by Rio Youers
My finger exerted pressure on the trigger. I closed my eyes and waited for everything to end. Instead I felt that tugging in my brain again and drew the pistol from my mouth. Lang dropped the feather and held out his hand.
“Give me the gun.”
He didn’t need to ask. I slapped it into his palm.
“Psychokinesis,” he said, caressing the grip, the barrel. “The ability to interact with, affect, or alter exterior matter through the power of thought.”
I coughed up threads of pinkish bile, tasting steel on my tongue and someone else’s blood. Lang smiled and focused on the gun’s barrel. His eyes narrowed and the brows above them hooked upward. I recalled watching Uri Geller on television when I was a kid, bending spoons and house keys out of shape. This was nothing like that. This was subtle, but real. I watched the barrel of the gun first crimp, then buckle.
“You’re a fool. A weak fool.” Lang handed the gun back to me. I looked at its warped barrel, then dropped it on the floor. Its shooting days were done.
“Monster,” I said.
“So what now?” he growled. “How are you going to stop me, Harvey? How is anyone going to stop me?”
I lowered my head and he slapped me. It was a cold, human gesture that shocked more than hurt me. I held my face and looked at him through the tears in my eyes, then directed my gaze over his shoulder. Sally lay in her cradle of red. I hoped this would be the part where I’d see her eyelids fluttering or her pinky twitching, something to assure me that she was close—she was coming. But there was nothing. She was glass.
* * *
Lang was in my mind a second later. He didn’t fly in. He wasn’t a bird, despite what he thought.
He was a spider. Still.
He crawled.
I felt the scratch of him. The skitter of him. Before he had been slick and plump, dragging his abdomen across my memories as his eight legs worked to connect damaged connection points. This time he was harder, larger, so that when he burrowed it felt like my brain was unspooling.
Am I cold, Harvey?
“Yes,” I blurted.
And deep?
I shrieked, shaking my head as if that would knock him loose. He laughed and went deeper, his stiff legs spidering through the rope of my brain. My body trembled. My eyes scrolled inside my skull and locked there. He skittered through emotions and instincts and emerged above the brainstem. The pressure was excruciating. I imagined blood vessels ballooning, weakening, all set to rupture and flood the deep tissue of my brain.
That would be too easy, Lang said. Too quick.
He wriggled down my spine, looped around my ribcage to my heart. He clambered onto it, legs braced, his swollen abdomen bouncing as everything thumped. I clamped both hands to my chest and staggered.
Now this could be fun, he said. Acute myocardial infarction. Or a heart attack, in layman’s terms. Whatever you call it, I can make it looooooong. Every beat will feel like a hammer falling, and you’ll wish each one was your last.
The strength went out of my legs. I sagged to my knees.
“Get out,” I wheezed. My heart mirrored the birdcages: choked red and full of cacophonous sound. I saw them in my peripheral vision, swinging and rattling. Small feathers bled to the floor.
I don’t think so, Harvey, Lang said. You don’t come into MY house, looking to kill ME, and expect to get away with it.
He squirmed back to my brain and started assembling memories, but bastardizing them as they formed. Here was Mom on her deathbed, not beautiful, even in her frailty, but monstrous. She had crow’s talons for hands. Black smoke plumed from her mouth and eyes. You were always such a weak little cunt, she said to me, and coughed glowing coals onto her breast. Another twisted memory: Dad standing at the top of his driveway, clutching a dead cat to his chest and holding his fist aloft. I believed in everything except you, he said. I should have thrown you into the lake when you were a baby. He disappeared and another memory formed: Sally dancing on the boardwalk while the band played “Abilene.” You were never strong enough for me, she said, and blew away in a swirl of feathers.
SALLY—
I recalled lying beneath the stars with Tatum, her mouth wrapped around my cock while blood dripped from the bullet holes in her chest. Then I was thirteen years old again, eating breakfast with Mom at Cadillac Jack’s. I had the Brando omelet while Mom feasted on a bowlful of dark, gristly flesh. Yummy cancer, she said, then pushed a bleeding tumor into her mouth and came in for a kiss.
