Breath

by Jackie Morse Kessler

  Could a single act have such repercussions?

  (none saw me)

  Xander almost had it. For just a moment, he saw not the human façade but the truth taking flight, a glimpse of wings beating against the sky. He thought he could hear, somewhere beneath the music, the sound of a beep—a steady rhythm, a backbeat to the melody of the guitar, to the harmony of Death’s voice.

  “I formulate infinity,” Death sang, “stored deep inside of me.”

  Xander felt like he was standing on the precipice of something huge, like his feet were dangling over the edge of the Grand Canyon. All he had to do was take that proverbial leap of faith, and then he’d see the truth. Or he’d plummet to his death.

  It was a long, long way to fall. He stepped back from the edge and focused on the song.

  Death’s long fingers moved deftly across the guitar, making music as if that was what he’d been born to do. Though Xander had long known the lyrics to “Oh Me,” this time he heard a poignancy to the words that he hadn’t been able to appreciate until this moment.

  When the song ended, he waited until the last chords were lost to the wind, and then he said, “You still play well.”

  “It’s not me, you know. It’s the form I’m using. He was a musician, a singer.”

  “I’m aware,” Xander said dryly.

  “It’s his talent, not mine. I have no such ability. My kind don’t have things like music or song,” said Death, removing the strap from around his shoulders. “But when I take the form of the dead, I can use their abilities.”

  “It’s pretty cool.”

  “It’s an echo,” he said, shrugging. “Nothing more.”

  “Well, your echoes rock. Your singing’s gotten better.”

  “It’s the same,” Death said. “That doesn’t change. I don’t change.”

  “Everything changes.”

  “Not me,” the Pale Rider said as he placed the guitar on the balcony floor. “Never me.”

  “Of course you change. I just said that your singing got better.”

  Death smiled. “That’s just your perception. Subjective reality, remember?”

  “Sure, I remember,” Xander said. “This is the part where you ask me if I’m willing to take a chance that this is all in my head, right? Well, don’t bother.”

  Beneath his tangle of windswept hair, Death’s eyes gleamed. “But wouldn’t that prove, once and for all, that none of this is real? What if my death is the act that pierces the veil covering your eyes?”

  “How noble,” Xander said, folding his arms across his chest. “Listen to you, making your death out to be some incredible sacrifice. Is that what you want? To be the sacrificial hero of the story?”

  “You called me a hero earlier, after accusing me of bravery.”

  Xander felt his cheeks heat. “Yeah, well, you called yourself a fool.”

  “And so I am. But we’re all the heroes of our own stories,” Death said cheerfully. “Even when we’re also fools.”

  “But this isn’t a story. This is life. It’s your life.”

  “The life of Death,” the Pale Rider boomed, sweeping his arm wide. Ted would have appreciated both the bombastic voice and the grand gesture. Hell, Ted would have taken notes. Death chuckled. “There’s a sort of symmetry there, don’t you think?”

  “Yeah,” Xander said, “and it’s bookended nicely with the death of life. Which is what you said would happen when you die.”

  “No, Xander. That’s what you said would happen. And I said that was one way of looking at it.”

  “You’re mincing words,” Xander gritted.

  “Am I, now? I’ve been told that I’d make an excellent lawyer.”

  Xander frowned at him, at those twinkling blue eyes and that casual smirk that made him see red. This isn’t about me, he told himself. Don’t get angry with him. He’s hurting, and he’s lashing out.

  That’s what people do when they’re hurting.

  “But I’m not a person,” said Death.

  Xander blinked at him, then blinked again. “Mind reading’s rude.”

  “Can’t help it. You’re a screamer.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Your thoughts. You don’t just think them. You scream them. Your thoughts are so big, so loud, they fill the world.” Death made a show of tugging his ear. “Kind of deafening.”

  “I’ll stop screaming my thoughts if you stay out of my head.”

  “Don’t make promises you can’t keep.”

  Nonplussed, Xander said, “I’ll try to stop screaming my thoughts.”

