Hummingbird

  I couldn’t seem to find my voice, still seeing the pen embedded in his skinny neck, his body sprawled on the ground, hemorrhaging language. A low drone came from the line, as if something was interfering with our connection.

  “Hello?” David said, sounding very far away. “Felix? Are you there?”

  “How much do you love me?”

  The question came out of nowhere. I was sitting in a chair in the middle of the living area with a towel around my neck. Kim had borrowed some clippers and a pair of scissors from a hairdresser friend and was giving me a much-needed haircut. “When we first met,” she said, trimming around my left ear, “you were like a raggedy old dog that had been kicked around its whole life. Look at you now. All cleaned up. Getting out of the house. You have to admit, I’ve been good for you.” She moved in front of me and started on my bangs, scissors snipping uncomfortably close to my eyes.

  “No?” she asked, when I didn’t answer. “You’d think that after everything that’s happened—the book deal, the advance—you’d be just a little bit happy.”

  “I’m happy,” I said, automatically.

  “Could have fooled me.”

  Our faces were inches apart, her eyes on my hair. She moved out of my line of vision, trimming around my right ear. “I’m not expecting a proposal or anything,” she said. “But a little gratitude would be nice … I can give you the number of a florist if you like. Hell, I can call them if you need me to.”

  Her snipping was getting increasingly aggressive.

  I didn’t know what she wanted me to say. I hadn’t asked for any of this. Her presence in my life had been one big imposition, and now I was supposed to thank her?

  “Do you ever think about what life’s like for the rest of us?” she demanded. “People who don’t have the luxury of throwing up their hands? We keep going, Felix. We make it work because we have to …” Her scissors grazed the back of my neck. “The tiniest effort, that’s all I’m asking. Some help. A sacrifice …”

  She’d stopped cutting. I could have lied to her, told her that I cared for her, that everything was going to be all right. Instead, I sat motionless in my chair, staring at all the cut hair on the floor. I wondered where the scissors were, if she was holding them in her fist, the way a person holds a knife.

  Do it, I thought.

  I shut my eyes and waited for the scissors to impale my neck, feeling her desire, knowing she was capable of it. Instead, she just sighed and started tidying up the back. A few last tufts of hair drifted to the floor, nearly weightless. When she’d finished, she brought a hand mirror around to the front of the chair and held it under her chin so that my face appeared to be embedded in her chest. I ran my fingers through my hair, surprised by how well the cut suited me.

  “Like a new man,” I said, softly.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  “I told you not to look at me,” Chad muttered as he ground my face into the snow. “Didn’t I tell you not to look at me?”

  “I didn’t!” I gasped.

  Nearly twice my size, Chad straddled me like a professional wrestler, bending my arms and legs in ways they weren’t supposed to bend, as if I were an action figure he’d gotten for Christmas. None of the other kids on the playground moved to help, watching with solemn faces as he forced my head back down. I had no idea what I’d done to deserve such a beating (I hadn’t looked at him—quite the opposite), but Chad was enjoying himself now, putting on a show for the kids who were shielding us from the playground monitors. “Who wants to see it?” he asked them. “Who wants to see Fee-lee’s tiny dick?”

  “No!” I hollered, fighting to break free.

  But Chad had already rolled me over and jerked the front of my sweatpants and underwear down with his free hand. The moment the cold air hit my hairless genitals, I went slack, like a rabbit that knows it’s about to die.

  “Oh my God!” he laughed. “Anyone got a magnifying glass?”

  The school bell rang and he released my waistband with a snap. The kids all ran for the doors and Chad trotted after them, throwing a wistful look over his shoulder, as if at a project he looked forward to finishing. By the time I got back to class, I’d decided exactly how I was going to kill him. I’d grab an aluminum bat from the equipment room and wait for him outside the back door of the school. The instant he stepped into the light, I’d swing. The bat would connect with his face and he’d hit the ground. No. One blow wouldn’t do it. It would take at least three. One to the face. One to his defensively raised arm. A third to the back of the head. When he was down, I’d adjust my grip and focus on his upper body—hammering him in the chest, the stomach, his stupid broken face. Other kids would pile out, watching in stunned silence as Chad sobbed and howled at my feet. One or two might run back inside for help, but I wouldn’t let up. I would keep on swinging until someone forced me to stop.

