If I Fall, If I Die

by Michael Christie

  “No epoch but the current!” Titus roared, bending to pick up the fish knife, his eyes lustrous and blazed with gold. He pointed the tip to Will and stifled a chillingly girlish titter, then pointed the tip into the dark waves that flapped like fabric in a gale. “In we tumble,” he said.

  “I don’t know how to swim,” Will whimpered, a small boyish utterance, as a great shaking overrode each of his muscles. “My mother never taught me.” What Will would give to be with her now, to be watching her snap a fresh sheet in the air over their bed, waiting for it to descend like a sweet parachute.

  With that some dark spell was counteracted inside Titus, and at long last he met Will’s eyes. “She didn’t, did she?” he said. “I’m sure she had some silver explication. She’s too buoyant for it. It’s a risky businessman, swimming.” Then Titus chortled, and Will couldn’t decide if it was mirthful or maniacal.

  “Be brave Icarus Number One,” he went on. “You can perform a life entire without ever getting wet.” Then he lowered himself and dipped a cupped hand into the rough water. He brought it to his lips and slurped long and loud with his eyes smashed shut in rapture.

  “Here,” he said, in one long breath of relief. “This is the meadow.”

  Titus set down the fish knife and began unwinding a length of wire from his arm, which was wrapped tourniquet-tight and made the veins of his thick hands bulge. Then he picked the knife back up and began snapping pieces of wire in short lengths.

  Next Titus grabbed one of the many bags of stones and fixed it to the end of the hose with wire. He kissed the hose mouth like a beloved rattlesnake and tossed it from the skiff. Will watched the white bag disappear into the deep like a fleeing ghost.

  Titus started the motor. “Come back here and take the tiller,” he said. “Fly us in sleepy as you can.”

  Will minced his way, hands still gripping the garrote in his pocket, to the back of the boat, passing Titus in the middle, who clutched the knife at his side. Will took the motor’s vibrating handle.

  As they crept toward shore, Titus fastened rock bags intermittently to the hose with wire and sent more of the coil overboard. With his own Black Lagoon subsiding, at least temporarily, Will allowed himself the momentary pleasure of piloting a boat for the first time. No wonder Marcus wanted one.

  “So why are we doing this?” Will said over the low rumble of the engine. “Is it some kind of art project?” He’d nearly said “masterpiece” but caught himself.

  “ ’Spose you could dedicate it so, that is if you sought some verbiage.”

  “Can I ask another question?”

  “I’m in an interrogative mode,” Titus said.

  “I met the Butler and he said he wanted proof of something from you. Proof of what?”

  “He’s dilated,” said Titus, as Will guided the skiff nearly to the shore. “Bring her in over there,” Titus said, pointing to some rubble at the foot of Pool 6. Will piloted them up on a patch of rocky sand, mostly hidden from the water. Will felt like kissing the ground when he stepped out. There he saw a shallow trench already dug, running up toward the elevator. Titus laid the hose in the trench and buried it at the waterline, then dragged the remaining length up the embankment. Following the trench, they reached the outer edge of the elevator, where Titus took the end of the hose and stuffed it into a protruding conveyance chute.

  Will followed Titus at a safe distance into a chamber of the elevator he and Jonah had never explored. Inside, Titus pulled the hose from the chute and began attaching it to an ancient machine. As Titus kneeled to fiddle with its settings, Will recognized this as his final chance, and with tingling, fear-deadened hands, he extracted the garrote, pulled it tight to his belly, and for a second it rang out a high sound. Will crept noiseless as he could toward Titus.

  Still crouched, Titus pulled a cord, starting the machine like a lawnmower. It puffed a foul ball of smoke and shook, running a few seconds before water burst from a spout.

  Right when Will was about to hook the wire around his neck and demand Marcus’s whereabouts, Titus pursed his lips and applied them carefully to the stream. He took a long drink with his eyes shut with such profound pleasure Will felt the moment was nearly too intimate to observe.

  “Superior,” Titus said, swallowing deeply. “Eventually, I’ll run this unblighted up to my quarters, but this donkey engine’ll suit for now.” Titus pushed a bucket under the stream, and it began to fill noisily.