  “I can work with that,” Death said. He glanced at his watch. “For a little bit, anyway. Four minutes left, Xander.”

  Four minutes to convince Death not to kill himself. Four minutes to save the world. If time mattered. Which it might—there was no way to know, not until it was too late.

  “Then tell me the rest of it,” Xander said, trying not to panic. He’d think of something. He had to. “Finish the boon. What made you come to my balcony tonight?”

  “You already know the answer: the chocolate bar. You gave me a gift, so I owed you a gift price.”

  “Yeah,” Xander said. “About that. You said that people can’t see you, not unless you want to be seen. But I saw you, back when I was a kid. Why did you let me see you?”

  Death looked immensely pleased. “What do you think?”

  Suddenly uneasy, Xander darted his gaze away. “I don’t know.”

  “Don’t you?”

  Xander shook his head. He didn’t know, and now he didn’t want to know. He was standing on the edge again, and he felt himself losing his balance. He shut his eyes tight.

  Death said, “I was there in the tennis club to correct the course.”

  Xander didn’t want to ask.

  Xander had to ask.

  He whispered, “What does that mean?”

  He could hear the smile in Death’s voice as he replied, “It means you died, Xander.”

  The Atwoods

  Xander Atwood died when he was nine months old.

  He’d been feverish, so his mother put him into a tepid bath to help cool him. After the bath, she towel dried Xander and set him down on the floor so that she could get him diapered. When he didn’t move at all, she knew something was wrong.

  When he didn’t respond to her touch, she started to scream.

  Xander’s father raced in, told her to call 911, and then gave the baby mouth-to-mouth. By the time the paramedics arrived, Xander was breathing fine.

  Tests revealed absolutely nothing: Xander had simply stopped breathing. It had been the longest sixty seconds of his parents’ lives.

  For the next two months, his mom and dad slept in his bedroom, on the floor, terrified that the baby would stop breathing again and they wouldn’t hear it.

  By the time Xander was thirteen months old, his parents were both back in their own bed, but they kept their door wide open—a habit they didn’t break for many years. That habit would come back to bite them when Xander was ten and he walked in on them having sex, but that was far in the future. For now, it comforted them to know that if something was wrong, they would hear it.

  They never found out why Xander had died that day.

  And when something wound up being very wrong, they didn’t hear a thing . . . not until it was far too late.

  Death

  Every second of every day, 1.7 people die. That’s the average. Sometimes, more than one person dies at once; other times, it’s just one person.

  The second that Xander Atwood died as a baby, it was one of those “just one person” times.

  During that particular second, Death was a little busy.

  ***

  Time isn’t linear for one such as Death, not unless he chooses to let it be so. Every moment is an eon; every second is an eternity. It’s part of what allows him to do what he does. It also makes it unfathomable when one such as Death is in pain. Mortals can comfort themselves by saying the pain
will pass—it only feels like forever. But for creatures such as Death, that agony literally is forever.

  Dying takes a little longer.

  ***

  It’s a door slamming shut, the resonant thunder booming until it dwarfs all other sound. Deafened, he feels himself falling.

  There’s a moment of panic, as always, a moment that stretches into infinity in which he’s terrified that this is all there is, that oblivion will grip him like a lover and rock him into nothingness. In that moment, he clings desperately to the He Who Was. He wants to hold on. He wants to be.

  He knows what he must do, and the knowledge crushes him. The holding on isn’t nearly as agonizing as the letting go.

  He lets go.

  The pain swallows him as he is erased. It takes one second and it lasts until the stars explode and the universe spirals into the void.

  And then, he is rewritten.

  Reborn.

  He reaches out, and the universe takes his hand and anchors him. He Who Was is now He Who Is.

  The first new breath is searing; the second, less so. By the third, it’s simply routine.

  It’s simply life.

  The moment transforms from present to past—a tense shift, a time shift, and then he returned to the here and now. He opened his eyes—new eyes, but still blue, always blue—and the first thing he saw was the pale steed.

