If I Fall, If I Die

by Michael Christie

  Now in the blue strobe of her Relaxation Goggles, she saw again her son bursting into the house only a few weeks ago, winded, terrified, his forehead deeply gouged and already scabbed over, without that security blanket helmet he’d always insisted on wearing, though it did comfort her too.

  But he hadn’t left the house since. Perhaps he’d learned his lesson? It was Will’s gorgeous, overdriven imagination that worried her most. He barely lived in reality, so how could he register its dangers? Who better than she knew how Thunder Bay could reach out and harm a child: the bears and wolves in the woods; the trains, the harbor, and the elevators; the cheap grain alcohol, the highway, the frigid lake, the biblical weather, the hurtling brutality of hockey, all those hard-eyed boys that used to lift Charlie’s shirt over his head before pummeling him, the acres of identical birch trees—serene as grandfather clocks—for Will to vanish into.

  No wonder she’d allowed him to stay home for so long. But had it been her doing? In all those years, he’d never shown the slightest interest in leaving. Maybe a better mother would’ve flushed him out earlier. Take your lumps. Play hockey. Crash your bicycle. But what hurts a boy other than lumps? Lumps are brain damage. One lump can drown a boy in a creek, can stop his heart dead as a stone, can rip him from your arms forever.

  No, despite his little excursion, she and Will were relatively safe. How many of the world’s mothers could claim that? It’s not a prison if you’ve built it yourself, she mused as the Relaxation Tape ground down and the Play button popped, and she unstuck the clammy headphones from her ears and lifted the clunky goggles from her eyes. It’s a fortress.

  With some baseline of calm restored, she put away the apparatus, went downstairs, and put on the electric kettle for tea. Lately, usually after she did her Sessions, she’d been detecting hints of a worrisome burning odor in the house—plasticky, like wires frying in the walls. She lowered her nose to the kettle to see if it was the culprit, but found nothing.

  5

  That morning the mailman brought a package. “You look like you need a nap, Will,” he said. “Rush delivery. You know where to sign.”

  After he’d lied about slipping in the creek and striking his forehead, his mother had been waking him nightly to flashlight his pupils and ask if his mouth was dry or if he had strange dreams. “My dreams are always strange,” Will said, referring to the hours he’d just spent doubling with Marcus through the woods Helmetless upon a cackling dirt bike.

  She’d Black Lagooned ferociously for days after his first official trip Outside. Like an improperly loaded washer on spin, their bed jiggled at night with her panic. Each morning, she lingered under her quilt, sitting up to fingerpick morose ballads on her guitar or spoon the canned soup he’d heated in the slow cooker and presented with a flourish in the clay masterpiece mug he’d once glazed for her birthday. She upped the Relaxation Tapes to twice daily, and, eventually, after a week, her weeping subsided and she started to venture out from San Francisco.

  Now Will breached the package with his safety scissors and unearthed the Helmet he’d ordered to calm her, this one traffic-cone orange. It fit perfectly and didn’t smell vinegary like his last. He couldn’t exactly recall when he started wearing Helmets—always the hockey kind, no face mask. She said she ordered his first when he was learning backwards somersaults as a toddler. When not in use, the Helmet hung from the hook on their bed in San Francisco. In the morning he put it on before his feet touched the floor and even when he shuffled to Venice at night to pee.

  Here was the thing about the Helmet: like not going Outside, she’d never exactly made him do it either. But, he found, the ethereal machinery of the house ran smoother with it on. Her shoulders unbunched, her breath passed more easefully through her windpipe. She left him for longer periods of time without checking up on him and even permitted more dangerous actions like running up the stairs or pedaling the exercise bike at full tilt.

