Drawn

by James Hankins

  She stood there a moment and he knew she had no idea what to do. He felt a little bad again.

  “I understand,” he said. “I really do. I’m sorry things happened this way.”

  She still seemed unsure, like she should sit down out of principle, but of course she didn’t want to.

  “I’m not going to sit down,” she said, “but not because of…because of…the way you look. I just don’t want to spend time with someone so rude.”

  “Like I said, I understand, I really do. Have a good night.”

  She stood there a moment longer. “I’d feel sorry for you,” she finally said, “but you’re doing a bang-up job of that yourself.”

  She walked away and though Boone felt a bit like a jerk, it didn’t matter. This was never going to end any differently. He’d merely saved them both time.

  Kenny walked up, put another beer on the bar in front of Boone. “That looked like it went well,” he said.

  “We’re going up to my apartment after I finish this beer. Turns out she’s got a Phantom of the Opera fetish.”

  “Hope you can sing.”

  “I meant the movie version, not the musical, Kenny. What the hell’s wrong with you?”

  “What? It’s a good show. I saw it with my mom. You should see it.”

  Boone said nothing.

  “Shit, Boone, I’m sorry.”

  Kenny wasn’t the brightest squirrel in the forest, so Boone didn’t care that his friend hadn’t considered the fact that Boone wouldn’t actually see much of the production, much less enjoy its thematic elements. He shrugged.

  “I’m an idiot, Boone. Let me make it up to you. Come over for dinner tonight.”

  “You told me you can’t cook.”

  “I can’t, but Susie can.”

  “Susie’s nine and a half months pregnant. She’s not going to cook for either of us. When the hell is this baby gonna come already, for God’s sake?”

  “The doctors are inducing her within the next day or two. Anyway, we can order in.”

  “Thanks, Kenny, but no thanks.”

  “Come on, it’s only four blocks away.”

  “Is it half a block away?”

  Kenny sighed.

  “Is it three-quarters of a block away?”

  “No, Boone, it’s not.”

  “Right,” Boone said. “It’s four blocks away, which means I’m not coming over. But it doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate the offer. Again.”

  Kenny picked up a rag and started wiping the already-immaculate surface of the bar. “How do you live like this? I couldn’t do it.”

  “Fortunately for me, most people deliver.”

  “So you’re never gonna come for dinner?”

  “Sure I will. As soon as you and Susie and the little whatever-you-have move onto my block. So what’s the damage?”

  “There’s a lot of ways I could answer that,” Kenny said, with a level of cleverness and perception that surprised Boone.

  “How about telling me what I owe you for the beer?”

  BOONE LEFT THE bar, turned right, and walked twenty feet to the stairs that led up to the apartment floors. He considered going on an adventure, which, for him, meant continuing past the entrance and walking down to the corner. From there he’d turn right, take the next right, then the next, and after the final right turn he’d wind up right back here. To shake things up he could walk the other direction and make four left turns, but he’d still end up right where he was standing. He did that sometimes, to stretch his legs and see the four corners of his world from a different perspective. But Boone simply could not get himself to cross the street. This city block of Chelsea was his universe. From Cherry Street to Broadway, between Second and Third Streets. Anything he couldn’t get here he had delivered. Fortunately for an agoraphobe like him, he could get nearly everything he needed brought to him if he was willing to pay a delivery charge. And for places that didn’t deliver, Boone could call one of the neighborhood kids—one of the ones who didn’t call him Frankenstein—and for a few bucks the kid would pick up or drop off whatever Boone needed.

  Boone climbed up to the second floor, fumbled around with his key and the lock, and entered his apartment. Because he had significant loss of sight in one eye and no sight in the other, everyday tasks presented more of a challenge to him than to most people. Some things he did purely by sight, but for most activities he used a combination of sight and, like a blind person, touch. He’d feel around for what he needed rather than simply look for it. He used two hands to do the job of one. It was frustrating because he always felt as though whatever he needed to find was just beyond the edge of his vision or, worse, was right in the center of it but was as invisible to him as if it weren’t there at all. So he’d turn his head and try to identify whatever it was using his peripheral vision, which often worked but made him feel like a pigeon, cocking his head this way and that to see a crumb of bread on the ground.

