The Danger of Being Me

by Anthony J Fuchs

  I had staked out a seat next to the teacher's desk, which doubled as a snack table. I had my faded-green notebook open. I was so focused on the phrases arranged across the tattered pages that I didn't even hear the triple chime that marked the beginning of lunch. When the stack of neon-orange pages crashed down onto the desk in front of me, I jumped in my seat, and looked up to find Ethan.

  I glanced back down at the heap of paper on top of my notebook. A few sheets had slipped free and floated to the floor. I asked, "What in the fresh hell is this?"

  Ethan grinned. He slipped into the desk to my left, and tapped the cover page. He told me simply, "My story."

  I nodded. He laughed. It had been more than a month since I had seen him. I was mostly surprised that I was not at all surprised to learn that he had written a book in that time. I gathered up the loose pages, saw that they were numbered, slapped them on top of the stack on my desk.

  I dragged my bookbag out of the wire basket under my seat, unzipped it, and crammed the entire pile inside.

  "I want your honest opinion about that," Ethan said as I stuffed the bookbag back under my desk.

  "Honestly," I told him, "it weighs a fucking ton."

  Dr. Lombardi cleared his throat from his desk.

  Ethan grinned again. Phil took the seat on his other side, and Helen sat next to Phil, and Winnie took the seat beside Helen, winding up next to Ben as well by accident. Mr. Lombardi checked his watch, and announced that the meeting would begin in five minutes.

  Beside Ethan, Phil asked, "How was Meadowbank?"

  "Scottish," he said in that diluted brogue. "I think I met roughly all six-hundred members of Clan Gibson, and that includes Alexander Gibson, 22nd Lord Hedgerow."

  Phil grinned. "I don't know what that means."

  "It's a peerage title. It doesn't mean anything."

  Ben turned a page, and looked up. "Was the University of Glasgow crawling with attractive and eligible lasses?"

  "You wouldn't know what to do with a university girl," Helen told him. "Let alone an attractive or eligible one."

  Ben smirked. "I'm sure I'd figure something out."

  "I met with the editor of the Guardian," Ethan said. "She was a lovely redhead. And the captain of the ladies' rugby team cleaned up quite nicely." He snapped his fingers. "This one brunette professor at the Medical School earned extra points for being forty-six and fetching."

  "Not many women can claim both," Phil said.

  "Kirstie Alley," I said. Phil pointed at me, nodded.

  "Shohreh Agdashloo," Ben said from behind his book.

  "Nobody but you has seen Twenty Bucks," Winnie said.

  "You've seen Twenty Bucks," he told her with a smirk.

  Winnie rolled her eyes. "You made me. You called it 'a wonderment at this unpredictable world and the subtle way chance guides our lives.' You called it brilliant."

  "And you believed him," Helen said, shaking her head.

  "It is brilliant," Ben said, turning another page, sighing. "Even if some fail to grasp that brilliance."

  Ethan laughed, and our group was whole once more.

  I had settled in at home that night seven months ago with every intention of reading Ethan's story.

  His style was surrealistic and nuanced and literary and gloriously self-aware. It was so unlike the sprawling space operas and dystopian cyberpunk I had recently discovered that I quickly lost interest. I took a break, stowed the thick manuscript on the bottom shelf of my computer desk, and found a slice of cold pizza in the refrigerator. I flipped on the TV, convinced myself that I would only watch until I finished eating. Then I'd get back to Ethan's story.

  I promptly got distracted by a Mission Genesis marathon on the SciFi Channel, the neon-orange pages forgotten.

  I tried twice more to make good on my promise to give Ethan an honest opinion of his book. Once during Winter Break, and once after our conversation on the roof.

  Both times his prose left me exhausted and perplexed. Both times I failed him. And now he was dead. His story was over. His body had been flown back to Scotland and buried under a yellowed lawn in Meadowbank that overlooked the Firth of Forth. He was gone.

