A Matter of Life and Death or Something (18 page)

Like two weeks before you vanished I went to visit you at work—you were filling in for a friend at the store—and I went to find you on a slow Saturday. The place was deserted except for you. When I came in the door you jumped up and ran out from the desk and hugged me. We weren't together but we weren't not together, and you weren't cold. You were warm. How could we ever hug in any acceptable way, in any civilized or neutral way? Our hugs even now—especially now—were too tight, too long and too close, and my chin always wanting to touch the soft skin open on your shoulder and it does—the hug that too many times and too easily turns into a hug full of sparks, and a gravity and a pulling close, and you putting your cheek against mine and the tiny blond hairs glowing all over our skin at the near-microscopic level brushing and our noses touching, us kissing, gently and slowly like we always tried, it was unspoken, giving, and our legs getting tired from standing for so long, then sitting on the edge of your bed when I only came over to ask you something, to just make something clear, but then look at us: lying there untogether, and holding unclearly for so long—

In the store we talked about our days like always, like we used to when we would every day, we became archives of each other's days, we had catalogues of each other's past year stored inside, and would remember every day of each other and share it all, and that was really one of the best parts—everyone knew that. But now day- and week-sized gaps were passing unaccounted for, so much time I couldn't picture you inside: what did you do yesterday, or the day before? What did I do? Anything?

We talked. About whatever. We talked about the music. We talked about the sun, other things. But we were pretending to stand so far from each other. I could feel myself growing stubborn, could feel myself splitting, slipping into a darkened mind, wanting—I could feel some place inside grow, and I didn't want to go there so I left. I said I should go and I went out the door. You were probably mad, but I had to go. Maybe I was even proud of myself for leaving.
Seeing you now was watching a family carrying all their belongings out of the house and into the trunk of their station wagon. It was watching things get packed away in brown boxes, hearing a door close in some other room. It was a drive to an airport and it was waiting for a flight to take off.
It was all of these things but it was
none
of them because it was something real and it was
really
happening to me, and it would make me cry walking down the street because this ending had no sense of public or private or tact and it found me everywhere. And maybe I can't believe I left you that day or that I'd ever leave you or refuse a minute with you, but it was impossible. It was impossible to pretend you'd still be in my life—impossible to keep pretending I was ever really in yours. You'd be gone.

CLUES:

– How you can't possibly think of anything else.

– How even when you think you're not thinking about it anymore you actually are.

– How it makes you really angry but you know angry is the wrong thing to be so you get even more angry.

When I got home from babbling to Rosie and making an idiotic moron of myself I went to my room and took off my soaking wet clothes. My wool sweater and t-shirt both already kind of smelled like laundry that got forgotten in the washer too long. They smelled like an old people's home, and they made a flop sound when I tossed them in my hamper. I went to the bathroom and grabbed a towel and fluffed my hair with it all over. I combed my hair, brushed my teeth, went back to my room and locked the door.

I opened my closet, reached in and pulled all the clues off of my bulletin board. I boggled them around on the floor to try to put them in a better order. Then I took some new scraps of paper and a marker from my desk and sat on the floor with my legs crossed like a Native American and all the clues in my lap. I made some new ones.

CLUES:

– How I will never be as brave as Rosie even though she is only a normal person.

Simon knocked on my door,
bang bang bang.

“Yeah?” I got up quickly and tossed the clues back in my closet.

“Whatcha doin' in there?”

“Nothing!”

“What?”

I went over and unlocked the door and Simon was holding his glasses at his side with one hand and scrubbing his eyelids with the other. There was a book tucked under his arm. He snapped his eyes open wide and smiled at me.

“Whatcha doin', chief?”

“Getting ready for bed.”

“Want a story?” The book he was holding was some red and blue covered thing I had never seen before.

“I'm really tired.”

Simon frowned a little and put his big glasses back on his small face.

“Something wrong?”

“No. Something wrong with you?”

“Me? No, I don't think so,” he said.

I turned around and sat down on my bed. I was obviously still kind of mad at him.

“Pretty big night tonight,” he said.

“Yep.”

I wasn't very interested in being read to by Simon. And like I already said, I wasn't exactly in an extraordinary mood, and besides, maybe Maureen wanted him to read
her
a story instead. On the phone, maybe. And then when the story was done she could ask him to marry her.

Simon put his hands in his pockets and walked over to one of my really old to-do lists that was still up on the wall. Lots of things were checked off but lots of things weren't. He looked at it for a while, but he seemed like he wasn't even reading it. I could tell because of how his lips slid sideways away from each other that he was thinking about something else. He took his hands out of his pockets, straightened the list and pushed the tack a bit deeper into the wall with his strong skinny thumb. Then he sat on my bed beside me.

“I'm sorry,” he said.

“I'm still kind of mad.”

