by Alex Shakar
The other one.
Fred looked to the floor. At his feet, a large box magic-markered: CLOTHES. Another next to it: SHOES. Glancing up from there, he discovered Mira watching him. He had the feeling she hadn’t been asleep at all. Her eyes had been a bit too tightly shut, now that he thought about it.
“One question, Fred.”
Her tone had a calm chill to it. Though her red-rimmed eyes burned into him.
“Did you know yesterday was our wedding anniversary, too?”
It took him a moment to speak. “What?” Too?
Her whole body was hidden under that beige jacket. Only her head protruded. Had it been slightly darker in the room, he might have thought she’d stuffed herself into a burlap sack.
“Come on, Fred. No need to be modest. You knew everything else. You knew what bar I work at. You knew where I live. Not just my address—you must have looked that up to send me those statues. But the actual building. I didn’t quite put that together. You stopped right in front of it, last night. You’ve seen it before.”
She stared, daring him to deny the charge. He couldn’t begin to respond. He was still processing her marriage, her loss, the bit about it being her wedding anniversary. He was still replaying the previous evening—her bender, her sadness—seeing pieces of it anew. Before he could even open his mouth, her arm shot out sideways from the cover of the jacket, brandishing that spectral tattoo.
“You even knew about this, didn’t you? Why else would you have told me that story of floating over the bar? Your hand and this one.” She pointed to the tattooed hand. “Like a glass slipper,” she said with a mocking, fairy-tale brightness. “The perfect fit.”
“Mira—” he said, hoping to slow her down. She was getting too far ahead of him—he couldn’t even see what she was accusing him of. The jacket had slipped from her bare shoulders to hang on her tucked-in knees. He hadn’t managed to say anything but her name. She was talking again.
“I didn’t put it all together until I got up a little while ago and saw that … that briefcase.” With this last word, louder than the rest, her voice quivered with horror. “You had it from the first day of the study, didn’t you?”
He opened his mouth. Nothing came out.
“Just waiting for me to notice it,” she said. “This whole damn time. So I could think, Oh, just like Lionel’s. What’s your game? Who do you know who knew Lionel—who knows me?”
He held out his hands. A laugh escaped him, flustered, but also relieved. The briefcases! She couldn’t possibly believe what she was saying, if she thought about it some more.
“Mira, please, slow down. I didn’t know about … about Lionel. At all. I’m—” He banished the smile. “I’m so sorry.”
“I saw that briefcase,” she went on, “and it all fell into place. I finally understood what your gift meant. What your card meant. Lucky me. I get two.” That false, fairy-tale tone again. “A second chance at love.”
The smile he’d been fighting dropped down the hollow of his chest. There was nothing absurd in her logic, he saw. Her logic was seamless. She’d taken all the puzzle pieces and assembled them into a version of him that bore no relation to the self he knew. And her version made more sense than his. How could he begin to explain that the statues had come not from him but from stalkers of his own, possibly from his comatose brother?
“I believe …” He stopped, took a breath, started again. “I mean the sculptures represent George and me.” At least, this was what he’d assumed they represented. “Not you and …”
He watched her, marshaled his thoughts. He could see his statement just starting to make sense to her. He could see all those pieces starting to rearrange themselves back his way. In that moment, she looked not only confused but afraid.
But then her eyes shone with a canny light.
“You believe, you say?”
“No … no—I know.” His gut twisted. “I mean—that’s what it means.”
“You know what I believe?” she said. “I believe you’re a textbook sociopath.” She nodded. “You don’t even have a twin brother, do you?”
“Mira, this is crazy. I wasn’t playing you. I wasn’t using you.”
“No? Well you know what? I was using you. And I’m finished now. So get out.”
He was gearing up once more to try to explain when her words caught up to him.
“Using me?”
Her mouth tortioned into a clamped smile, waiting for him to get it. It took him a while. His first thought was again that she was in on those angel messages, somehow. Finally, though, her true meaning dawned on him, all at once, in too-vivid detail. Every one of those loving kisses, caresses, counterthrusts, instantly recast.
“What,” she said, “you thought all that was for you?”
She stood, and with no great hurry, as if to mock him with the sight of her, put the jacket on.
“There’s one accurate diagnosis, at least,” he said. “You using me. You program that helmet to make me want to fuck you?”
She swung out a hip, opened her mouth to reply.
“You vampire,” he added.
Her shoulders hunched slightly. For a moment, she just stood there, holding herself in the jacket.
“Get the fuck out,” she spat. “Go play with your imaginary twin.”
Dude, said Inner George, did you really just call a 9/11 widow a vampire?
Inner George’s sigh whistled in the breeze around him.
Smooth move, Freddo.