  Will laughed aloud, jamming the weapon back in his pocket, half-overjoyed, half-terrified. “This was what you were doing all this time? Trying to get pure—I mean unblighted—water?”

  “I’m not as strong as I once was to fetch it myself, and I can’t go relying on you or Aurelius to do it for me anymore. I’m falling weaker each day. But I’m aiming to habitate this old premise as long as permitted. Which is why you should tumble home now, Icarus Number One. You’ve saved me in more methods than you’re privy to. But you’re a gold necessity to your mother. Boys don’t fit down here. It’s only septic things. The Butler included. I can’t shield you like I could’ve once.” Titus stood and wheezed, long and tired. He thumped at his chest violently with his big fists. “Sometimes I suspect my whole damn condition is that my head isn’t privy to enough air,” he said pitifully, “because of these old wind bags. And that’s why my nut goes turbulent.”

  “Can I ask you a question?” Will said backing away cautiously.

  Titus looked up and nodded again.

  “Promise not to take it the wrong way?”

  “No such right way here down by the bay.”

  “What does it feel like to be crazy?”

  Titus watched him for a moment with an unreadable expression. “So that’s what has been wobbling on your vector top this whole operation?” he said.

  “Yeah,” Will said. “I guess.”

  “Well,” Titus said, cutting the pump’s motor and standing there on legs bowing as though they might snap. “A ripe comparison would entail trying to fix a radio. Except the only tool that comes to hand is another busted radio. You scavenge me?”

  “Is that why you helped Marcus? Because he’s a busted radio, like you?”

  “I nurtured him because Aurelius has been through Hades and still managed to till some good acreage in his soul.”

  “Yeah, well, I have one more question,” Will said with a throb of mounting courage, turning his feet to bolt for the door. “If you were so busy helping Marcus, why did I find your fingerpri—” and it was then Will heard the dull scrape of metal behind him.

  Relaxation Time

  At the subway station, she canted the stroller and wheelied her son onto the escalator, holding him prone as they descended. He frowned and threw the worlds of his eyes wide, thoroughly baffled by her upside-downness.

  They emerged onto the grimy, gum-spackled tile of the platform. Always tile! she mused playfully, must public transit take place in one enormous bathroom? As though all the tunnels were slated to someday be flushed?

  She and Will awaited their train, the air close and thick, her son babbling fragments only she could piece together, most related to food and the construction scene they’d witnessed earlier that day: a section of pavement torn out, exposing the multifarious cables and pipes beneath, densely packed as a wrist. Workers had cut into the pavement with a tremendous saw, a blade the size of a café table, throwing a rooster tail of sparks into the tepid morning air. It was a spectacle of noise and destruction no boy could resist, so she’d held him up to watch over the fence. When the sawing ceased, leaving his eyes braziers of wonder, aflame with the knowledge that, like wood, pavement could be sawn, she resisted a gushy urge to crush him in her arms, to feel him squirm but hold him fast.

  Now in the cool of the tunnel, she could feel the lick of perspiration at her neck’s nape. It had been a long day of walking, of submission to the pedestrian rapids, to the dueling scent of exhaust and hot dog cart—how long would these smells last if either were outlawed? A year?
More? She’d once heard the street scene called a ballet, but she disagreed. The president of some arts foundation had once mailed Arthur tickets, but Diane fell dead asleep, only to be poked awake by the pin of her thrift store brooch. “No one ever falls in the ballet,” she’d said afterwards, one of her famous remarks.

  But is there a greater, more sustaining joy than walking in a city? She could wring all that she needed from the sight of men shaking hands, the cooperative swerving of cars, the incredible garbage arrayed curbside for collection. What a thrill it was to move through it all, unharmed, like sipping tea in the splayed jaws of a lion, then stretching out and napping there, waking only to linger in the lion’s warm breath for another minute.