“I know chief, I know. I'm sorry I didn't—”

“So you're going to give it back?”

“The book? No, I can't give it back. Not yet.”

I knew he wouldn't anyway.

“Well then I'm still mad.”

“I know. If I were you I'd be upset too. But I'm me, so for now I'm going to keep it, and I'm sorry.”

I didn't even bother rolling my eyes.

“Listen, about Maureen, I—”

“You didn't call 9-1-1 did you?”

“About the book?”

“Obviously.”

“No, I didn't do that. I'm still not sure what to do, to be honest.”

He scratched his neck.

“Maureen's just—”

“I don't wanna talk about it.”

Simon scratched his neck again.

“You don't
have
to be like this,” I said.

“Like what?”

“Like a security guard or something.”

“For now, I do.”

“I didn't do anything wrong.”

“No, you didn't. You're right.”

“You don't make any sense.”

Simon shook his head and looked at the carpet.

“The whole thing doesn't make much sense,” he said.

“What does
that
mean?”

“I mean, how could somebody... I don't know. It seems so contrived almost, not contrived but—I don't know. You found it in the woods?”

“Yes.”

“In our woods, right here?”

“Yeah, I already told you that.”

“I know. It just doesn't make much sense.”

“What are you talking about? I just found it in the woods lying there on the ground, I told you that a billion times.”

Then he leaned down at me until I looked him in the eyes and he was making a completely serious look like he was a worried boulder. He said “Are you okay?” and I said “Yes.” Then he said “Arthur, tell me the truth. Are you okay?” and I felt weird because he was being a little scary with how serious he was, and I said
“Yes.”

Simon didn't talk for a while, then he said “Alright. We'll discuss the book in a few days when I've... when I've given it more thought.”

“Fine.”

“So, no story?”

“No.” I was about to tell him that there was actually one book he could read me a story from if he wanted, and that it had a black and white speckly cover and that it was probably hidden somewhere in the house, but I didn't.

“You brush your teeth?” Simon asked.

“Mmm-hmm.”

“Okay. I love you.”

“Sure.”

Simon got up and stood with his hand on the light switch, waiting for me to get under the covers. I did, and he flicked the light off.

“Night, chief.”

“Night.”

My door closed and made complete blackness. That's maybe my favourite part of the day: when I can close my eyes and it looks the exact same as when I open my eyes. Not even Simon could wreck it. I stared up at the ceiling and saw nothing, and closed my eyes and saw nothing. Still nothing when I opened them again. Then my eyes woke up and started working overtime, and I saw the bright beginnings of some things. I became the pencil eraser guy on the black page of my room.

I saw a speck of yellowish white in the middle of the darkness and I rubbed at it with my eyes. Then at another and another one, and I could see the stars on my ceiling. I drew white lines to show some of the constellations. I erased white outlines for the pieces of paper on my walls, and then filled in the rectangles one by one. My glow-in-the-dark light switch, a few stray shirts, my half-finished igloo: brick by brick I erased all the bright things into my bedroom. It's silly, but I even scratched away with my mind and drew the Beckhams' white cat lemniscating at the foot of my bed, and Rosie's reflecting vest hanging on my coat hook. I could draw my own universe, if I wanted. I could make things exist that didn't, because in my room the big bang was
me.

Finally when I closed my eyes there was nothing, but when I opened them: everything. I closed them again and let go of everything and drifted asleep.

MY EYES SLAMMED open and the rain wasn't falling inside my room and Rosie wasn't there. I was all confused in the brain. Did that stuff really happen? I was in my bed. There were my stars and my light switch. My igloo. It was a pile of white bricks on my floor, because it fell over again. That's probably why I was awake.

I lay there. It was one of those times when you think your dream life is real and your real life is fake. My brain started switching them back around. It must have been thinking about Rosie the instant I fell asleep and then turned it all into a dream.

In my dream Rosie said “What do you mean he's not your dad?” and I told her about how I didn't know who my real parents were and she asked me if I wanted to know very badly and I said yes and she asked why and I said I didn't know.

We were running on the side of the highway. The sky was pitch black. Instead of Icebird we were pulling a handle attached to our rusty car with Simon in the driver's seat reading a red and blue book. He never looked up, he just kept reading page after page really fast, and it was raining inside the car but there were windshield wipers attached to the top of his glasses and one of them was broken so he had to keep flicking it with his finger to make it go again.

I told Rosie that I was just about to crack the case of Phil when stupid Simon took him away. I told her there was no way that
no one
on the street had clues about Phil. I told her I only had one house left. We were getting soaked. I was really out of breath because we were sprinting full speed.

Then Rosie steered the trailer-car around a bend in the road and we went up a little gravel hill. She wasn't saying anything about all the stuff I was telling her, she was just silent and running.