  And standing at the foot of a stripped twin-size bed in this notorious room at the Gateway Motel, I knew that those 716 sheets of neon-orange paper were his legacy. His afterlife. The part of him that had survived his death. The part that would exist forever and change the world for as long as I managed to guard it for him. I knew that he had entrusted the totality of his own memories to me, all those months ago. And he had not visited me last night under the sane light of an all-night convenience store on a street corner in Prophecy Creek to bring me a message.

  He had come to remind me that I had been carrying the message with me all along.

  I crossed the motel room to that writing table under the window, grabbed my bag, climbed back onto the mattress. I sat cross-legged in the center of the bed, facing the bureau and the television on top of it. Safer that way. Less chance of tripping over my own feet, falling off the mattress, and snapping my spine like kindling. The thought made me giggle, and the sound of my own delirious laughter made me giggle harder into the silence of the room.

  The silence had no opinion on the matter. I grinned, shrugged at its indifference, unzipped my bookbag, hauled out the neon-orange pages of Ethan's manuscript. Tonight, I would learn the ending to the story. Not the ending that had been written for him, that he had been forced to play out by a conspiracy of coincidence beyond his control.

  Tonight, no matter how long it took, I would learn the ending that Ethan had written. The ending he had chosen.

  Because Ethan had told his own story. He had made himself into the author of his own life, and it had cost him everything to do it. He had discovered the pattern behind the world, and he had rejected it. And he had created a new pattern with the force of his own infinite will.

  He had brought into existence what had not existed.

  And I needed to know.

  So I laid the stack of pages down on the mattress in front of my knees. The cover page three lines. The words Cecilia's Song in large, plain font; below them, in smaller type, the single word by; under that, a name.

  Ethan Seamus Gibson.

  I flipped to the first page, and began Ethan's story.

  5.

  His manuscript was the undiscovered masterpiece of a forgotten genius, written in the alien letters of an esoteric alphabet of his own design.

  He had written the sprawling, thoroughly abstruse, occasionally maddening story of Eric Guilding's childhood in Musselburgh, narrated by Eric Guilding in delirious hyperbole as he lay bleeding to death on an abandoned highway at night. It was a frame-story with a shifting frame. Guilding told stories out of order, and stories within stories. He described prophetic night terrors that had plagued his youth before his family moved to the United States. Night terrors in which he watched himself bleed to death on an abandoned highway at night.

  Broken and dying in the cold, Guilding developed a consuming obsession with Orion at once haunting and incomprehensible. His delirium escalated until his mind came unmoored. He time-traveled into his own memories, crashed through his own past in a fragmentary stream-of-consciousness. He could not change the events of his life, but only relive them. He decided that he was not bleeding to death in the present but dreaming his death in the past.

  He died without explaining why he was bleeding to death on this abandoned stretch of American highway.

  The book opened as Guilding woke in the middle of the night in the bedroom of his house in Scotland. He was twelve years old, and he was screaming. He had suffered his prophetic night terror again, watched himself bleed to death on an abandoned highway. I had read this scene three times before, but I had never really read it. Not until tonight. I started a second stack of pages, laying each sheet facedown after I reached the bottom.

  The alien letters of Ethan's exoteric alphabet twittered across those neon-orange pages,
determined to defy my efforts to decipher them. It was excruciating, and I refused to fail. I had one last job to do, and I meant to do it.

  I would finish this book. For Ethan. For myself. My mind came unmoored, but that didn't concern me. Not even a little. I read Ethan's prose, and I time-traveled into Eric's past. I trekked up the heights of Beinn Nibheis with him and his father, who wore the most ridiculous purple corduroy pants, during the summer before his family moved Stateside. We reached Lochan Meall and left the safety of the Pony Track, searching the rocky grasslands along the Allt a' Mhuilinn for cloudstones.

  "They looked like ordinary soaprock," Eric's father tells us in his heavy Scottish brogue. A bitter breeze slices down the hillside. He sounds very much like Ethan.

  "But they're not," he says. I look up at him. He watches a sky the color of brushed chrome above the mountain, the wind ruffling his hair. "They're the dreams of gods."

  He turns to me, and he smiles. "The Aes Sídhe were driven out of this place long and long ago, and they fled to the Land of the Young." Then he looks at the highland again, and he sighs. "But they loved this land."