  At noon, I looked up from my workbook. I’d been so caught up in the fantasy, running it over compulsively in my mind, adding satisfying little details and flourishes (the angle of his smashed nose, the faint wheeze of his failing breath) that I had absolutely no idea what I’d been doing for the last hour and a half. Math, from the look of it. I tucked the book into my desk and grabbed my coat and gloves from my locker. The routine required no thought. I would be home in ten minutes, eating a sandwich in front of the television. My breath leaped from my body as I stepped out of the school, the murderous film still looping through my head. I was making gestures now, jerky little half-swings, muttering through my teeth as I stared down at Chad’s swollen, battered face, his trembling hands rising in one last plea for mercy. I beat them down. This was happening. It was real as anything I’d ever done. The surrounding houses faded, as if they were the things being imagined. I didn’t see the sheen of black ice on the road ahead. I had no awareness of the teal blue Chevy Nova bearing down on the intersection I was about to step into. In that particular moment, I wasn’t seeing anything but blood, or hearing anything but my own frenzied screams.

  The world flickered.

  I reared back in my chair, trying to make sense of the scene coming into focus around me. Kim and two strangers, sitting across from me at a small table. Stuttering lights. Bass thudding up from the floor. Across the club, a woman in a G-string stood on an elevated stage, moving her hips broadly as she danced. Kim yelled to be heard over the music, saying something that sounded like “money” to a bald man beside her who appeared to have fallen asleep. When I recognized the other person at our table as the superintendent of my building—garishly made up, in a tight black dress—I nearly shouted in surprise.

  You all right? Kim mouthed at me.

  I tried to stand up, but couldn’t catch hold of the room’s spinning edges. The glass in front of me was filled with a green liquid that glowed under the black lights of the club. My mouth tasted like hard candy and ash. As the stripper on the platform sleepily removed her G-string, the superintendent’s foot bumped up against mine under the table and stayed there. Kim started to laugh. She laughed until tears rolled down her face and the superintendent began giggling along with her. The bald man jerked awake, his eyes falling on me, and he too started to laugh. Up on the platform, the stripper was spinning around the pole, fully naked. Only when my stomach began to hurt did I realize that I was laughing harder than any of them, and none of us, our faces twisted grotesquely, as if in pain, seemed to be able to stop.

  “Where was your head?” Dad shouted. He was pacing around my bed in what looked like a hospital room. Tubes ran into my body at multiple points. Plaster immobilized my elevated leg from calf to thigh. My sister sat in a chair across the room, hugging her knees and eyeing me narrowly. The last thing I remembered was hoisting a bloody bat and drawing a bead on Chad Temple’s barely recognizable face. I couldn’t imagine how I’d ended up in the hospital, but Dad’s tone left no doubt that I had only myself to blame.

  “I’m sorry,” I croaked.

  Dad stopped pacing. “Sorry? Jesus Christ, you don’
t have to be sorry, Felix. You have to be careful. Next time you might not be so lucky.”

  “What—”

  “A car ran you down,” Eileen said, with evident pleasure.

  “Came out of nowhere,” Dad added. “That’s what the driver said. Waltzed right in front of his car without looking. If he’d have hit you at a slightly different angle …”

  I frowned at a crack in the ceiling. I had no memory of the accident. What I remembered was murdering Chad. Of the two events, that was the one that felt more real just then, more relevant.

  Eileen made an unimpressed motorboat sound with her tongue. “Does Felix have to go to school tomorrow?”

  Dad shook his head. “Oh, he’ll be out of school for a while after this.”

  “No fair.”

  “Something’s happening,” I whispered.

  The crack on the ceiling was expanding, new fissures opening and spidering out, as if under intense pressure from above.

  Dad looked up, then back down at me, confused.

  “Cracks …” I said.

  Eileen laughed and bounced in her seat. “Felix is going crazy!”

  I shrieked as a dark shape punched through the plaster, the pointed tip of something enormous. Dad put a hand on my chest. “Whoa there! Hey! We need some help in here!” He hammered the call button beside the bed.

