“You can’t open the door? Lady—”
“My name is Claire.” Claire watches the woman through the peephole. She stands for a moment and then places a hand against the door, right about where Claire holds her palm against the surface.
“Claire.” Petunia Delilah’s voice sounds weary and resigned. “Claire, can you please open the door? I don’t know how much longer I can stay on my feet and I need to call for help. My baby’s coming now and it’s in trouble. My phone’s dead—I can’t get ahold of my boyfriend or my midwife or anyone. I’m all alone here.”
“What about the kid? I can’t see him,” Claire says, then bites her bottom lip.
Through the keyhole, Claire sees that Petunia Delilah clearly knows she’s being watched. She looks directly at the fish eye.
“He’s here, just lying here on the carpet. Not doing much more than that and breathing.” She looks down at her feet. “I don’t know what’s wrong with him, he just passed out. Please, Claire,” Petunia Delilah says, “help.”
“Okay, stay right there,” Claire says as she pats the door with the palm of her hand. “I’ll get my phone and call an ambulance. Don’t move.”
One step from the door, Claire freezes. Through the inch of wood she hears the most pained and animal noise she has ever heard. The woman on the other side, Petunia Delilah, groans and starts sobbing. It’s a pitiable noise of pain and frustration. Claire responds on the same base level. Before rational thought can stop her, she unbolts the dead bolt, removes the chain from its track, and opens the door.
35
In Which Homeschooled Herman Suffers a Horrific Accident
And as the car drifted across the lane into oncoming traffic, the opening piano strain and Bonnie Tyler’s smoky voice drifted through the speakers. From the back seat, Herman watched his mom shaking his dad’s shoulder. Dad didn’t respond. His head drooped forward, exposing the massif of vertebrae under the skin on the back of his neck. Herman could see Mom’s mouth moving, but he couldn’t hear the sounds coming out. She was screaming in Dad’s ear. The veins in her neck and on her forehead stood out. Her face turned rosy; her cheeks flushed pink.
Dad didn’t move.
Mom looked out the windshield. Their car had crossed fully into the oncoming lane. She grabbed the wheel and pulled it to the right. The car jerked back toward the centerline, toward the safe side of the road. It was a ridiculous line on the pavement, a ludicrous protection, those three inches of yellow paint demarcating the difference between safety and this.
And the chorus began to swell through the speakers.
As the front of the car crumpled with the impact, as the screeching of metal being folded and torn asunder battered Herman’s eardrums, and even as the diamonds of safety glass sprayed across his body like hail, the radio played on. As Mom and Dad were thrown forward in their seats, only to come to an aorta-tearing jolt against the seat belt restraints, as his sister was tossed sideways into him, her head colliding with his in a shock of sepia sparks behind his eyelids, even through a second concussive whump and another shuddering jolt, through it all, Bonnie Tyler sang on.
The car whined and screamed in protest as it was bent and shattered. When the car spun sideways across the highway and the tires wailed against the speed and flinty asphalt, when gravity took a spin around the roof, leaving the debris of the crash suspended in opposition to its forces, and even when everything went silent except for a lone voice screaming somewhere outside, the song played on.
The car had come to rest on its side, and Herman hung sideways by his seat belt, suspended over his sister. The weight of his head bent his neck. His ear rested on his shoulder. He couldn’t muster the energy to right himself. His arms dangled, one across his chest and the other splayed out in the space below him. The back of his hand rested against his sister’s cheek, her hair tangled through his fingers, soft as feathers to the touch. Herman did not feel it though; his body was limp and he was gone. He had been for a while.
The radio played all seven minutes of the power ballad, and it took seven more for help to arrive.
But that length of time was nothing to Herman. He wouldn’t come back for three more weeks. He didn’t want to. When he did wake, he was in a hospital, and he was alone in a dark room. Every bit of him hurt as he tenderly moved his hands over his body. There were wires and tubes attached to him. There was beeping coming from somewhere in the dark. Through the window, he could see it was dark outside. There was a city of lights out there, just on the other side of the glass.