  Boone was passing through his living room toward the kitchen when something registered on the edge of his vision—of course it was on the edge of his vision—something a little…off. He stopped, did his pigeon thing, then realized that a picture on the wall was crooked. His walls were covered with framed photographs Boone had taken before his accident, back when he was a professional photographer, and a damned good one. A photo he’d taken of a rainbow over the South American rain forest, snapped from the top of a kapok tree, had made the cover of National Geographic. A few dozen of his other pictures had made it into other prestigious magazines as well, pictures taken all over the world—back when his world extended beyond a single city block. The picture on the wall that was now hanging crooked was one of a series of four he’d taken during a camping trip at Yosemite National Park, in California. The first was of a beautiful, gnarled oak tree. The second depicted a red-tailed hawk gliding through clouds gilded by a late-afternoon sun. The third photo was of a bear crouching by the edge of a river swollen after a hard rain. This photo had been taken from the safety of the opposite bank of the river. The final photograph, the crooked one, was a shot of a mountain peak with a crown of dark clouds resting on its head. Boone couldn’t see the photos well anymore—they lost all detail, even if he looked out of the corner of his eye—and this both saddened and frustrated him. Rolling a jeep off that muddy, slippery dirt road in Costa Rica had robbed him of more than nearly half his face and the better part of his vision.

  Boone straightened the photo. In the kitchen, he turned on talk radio, as he always did, and made himself a tuna sandwich, which he ate at the table, barely listening to the voices filling his kitchen. He didn’t care what they were saying, just that someone was there, talking.

  After putting his dirty dishes in the sink, he walked back into the living room, intending to lie on the couch, close his eyes, and listen to an audiobook. He stopped. He almost hadn’t seen it because it was on his right side now, his blind side. He turned his body and cocked his head. Yup, he was right. The damned mountain picture was crooked again. He straightened it, waited a moment to see if it would tilt to one side again, and when it didn’t, he dropped onto the couch below it. Using a remote control, he turned on the CD player and heard a Morgan Freeman sound-alike say, “Chapter Six.…”

  HALFWAY THROUGH CHAPTER Nine, the picture of the mountain fell from the wall. It landed on Boone’s chest, its corner digging painfully into his sternum.

  “What the hell?”

  Boone sat up, the picture in his hands. He turned it over and tried to see whether there was anything wrong with the wire on the back of the frame, but he couldn’t see it well enough. It felt fine to his touch, though. He shook his head and put the painting on the coffee table in front of him. He stood and ran his fingers over the picture holder nailed to the wall. That felt fine, too. He nearly hung the photo back up but decided he didn’t want it to mysteriously fall again and wake him up in the middle of the night.

  Strange how the picture kept falling.

  CHA
PTER THREE

  “OTHER THAN THAT, is there something wrong with the clock?”

  The saleswoman gave Nathan Zeltner a patient smile, the kind he’d seen too much of lately. They seemed to start when he turned seventy and in the two years since he’d seen it more and more. It was a smile that said, “You’re old and probably not very sharp anymore, so I’ll humor you, using the same smile that I’d use on a second grader.” It was not a smile that said, “I realize that you may have fought in wars, earned a respectable living for four decades, and built a house with your own two hands for your wife and son, so I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt that your gears are still grinding away in that old noggin of yours.”

  “Nope, nothing wrong,” Nathan said. “Just that it ticks.”

  “A lot of clocks tick, sir.”

  Nathan could not bring himself to return her patient smile. “I realize that—” he looked at her nametag “—Diane, but I don’t want one that ticks. I want it to keep time nice and quietly without letting me know every second that it’s doing it. I want it to do its job without bragging about it.” He could feel frustration creeping into his voice but did nothing to stop it. “When I want to know the clock is working, I’ll look at it, see that the hands have moved since the last time I looked at it, and I’ll know it’s working. I don’t need a constant ticking to tell me. Okay?”