His twin’s voice was crisper in Fred’s head than usual, maybe due to the emptiness of the early morning, the streets and sidewalks freshly washed in an overnight downpour he must have slept through altogether. Or maybe it was due to the austerity within, the lack of all other distractions—no food to be digested, no money to be spent, no job to be avoided or not avoided, no final helmet session, no Mira. Nothing left but Inner George, and the rumble of the odd passing garbage truck.
Likewise, angel boy, Fred replied, thinking of those fucking statues.
He kept replaying the fight. He thought about all the things he might have said to convince her he wasn’t some kind of creeper, playing her from day one. He thought about the fear in her eyes as she reconsidered which version of him to believe in, and her evident relief once she’d settled back into the one that could best keep him at bay. He thought about that other look on her face, that tormented smile with which she’d told him she’d used him. She would never have said this to him but for the absurd misunderstanding. He knew this. He’d witnessed too much tenderness in her last night ever to think her cruel by nature. But that didn’t make the statement any less true. She’d been making love to her dead husband. As far as she was concerned, Fred hadn’t even been in the room.
In the hospital lobby, nowhere close to visiting hours yet, he fell into a leather armchair facing the courtyard window, and began flipping the Swiss Army knife in his fingers, snapping the implements out and in—a reamer, a ballpoint pen, a pharmaceutical spatula.
What do you want from me, George? Who’s helping you?
His thumbnail caught a crevice behind the key ring attachment, and he was pulling something new out from a slotted sheath: tweezers. For a minute, he was back in that supermarket, on day one of the study, following those silver hair-whorls toward the sun-filled exit doors, feeling like there was nothing out of place in this universe, not even him. He wanted to draw a line from that day to this, from tweezers to tweezers. He wanted to take these trembling tines and grip that little line and pull it, inch by inch, until the whole grand pattern, all the hope-against-hoped-for meaning and more, came sliding into view.
He dozed off, into a dreamless oblivion, for what seemed like seconds but was in fact hours, and awoke hungover, the inner surface of his skull pulsing like a single, giant nerve being chewed by some ruminant animal.
The lobby was now aswarm with visitors and staff, the usual lunchhour bustle. Checking his watch, Fred confirmed it was close to one in the
afternoon. Brittle, fainter than ever from the lack of food, and all the more drowsy from that death-like slumber, Fred drifted with his bags to the elevator bank and floated up to George’s floor. As the doors slid open, an electronic chime went off somewhere close. At first he thought it was a pager or phone beep from the belt of one of the nearby doctors, but as he followed the colored lines along the hall floor, he thought to check his cell phone, and discovered he’d just gotten a text:
CALL GEORGE
Followed by an unfamiliar number. Foreboding seeped through his scoured nerves. Before he could settle his stomach and work up the guts to dial the number, a bang shot from George’s room.
He peered around the doorframe. His mom and dad were at the far side of the bed, Holly working George’s fingers, Vartan by George’s head with a block of wood in either hand. A stick of incense smoldered from where it had been wedged between the IV bag and its pole. Fred’s parents looked up and their huge eyes found him.
“He tried to speak,” Holly said.
Vartan nodded in confirmation.
“It was just a whisper,” Holly went on. “I couldn’t make it out. He stopped before I could get my ear to his mouth.”
“I didn’t hear it,” Vartan said, “but I saw his throat and jaw moving.”
“He was almost off the bed when we walked in,” Holly said.
“Like he was trying to get up,” Vartan said.
The two of them went back to watching George. Clutching the cell phone, Fred overcame the urge to try switching the light on and off, as per Mira’s instructions, to check if he was dreaming, though he allowed himself an unobtrusive hop on his heels (gravity seemed to be working normally), before moving to the bedside. The cuff of George’s tracheostomy was deflated, Fred saw, as it always was after meals to lessen the possibility of refluxed goop getting inhaled.
“Did you get any other responses?” Fred asked.
“Some winces when I bang the blocks,” Vartan said.
“He’s following along more,” Holly said, opening and closing his fist. “And there’s some trembling, like he’s straining.”
Vartan put the blocks down and held one of George’s eyes open. “No tracking, but there’s some dilation.”
Reactions like these weren’t very high on the Glasgow scale, only slightly more than they usually got. But they’d never found George nearly off the bed or heard him vocalize before.
“Did you try the Tabasco?” Fred asked. They each had their favorite items in the box of toys.
Vartan rummaged for it.
“Grab his toes, Fred,” Holly called out. “Help me do the exercises.”
Fred started bending them, one at a time, then all together, then started working the ankles as Vartan opened George’s mouth and dabbed hot sauce on his tongue. Holly picked up his hand, then swayed unsteadily, looking ill for a moment.
“The energy’s so … stormy in here,” she said. Her eyes met Fred’s and Vartan’s. “Can either of you feel it?”