  Along with the Helmet had arrived other mail, and Will sorted the bills and invoices from the letters addressed to his mother in the usual crazy-person script. He set the others aside and whisked the letters down to Toronto, where he dumped them in a banker’s box. Over the years Will had read samplings when boredom had overwhelmed him. They were penned by people in mental institutions and prisons mostly, but sometimes universities and film associations, who all seemed to have memorized her films shot-for-shot. Though Will had never watched any of her films—she said she didn’t have prints, which his routine searches of the house confirmed—the portrait he’d assembled was that they lacked actors, or even a story, and were only footage of objects and people she’d shot haphazardly on the thrumming streets of real Toronto—imagine!—with her voice talking overtop. As far as many people were concerned, they were about something called “modern urban malaise,” which made Will think of city people barfing into open manhole covers, because malaise sounded like mayonnaise, a forbidden substance because it went deadly poisonous after only a few minutes out of the fridge.

  A filmmaker was a person who made movies, but not the ones you’d want to watch like Predator or Die Hard, which his mother called “bullet ballets” and limited to special occasions. His mother once said she’d made films that people wrote dissertations about. “Is that like getting dissed?” he’d said, to which she replied, “Essentially.”

  She made all six of her films in Toronto, where they once lived, which he hadn’t remembered at all until he’d gone Outside, because all their years Inside had overwritten it. Mostly his memories consisted of near-death experiences, colors they’d painted the rooms, epic stains in the carpets, whole epochs of furniture configuration. But real Toronto was where his mother had met Arthur, his father, who was a genius architect, except he wasn’t really a genius when it came to phone usage. He had a new family and lived in the Netherlands. Will had talked to him a few times, but the calls tapered off because they consisted mostly of long, searching silences. But Arthur’s buildings were all over the world, like real Paris and London. The plural of genius is genii. And that’s what Will’s family was, really, genii, including his mother, except Will couldn’t tell anyone that because of the tooting horn. As a boy, Will vowed to use his genius to build them a teleporter so they could go back to Toronto or go surfing in Hawaii, where he would crack coconuts for her with a machete, but she said she’d be too afraid to get into it.

  Will slept with the amethyst clutched tight in his fist like a sacrament, the spiky rock somewhere between purple and blue, same as blood when it’s still inside your body, before the air coaxes it red. But now that his friend Marcus had left Thunder Bay and those bomb-making twins hadn’t exactly welcomed Will into their group, he’d been afflicted with a painful vacancy in the center of his chest that could only be alleviated with two hours of daily exercise biking. With no longer any reason to go Outside, he’d vowed to do only productive activities during Relaxation Time. He bounced balls off the corners where the wall met the roof, performing a hundred catches in a row without a drop. He strained through sit-ups, jumping jacks, and gut-wrenching exercises he invented himself. Upstairs, he crouched over the heating vents like a hunter to dry his sweat-soaked pajamas.

  But one bonus of his Outside near-death experience was that it had rekindled the house’s wonder. As summer dwindled, days passing like clouds, the sky gas-flame blue in their windows, Will re-counted the stripes in the wallpaper, recalculated the surface area of the rooms, and reached his arms as deep as possible into the heating vents. Again he relished the medieval crawl space, the perfumed confines of his mother’s closet, the menacing pig-faced outlets, the raw smell from behind the fridge, the chugging alchemy of the laundry machines. He made recordings on her old reel-to-reel, indoor field studies. Music like John Cage, who was also a genius. “This. Is the sound of safety. Scissors,” Will said, before snapping them loudly at the microphone. “This. Is the sound of a garbage. Bag,” he said, rustling. His mother loved his sound collage, and he played the tape for a
n Italian pharmacy deliveryman, who declared it “real freaking interesting.”

  Mostly, however, Will painted a new series of masterpieces. The totality of his entire artistic output, everything he’d ever painted, constructed, designed, or slapped together, was archived in Toronto. The magnificence of his masterpieces routinely made his mother weep (not a great feat for someone who literally feared her shadow, admittedly, but she knew art). “I’m keeping them for posterity,” she’d once said. “Why would you keep it for someone’s butt?” Will had asked. “That’s posterior.” Which was why she said “for posterior” all the time, because things got tacked to a corkboard inside her head and stayed there. Which, he suspected, may have been her problem. Will harbored a magical hope that Marcus would reappear one day and ping her in the head with his slingshot, just once, hard enough to give her the gift of amnesia. Then she’d step Outside with no clue she was a person who was afraid of everything.

