by Rhys Thomas
Sarah stared at him.
He made his mouth into an O and exhaled.
“I get it now, and I do love you,” he said. “But it’s not enough, is it?”
A car rushed past outside. Why was he doing this? The coward, the Sam who wanted a simple life, smiled from some deep, dark place inside. He swallowed and said, unable to stop himself now, “Just because I love you, it doesn’t mean I can’t be happier without you.”
31
HE COULDN’T REMEMBER the drive home. He peered into the living room, at the stillness and neatness, and a strange sensation of nausea crept up on him. The light was harsh and the house cold. He went through to the kitchen and leaned on the counter. Taking a glass from the cupboard, he poured himself some water and gulped it down.
“I miss you,” he said, to the vision of his parents in his mind, fully aware of how crazy and stupid this was.
The out-of-control feeling was back. He regulated his breath and closed his eyes and counted to ten. Then he threw the glass as hard as he could against the wall. At the breakfast bar he untucked one of the tall stools and took it into the living room. He calmly turned it on its side, legs facing the wall, and smashed it through the screen of the TV with such force the glass spat back into his face.
He remembered seeing a documentary about people living close to Chernobyl and how, on the night it happened, they sensed what felt like tiny bits of sand being fired against their skin when, in fact, it was gamma radiation.
Sam stepped back into the middle of the living room and examined the stool, two-thirds suspended in midair, the other third through the screen and out the back. He didn’t feel any better. Making his way back to the kitchen, he unlocked the side door into the garage and took from one of the metal racks a stack of folded-up cardboard boxes and the tape gun.
Ascending the ladder to the attic, he switched on the lights. He had grown to hate this place. He filled box after box without stopping, without hesitating, for three hours straight. Inside himself there was a staccato cascading. Before taping up the final box, he noticed an eight-page preview comic of Y: The Last Man. In the hallway he took it out and flicked through it. In the same box he found a reprint of The Death of Superman. There were all the Akira books. There were lots of Suicide Squad comics, Hellboy, Neonomicon, We3, From Hell, 100 Bullets. He loved these comics so much. They had done so much for him.
He taped up the final box, and when he loaded it into his car he looked at all the boxes, filling the inside to the brim, but even so it didn’t seem like much. His eyes and throat stung with hidden dust, and he opened the car window on his way.
When considering his chosen superpower, he used to think if things were getting too hard he could blink and everyone in his field of vision would disappear. He would love that so much—to be alone, to go back to, if not a happy life, a life he could bear.
He felt perfectly calm as he arrived at the tip. He pulled up at the paper recycling area and started unloading the boxes, untaping them, tossing the contents over, quick as he could, throwing them jerkily, as if they were covered in disease.
He suddenly remembered exactly how good the first volume of Y: The Last Man was. What an awesome premise for a story: the death of every creature with a Y chromosome, apart from one man and his pet monkey. He’d read it in springtime, season-change weather, the sun higher in the sky. Now his breathing faltered again and the rain, falling in sheets, was freezing. His T-shirt provided little protection from it. He started opening the remaining boxes but couldn’t remember which one it was in. It was dark and he was in the shadow of one of the huge metal containers. Pulling the tape back, he felt a certain degree of panic. He’d just keep that one. But he couldn’t find it. He upended a box, then another, then another, the comics spilling all over the concrete. He kicked them aside but to no avail. What if he’d already thrown it over the top and into the container? He looked up. The container was red and blistered with rust.
“Just forget it,” he said aloud.
He tried to stay calm, but his lip was shaking and he put his hands to his head and grabbed two clumps of hair and started pulling as hard as he could. His eyes were pinched so tight they hurt. He threw away the few strands that had come out of his scalp and from the corner of his eye caught them drifting up and away toward the orange light. He went down on his knees to find the comic, but it wasn’t there, and then started punching the sides of his head, fighting back the tears, determined not to be pathetic and cry. He could feel the last vestiges of sanity slipping into the distance as he ran at the container, brought his fist up and smashed his knuckles into the side as hard as he could. He felt the bones crunch and the pain shoot up his arm. He lay down in the soaking mud for a second. It was dark and late and nobody was around, so he stayed there.
At last he sat up and threw what was left of his beloved comics over the lip of the container. In the last box he came to the first book of Sandman, the book that had pulled him back into the world that day in his neighbor’s deserted garden. He tilted it toward the light and turned to the last story, about Death. How many nights had he gone to sleep with this book lying next to him? He watched it flutter upward, a broken butterfly, and time seemed to slow with the image of the book coming open, the leaves flapping, the backlight of orange halogen. Then it was gone and the rain picked up.
Shivering in the car, he sat for a moment, soaked through. His chest was tight and it felt as if fingers were at his throat. The unnatural, prickly sweating and light-headedness. And then the feeling of impending death. His mind fell back, years crumbling as his memory accessed the coping mechanisms for panic attacks. He imagined a forest glade, bright sunlight, the cool shade under the eaves of the trees at the fringe.
But the Andromeda Galaxy was on a collision course with our own Milky Way, comets from the time the universe started hurtled across space in never-ending streams, the sun was going to burn out. Eventually the whole universe will tear itself apart.