  I flinched as two more booming impacts came, making a hole the size of a car tire in the ceiling. I tried to get away, but Dad held me down as Eileen looked on with horrified delight.

  “What’s happening?” Dad asked a nurse who’d arrived in the room.

  A massive black eye appeared in the hole and another scream ripped out of my chest. I clawed at Dad’s arm.

  “What’s wrong with him?” he shouted at the nurse, who advanced on me with a syringe. She plunged something into my IV line and I sagged, still terrified but fading.

  “Just a bad reaction to the morphine,” the nurse said.

  “No,” I moaned, fighting to stay awake. “It’s …”

  I surfaced in the dim living room and looked around wildly. This was new—being hammered back and forth in time like a paddleball. Kim was cutting her toenails beside me on the couch. I flinched as one hit me in the face. “Sorry,” she grinned wickedly. “Did I get you?”

  On the TV, a couple was French kissing, tongues grappling.

  “What day is it?” I asked Kim.

  She laughed. “Wow. You really do need to get out more.”

  “I—”

  Another jump, like one roll of film spliced onto another.

  I was back on the playground, surrounded by kids in shorts and T-shirts, the snow turned to grass. Chad leaned against a wall by the basketball courts, but he wasn’t really there. He couldn’t have been. Not after the way I’d attacked him with that bat. I limped over and he walked off in the opposite direction, pretending not to see me. “Chad!” I called to him. “Hey, wait up!” He disappeared into the school, and I followed him into the bathroom, where he wheeled on me, looking almost afraid.

  I grinned at him. “You can do it now. I don’t mind.”

  “This again?”

  I limped closer. “Come on. Do it.”

  His jaw flexed. “No.”

  “Do it!”

  He hauled back and punched me in the mouth.

  I smiled, tasting blood. “Do it again.”

  He slammed me against the bathroom wall and jerked my arm behind my back. I gasped as something popped in my shoulder.

  “There! Happy?” He shoved me to the floor.

  I got back up, my hurt arm dangling. I had earned that pain. I enjoyed it. But it wasn’t enough.

  “I—” My voice was weak. “I need you to do it again.”

  Chad stepped back, teeth bared, tears in his eyes. “What is wrong with you, man?”

  “Just one more time.”

  “Get away from me!”

  “Please …”

  “I said, get away!”

  “It’s he-re!” Kim sang as she lugged a heavy-looking cardboard box into the living area. I tried to look like I knew what was going on, like I wasn’t expecting to be hauled off again to some random moment from the past. I was shocked that we were still together. I couldn’t have been acting remotely normal. She dropped the box on the coffee table in front of me. “Well? Aren’t you excited?”

  “Uh …”

  She sighed and tore open the box, scattering Styrofoam popcorn as she pulled out a hardcover book. On the front, between my name and the title, a man and woman in silhouette straddled opposite sides of a stripper’s pole. Kim turned the book over in her hands. “It’s beautiful,” she said. “Isn’t it beautiful?”

  “Wow,” I said dutifully, recalling the bizarre strip club scene with the superintendent and the bald man. “Hey, um … have you seen my building manager lately?”

  “Nancy? No. Why?”

  “No reason,” I muttered, unsettled by the fact that they seemed to be on a first-name basis. Kim hauled out more books, piling them on the table. It was like some dark ritual. The books. The scented candle juddering on a side table. Kim insisted that I hold one and I turned to the first chapter. Pressure filled my head. The opening lines felt as if they’d been written by a stranger. I read on, but none of it was remotely familiar. Not the pace or the cadence or the setting. Even the names of the characters had changed. I closed the book, invisible talons slicing the air in front of my face.

  “It’s all different.”

  “Uh-huh,” Kim said, distracted by the book in her hands.

  My head felt incredibly heavy. I stood up and the claws became wings, bursting into sight and vanishing all around me. I made my way to the bedroom, holding the walls for support, while Kim hummed softly to herself on the sofa. The moment I sat down on the bed, the phone rang. Kim picked up and spoke in a low voice, making plans that somehow involved me. The harder I listened, the less I could hear.

  “Where was your head?”

  I jerked around. Dad’s exasperated voice had come from right beside me, as if through a hidden speaker in the wall.