Later, the doctors said the reason he survived was because he seemed to be unconscious at the time of impact. His body was completely limp and was able to absorb the thrashing as the vehicle spun to its side and rolled over twice. They also told him he was a kid and his body would heal quickly. A few more weeks passed, and they released him into Grandpa’s care, as per the directions in his parents’ will. There was no other family on the continent.
Even later, Herman would revisit the scene. Going back to that moment was how he remembered what his mom, dad, and sister looked like. He reached across the invisible centerline of the seat, the one they had fought over for years, from his side to hers. He felt his sister’s hair, her soft tangles woven between his fingers. When he looked down from where he was suspended by the seat belt, asphalt outside her window, she appeared to be sleeping. Occasionally, he would pop in to see it play out again, but he would always leave before the song ended. There was nothing to understand after that point in time. By then he would be gone, knowing where and when he could return should his parents’ faces fade from memory or should his fingers forget the softness of his sister’s hair.
He never told Grandpa he went back to the car crash, not even after he had settled into his room in the Seville on Roxy to work on his history lessons and language studies and trigonometry problems.
* * *
Herman stared at the page, his eyes dancing between the two dots that Grandpa had penciled in opposite corners. They were 13.9 inches apart, and no matter which way his eyes traced lines across the blank white page, they always wound up the same distance apart.
“I’ll leave you to it,” Grandpa said as he left Herman’s room. “The distance between the two is variable. Those two dots can be the same dot, or they can be anywhere up to fourteen inches apart, like you think. Now tell me how that could be.”
Herman chewed on his pencil eraser as he contemplated the puzzle. The kettle whistled from the kitchen, and then the newspaper rustled in the living room. The button of eraser came off in his mouth.
How can those two dots on the page actually be one dot? he pondered.
Or, alternately, he thought, how can one thing exist twice at the same time?
“Got it yet?” Grandpa called out from the living room.
“No,” Herman mumbled loud enough for Grandpa. “It’s impossible. You can’t make the hypotenuse shorter,” he said to himself. “It’s an absolute.”
“Herman,” Grandpa’s voice came, “the world being round was an impossibility. Now we live on a new continent. Human flight was impossible. Now we go into space. This is easy compared with those things. Think of that space between the dots as time, not distance. Time is a drug we’re all addicted to. Sooner or later we have to kick the habit.”
The newspaper rustled, and Grandpa went quiet.
Herman put his hands to opposite edges of the paper, pinning it flat to his desk. His brow furrowed in concentration. He scrawled out a few more calculations, his frustration mounting. They didn’t work out, so he crossed them out. He circled the 13.9 at the end of his original calculation.
What did Grandpa mean? If distance is time, the only way to shorten it is to travel faster. But distance didn’t travel at a speed, the combination of the two did, velocity did. They were tied together, but not the same, as Grandpa said.
With each passing minute, Herman felt his flustered brain become more agitated until he could no longer think. Had anger b
een in his nature, he would have crumpled the paper and thrown it in the trash. Instead, he swept his hand across the desk. The paper fell off the side and landed against the wall in a curl, and momentarily, the curve of the paper let the two dots touch before it straightened itself again.
“The two dots are the same,” Herman said to himself. “They are no distance apart even though they’re on opposite corners of the page.”
He picked the page up and slowly curled the corners toward each other. All the while, the distance between the dots grew shorter and shorter until they touched. They were the same even though they were far apart. He let the page lie flat on the desk, excited to share his discovery with Grandpa.
He called out, “Grandpa, I know it. I know that they’re the same dot.”
There was no reply from the living room.
He contemplated the equations scrawled across the paper, some crossed out and others circled. The pencil strokes were clear and magnified; viewed from so close they were pock-marked, thick graphite lines striking out across the fibrous expanse of paper. The tip of the pencil was a waxy moon rock from this magnified perspective.