He thought of the magical pond on the mountainside. And his mum and dad. What were people going to do when they recognized him on the street as the weirdo who dressed up as a superhero? What was he going to do now that he was a freak in the only place he felt safe—his hometown? What was he going to do without Sarah?
In the night he read every road sign under his breath twice and blinked with a little nod as he passed every lamppost.
He pulled up outside the community center, where his friends were camping out for a Call of Duty video game night, and ran to the front door, pushing through it with his shoulder. In the hallway blue light glowed through the square of reinforced glass windows set into the double doors. Inside, banks of screens stood on a fold-out table, computerized images of war, with steel frames draped with black netting and plastic vines like camouflage around the center of the room. There was a table of supplies: chocolate bars and kettles and milk and bottles of Coke. In the center of it all men in sleeping bags lay on their fronts on top of camping mats, ratcheted up on their elbows, their gaming controls held up before them. Sam sidled round, found Blotchy and stood in front of him.
“Hey!”
Blotchy tried to crane his neck to see around Sam’s form.
“Congratulations, you got what you wanted,” said Sam, leaning over him.
“You’re not covering us,” someone shouted.
Blotchy’s glasses caught the reflection of the screens and the rest of his face was in near darkness, but Sam felt his eyes behind the lenses.
“Don’t ever speak to me again. You hated it that I was going to be happy, and now I’m not and I just came here to say I don’t need you. I never needed you, and never speak to me again.”
Sam gave a final nod from his head down to the center of his chest, and then he made for the door.
The night outside was even colder now. He started shaking uncontrollably. He couldn’t remember ever being this angry.
Something had snapped.
“Sam,” a voice called from behind.
Tango. Sam reached the car and got in, slamming the door.
“What’s happened?”
Tango’s voice was muffled through the glass. The anger growing and growing, Sam screeched back up the ramp that led to the road. There was a flash of light and the sounding of a deep horn, the screeching of brakes and tires squealing as a lorry swerved across to the other side of the road. Sam put his foot down, his back end fishtailing, his heart beating so hard it shook his bones, and tore off.
He imagined the scene, Blotchy laughing to himself, emailing the newspaper, telling them about Sam and his superhero alter ego. He accelerated up the streets, the wind throwing the rain into vortices as he cut through the night.
He picked up the photo on the passenger seat, of his family, and glimpsed at it whenever he passed under a streetlight. They’d want you to be happy, people had said to him when it happened, but he couldn’t be happy. That path was not open to Sam. He wished it would come to him, the memory of the day, like a hidden door sliding open, but he knew it never would. The day the picture was taken was lost in the synapses, data corrupted. The past was gone forever.
32
THE LOW DREAD returned immediately when he woke up. He’d finally fallen asleep at four in the morning and now it was half one in the afternoon.
Many years before, when he was fourteen or fifteen, he had fallen head over heels in love with a girl at school. It happened at the end of May, those presummer days when languid sunsets through moist air give a soft focus to the world. Hormones firing in such floods as to be almost overwhelming, he would sit on the riverbank tossing pebbles into the gentle water and think to himself, I will never forget this. This is the most important thing in the world. He saw adults walk the world and they were serious, distracted, tired-looking, and he thought to himself, I must never be like that. I must never forget the importance of true love.
And he hadn’t forgotten it. But at last he understood why love must, in the end, fade away, how difficult it makes the business of living life. He knew now why the adults of his youth had appeared as they had. Love was too hard.
He was supposed to be meeting Mr. Okamatsu in a couple of hours for the trip to Japan, so he needed to get out of the house until that time had passed, just in case he showed up. He pictured the little café at the seaside, his perfect hiding spot. He got showered and changed and went out into the driveway, noticing subconsciously a gold Lexus parked opposite. Sam went to open his car door when the realization of what was happening dawned. There was the sound of footsteps clicking on the driveway, a flock of birds flew out of the tree in his garden and a strong hand pressed itself into Sam’s shoulder.
“I have come to collect you, Sam,” he said.
In the cold air, the sound of a magpie cawing from a rooftop.
“I can’t go.”
“The tickets are bought. You are coming to Japan with me.”
His light-sensitive glasses were half-clear in the winter light.
“I have a family, Sam,” said Mr. Okamatsu, firmly. “I cannot lose my job because of you.”
Sam stared at him, the energy in his bones singing. A family.
* * *
From the drawer of his bedside table he took the fireproof security box where he kept his passport, and also removed the spare mobile phone, locking the box and double-checking it was secure. When he came back downstairs, he found Mr. Okamatsu staring into the living room, at the stool he’d smashed into the TV, but he said nothing.
His hand hurt like hell, his legs felt weak and cold sweat ran down his ribs as they drove to the airport. They didn’t speak, but Mr. Okamatsu listened to his classical music compilation album, just as he always did on the business trips Sam had taken with him in the past.
He checked his phone for messages from Sarah, hoping that maybe something had changed, but nothing came and he knew he just had to accept it.