I screamed for Sally. I needed her.
She’s broken, Harvey. She won’t find you.
My skin scrawled. My teeth rattled. Lang turned my sweetest memories into nightmares but I refused to break. I clamped my skull between my palms and roared, and the more I defied him, the harder he pushed—the more monstrous he became.
I’m going to kill her while you watch, Harvey.
I slumped onto my side, knees drawn to my chest.
No … I’m going to make you kill her.
Lang scurried deeper, squeezing his engorged body between the folds of my brain. I saw my parents hand in hand at Spirit Lake, and everything was exactly how I remembered except they had curled horns and swishing devil’s tails. And there was something else, only glimpsed: a ribbon of red light over the mountains beyond. I remembered my first day at school, where every kid wore a bloodied pig mask and we pledged allegiance but Lang’s face was on the flag. I looked out the window and briefly saw that red light again. More “memories”—snapshots of my life, every one buckled or cracked. I glimpsed that shimmering red ribbon in all of them. I thought it was Lang. His anger. His wickedness. But there was a familiar delicacy to it. Something in the way it danced.
I’d seen it before, I realized; I’d followed it through my mindscape when my memories were restored.
Sally.
Her coil had some flicker—Lang said so himself—and she was using it. Not to look for me, but to track Lang’s psychic signal. We’re connected, she’d said at the motel in Cypress. It’s a thin thread, but it’s there—it’s real. She rarely used her power because it gave away her location. I had a feeling that line of communication worked both ways.
I pushed against Lang, trying to get him to amplify his signal, but I couldn’t keep this revelation—or the hope—from my mind. He tuned in to it. I felt him recoil, then retreat.
Too late.
My head filled with red light. The ribbon flowed. It turned into a bird.
Sally found him.
She swooped.
* * *
He was snatched from my mind in a blur of red feathers. My eyes shot open and I staggered to my feet. Lang pirouetted across the room, but not deliberately this time—certainly not gracefully. He held his head and shrieked.
The birds cried. Tiny red storms.
Sally stood at the foot of the bed, head low and shoulders hunched. She glowered at Lang, using what precious power she had left to smash his wicked brain. But it was just a flicker, as Lang had said, and she faded too soon. She took a faltering step and raised one hand to her temple. Blood bubbled from her nose. This was all Lang needed. He pulled back his shoulders and hissed. Sally quailed beneath the force of it. He swept toward her, struck her twice across the face. She fell to one knee.
He went for her mind.
He was, however, completely out of my mind. If the gun hadn’t been twisted out of shape, I could have retrieved it, aimed, and blown him out of his dirty old skin. It remained the only weapon close to hand, though, and I knew I had to do something. I picked it up and ran at him, intending to drum it off his skull. It might damage him enough for Sally to regain control. Finish the job.
I didn’t get close, though; Lang turned toward me, eyebrows flared, and I bounced backward as if off an invisible wall. I went sprawling to the floor. The gun popped from my hand, spun out of sight.
Sally shuddered and moaned. Her lips were skinned back and her eyes twitched.
“SALLY!” My throat ruptur
ed; I put everything into that cry. She didn’t hear, or didn’t appear to. Lang loomed over her and increased the pressure. I staggered to my feet, approached him again, bounced off the same invisible wall.
“Watch me kill her, Harvey,” he said. “Watch me crush her fucking skull.”
Sally held her hands out. Blood trickled from the corners of her eyes.
“Help me,” she said.
I did then the only thing I could think of to do: I ran at the cages, every one of them. I opened the doors, and let the birds fly.
* * *
They didn’t attack—they were canaries and finches, dyed red, not buzzards—but they did distract. They swarmed Lang in a bristling cloud, breaking his concentration. He turned away from Sally and flapped at them, scowling. Some were batted from the air and stomped on.