  “Well,” he said, and “well” again, fascinated by the sound of his new voice. “Well, that part’s done.”

  “Groovy,” said the steed. “Buy a horse a cheeseburger?”

  Xander

  Xander didn’t feel his legs give out. One second, he was standing in the doorway between his living room and the balcony; the next, he was on the ground, his back against the door frame, his legs splayed out in front of him.

  He’d died.

  He saw it in his mind, clear as HDTV: him as a baby, lying naked on his nursery floor, not breathing, his mother screaming, his father performing mouth-to-mouth.

  He could feel borrowed air inflating his lungs, feel it hissing out like a busted tire.

  A sound like a screech of tires . . .

  “No,” he whispered.

  “Yes.”

  He blinked up at Death, who was still sitting easily on the balcony railing, his elbows propped on his knees, his chin in his hands.

  “You were nine months old, and you died. No official cause,” said Death, “though my money’s on SIDS, and it was only for a minute. But you were dead, Xander Atwood.”

  “Then—” Xander’s voice cracked, and he worked some moisture into his throat and swallowed before he tried again. “Then why am I still here?”

  “What you mean to ask is why didn’t I take you at that moment.” Death shrugged. “You happened to die at an inopportune time.”

  The world had shifted five degrees to the left when Xander hadn’t been looking. Dizzy, he repeated, “Inopportune.”

  “I was in the throes of my cycle beginning anew.”

  Xander tried to make sense of the words, but his head was spinning and his heart was screaming and things like logic and rationality had taken a back seat the moment Death had appeared on his balcony. “So . . . I got a second chance because you were busy?”

  “You could say that. The second you died, I didn’t exist.”

  He blinked, and blinked again, and all he could say was, “Oh.”

  “As I said, it was an inopportune time.” Another shrug. “You sort of slipped off my radar. When I figured out what had happened, I put you on my to-do list.”

  Realization dawned. It was less a light bulb turning on than it was a neon spotlight in Xander’s brain.

  “Correcting the course,” he said. “You were at the tennis club that day to kill me, because I was supposed to be dead. Right? That is what you meant,” Xander said, his voice rising, “isn’t it?”

  “So dramatic.” Death clucked his tongue. “Not like you hadn’t already died. Well. For a little bit. Yes, that’s exactly what I meant, well done. Gold star for you.”

  “But you didn’t kill me.”

  “No.”

  “Because . . . I gave you a chocolate bar?”

  Death’s mouth quirked into a lopsided smile. “I was moved.”

  “My life was saved by a chocolate bar.”

  “Of course not,” Death said. “You were kind to me. That’s what led me here today: your act of kindness. The chocolate was just a bonus.”

  If Suzie were with him, she would have said that chocolate was always a bonus.

  Xander looked up at the Pale Rider, who was looking back at him pointedly, as if he were waiting for something. Behind those blue, blue eyes, Xander saw emotions sparkling like crystals catching the light—a wink of compassion, a glittering of gratitude. But more than anything, he saw exhaustion staring back at him and, beneath that, a hint of fear.

  Death was afraid. Xander would have bet his life on it. Which, Xander supposed, was appropriate when one trafficked with Death.

  The Pale Rider was afraid to die.

  And that meant Xander could save him. He just had to figure out how.

  He cleared his throat. “Thanks,” he said, and then immediately felt sheepish, because the word was nowhere near enough. “For, you know. Not correcting the course.”

  A shrug. “De nada.”

  “It’s not nothing,” Xander said. “It matters. Life matters. You matter.”

  Death rolled his eyes. “Here we go again . . .”

  “If life didn’t matter,” Xander said, louder, “then death wouldn’t be a big deal. But it is. You are. Don’t you see that?”

  Another shrug.

  Okay, Xander told himself as he climbed to his feet. Time to backtrack. “What happened?” he asked. “You were lonely, so you created companions, first your steed and then the Horsemen. And they helped, you said. For a time, at least. They helped. But something must have happened. When did they stop helping?”