They got to Heathrow and checked in and were ushered through to the departure lounge and it was all dreamlike, the sci-fi sweeps of the steel, the mezzanines, the walls of screens and all the people crisscrossing the atriums, like a moving photograph. His mind felt blurry, fuzzy, not quite able to accept things. He followed Mr. Okamatsu, who moved gracefully between the crowds with his small suitcase on wheels. Sam thought of all these people, their lives, their destinations, and this interchange where they amassed. He should have been to more places. They’d want you to be happy.
Huge plate-glass windows looked out onto the runway and here was the first time Sam saw the planes and reality returned. They were so massive. They were impossible and awful. The one nearest the window, the nose so close to the glass it was almost touching, had rust on it where the bolted-on panels met.
Mr. Okamatsu took a seat on a bench and Sam joined him. He swore he could feel the temperature of his blood dropping and the chemicals inside it separating out. The low burn of fear. Mr. Okamatsu had lied about the flight time, because he guessed Sam would try to escape, but even so their gate was soon announced and Sam had no choice but to follow his boss. He never thought he would set foot in an airport again and the fact that he was in one now made no sense. Something didn’t connect. Even thinking about Sarah didn’t work. No matter how hard he tried to focus on anything, the thought slipped from his mind as the irrationality of his fear swelled, as the conjoined histories replayed in his mind, over and over.
On the one side he was in London, on the other he was in an airport in Brazil, his family tugging their luggage along, the twins hopping and jumping. The two moments overlapped—Sam and his impending flight, and what was about to happen to his family. He would arrive at the door of the plane and take his seat, just in the same way they had. He would roll across a strip of concrete and the physics of flight would bear him up into the air, the plane’s angle shifting so that it was no longer in line with the angle of the Earth but a curve upward into the atmosphere, just as their plane had.
“I need to go to the toilet,” he said, his voice croaky.
He locked himself into a cubicle. He could hear his own breath, as if his ears had pressurized, and he remembered something. He remembered the day outside with Steve and Sally, the spring day with blue skies and cotton-white clouds. Well, isn’t this a lovely day? she’d said. And Steve there, a red balloon on the end of a stick brilliant against the blue of the sky, his voice slow and his eyes on fire. Don’t you wish it could stay like this forever and ever?
But that’s not how things work. He’d lost Sarah, and his future was nowhere. The trauma around which he’d cobbled together what passed for a life spread through him like a virus.
In his pocket he felt the lump of his spare mobile phone that he’d kept all these years. He switched it on. The blue screen flashed to life. He’d used this phone so many times. Before he met Sarah, he used it every day. Then it was every few days, then every week and then hardly at all. It could no longer make calls, but he needed it now. He needed to check his voice mail.
* * *
His mother spoke first and she said, Hey, Sam, extending the word hey: heeeey, Sam, just checking in on you.
In the background Steve and Sally were laughing and talking, but Sam had never been able to decipher what they were saying.
Our flight to Manaus is delayed, so we’re just calling to see if you’re okay. Hope you’re having a good time in the Beacons—examining your mud.
His dad’s voice called, How’s the mud studies going?
Sam imagined them huddled around their bags in the airport with the bluster and flux of all the people rushing to be rocketed across the planet, how happy they seemed, and how this made Sam happy because they were happy there, right at the end.
The call was just as long as it was, less than a minute. They’d been in the airport and just made a quick call to check in. To say goodb
ye. Bye, honey, speak to you soon, be good, she said. Bye, Sam, he heard Steve shout. Bye, Sam, called his dad, then Sally, then it became a game, and in his mind’s eye each time they shouted Bye, Sam an image of whoever shouted it appeared in his vision, each overlaying the last: his mum, Steve, Sally, his dad, Steve, Sally, his mum; Bye, Sam. Bye, Sam.
Bye, Sam.
He saw them, burning up, a tide of fire washing across them.
The phone was held in his left hand by his side, clutched tight, and the sound beyond of an airplane taking off put a frost in his blood. The sound rushed and filled, penetrating deep into his core, a sound so loud it might shake him apart, then it was cut to nothing by the door swinging and a voice.
“Sam,” it said. “It is time to go.”
* * *
He placed the palms of his hands calmly down on each armrest and pushed his head back into the seat. He took a deep breath. The sound of things ramping up, the quick shudders across the structure, the sight of the enormous wing and the huge cone of the engine. How things might have been different if he’d answered that phone and spoken to them one last time.
Mr. Okamatsu, sitting next to him, leaned across and did something Sam did not expect. He put his hand on his forearm and said, “It’s going to be okay. This is normal.”
Sam turned, but Mr. Okamatsu’s face was staring straight ahead.
He saw his signet ring, with the carved lizard motif.
This was happening. He was on board and though his mouth was dry, and his fingers were digging into the armrests, he was, at least, on board. He closed his eyes a moment and felt the acceleration. He’d forgotten the power of the thrust and the moment when you hold your breath, the way the world floats away beneath you, the horizon shifting as you turn, and suddenly the view from above the clouds is beautiful, dreamlike, like something special that was forgotten at some unknown moment in our history, that day we let go of the rocket tree.