  In the evenings they screened films in Cairo, with the VCR or her 16mm projector. Will loved action movies best, which she couldn’t stomach. No movies for her with guns or where anyone died, except if it was from tuberculosis or lovelorn suicide. That’s what happened in all her favorites, which were in other languages and featured half-beautiful, half-ugly people staring at each other for long stretches of time as though they’d been robbed of speech. They unsettled Will as much as his movies did her.

  Years before, for his ninth birthday, they’d watched the 3D version of The Creature from the Black Lagoon on the projector. He’d ordered the print from the library, and it even came with 3D glasses that had been retaped a hundred times. He used the leverage of his special day to make her promise to sit through it. It was the most excited he’d ever been.

  But she was already breathing funny during the film’s opening, repeatedly burying her eyes in her hands and steaming her red-and-blue lenses with hoarse breaths. “Just make yourself watch,” he said. “The Creeetuuure can’t kill you,” he added in a gravelly monster voice, attempting to pry her hands from her face with his fingernails.

  “I don’t want to make myself,” she said, eyes closed tight as a boxer’s fists.

  She was fine for a few more minutes as the story was established. Then the murderous amphibian appeared beneath the unsuspecting woman as she front-crawled across the lagoon. He lurked just inches from her, menacing, but also curious, as if he wanted to help her and get sexy with her vagina and kill her all at the same time, as an entire orchestra’s brass section blasted away unnervingly, as it did whenever the Creature—or usually only its gnarled, dinosaurish hand—graced the screen. It was more than enough to kidnap his mother’s brain.

  In old movies when people get afraid—when the killer’s shadow seeps through the crack under the door or when the giant radioactive bug crests the skyline—the actors stuff their fists into their mouths like they are eating them. Like eating yourself alive is better than staring down an unmentionable horror. That’s what his mother did then, except in real life. Sometimes Will thought she’d eat her whole body if she could somehow get it into her mouth. “What about my birthday?” he’d called out as she fled to San Francisco and didn’t emerge for a whole week. Now whenever she Black Lagooned, he pictured the monster swimming inches beneath her. Except she’s the only person who could see it.

  One morning late in August, his mother was reading the paper in her good green robe, her hair puffed with sleep, when she gasped.

  “What?” Will said.

  “Oh, nothing,” she said, the Black Lagoon a harried shadow on her face. She rose, neatly folded, then ripped the page into strips, setting them in the garbage instead of the recycling. “I’m going to do a Session.”

  When he heard her door click, Will extracted the strips from the trash and reconstructed them on the table. Normally, newspaper stories were of little relevance to Will. He found an article about how it was too expensive to demolish the “blight” of the old grain elevators by the lake, so the city had to leave them there; an article about some Indian treaty talks that went nowhere; another about a local hockey team that won a tournament.

  Then he found it. Small, in the corner near the back. A boy. Missing. It said he lived in a foster home, and they hadn’t noticed him gone for weeks. There was a tiny photo, and the boy had the same crooked bangs and bright look as when he’d offered Will his T-shirt to dab the blood from his eyes. Marcus. His friend. His only friend.

  That evening, New York seemed shrunken. Insomnia settled over Will, the minutes grinding and endless, quiet as surgery. Will’s mind turned with a terrible waterwheel of tantalizing questions: Why had the Twins reacted so guiltily when he approached? Why did they say Marcus had left town? Why the garden hoses and match bombs? And what did any of it have to do with Marcus going missing?

  Whatever, sure, brave Marcus had said that day when Will asked if they were friends, a mental reel Will had nearly worn out with replaying. Will looked up this word whatever in their old dictionary, the one with the name Charlie written in the front, and found that it meant “no matter what.” At the permanence of this beautiful sentiment Will wept, tears tapping the dictionary’s oniony pages.

  Even before Will closed the book, his mind had already seized upon a whole new trajectory to aim the Roman candle of his life. He couldn’t just go wandering Outside aimlessly like last time. It was much too dangerous. Will needed somewhere to go, a reason to leave. He needed more than masterpieces and smoothies. He needed answers. He needed Adventure. He needed to find his friend Marcus.