The quiet apartment was unsettling. Herman knew something was wrong. He could feel it. His body knew too. This silence often came before the blackness.
There was silence. The usual noises of the apartment were gone. The only sounds came from inside Herman, his heart beating a thump-thump to push his blood around. Herman breathing. His own voice in the silence of his apartment, sounding muffled in the flesh and bone of his head, calling out after a moment’s ponderance.
“Grandpa,” it said.
Herman stood, waiting.
There was no reply.
“Grandpa? Are you there?” he called out again.
* * *
Then, there is blackness and commotion and a persistent tugging at his leg. He hears voices, watery and far away.
“He’s here, just lying here on the carpet. Not doing much more than that and breathing,” a woman’s voice says. “I don’t know what’s wrong with him, he just passed out. Please, Claire, help.”
36
In Which Things Below Are Rapidly Growing Larger from Ian’s Perspective
Ian doesn’t know it, but for a moment of time so short it is barely measurable, he passes the halfway point of his descent. Ian is starting to feel the physical stress of being airborne for so long. He gasps, his mouth gaping in an atmosphere too thin for him to process any oxygen. He can’t get his gills to flare, no matter how hard he tries. The wind blasting by his body forces them to remain shut. The current is much too strong for the delicate mechanism to function.
For a moment, he wonders, Now … what was I doing? Then he realizes he’s falling.
As he passes the thirteenth floor, he slips across a line drawn in the sky, out of the late-afternoon light and into the shadows cast by the surrounding buildings. It’s a strong contrast to the light, and when the last glint sparks off his golden scales, he finds his mood is dampened. The once brilliant reflections off the glass and steel of the surrounding buildings become muted with a gloomy light. Everything that was once there and so clear is now a dimmed version of itself. All the details are diminished; the former clarity of the day grows muddy. The building alongside which he falls is less vibrant and the air itself seems to become more subdued. A deep sense of foreboding sprouts within him, as if he has passed around the dark side of the moon. He’s alone in an alien environment, and the elation of his escape feels less certain now, more a chipped veneer covering something threatening and dangerous.
The thirteenth-floor apartment is pink, as a state of being as much as it is a color. The walls are painted pink, the furniture is pink, and the floor lamp has a gauzy Pepto piece of fabric draped over it. To Ian, it’s a streak of late-sunset pink, the kind that shows itself moments after the sun drops below the horizon. The color is drawn into a vertical streak as he zips past.
Ian doesn’t know it, but that apartment is rented by Raquel the bartender and Fontaine, her flight attendant roommate. They aren’t home at the moment, but so many moments of their lives are still in there, between the walls, the ceiling, and the floor. Raquel and Fontaine split the rent, all the bills, and they get along famously. They’ve kissed each other a couple of times in a way friends typically don’t: once when they were drunk at a New Year’s Eve party and got a little carried away, and once at a party where a hot guy became creepy and Fontaine needed a way to flee his advances. Social lesbianism has always been a great escape. It simultaneously titillated the creepy guy and freed Fontaine from any obligations he perceived. Neither of them identifies as queer, but both think the kisses were really nice. They have never told each other as much, however.
Ian can’t see the future, but Fontaine is two years away from meeting the love of her life on a charter flight to Mexico. She has a twenty-four-hour layover, and he’s booked into an all-inclusive resort for a week. She stays with him the whole time she’s there, and they date often when he returns. At first their marriage is a dream, but by the end of the fifth year, both of them have become heavy drinkers. They attend couples’ counseling groups and spend thousands of dollars on individual therapy. For some reason they’re never quite sure of, they enable each other’s worst tendencies. There are a few happy years and many hard ones.
Their marriage lasts eight years and four months. In the end, there’re no kids to share, no dog to fight over, just a mortgage and a joint bank account to sort out when they separate. They don’t talk after the split, and neither remarries. Fontaine quits drinking, but her ex-husband doesn’t and prematurely loses most of his teeth.
