by Brian Hodge
They had come to the part where normal people were supposed to pump up the miracle talk: What a lucky guy, your guardian angel was keeping an eye on you that night—all the things that oozed out when the person’s fundamental perspective was ignorance.
Kimmy knew better.
So u died, she wrote instead. The tunnel, white light, dead relatives waiting 4 u, the whole routine?
Textbook.
How long b4 u started 2 remember the way it REALLY happened?
He looked at the number keys across the top of the keyboard. Until this moment, he’d never thought of them as a decade of his life, stretched between an accent mark on one side and dashes on the other.
8 years
& u havent blown yr brains out yet? (Paradoxically, it’s been known 2 happen!) Or screamed yr throat raw until they sedated u? Pretty impressive, Andrei. U may B 1 of those that make it.
It was the first dumb thing Kimmy had said, of course, and she probably wished she could take it back, that she didn’t make such a habit of typing before thinking.
He thought he’d sooner kill the rest of the world before he would kill himself.
He put fingers to keys, to tell her so.
And what was the point of making it when you already knew how much there was to dread once death grabbed you and held on for good?
* * *
At Janika’s side, Corey tossed, turned, and through little more than sheer force of annoyed bulk, made sure she was as aware as he was of her brother’s nocturnal habits.
“If he’s gonna stay up all night like this, you are gonna have to see to it that he gets himself a quieter keyboard. I can hear him up there all the way through the floor.”
Maybe it was a noisy keyboard. Or maybe Andrei had a neurotic habit of pounding the keys, as though his thoughts and feelings would be lost if he didn’t eject them with great force. Or maybe Corey’s ears were sensitive to the point of silliness. Last week when he was sleeping over, he swore he’d been awakened when somebody out on the street dropped a ring of car keys.
Janika rolled over and scrubbed the crust from her eyes. “Try and be a little glad for him. I think he has a girlfriend. Sort of.”
“Seriously?”
“As serious as an online friendship can be.”
“Aw, shit.” Corey rumbled a laugh. “He get her real name yet? Or just her wish-fulfillment name?”
“I think. I don’t remember.” She went for the glass of tepid water at the side of the bed. “No, wait—Kimmy, Cammy, something too cutesy by half. One of those names that when you hear it, you pretty much know she has this squeaky little cartoon character voice.”
Corey’s laugh slid up two octaves, the way it didn’t when he wasn’t trying to be smooth. “Hope he’s not in for some heartbreak. Probably some chunkyboy on the other end, likes to dress in lacy panties and call himself Kimmy, Cammy, whatever it is.”
She reached over in the dark and patted his belly with a soft slap. “That’s exactly how I imagined you when we first met.”
“Now you just being cruel.” He whapped his belly a couple times with both hands, meaty slaps that trembled the mattress. “I carry my chunky self with a whole ‘nother kind of authority.”
Yes, he did, and certainly she didn’t mind it; in fact, she had quickly come to appreciate it. Corey was the first man she’d been with who genuinely made her feel small. A sweet and protected feeling, all that engulfing heft when he held her. Not that she shared his build, exactly. It was worse than that, because if she did, there was always dieting. Blame her bones, instead. Bones, muscle, ancestral DNA. She was the umpteenth great-granddaughter of Eastern Euro-peasant stock who’d never been near a farm, the genetic culmination of fifty generations of women bred for slinging wayward calves across their shoulders. Not fat, not even pleasingly plump, just tall, sturdy as a Valkyrie, her body fitting together in a dismayingly unsegmented whole.
“Anyway,” Janika said, “I have a feeling she’s who she says she is. Now, whether that’s good or bad, I have no idea.”
“Why’s that?”
“She’s another one like Andrei. Died, got revived, years later started claiming to remember the same kind of things about the experience Andrei says he does.”
“Aw shit—seriously? Where’s a guy go to meet a girl like that?”
“Some chat room, it’s the main topic of discussion.”