  She’d imagined strangers as houseguests to introduce to her son, adoring the combination of indifference and tenderness commingling in their faces: a man with a thudding radio perched upon his shoulder like a parrot; phalanxes of businesswomen in imposing shoulder pads and high, fortified hair; a man in red leather pants and futuristic shades like the human version of a sports car; another man rummaging through the trash with a baseball mitt. Even the ugliness was important, the seediness, the homeless, the filth—it needed to be acknowledged, even to children, so they didn’t grow into princes. If she wasn’t with Will and she’d had her Bolex, there wasn’t a single part of it she wouldn’t have loved to capture.

  A day of ticked-off errands: produce shopping in the thick compost funk of Kensington Market, the post office to forward Arthur’s mail to his latest PO box in Milan, and a visit to her lawyer. To avoid conflict of interest she’d found her own counsel, a woman that their lawyer (who Arthur kept—old U of T classmates) had suggested. She took the fact that she had toys in her waiting room as both a good sign and something terribly sad.

  Had she really just signed those papers? Wasn’t this business the reason they’d remained common-law? Legally, however, it was the same mess. A “trial separation”—whether this meant a tryout or a formal ceremony of judgment and sentencing she was unsure. It was terrifically amiable, almost maddeningly so. She wondered if he was paying full attention. The house was hers. As was Will, whom Arthur adored, theoretically, but had always viewed more as a side dish to the main course of himself, as he had her, she supposed. In truth, she felt nothing: neither longing nor onrush of freedom, only an emotional beigeness, as though hydroplaning on the surface of her life, something close to those reckless months after Charlie died. But she expected life without Arthur would closely resemble life with Arthur, who was either at his drafting table or attending the architectural conferences and colloquia of the world.

  Finally the train arrived, and she wheeled a now-napping Will into position. Bodies pushed to line the tracks. All these people, she thought, as the train stormed past their noses, so content to stand inches from their deaths. When the doors parted, casually, with no warning, like the tiniest snag on the otherwise flawless surface of her confidence, she realized that she might be somewhat afraid to step onto this particular car. With this thought a knuckle of fear slipped into her throat, unswallowable.

  She chuckled. Afraid the doors might pinch her behind? Of going the wrong direction—as she and Arthur so often had, rapt in the conversation of their early days? Was this feeling even real? She’d ridden hundreds, thousands, of subway cars—though she’d never loved the black rushing of tunnels, she’d always endured them, cheerfully even.

  Yet her heart insisted on racing, like an oil-doused bird flapping for its life in her chest. Other sensations, too, unmistakable as neon: a dull pain throughout, a soreness to her blood, a twisting in her gut, stardust in her fingertips. It would pass, a mere miscalculation of an errant brain that found danger where there was none, that saw a lion instead of the lamb before her.

  People pushed past as she breathed hard and fought to reset herself. She needed only to regain the mental ground on which she’d stood a moment before, only one step back, a gathering of balance, but the fear—it was fear, she admitted now—would not abate.

  She refocused her eyes, saw the car still split before her like an offering. A chime sounded. The doors jumped shut and the train dragged itself away. She laughed, more for those she imagined watching, then glanced around the empty platform. Everyone had done what she couldn’t. She must look lost, or more probably insane, as if she’d remembered her pressing appointment with God in the other direction.

  She drew Will away from the tracks. Passengers arrived clueless of how narrowly they’d missed a train. She took a long breath and decided she would simply make herself, through sheer mental force, board the next train, and the inevitability of this comforted her. Soon her heart slowed. Tingling ceased.

  She waited with a bullied, yet sturdy, calm. A warm breeze emitted from the tunnel, carrying with it the fragrant innards of the city. Wheel grease had affixed itself to everything down near the tracks, leaving all the mechanics and gadgets a flat black, like the backdrops of those experimental theaters Arthur loved. Only the tracks themselves were clean and silver-smooth, like the palms of hands.

  She was composed now, solid even, and her foundation—all she’d done, the dangers she’d braved, places she’d traveled—had returned beneath her. Maybe it was the sight of the steel subway tracks, but suddenly she was a girl looking on the grain cars from the workhouse of the elevator in Thunder Bay, sitting like notes on a musical staff of steel far below. It was those same tracks that brought the cars that both her father and Charlie unloaded. Their weight that broke the cable that swept her twin brother from the world like crumbs from a table—oh, she wished a train would arrive this instant! If the doors opened before her now, she could surely step in and leave all this nonsense behind. This was but a tiny blockage in the flow of her day. The only mercy was that no one would ever know it happened.