  And who could blame them, I think. But I don't say it out loud, because I don't really need to. Not now.

  "They dream of this land often," he tells us. "Of coming home. And when they dream of this place, their thoughts brush up against our world. They create cloudstones."

  He crouches beside me, picks up a small chunk of granite. "A dream is a powerful thing," he says. I nod. "It's unbound. It has no rules. It creates new patterns, its own patterns. It brings into existence that which had not existed." He holds the rock out to me. I take it.

  "But a dream that comes from the mind of a god," he says. He laughs, looks at the chunk of granite in my palm. "That's about the most powerful thing there is."

  I tighten my fingers around the cool weight of the rock, and I nod. It's all I can think to do.

  His smile dims a little, and he looks into my eyes as he tells me, "But they know." Of course they know. It seems foolish to think that they wouldn't know.

  "So they sent guardians to keep them from falling into the hands of the wicked." He glances out over the hillside as another burst of wind scuffles across the grass, tossing his dark hair. I pull my jacket tighter around myself as he turns back to me. "You've got your slingshot?"

  I do, and I tell him so.

  "Good," he says with a nod, and stands.

  We start along the bank of the stream again as I say, "But we're not wicked, right?"

  "No, we're not wicked." He laughs. "But the Cat Sìth can't always tell the difference."

  For eight hours, we search among the rocks and grass for cloudstones. Twice Eric's father suggests that there are none to be found this time, but we might try again another day and have better luck then. Twice I tell him that we can't give up, we can't chance leaving any behind in case some wicked person comes up this way, because a wicked person would obviously know how to trick a Cat Sìth and steal the cloudstones. I refuse to fail.

  We find nothing by the time evening begins to fall, and Eric's father finally persuades us to give up the hunt. We start down the grassy slope toward the creek. Then we hear movement in the grass. I am suddenly sure that a Cat Sìth has been stalking us, trying to decide whether or not we were wicked, and has decided to strike.

  I spin toward the sound, pull my slingshot, dig the chunk of granite out of my pocket. I pack the rock into the pocket and drawn back on the weapon. Eric's father stops, turns back, standing over me, looking toward a thicket where we can see movement as well as hear it.

  Then the branches part. A small head emerges from the shadows. It spots us, and stops. A cat. The right side of its face is the color of nor'easter snow, the left side the color of charcoal, and down the center from ears to nose is a streak of scarlet the color of blood. One ear is notched. I take aim, and Eric's father's hand brushes my shoulder.

  "No," he says, his voice a bitter breeze. "Not this one."

  I open my eye. Look into the thicket where the cat crouches among the branches. It watches me, not deciding if I'm wicked. It is no Cat Sìth. No guardian sent by gods exiled to the Land of the Young. It's an ordinary Kellas cat with extraordinary coloring that has come to investigate the pair of humans blundering through its territory.

  I lower the slingshot, remove the chunk of granite, stow it back into my pocket. Then I rifle through my haversack until I find the remains of my lunch. I only managed to finish half of my second corned-beef sandwich, and now I unwrap the second half, tossing it into the grass.

  The cat's eyes flicker to me. It doesn't move. That's fine. It will accept my offering, or it will not. But it will know that I am not wicked, and that is enough for today.

  I decide to name the cat Galen. Then Eric and his father and I head back toward the Pony Track.

  For eight hours, I drifted in and out of Room 16.

  Midnight came. Midnight went. No one had mourned its passing. Twice I fell asleep sitting cross-legged on the mattress. Twice I woke as my legs went numb under me. The first time I crossed to the bathroom, relieved myself, ran the faucet, splashed cold water on my face and neck. Blinked at my haggard reflection, and looked into his tired brushed-chrome eyes. Wondered why that other-me on the far side of the looking glass seemed so unbearably old. I couldn't imagine the tribulation he'd been through.

  But then I grinned at him, and he grinned back.

  Because maybe I could.

  The second time I dozed, I climbed down from the bed, snapped on the television perched on the bureau, flipped to a replay of the previous night's Flyers' game.