“They got chat rooms for that?”
“They’ve got chat rooms for everything. For god’s sake, they’ve got chat rooms for sneezing fetishists.”
“I ain’t gonna ask how you know that. Umm, sooooo…” Corey drew the word out, the way he did when he wasn’t looking at something from anywhere near the same angle as she was. “How could this be any kind of bad thing, him meeting another one’s got the same problem? You ask me, I’d say that’s just about the only kind of woman’s gonna give him much of a chance these days, the two of ‘em speaking the same weird language.”
“I don’t know, Corey—do you think maybe it might be a good idea for him to keep away from people who are going to reinforce his delusions?”
“Naw, you looking at it all wrong. You look at this and see a worst-case scenario. I look at this and I see a beautiful thing. Like when a couple of midgets get married. Don’t nothing warm the heart like two midgets who’ve found true love.”
“Your brain can be a dangerous thing sometimes,” she said, and gave Corey the benefit of the doubt that he was only having fun here. That he understood whatever parallels he was seeing were strictly superficial—that the midgets really were short, while Andrei’s fixation was a different problem altogether.
“Anyway,” she went on, “for a while I’ve had this secret hope that he might pair off with Manon, at the shop. She’s always seemed to take kind of an interest in him. Now, whether she actually sees some remaining potential in him, or it’s just pity, I’ve never had the nerve to ask.”
“Ain’t nothing wrong with pity. ‘Fore I met you, some of the best relationships I ever had was pity fucks.”
She slugged him in the belly, the one place she could never hurt him, and he bubbled over with that high keening laughter of his.
“Mmm, okay, Manon…I could maybe see that working. Something a little weird about her too, can be, so yeah, it might work, the two of them go off and be weird together.”
Marry her brother off, get him out of the house—hey, maybe even get him out of Pittsburgh altogether—Corey was hardly innocent of self-interest here, although she couldn’t fault him for it. He didn’t live here, but he was up to a sleepover average of three nights per week, with his eye on the other four, and most days she wanted him here full-time. But there was a glass ceiling on a relationship when your brother had the top floor of the house to himself and a headful of peculiar ideas about what had happened to him when he was a stupid teenager with equally stupid friends. Eight years of blindness to it, he claimed, and another six years with his eyes open, a clarity of vision that had crippled him in most other respects.
Not a lot of men wanted to live alongside that kind of in-law baggage. She had the divorce papers to prove it.
Maybe she should’ve been making a concerted effort to find a nice Latino. Those guys were all about family, warts and all.
“You ever think about giving him a time limit?” Corey said.
“The day I do that’ll be the day I know somebody swapped my heart for a rock,” she heard herself say, more than a little surprised by it, and she tried to convince herself she actually meant it.
II
Whenever he was between jobs, it would occur to Andrei what an interesting variation on the theme it would make if he actively lost one for a change. Losing a job in general was no problem—he could do it in his sleep, and had. But to make a big, flashy spectacle of it one day, with a roaring tantrum and acres of smashed glass…he had reached the point where, perversely enough, this seemed to be worth aspiring to. A muscle twitch to prove that he was s
till alive in more than just the sense of breath and heartbeats.
Instead, he and jobs always parted in such passive ways, often just a phone call informing him that he needn’t bother coming in anymore. How it happened, time after time: One day he would awaken with the usual good intentions, then get only as far as the front door or pass in front of a window overlooking the alley out back or the maple trees in front, and some mutant shadow or flash of light or scrape made by sources unseen would root him to the floor with the certainty that he could not leave the house. Definitely not today, probably not tomorrow, maybe not ever, the conviction washing over him like a tide of icy water as, all over again, he became acutely aware of the dangers beyond the door.
How could he have forgotten them? How could he have convinced himself that they didn’t matter, that he could venture out and dodge them all? Runaway trucks and collapsing scaffolding and drive-by shootings and freak hailstorms hurling ice the size of baseballs and viruses from the far side of the world…there was no end of ways to die, to die again, and he feared that, like a dog that had once sunk its teeth into his leg, death now had his smell, and knew him well enough to lunge if he wandered too close.