  The plastic smile melted a bit. “Okay,” she said. “Do you have a receipt?”

  “Nope. I didn’t buy it. I won it at bingo night. I just want to exchange it for one that doesn’t tick.”

  She didn’t understand. He couldn’t expect her to. She was young and had a lot of years ahead of her. She probably had a husband, maybe a toddler or two. The soundtrack in her house consisted of life sounds—conversation, cartoons, laughter, games, singing, the bustle of busy, happy lives. She couldn’t know that Nathan’s soundtrack was the hum of his refrigerator and a persistent drip from the bathroom faucet. He didn’t want to add the lonely, incessant ticking of a clock.

  “So how about it, Diane?” he asked. “Can I trade this thing in?”

  The saleswoman’s smile, which had already begun to melt, morphed into a pained wince. “I’m sorry, sir, but without a receipt I can’t do an exchange.”

  “Look, there’s a price tag on this. Says it cost twenty-six bucks. How about I take that little twelve-dollar plug-in clock there and you keep the difference.”

  She shook her head slowly. The wince remained in place. “I’m sorry.”

  Nathan slipped the clock back into his plastic supermarket shopping bag and walked away.

  Nathan used a fork to slide the no-longer-frozen dinner from the microwave onto a plate. He carried it, with a glass of iced tea, into the living room and set the food on the table beside his recliner. He settled into the chair, pulled the plate onto his lap, and took a bite of steaming Swanson’s Salisbury steak. As he chewed, he looked up at the bingo clock, which he’d hung on the wall above the TV. It wasn’t a bad-looking clock, with a dark wood frame and a shiny brass face. And he couldn’t complain about the price. As long as he didn’t put in batteries, it was fine.

  Nathan chewed on a mouthful of soft, gummy corn and reached for the TV remote control. It was time for Judge Somebody to scold another cheating ex-boyfriend who left his ex-girlfriend holding the bag on some or other debt.

  NATHAN IS WALKING through the woods. A thick fog, gray in the gathering dusk, makes it hard to see where he’s going. The grayness is all around, a heavy haze of it, a cool damp on his skin, the trees darker-gray columns in a lighter-gray void. Despite the cool fog, he’s sweating all over. The leaves crunch under his slippers—why did he wear house slippers into the woods? He’s moving as fast as his aging legs will carry him. He’s listening for something, a voice, he thinks, but he’s not sure whose. He just knows he wants to get closer to it, to the voice, whosever it is.

  He slips on a moss-slick log, nearly falls. He’s barely into his seventies, but he’s known others who’ve broken a leg at his age. They never get around quite the same again. Still, he hurries on, stumbling now and then on a root or rock.

  There it is again, a voice from somewhere in the fog, and Nathan thinks he recognizes it. And now he wants, needs, to reach it more than ever. He has no idea if he’s heading in the right direction. The trees, which look more like ghosts of trees than real bark-and-branch trees, all look the same. He might be moving in circles while that voice drifts away forever. He desperately doesn’t want that to happen. The voice calls again and Nathan thinks he’s right about it. He’s tiring but he keeps going.

  Then he sees him, far ahead, moving between the trees, a gray shape drifting through the fog. It’s him. It has to be. Nathan tries to call to him, “Jeremy,” but the word comes out in a wheezy croak. The figure pauses for a moment, almost as if it heard him, before moving on. The shape calls out again, distantly, in a voice that could be Jeremy’s, “Are you there?”

  Jeremy is swallowed again by the darkening gray. Nathan’s heart is threatening to explode. His legs are failing. He’s failing. But he pushes on.

  Very faint now, from far away, the words barely able to reach him through the thick curtain of fog, “Help me.”

  Nathan steps wrong, into a depression, and he falls. He labors to his feet, the ankle he just twisted screaming at him. He spits out dirt and limps on. Ahead, Jeremy slows and begins to turn. In a moment Nathan will see his face—the face he hasn’t seen in so long. But the ground shakes suddenly as though a bomb exploded somewhere under the forest floor, somewhere not far enough away. Another low, distant boom. The leaves quiver on the trees. Another boom. They are regularly spaced. And getting closer, like giant footsteps. Jeremy cries out in abject fear and turns away again. He begins to run.