  Both times I returned to those neon-orange pages and picked several facedown sheets off the growing pile to the right. I reread paragraphs, passages, and pages that had slipped by as my mind circled down the long, dark tunnel toward the deepest catacomb of my twilit dreams. Twice the icy tingling in my legs had pulled me back from the brink of that infinite dreamscape below my mind.

  But I had come dangerously close. If I lost my footing and slipped down that marmoreal flight a third time, there would be nothing to pull me back up. So I read.

  I visited Campie Primary School in East Lothian, and I played rugby with Eric's mates at the field off Stoneyhill Farm Road. I met Fiona Deacon. She had moved into the house next door to the Guildings on Watt's Close, and they spent the summer after Eric's tenth birthday together. And I watched their close friendship turn into something else, something more intense. Something that they guarded fiercely though they did not understand it.

  Eric's family relocated to the town of Hatborough, north of Philadelphia, the June after he turned eleven. He spent most of his first month in America burrowed in the downstairs bedroom of the Guildings' split-level house on Maple Avenue. His mother eventually persuaded him to venture out to the Willow Grove Mall with her so that he could pick out new clothes for school. There, they passed a video arcade. They stopped. And Eric was hooked.

  He met Patrick Mitchell at that arcade, and Hannah Radcliffe, and Bill Kingsley. When school began, he met Willow Darling, a shy poet and fellow seventh-grader who reminded him so much of Fiona that there was no help for his instant affection toward her. He built a new circle of friends around himself to make up for the one he'd lost, and he gradually adapted to American culture.

  And five months later, on a frigid Winter morning in 1992, he met Matthew Evanson, who had transferred from St. Humility Catholic School on the other end of town. Eric saw something off-center about the kid, something flighty and potentially untrustworthy. He sensed something missing from the kid, and he sensed the kid's desperate desire to find it. But what he sensed most about Evanson was fear. And that was something he understood.

  Scattered throughout the remaining four-hundred pages, I gathered the jumbled pieces of Eric's six-year friendship with Matthew. The two, along with Patrick, had tried to console Kingsley when Helen broke up with him at a Valentine's Day party in middle school.

  T
hey joined the staff of the student newspaper together when they made it to high school. When Matthew got into a heated argument with the editor, Eric took him up to the roof to let off steam and smoke herbal cigarettes.

  6.

  Eric and Willow slept together for the first time on a bitter night in December of their senior year. And lying with her in his downstairs bedroom, Eric dreamed.

  He dreamed that he stood on a stretch of sidewalk in front a bookstore in downtown Hatborough, such as it were, wearing an amethyst scarf draped around his neck and a peacoat with the collar turned up. He crossed to the window and looked inside the building, and saw a crowd looking up at a man behind a narrow lectern.

  My own breath went cold. My brain buzzed with Ethan's intricate prose, and my stomach felt full of ice. I saw what Eric saw in the depth of his dream, and I trembled deep in my gut as he looked into the bookstore and saw that the man behind the lectern was Matthew. The kid spoke as tears rolled down his face, but Eric couldn't hear the words through the glass.

  Then Matthew stopped and looked across his audience, and over them, toward the window, and he saw Eric. The look on the kid's face made Eric grin. As he exhaled, his breath fogged the glass of the storefront window. He looked at the smudge, and he smiled. Then he turned away, shaking his head as he hiked along the length of the sidewalk to the intersection a block up.

  He reached the corner, and stopped in the sane light of an all-night convenience store. He glanced down at the ground, and saw his own shadow thrown out crookedly across the concrete, stitched neatly to his feet. Of course it was. He laughed. It was a perfectly meaningless sort of thing to notice, and he appreciated it. He looked up to the streetlamp throwing its harsh corona on the sidewalk.

  Eric stood in the frigid night air, his hands buried in the pockets of his peacoat, watching the pale patches of his breaths circle his head like wraiths in the moonlight. He had been headed somewhere, he was sure of that, but he had forgotten his destination. He considered running into the convenience store and grabbing a cup of coffee while he figured out just where it was that he was headed.