to my throat.

  The matter in my head had leaked out onto the pillowcase.

  There was not much of it, but there was a definite dark crushed substance, several fragments of it. I recognized it very slowly as snail shell.

  I washed the pillowcase out very carefully in the bathroom sink, and then I washed my hair under the shower, telling myself: my parents won’t know.

  Nobody will know anything.

  13

  I couldn’t lean my head against my hand because my cranium was sore there. I tried slumping way back and down, but the chair met the back of my skull and that hurt, too. So I sat up straight.

  “They charged into cannon fire. Eyes scalded, blinded by the smoke. Some of them permanently deafened by the noise. Deaf for the rest of their lives from that day.” Mr. Milliken paced up and down. He glanced at me, and I must have smiled or looked pleasant because he gave a quick little smile himself.

  “A cannonball didn’t blow up,” announced Mr. Milliken. “It didn’t explode and make a nice fountain of dirt, like you see in movies. Cannonballs took off arms. Legs. Heads.”

  I was not sure, exactly, how pain medications are supposed to work. Is it something they do at the synapse? Do they keep neurons from firing?

  The pills were having no effect at all, or only a little. I could move my neck.

  I was aware of Sky, rows away from me. When she bent to make a note in her three-rin
g, when she ran the point of the pencil back through her long hair, I knew it, even if I wasn’t looking.

  Mr. Milliken was, as usual, trying to sell us history by making it into something you could see on a tabloid: ANCIENT WEAPONS BLOW OFF ARMS AND LEGS. SEVERED HEAD FLIES THROUGH AIR LOOKING AND THINKING.

  It had been Mr. Milliken’s contention one day, in an attempt to stir his class awake, that a severed head could see and remember, and even gaze out in wonderment at its new condition. The Revolutionary War, under discussion, had segued into the French Revolution and the guillotine. Just as now the Civil War was about to drift into the Gatling gun. We were never going to make it to the H-bomb.

  I was a mess from the night before. Not a wreck; I can take punishment. My neck was stiff and I had the very slightest double vision. My mother’s medicine cabinet had furnished some Tylenol and some pills that I supposed were for menstrual cramps. I had taken them, too.

  To encourage Mr. Milliken, I leaned forward and drew a small explosion next to the pink line that marked the margin. I wanted him to think I was taking notes. I needed the distraction. I was seared inside with my new understanding: I was trapped.

  It was so painful that I tried to edge away from the word.

  But I could hear Jared’s laugh, kind and mocking at once. He knew, and I knew, the truth. I was a coward until I played the game again.

  “Chain shot!” Mr. Milliken nearly shouted, desperate to keep our attention. “Howling, twisting chains cutting men in two.”

  The board read: Civil War. Causes. Armaments. But what swept Mr. Milliken was the great hunger to have all of us quiet. And more than that. He wanted us to care. “Grape-shot,” he said, getting hoarse. “Point-blank. Bodies atomized.”

  The bell rang, and Mr. Milliken slumped on his podium. His freckled face was flushed, and I could tell by the way he did not meet our eyes that he was fatigued by his performance, and at the same time sure that it was wasted on television-dazed cattle. I already understood that Mr. Milliken did not relish the destructive details he recounted. He found them of some interest, but he believed that only gore could keep the attention of his class.