  She was exhausted. That was it. The lawyer, the heat, the walking, the city, the hectic day with Will—and look, here was another train blaring into the station. They were quick during commuting hours, thankfully. Why was she thankful? Couldn’t she have waited longer?

  The train’s wind flicked her bangs from her face and puffed her cheeks slightly, a film of dried sweat tightening her skin. As she pushed Will closer to the tracks, she was forced to admit that this particular train seemed fiercer, more indifferent than the previous. It wept and screeched as it halted like a tortured thing. The doors blew open and people erupted. More passengers this time, nearly rush hour. Will would be starving when he woke.

  She would step onto this train, but the fear of another failure stayed her. Figures pushed past. To buy time she searched her purse for nothing in particular, imagining what she’d lost. She grasped her house keys and squeezed them until her hand shot with pain. Then, impossibly, the doors shut, after hardly enough time for people to board. Had there been a mistake? An impatient operator? The train lurched forward, fitting into the dark like a glove.

  She retreated. Her knees were water boiling. Her limbs crawling and tingling as though Arthur had slept on them. She could leave, cart Will back up the escalator and hail a cab to deliver them home. But how would she manage without the subway? She’d have to lie, hide, make excuses—it would be dreadful.

  She leaned against a plexiglassed advertisement hung on the brown tile wall, inhaling deeply, blowing out her panic like a birthday candle, but it only leapt back, fed by each breath, with a thicker, more lustrous flame.

  She could hear her tongue scouring the roof of her gauze-dry mouth. Her throat constricted—how small a windpipe is, she thought, how minuscule an area we must keep clear to survive. Her heart thudded in her eyes. The word pulmonary entered her mind like a cruel rhyme. What word did it usually go with? Ebola? Embolism. What did that mean? Why did she think what she didn’t even understand?

  Then someone speaking in an annoying, distant manner. Oh, she couldn’t bear assistance. Not now. She needed to weather this. Alone. But the voice persisted. She decided to listen, only enough to gather what was said in ord
er to properly repel it. The words were a man’s. For how long had men talked in her direction, wanting something? She held the words at arm’s length. Every part of her felt unfounded, jumbled, questionable, open to invasion and disarray. She would not let him alter her, enlist her. He wanted his fingerprints on her organs. If she wasn’t careful, he could tell her that her name was any old word in the dictionary and she would believe it.

  “You said you’re all right, right, yeah? No need for help?” he said earnestly, like someone, Whalen, but not him.

  “I did?” she said. She could feel her face betray her, twisting and sweaty, her eyes two flushed toilets.

  “Did you?” he asked, somewhat flirtatiously, which left her exhausted and ill.

  “I’m all right,” she said, willing a smile, an expression not attainable by those on the doorstep of losing their minds.

  “Cute,” he said, nodding his head toward Will.

  She waved him away, and he retreated, no doubt convinced of her madness. That was what they wanted anyway: a functional madwoman, crazy enough to excite, not too crazy to be a burden. He turned back and said something else, and she realized then that he had no idea that he was as intangible as smoke. She let loose an enormous current of breath and blew him away before feeling herself stagger. She set her bags on the floor and yearned to join them there, but gravity had become a villain. She could feel death—real, cold death—snapping at her ankles like a black lapdog that could tear her to pieces with needle teeth if she fell. A thought stood up in her mind: go under here, and you will die or awake crazy. Crazy enough for them to take Will.

  From her.

  Her son.

  A mere whiff of this notion sent the dimensions of the tunnel sliding together. Her balance vacated her, wracking her with tremors of such ferocity they seemed to originate outside her. Sound ran together like the paint of children. The light died. Spots bloomed like mold in her vision. She peered into the tunnel and saw that it was the blackened esophagus of a giant, a monster. She knew then that she had been swallowed, as her brother and father had been in another life that was still hers, whether she’d left it behind or not. The platform crowded again. Another train, a throb of steel and glass, the lewd screech of wheels, a symphony of hissing and chuffing. Did it ever stop?