  “No,” Nathan cries. He presses on, ignoring the pain in his twisted ankle. Ahead, Jeremy falls and crawls in a panic through the dead leaves before pushing to his feet again and stumbling on. The forest shakes behind Nathan, as whatever is following gets closer with every terrible, thunderous stride. Whatever it is, it will overtake Nathan soon. He can only hope he slows it down enough for Jeremy to escape.

  He crests a small hill and becomes aware of a sound, a low rumble, different from the crashing footsteps behind him. It’s a raging river, its rumble growing unnaturally louder until it sounds like a subway train passing through the trees just beyond the hazy edge of his vision.

  And there’s Jeremy now, up ahead, suddenly standing still, a ghost in the fog. The thing in the forest is nearly upon Nathan. He hears its freight-train breaths between earth-shaking footsteps. Ahead, through the roar of the water, he barely hears Jeremy say again, “Help.” Before Nathan can get close enough to see him clearly, the ghostly figure disappears, falling from view.

  The splash of water is terrible to hear. Nathan screams, falls to his knees, crawls across hard rocks and sharp sticks, to the river’s edge. The thing in the forest, which had been about to emerge from the trees, had fallen silent when Jeremy hit the water. The whole forest is silent but for the sound of the river.

  Nathan wants to wake up, wants desperately to wake up. But he’s unable to. It’s killing him, not being able to break out of this nightmare, but he just can’t. So for a long time, far too long, he kneels there by the river, in the fog, his face in his hands, cold and alone.

  THE FIRST THING Nathan saw when he opened his eyes was his new clock hanging on the wall. Below that, on top of the TV, a framed photo of his son, Jeremy—Jeremy looking handsome and immortal in his Marine blue dress uniform. Nathan shivered. His skin was damp with sweat, like in the dream. And Jeremy was gone. Like in the dream.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  “I SAW IT first.”

  “The hell you did.”

  “The hell I didn’t. Let go.”

  But Miguel wasn’t about to let go. He hadn’t eaten since he’d given his best puppy eyes to a well-dressed couple outside a Dunkin’ Donuts that morning and they’d given him a
big handful of change. Not enough for a breakfast sandwich, but enough for a doughnut and orange juice. That was the best meal he’d had in a week, but it didn’t make up for the lunch he couldn’t scrounge today. So Miguel would be damned if he was going to let go of the McDonald’s bag he’d rescued from a trash can. From the weight of it, he guessed there was half a sandwich of some kind inside—maybe a cheeseburger, maybe a chicken sandwich—along with a handful of fries. It would be days before he came across a find this good again.

  “Do I have to kick the shit out of you?” the other boy asked. He was half a head taller than Miguel, with a thicker body. Probably a year older.

  “You can try,” Miguel said.

  They stared each other down. Miguel had seen a nature film in fifth grade, two years ago, back when he used to go to school. In it, two hyenas played tug-of-war with a gazelle’s leg, both of them snarling, blood frothing at their mouths. It had given Miguel nightmares. He thought he and the other boy probably looked like those hyenas now.

  “Or,” he said to the bigger boy, “we could share it.”

  The boy narrowed his eyes. Maybe he was going to make a final play for the food. Maybe he was thinking about Miguel’s suggestion. He nodded.

  “So let go,” the boy said.

  “You first.”

  “No, you.”

  Miguel hesitated. He shifted his eyes to the alley behind the boy. If the kid chose to run, Miguel thought he’d be able to catch him, tackle him from behind and take back the food. He dropped his hand from the greasy paper bag. The boy looked a bit surprised, which Miguel understood. Trust was harder to find on the streets than a crisp ten-dollar bill.

  “Let’s sit over there,” the boy said.

  Miguel followed the bigger boy to a dark doorway. Peeling brown paint, black shadows. Miguel slowed his steps. The boy sat on the grimy concrete stairs and put the bag beside him.