  He needed everything.

  6

  The night before his first day of school, Will lay awake, twisting with anticipation. The previous week he’d searched the muskeg where he’d met the Twins—a walk around the block, he told his mother—and found his Helmet gone, no trace of hoses or matches. The next day during Relaxation Time, Will phoned Tom Sprague, the wiry man who’d been doing their yard work for years, and asked if anyone in the neighborhood was missing garden hoses. “Oh, sure, most of my clients had their hoses stolen at one time or another this past summer,” said Tom. “Your street in particular. Had to pick up a new one for you.” Will asked whether it was mostly on the creek side. “Come to think of it, most of them backed the creek, yeah.” After Will placed a call to the police station and was put on hold for an hour until he hung up, he deemed his only move was to go undercover to gather information. He’d known school happened in September because that was when kids trudged past his house in early morning like soldiers with their whole lives stuffed into backpacks.

  She’d been reluctant to enroll him, but then he said he would start calling random governmental numbers in the blue pages and tell whoever answered that his mother refused to let him attend school. “Of course you’d never do that,” she said, more plea than assertion.

  Fresh from the bath, Will found his favorite clothes laid out on his bed like a steamrollered boy. He went to his closet and picked his second-favorite clothes as a statement. Over a five-course breakfast of slow-cooked steel-cut oats, fresh bread, eggs hardboiled in the kettle, and sliced pineapple, she warned him of real tests, which were mind games to prove how smart you were. Will looked forward to them. He would surely get As. At home they often did “Creative Challenges,” which he graded himself, always checking either “amazing” or “stupendous” on the evaluation forms she typed up on her Underwood.

  In the orange burn of dawn he followed the sidewalk toward the asphalt path that wound up the tall hill on which the school stood. It was an impossibly huge structure, like five entire houses all bound together, encased in cinder block. Other kids were approaching the school, mostly girls in neon swishy jackets. He climbed and entered the colossus randomly through one of its heavy steel doors, into a hallway strewn with tiny dazed children. He wandered giant-like between them until happening upon the office. The perfume-soaked secretary walked him to his classroom.

  He hung his coat and lunch bag in the cloakroom, where many of
the same kind of jacket lined the walls: felt with leather sleeves and patches. Hockey jackets, he surmised, from their insignias of variously paired stick and puck.

  His teacher, Mr. Miller, a gap-toothed man with glasses thick as the double-paned windows in Cairo, ushered him to his desk. This teacher was strange in two ways: one, he was a man; and two, he was old. Will had had little contact with men beyond signing clipboards and writing checks, and the deliverymen were prevailingly young.

  “You can sit in Jonah’s desk for now,” Mr. Miller said, his teeth whistling faintly. “But you’ll have to move when he returns, if he does.”

  Will crammed his legs into the desk as a wall-mounted speaker emitted an amplified breathing. “This is your morning announcements,” said the quaking voice of a student, who described an upcoming hot dog day and impending hockey registration. Next came “O Canada,” which Will had heard a few times before, then The Lord’s Prayer, which he’d never. Sometimes, when feeling especially chipper, his mother sang “500 Miles,” a song he liked, though it was about being poor and far away from home, a condition he hadn’t much experience with, until recently, anyway. When she cleaned she put on The Rite of Spring, which sounded like a heinous multicar accident, except the cars were built out of orchestra instruments. To Will, it was the distilled sound of Black Lagoon.

  During the prayer, Will didn’t know where to look, how to tilt his head. He attempted a solemn, respectful face. He preferred it to the anthem: juicier words, especially the word trespasses, a Marcus word, even if it was something that necessitated forgiveness. There wasn’t much of anything in the classroom: no masterpiece supplies, no exercise equipment, no slow cooker. A picture of the queen, who he recognized from the dollar. A map of Canada, pink as a cartoon pig, the top a confettied mess of either islands or icebergs—he was never sure. A pencil sharpener bolted to a shelf near the window. The rest just greenish seas of blackboard.