In the commotion I watched Sally get to her feet. The birds whipped around her, too. They thumped off her shoulders and arms, brushed against her hair, but she didn’t flinch. Her attention was on Lang. She wiped her eyes and staggered toward him. I’d like to say that what happened next was spectacular—that Lang’s head exploded in a shower of blood and bone, or that his heart was ripped still beating from his chest. His violent life deserved a violent conclusion, but this wasn’t the case.
He didn’t even bleed.
Sally managed two shaky steps before collapsing to her knees. Urine squirted from between her legs and more blood bubbled from her nose. She didn’t lose focus, though, and Lang stiffened as she took hold of his mind. I don’t know how strong the latch was, but he made a deep gurgling sound and his upper body trembled. The birds darted and sang. Red feathers swirled around him. Sally clenched her fist and Lang dropped to one knee.
“No,” he said. “It can’t…”
She pushed. I saw it in her eyes and in the way her muscles tightened. The red bird in her mind may have had its wings broken—torn off, even—but it wasn’t dead. It hopped from its cage. Its beak was still sharp.
“The clouds don’t know,” Lang said bizarrely. “It’s all fuckles.”
I knew then that she had him. She might empty her soul in the process, but nothing was going to stop her from finishing Lang once and for all. He toppled onto his back and Sally put the pressure on. She crawled toward him, pushed harder. More blood dribbled from her nose and eyes.
“Over,” she snarled. “No more hate.”
Her hate, or his … I didn’t know. Both, I supposed. He reached for her, maybe to strangle her—shit, maybe even to caress her—but his arm flopped loosely to the floor. His eyes rolled. They wept.
“No more,” Sally said.
“Hate,” Lang said, as if to finish Sally’s sentence. He then uttered his final words: “Fucking bird.”
It wasn’t quick. It was the mental equivalent of smothering someone with a pillow. In movies this is done in seconds. In real life it takes much longer—in this case eight-and-a-half minutes. Lang twitched and moaned. At one point he tried to sit up. Then, finally, and without fanfare, his eyes closed and he never moved again.
A bird landed on his chest, unexciting but felicitous.
This is how I’ll remember you, I thought.
Sally rolled onto her side and wept.
* * *
I don’t know how long it was before the birds found their way out of the basement and dispersed throughout the house. The first I knew was that I heard the music from upstairs again. Something from the Great American Songbook. That’s what got me moving.
I stepped around Lang—broken, unquestionably—and crouched beside Sally. I touched her shoulder, then her hair.
“Sally … it’s me: Harvey. I’m here.”
She wept behind her hands. Didn’t look at me.
“You’re safe now.”
I asked if she could walk. She didn’t reply, made no effort to get up, so I scooped her into my arms and staggered to the steps. If I hadn’t been so weak, I would have made it out of the house and to the car without stopping. As it was, I rested four times. In the kitchen, I found a non-red tablecloth to cover Sally’s nakedness. We drank water. Two tall glasses each. I cupped her face. It complemented my palm perfectly.
“Do you remember me?” I said.
“I don’t want to remember anything,” she said.
I carried her down the driveway with a fierce sunrise lining the horizon. By the time I reached the car, it had robed the lake and Lang’s house. It soaked through the trees.
Everything red.
I drove in the opposite direction.
Moment: How It Begins
Four years have passed since you last wrote in your Book of Moments. Most of that time was spent going through the motions. From average Monday to slightly-better-than-average Friday, you’d get up, eat breakfast (quinoa flakes with blueberries and almond milk), then roll into your day. The evenings were spent with Miranda (Sally, as you knew her then), reading, listening to music, making love. Life was … you know … life. It was simple, but you dug it.
The last few months have kicked the ass out of almost everything. The moments have gone from average to unimaginable. That’s putting it mildly. You haven’t been reshaped—you’re still you—but you have been adjusted. You’re like the feather in your pocket: a symbol of justness and determination. Damaged but storied.