Raquel keeps in touch with Fontaine. She’s there for support, and they are even roommates again for a short while when Fontaine leaves her husband.
Raquel never gets married and she’s okay with that.
Now … what was I doing?
Ian’s perspective changes along with the light. The ground is much closer and more portentous than it once was. It was so far away mere moments ago, way down there in the shadows, so innocuous that it was possible to ignore it without effort. But what was once a distant backdrop to his life has become a definite and dangerous player in his fate. The finality of his journey is approaching, and with it comes a foreboding that was not felt at the start. Initially, fresh with the excitement of adventure, he was blinded to the near certain outcome of his fall. Presently, the only control in his life is the constant pull gravity exerts. Were he capable of contemplating it, he might realize that this gravity is no different from the constant pull time wields against all things.
Ian enters one of the last cycles of his memory before he reaches the ground, one in which the realization of death lurks as he zips past an empty twelfth-floor apartment.
Ian doesn’t know it, but the previous occupants of the twelfth-floor apartment moved out two days ago. They were well liked by their neighbors, a handsome newlywed couple with a lovely disposition. The few times they threw a party, they remembered to turn the music down at ten o’clock as stipulated in the building’s rules. They would keep an eye on their neighbors’ apartments when they went on vacation, collect the mail, feed the cat, and water the plants.
He was a salesman for new condos, and she was an engineer. Their sex was ordinary, but they had it often, quietly, and to the satisfaction of each. However, she was always mildly annoyed by his need to have a shower within minutes of them coming. She felt it implied that she was dirty or their sex was dirty, neither of which she believed to be true.
When they moved, they packed their dishes with newspaper between each bowl and plate. They labeled the boxes well and courteously packed their books in small boxes that weren’t overly heavy for the movers. And then they moved out to their suburban house in a blissful new community called Burnt Timber Acres. Now, they have a yard and a fence and property taxes and furnace cleanings to schedule every couple of years.
Ian can’t see the future for them, but ther
e are two babies there, not so far away, one girl and one boy. Not everything is blissful, of course. There are several fights and some yelling. One of them leaves the other for a short while over money and trust issues, but they reconcile quickly and are evermore in love.
When he dies after forty-eight years of marriage, she grows lonely and follows him a year later. Both children speak at the funerals and give touching eulogies. The younger one deems himself a poet and reads a heart-wrenchingly awkward poem. Most mourners are brought to tears, even those who rarely cry. It’s less for the poem’s performance and more for its ill-executed potency.
And what Ian wouldn’t do for the ability to generate tears. His eyes, burning from dryness, flit from the twelfth-floor apartment to the street below. A second ambulance pulls up to the curb. As with the first, the strobing lights remain on even as both doors open. The cars on the street continue their crawl by, a sluggish mechanical millipede. The bustle below seems so slow because of the speed of his descent. It seems to take an eternity for the ambulance doors to open, and by the time the paramedics emerge, Ian is staring sidelong and head down through the eleventh-floor window.
37
In Which Our Heroine Katie Encounters the Evil Seductress Faye
There’s no mistaking her pink nightshirt. This woman, paused in her descent half a flight of stairs away, is wearing Katie’s nightshirt. It’s wrinkled and stained and it’s on some other woman, but it’s definitely hers.
There’s no mistaking where this woman got it from, and there’s no mistaking why she is wearing it. It’s simple to connect one thing to the other, especially since they’re presented together right in front of her. It’s abundantly clear now.
Katie left the nightshirt at Connor’s a few days ago. She had gotten into the habit of leaving behind something on every visit. She wanted it to remind Connor of her. She had the romantic notion that he would smile when he saw the nightshirt. She even conjured beautiful visions of Connor snuggling up with it in bed, falling into a peaceful sleep with the soft cotton under his cheek and the lingering smell of her skin a subtle fragrance in his nose.
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