On days like that—weeks, months like that—the only place he could make his stand was within four walls so familiar he could sketch them from memory, from the bottom of their iron-grated furnace vents to the tops of the pictures that hung in place of more exotic views and human company. On days like that, he wished he could be like the rest of them: the thousands, maybe millions, whose hearts and lungs had stopped, then who after their brief stasis had rejoined the living with no more fear of death, only a tranquil anticipation of returning to the white light and the welcoming hands of those who’d gone before.
Madness. Blinded and forgetful, they’d all swallowed the great lie, he knew that…yet there were times the wish to be one of them was so great that Andrei thought he might be willing to sacrifice whoever it took just to make it so.
But today was not one of those days.
Then there were times when the fear respected no boundaries at all, and not even four familiar walls could keep it out, Andrei realizing that he nurtured his own lie as eagerly as the forgetful millions nurtured theirs. The truth? Home was no safer than anywhere else. If death meant to find him, it could just as easily employ a bad cut of meat, an electrical fire, a plane dropping from the sky. Such fatalism freed him up to leave sanctuary behind, although there was no relief in it, Andrei on the streets and out in the open beneath a scowling sky, daring the god whose love and mercy he could no longer believe in to quit screwing around and come and get him.
But today wasn’t one of those days, either.
And that suited him fine, because somewhere in between, with a little luck, days like this could be about as good as they got anymore.
* * *
Today turned out to be check day, discovered after breakfast when he brought in the mail, an Arizona postmark on the monthly stipend that his and Janika’s parents sent whether he was working or not. Their mother’s writing this time. It alternated, but the check rarely came accompanied by anything more personal, wrapped inside a blank sheet of paper that perfectly summed up everything they’d had to say to him over the past few years.
It was a buyoff, really—neither he nor Janika thought of it as anything else. Twelve hundred dollars a month that he assumed must assuage whatever twinges of conscience that they might still feel over the near-year he’d spent under their roof after the memories had started cracking through. He hadn’t asked for the checks, and Janika swore it wasn’t her doing either. They’d simply started showing up two months after he’d pulled himself together enough to brave a three-day Amtrak journey from Phoenix to Pittsburgh—a prolonged nightmare, but a plane flight was unthinkable. Planes crashed. Planes were commandeered by terrorists. They lost cabin pressure and left you blue, gasping for frozen air as thin as the hopes pinned on your prayers. Trains could crash too, but you at least had a fighting chance of survival.
He endorsed the check, filled out the deposit slip, wondered if they’d never opted for wire transfers because this was their subtle way of trying to nudge him out of the house.
As Andrei biked across from Mount Washington to Southside—a meticulously laid-out route of shady streets, sidewalks, alleys, Grandview Park, and as many other low-traffic stretches as he could string together—he allowed that it may have worked out better in Phoenix if it had felt more like home. If he had been able to seek sanity and shelter in the house where he’d grown up, he and his parents might have settled into familiar rhythms dictated by a home that had seen them all before. But strangers lived in that house now. This new house? Having moved in not two years prior, his parents were barely comfortable in it themselves. Retirement had meant a new house, new state, new neighbors, new church, new golf courses. The air was dry, and the winds full of stinging grit.
It wasn’t home. It was nothing like home.
Instead, he’d arrived like any other out-of-towner, arms dangling luggage and no room in which he actually belonged. Worse, to his parents’ new friends—none of whom had watched him grow up or would remember when he’d spent thirty-eight minutes as a corpse—he wasn’t someone to be introduced. Rather, he was something to be explained. To be excused and maybe apologized for, damaged goods that had come to stay and never left, no longer employed, perhaps not even employable, rarely leaving the house except for the twice-weekly sessions with the psychiatrist they’d insisted on as a condition of his room and board.