  “Shut up,” I whispered back. My head was compressing, collapsing on itself until it emitted a thin whine of protest, before abruptly expanding, filling the bedroom with space, widening it into a maze of books—alphabetized stacks spanning out in every direction from the cluster of reading tables I was sitting at. The other tables were empty. My knapsack sat on the floor by my feet. I tried to focus on my statistics textbook, but something pulled my eye to the folded newspaper on the next table. A grainy photograph of Chad Temple in a striped polo shirt and shorts, smiling a big unguarded smile, surrounded by kids with swollen stomachs and tiny arms. I reached over and grabbed the paper, feeling gravity slacken on my body as I read the accompanying article. According to the author, Chad had been working overseas for a Christian aid agency when he’d been murdered in an alley behind a youth hostel. Bludgeoned to death. The motive for the killing wasn’t known, though investigations were underway. Towards the end of the article, a family friend testified to Chad’s excellent character. “He didn’t deserve this,” were the friend’s exact words. “He never hurt anyone in his life.”

  A vague pain radiated through my head. I folded the paper and surreptitiously tucked it into my knapsack, along with my statistics book.

  As I left the library and crossed the busy campus, my headache swelled to a full-blown migraine. The fact that I’d found the article at all was remarkable. I hadn’t seen Chad since grade school. I never followed the news. If I hadn’t been studying at that exact moment, at that exact table, I’d have never known what had happened to him. Back in my dorm room, I sat on my bed and reread the article, looking for clues, some hidden pattern beneath the words. He never hurt anyone in his life. At those words, my humiliation in the schoolyard returned, fresh as ever, along with everything that had followed—my rage, my guilt. Two possibilities occurred to me, both of them equally insane, both of them strangely plausi
ble. Either I really had murdered Chad in my childhood via some future proxy, or I’d simply foreseen his death, my mind framing the event in terms it could understand.

  The door swung open and I stuffed the newspaper under my pillow.

  Henry came in, looking surprised to see me. He gave me a terse nod and sat down at his desk with a thick Chemistry book. I pictured myself hoisting him out of his chair and lurching over to the window, our shared momentum carrying us through the glass and down to the paved courtyard below. He stiffened, as if receiving the image through an invisible cable.

  To counteract the horrors going on in my head, I asked him the first thing that came to me. “Are you religious, Henry?”

  It seemed like a reasonable question. We’d been roommates for two years and I hardly knew a thing about him. He remained quiet for a long moment before answering. “I’m sorry?” he said, still frowning at his book.

  “I was just wondering if you’re religious.”

  “No.” He glanced over his shoulder. “Why?”

  I shrugged. “No reason.”

  “Well, my mother is Buddhist,” he said, carefully. “And my father is Catholic.”

  “So you’re …”

  “A little of both, I guess.”

  “I see.” I smiled what I hoped looked like an innocent smile, the image of us going out the window together lingering. It made no sense. I had no reason to want to hurt him. “So …” I cleared my throat. “What are you doing this weekend?” He returned his eyes to his schoolwork. “Studying.”

  “Oh. Okay.”

  I watched him vacantly for a while, as if he were a television screen, my consciousness and body peeling apart like two segments of an orange. Henry shut his book with a sigh and got up, saying he’d forgotten something in the computer lab. When he was gone, I looked at my hands, thinking about the tiny digits hidden in birds’ wings. Phalanges. I closed and opened my fists. The usual sounds of the dormitory—a racquetball smacking a wall, an out-of-tune guitar, a peal of female laughter—were overlaid by a steady throbbing in my right ear. I rubbed at the ear, and the whole of my childhood rushed through my head, as if spun through an impossibly fast projector. The experience was over in seconds, accompanied by an odd suction and a swell of emotion so intense I could hardly bear it. Everything was there. Every sensory detail. Every lucid moment. I cried out briefly, as though in sexual pleasure, then lowered my hand from my ear, stunned not so much by the realization that my memories had been so meticulously archived, but that the archives were accessible. If I could find a way to tap into that frequency and slow down the film, I could relive my life, moment by moment. The notion should have been reassuring. But as I took the newspaper out again and looked at Chad Temple’s smiling face, it brought me no comfort at all.