Then we slowed down, and eventually stopped. I waited for her to say something but she didn't.

I looked around and realized where she'd brought me. The highway wasn't the highway anymore even though it had been the whole time: now it was my own curvy old street, and we were standing in the rain at the end of a gravel driveway and a hundred footsteps up ahead was the hermit's house.

There was one lonely orange window lit up.

I stared at the house. I was just about to ask Rosie what I should do and then I was awake.

I lay there wiping my forehead with my blanket, because it was wet for some reason. I couldn't tell if it was sweat water or rain water. The dream was so real, I could even remember what my hands felt like on the handle of the trailer-car. I could still feel the cold metal on my wet palm. I could still see the hermit's house. In the dream I was confused, but somehow I wasn't scared.

I sat up. My alarm clock said 1:43 and my body said “go back to sleep,” but I was saying something different. I peeled my blanket off of me. I switched on my lamp and looked at all the superheroes all over my sheets, with all their flashy orange suits and huge round muscles and small pants. None of
them
looked like they'd needed to sleep a night in their lives. I tossed all the superheroes off of me and turned to the floor. I yawned my mouth so wide.

After I scrubbed everything out of my eyes, I stood up. There was a giant pile of clothes in front of my closet, because I was being so distracted and messy for the past couple weeks. I searched through the pile to find warm things. I picked out a dry black sweater and put it on top of my t-shirt. I put my black corduroys on below that. For some reason, even though I mostly hate them, I put socks on. I knew it was going to be cold. What I
wished
I could put on were my silence boots, but I didn't even have any.

I was the groggiest I'd ever been. There were the driest but stickiest snots ever in my nose, the kind that are no fun to pick because they itch. My whole scalp itched too and I felt sweaty all over. My mouth tasted like what I imagine coffee would taste like: disgusting.

Like a little field mouse I tiptoed out of my room, up the stairs, across the hall, to Simon's door. I looked at the doorknob, and wondered if it was going to squeak, and wondered if it was a friend or enemy. I couldn't believe I didn't even know whether Simon's doorknob was squeaky or not. What kind of investigation was I running anyway, without even having my own house on the back of my hand? I yawned, with no sound. I asked the doorknob, with my eyes, to help. Someone once told me that our bodies use a language that is a million times easier to understand than when we talk with words. I figured that it didn't work on doorknobs, but still. With my eyes I told it the whole story. It stared back at me, but not with eyes, obviously, because it was a doorknob. Still, in its metal way I thought I could hear it saying, well, I think it said, “Open sesame.” So I turned it with the carefullest fingers I had, and I pushed on it. The door opened smoothly and completely silent.

“Thanks, doorknob,” said my eyes.

“No problem, brother,” whispered the doorknob.

I only opened the door Arthur-wide so that I'd fit through sideways, but not too much light would shine in from the hall. The hall was pretty dark anyway, but I couldn't be too careful. I slipped through, into the room. It was darker in there than the night itself was: there was a dim grey glow poking in from the window, in lines, creeping in between the blinds. The lines fell onto Simon's bed where he was sleeping on his back like a dead mummy. He was snoring, and I was glad. It was good to be able to know for sure that he was sleeping. I snuck over to the other corner of the room by the window, to his desk.

I opened the top left drawer with silence, which took about two ice ages. I looked inside. Paperclips and a pencil; that was it. I shut it just as slowly. Every movement I made so amazingly slow that they made no sounds. I inched the next drawer open. It was full of folders and paper, so much paper. I pulled on the bottom drawer and it squeaked. I turned into an ice sculpture of myself. The squeak was really loud, and on top of it I probably squeaked too. I waited. There was still snoring. I thawed myself out. There ended up being nothing at all in that drawer. Dust.

I left the squeaky drawer half open, because I didn't want to risk another sound. I must have been looking in those drawers for fifteen minutes, and nothing. Simon rolled over. I was starting to go a bit mental. I took a deep breath and sighed, a really slow sigh, to stay quiet and calm.

I took a good look at the top of the desk for the first time. Simon's laptop was there, and a mug full of pens and pencils. Beside that, there was a framed picture of me. Even though it was so dark I recognized the picture, it was this one where I'm in a yellow raincoat and I'm tiny, and I have my hammer and some blocks of wood on the ground in front of me. I'm in the woods near where the treehouse is and in the background you can see only half the treehouse because it's not all built yet. Simon isn't in the picture, because he took it, obviously. I look like I'm uselessly banging on the blocks of wood with my hammer for some reason, but also I look happy. The picture made me smell a smell in my brain that I hadn't smelled in forever, which smelled almost like the woods, and kind of like chocolate chip cookies baking, and then for a second I felt like I was way older than ten years old. Then I snapped out of looking at the picture and looked over on the far right side of the desk and I saw Phil.