They wore the weight of him like cumulative failures, and the last thing his parents wanted to tell anyone was the truth. They refused to believe it themselves, dismissing his new memories the way passersby dismiss a streetcorner prophet warning of the end, and convinced it was something that the proper specialist could drill out of his head with no more bother than a rotten tooth.
If only.
I’m not the crazy one, Andrei had decided. It’s the rest of the universe.
On alert for everything from cars to squirrels, he biked along and felt alive, immensely alive, the only way he wanted to feel, today and tomorrow and forevermore. The day was made for it, October air crisp as a starched sheet, the morning sky the blue of mountain lakes.
He couldn’t help but wonder what it looked like in Wyoming now.
After he’d deposited the check at his bank, keeping back fifty for pocket cash, Andrei pedaled the rest of the way to Carson Street, where Janika’s shop anchored the storefronts in a block shared with a coffeehouse, a used bookstore, a thrift shop, and a nail parlor that seeped lacquer fumes as far as the curb.
Global Village, it read over her windows. No two letters looked the same, each in a different font and color that called to mind a country or a culture apart from the rest: Celtic and Caribbean, Arabic and Aztec, African and Himalayan and more. Inside the doors, the smell was a mélange of incense and spices and oils rubbed onto woods cut from forests on the other side of the planet. Some nights, after closing, he liked to walk the aisles with his eyes closed, seeing with his fingertips and breathing the dust shaken from the folds of bright Indian saris and smuggled in the crevices of llamas carved high in the Andes, and if he hadn’t seen much of the world these past six years, he could tour it, at least, letting a hundred fragrances be his guides.
Global Village, his sister had named it, but everybody who worked here ended up calling it Globville.
He flipped Janika a wave across the counter as he walked his bike past. “Where can you use me?”
She pointed toward a door slapped with an Employees Only sticker. “FedEx dropped off some boxes. Inventory and tag ‘em, and bring out, like, three of each carving. Do the Welsh order first. We’re out of everything from there.”
He glanced around the store, saw a handful of browsers but no more staff. “Isn’t Manon in today?”
Janika waved a plastic-capped coffee cup from down the street; crushed it in her hand and let it fall. It hit
the waste bin with a hollow clang. “She went for supplies.”
Andrei grimaced. “Is there time for me to get in on this action?”
“If you’re lucky.” She lifted the phone and pecked a single key. She had them on speed-dial.
“It’ll be early, I know, but any problem if I take a break during Manon’s lunch?” he asked while the phone was still ringing.
“No. In fact, I insist on it.” Her eyebrow ticked upward in a sly arch, reading more into things than there was, or at least working overtime to give him that impression. “Lesson day?”
“Supposed to be.”
The coffeehouse answered, so he left his fate in Janika’s hands, rolling the bike into the back room and setting it out of the way along the far wall, near the alley door. He went for the new arrivals and slit the packages open with a box cutter.
Shades of Phoenix. Home, these past years, didn’t come unconditionally, and this was his sister’s requirement: Whenever he was between jobs of his own, but could at least handle the idea of leaving the house, she expected him to put in some hours here.
Free labor for her, something faintly resembling a social life for him…they both came out ahead.
Andrei peeled apart the flaps of reinforced cardboard and, as always, had to weather a vertiginous moment when he feared that fate had caught up with him—that the box held more than crafts and packing, something else hiding in there to kill him. Boxes from Europe weren’t bad. He trusted them more, could imagine the room where the shipment had been packed and sealed, because it would be a room not so different from this one, or one of the rooms at home. Nothing too scary there. No badgers were going to stow away. Boxes from Malaysia, though, tropical places like that…it had taken a long time before he could unpack them without using gloves or tongs, for fear of pulling his hand from the box to find a bright snake twined around his arm. Or feel a needle stick an instant before seeing a hairy spider glaring out at him with eyes like eight black BBs.