This Book of Moments is similarly damaged, in part from having journeyed with you across the nation in search of a girl you couldn’t remember, but mainly from having been read so many times. You gave it to Miranda, hoping it would trigger some memories, but it didn’t. “I’m in this, but it’s like reading about somebody else,” she said, which is exactly how you felt when you discovered it in Dad’s bunker. She’s read the second half—the Sally years—eight times, but nothing has stirred. On her last read-through, she pointed out the several blank pages at the end of the book.
“You should fill these in,” she said. “One final moment.”
So here you are, with your unusual second-person narrative, to better detach yourself from emotion and focus on memory.
It is, after all, what we’re made of. When we think of the soul, we imagine an ethereal essence separate from the physical. That’s exactly what it is, but this is also true: “Soul” is the collective noun for memories.
* * *
Late afternoon, the sky smoky with cloud, except for a patch to the west where the sun hangs in a spill of color. You sit on the porch, guitar on knee, the fretboard as familiar to your left hand as the shape of Miranda’s face. She sits in the chair next to yours. Michael Jackson is curled on her lap in a near-perfect circle. You have him on weekends, then he goes back to Marzipan, who adores him. She has replaced the pictures of spooky nineteenth-century dudes in her restaurant with pictures of Michael Jackson—the cat and the superstar. People come from miles around to have their photograph taken with him.
A breeze whirls along the porch boards and a loose shutter taps softly. It has already become a familiar sound. You moved into Dad’s house a few weeks ago. You made it comfortable—a place for you and Miranda to feel at home, but it isn’t home. It is now and will always be Dad’s house. You don’t have a problem with that; the memories are mostly magical. You just can’t live here.
It needs to be a place of rest, you realize, like Dad’s grave. He is buried at Rose Hill, next to Mom. You visit most days, usually with your guitar, and you sit with the whisper of the lake and the wind piping through the sculpture, and sing their favorite songs. Something else: Totally stealing Dad’s idea, you leave little notes—memories, glimpses of the life they lived, and what they meant to you. The last one, placed beneath Dad’s headstone, reads:
The distance between boulders is greater than your little legs can manage. You hesitate, then feel yourself being lifted into his arms. You look at his face as he strides effortlessly across the gap and know he is your father. You hold him tighter. He never stopped carrying you.
“Play my favorite song,” Miranda says.
You do. “Ruby Tuesday”—the Melanie Safka version, with its spirited chorus. Miranda only knows it’s her favorite song because you told her. She closes her eyes and listens, but doesn’t sing along.
“It’s quite dark,” she says when you finish. “And sad. I should get a different favorite song.”
“I can help you with that.”
You laid Sally Starling to rest and Miranda Farrow was born. Or reborn. She doesn’t have to hide anymore. You obtained a copy of her birth certificate from Tennessee Vital Records, then got her a social security card and driver’s license. She has an identity for the first time in nine years.
What she doesn’t have is a past.
Dominic Lang said that she might have a few of her own memories ghosting around, but that she’ll never be the woman she was. It’s still unclear how much of her mind he damaged with his power, not to mention the excessive dosage of antipsychotics. She is present enough to know her name, and there are snapshots of her parents, her childhood—a tenuous sense of self. She recalls elements of your relationship (“You used to have long hair,” she said to me last week), and knows you would never hurt her.
She knows you love her, but doesn’t remember what that means.
Yet.
You have told her as much of her past as you know, not all at once, but in reasonable increments. You assured her that her parents loved her immeasurably. “They weren’t always the best parents,” you said. “But you were the most precious thing in their life, and they did everything they could to protect you.” You showed her the news stories about the “Ragin’ Redneck” couple that waged war against the mobsters that disfigured them. Steve-O and Tatum have achieved cult status. Their faces adorn Internet memes and wallpapers and T-shirts, and their unofficial social media pages have “fans” and “followers” by the millions. Your favorite image is the Scarface movie poster with Tatum’s face Photoshopped in place of Al Pacino’s.