  Death smiled thinly. “It might have been around the time when they were talking about how to stop me.”

  “Is that where you went before, when you popped out of here? To talk to them?”

  “No. I went to kill them.”

  Xander spluttered, “What?”

  “I went to kill them.”

  “You killed the Horsemen of the Apocalypse?”

  “The steeds too. Really, it’s not such a big deal. I am Death, after all. Besides, it’s not like I murdered them. I just took back what was mine. More whole again, for the first time in thousands of years.” He spread his arms wide and glanced down at his billowing sweater. “Does it look like I’ve put on weight?”

  Xander had only thought his head had been spinning before. Nauseated, he said, “You really killed them all?”

  “Technically.” Death lowered his arms. “I reabsorbed the parts of them that made them Riders. So yes, I killed the Horsemen. The human parts were theirs, so those remained.”

  “The people who had been Riders—they’re still alive?”

  “For now.” He glanced at his watch. “Ticktock, Xander.”

  “You didn’t kill them,” Xander said, his heart racing. “You could have, but you didn’t.”

  Death shrugged. “Not a big deal.”

  “It is. You care about them,” Xander said. “You love them.”

  “Love,” Death repeated, turning the word into something profane. “You humans are so quick to use that word, as if saying it makes it so.”

  “Saying it, no. Feeling it, believing in it, yes. Love makes us do amazing things.”

  “Love makes you do stupid things.”

  “That, too, sometimes.” Xander thought of the Amazingly Perfect Riley Jones, the one for whom he’d changed his future, and for a second he thought he heard Suzie yelling at him to wake up already. “Love can mean everything.”

  “Love can cause more pain than you ever imagined.”

  A sound like a door slamming shut, or maybe a screech of tires.


  Quietly, Xander said, “And love can make that pain bearable.”

  Death laughed softly. “How romantic. Now who’s the hero of the story, Xander? Does true love solve everything? Does love really mean a happily ever after?”

  “It can,” Xander insisted.

  “Just because you love someone,” said Death, “that doesn’t mean you’re loved in return. And even if you are, that doesn’t mean the one you love will always be with you. Your love can leave you, abandon you, and then all you have left are pieces so jagged they slice you when you try to grasp them.”

  For the first time in years, Xander suddenly, vividly, remembered his first love, and he shuddered because Death was right: Being in love was no guarantee of happiness.

  Ashley Davidson had taught him that lesson long ago.

  Xander

  Some people say that love and death are connected. Xander got to experience both when he was twelve.

  He fell madly, completely in love with Ashley Davidson the first time he saw Ashley smile. He would spend hours thinking about Ashley’s eyes, the way they were so black that they looked almost blue. In his seat in the back of the classroom, he would quietly dance to the music of Ashley’s voice. He’d cast surreptitious glances toward Ashley during PE, trying not to look at Ashley’s legs but not being able to help himself. He wrote Ashley’s name again and again, whispered it to himself at night. Thinking of Ashley made Xander’s heart do amazing gymnastic feats in his chest. It didn’t matter that he lacked the courage to tell Ashley how he felt: His love for Ashley transcended words. He was content.

  And then Ashley died.

  Everyone had known that Ashley had been sick, the sort of sick that adults talk about in hushed tones even when they think the children are out of earshot. Everyone had known that Ashley didn’t choose to be bald but instead had to be because of the chemo. Instead of complaining about it, Ashley turned it into a fashion statement and wore brightly colored bandanas, a different one every day. That had been fourth grade. In fifth grade, Ashley traded bandanas for hats: large-brimmed ones, bowlers, baseball caps, cowboy hats, floppy hats, even an Abraham Lincoln stovepipe hat. But in sixth grade, Ashley had made it to school only one day, the first day of class. Xander remembered someone teasing Ashley for daring to bring in a classroom snack the way that the elementary school kids did. Ashley had blushed, and had looked so tired, and Xander wanted to say something funny to make Ashley smile that radiant smile again, but he couldn’t think of the words. So he said nothing to Ashley that first day of middle school.