Holly went back to working George’s wrist, then his elbow.
“Your energy is strong too,” she said softly in George’s ear. “Swim home, George. Swim through the clouds.”
She straightened, moving George’s whole left arm, while Fred moved his right leg. The motions looked a bit like George was doing a crawl stroke.
“Don’t say that,” Vartan said. “Don’t confuse him.”
“If it helps him move …” Holly let the thought trail off.
“And put that incense out. It’s bad for his lungs.”
“Follow the incense,” she whispered. “Come back home.”
“Come on, dude,” Fred called out. “What is it you want to say?” He was thinking about his dream of waiting in the hat—or of George waiting in the hat, maybe, trusting that Fred would soon pull him out. Fred tried to trust as well, trust he could do just that. If life itself was some kind of dream, who was to say there wasn’t a way to gain control, to will the shape of it?
“Let’s switch,” Holly said to Fred. She took George’s other leg. Fred took his other arm. In silence, for a minute or two, they worked George’s fingers and toes, ankle and wrist, elbow and knee. Fred wasn’t sure. Maybe he could feel George cooperating.
“He’s coming back,” Holly said, her eyes bright. “I know it. I dreamt it again.”
“You did?” said Fred.
“I dreamt I was out on the street on a cloudy day. And then all of a sudden the sun came out. And then I was standing over this hospital bed. And I saw him open his eyes, and look at me.”
The light around her seemed stronger, then dimmer. The wooziness ebbed and surged. From Fred’s pants pocket, his cell phone chimed again. His heart slammed. Wake up, dude. Wake up.
They turned George back over. Holly raised her hands to do Reiki. Vartan peeled George’s lid again. Vartan had the flashlight out now, arcing it downward to bear on George’s eyeball.
“There he goes!” Holly said.
Fred ducked his head under the flashlight, put his ear to George’s mouth.
“What’s he saying?” Vartan whispered, somewhere behind the light.
Fred listened. The nausea surged as he heard:
“Kghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhrk.”
Relax, and close your eyes, at the count of
five
and imagine a drop of blue water falling on your head. One drop. One spot. A refreshing coolness on your scalp. Imagine, now, that this is special water. Healing, purifying water. Even this single drop of it can leave you feeling so peaceful that at the count of
four
as you go ahead and imagine another drop, and another, you can feel the pores of your scalp opening wide, thirsting for more. Feel that coolness, that relaxation, spreading all across the top of your head. Feel it soaking into your skull. Feel the cool, healing peace seeping right into your brain. Drop by drop. So replenishing that at the count of
three
you can let go even more, and the more you let go, the more blue water comes pouring in. A trickle. A steady stream. Feel it filling the muscles and skin of your face and scalp, and coursing down your neck, and into your shoulders. So revitalizing that at the count of
two
you’re feeling so light, so new, that you can keep opening and opening, letting it gush down your arms to your fingertips, down your back and front, into every organ, even your lungs—this is special water, you can breathe it as easily as air. How good it feels, suffusing you from head to toe. So cooling. So healing. So rejuvenating that at the count of
one
your every cell is so relaxed it’s just floating in the blue water. Just floating, perfectly at ease. Just like it feels when you’re floating in space, above the Earth, with all the little bits of the city floating around you. It’s all up here, now, every last piece. The parking meters, the telephones, the water towers, the subway cars, the streetlights, the beams and bricks and millions of bits of glass: all here. And all moving, every part on its own, parts seeking other little parts, reorganizing. But not into that old thing you remember. Not that old city, but something wholly new. There goes the Statue of Liberty, sailing by, torch first, in a cloud of tiny Statue of Liberty souvenirs. There go a pack of mailboxes, scoop-mouthing a school of light bulbs. Look at those keyboard keys clinging like barnacles to chunks of concrete. Look at those street displays of sunglasses angling themselves like flowers to catch the sun’s rays. Look at that flock of pretzels weaving nests of glowing fiberoptic cable. Watch it all, the whole thing, this big, new ecosystem, this big, new creature of a trillion glittering parts. Watch it float off, to the distant stars and beyond. Wish it well, that dwindling sparkle in the black. And trust you’ll never need it back….
It was just possible to sit up straight in the tent, if he sat in the middle with his head in the apex. It was well over ninety degrees inside, the sun-drenched blue fabric angling down around his head. Fred faced the open slat of the entrance, through which he could feel an o
ccasional draft. Visible through the opening was a sparkling black wedge of roofing material, the aluminum gutter running along the roof’s back edge, and beyond that, the rustling leaves of a backyard tree refracting the sunlight in too many ways to track. The roof sloped downward from front to back, which helped his zazen posture (gleaned from a website): leaning slightly forward, propped on staggered pillows, legs in half lotus, George’s sleeping bag serving as a floor cushion.