Freewill (10 page)

Nothing looks any different from when you closed your eyes, not the closed door, not the murky stillness of the air, not the classic morbidity of your rigid upright pose. Only now your hand is covered in wet and warm, unfrozen mixed summer vegetables.

The alarm goes off, bang on seven as usual. Not usual, however, is the quick bang of you turning it off again.

Nothing happened, no one came. What were you expecting? Do you even recall?

You are going to school, is that right? Are you going to school? Was it like a particularly nasty storm, upturning some trees, shattering the odd window, but essentially come and gone and now, having weathered it, you will get on with things? Look at the hand.

You are refusing to look at the hand. You do your dressing—back into yesterday's clothes which hadn't gotten much wear after all—mostly with the one hand. Look at the other hand, Will.

Having satisfied yourself that you can function without it, you allow a brief glance. It is enlarged and distorted, fatter now at the outside edge of the hand than anywhere else. The valleys between knuckles have been landfilled to reach the same smooth height as the peaks. There is no sign of a vein or a sinew anywhere on the back of that right hand. And though
you cannot see it, you are intensely aware that the continuous line of skeleton beginning at the tip of the pinky finger, running down the hand, through the interchange at the wrist, up the arm, the shoulder, the neck and points everywhere beyond, is broken. As if a part of you is now abandoned and isolated from the whole.

You head for the door, open it with your left hand, and head downstairs.

Where you find a sort of party in your honor.

“Hello,” Gran says in a voice so nakedly panic-ridden that if you were not worried before you certainly should be now.

But you are not. You are not worried today. You are not anything today. There is something there that was not there yesterday, and you have to do something about it, Will. There is a distance, a wall, a separation, something dividing you from you, and it cannot be allowed to stand. Listen. Listen. Listen.

“Hello,” you say, and take your seat in front of your oatmeal. Without fanfare you address the two men across the table—one of them your ashen-faced grandfather, the other a total, gray-suited stranger—and place your lovely cold glass of freshly squeezed orange juice on the back of your hand.

“Morning, Will,” the man says.

“Morning, detective,” you say.

What? Did they think you were the only one in the entire
game who would be surprised by the police at this point? Exactly how far gone are you supposed to be?

And exactly how far gone are you? Will you answer? Do you know? You cannot let go, Will. Keep thinking, keep feeling, keep asking and answering us.

“Did you call this one, Pops?”

“I didn't call anybody. And what do you mean,
this one
?”

“Somebody must have called”—you look at today's paper prominently displayed, open to page three—“
him
.”

“I didn't call him, he called here.”

“Well why would he call here?”

“He traced you to the school, after the second sculpture appeared at the bridge. He was already working on you before this last one. Will, my name is Lieutenant Dahl.”

“Hey,” you say.

“That hand looks bad. Want to tell me how you got it?”

Gran sets a cup of tea down in front of Dahl.

“Gran, he's going to take me away, and you're serving him tea?”

“I am not here to take you anywhere, Will. It's just, there's a lot of stuff in there, and I need to look into it. You want to read?” He nudges the paper toward you, even though it is still facing his way, upside down to you. That is as it will stay.

“No thanks.”

“It's every bit of it nothing but sick lies anyway,” Gran
says. Pops says nothing. Pops appears for all the world to be waiting just like the good lieutenant, like every other concerned uninvolved tabloid reader, for the story to unfold. What is your grandfather actually thinking, you might ask. Well don't. You cut him loose from this point, son. Don't count on him, don't work on him, don't try to figure him out or bring him on board. That is complete dead-weight action. Believe it, cut anchor, move on.

“I'm sure it is, ma'am,” Dahl says. “I just have to check.”

“Check,” you say, as if the game is chess, rather than your life.

“Okay. Were you there when those kids went in the water?”

“No.”

“So how did you happen to know to start a memorial so soon after?”

“I didn't. I planted it before.”

“Before. So, are you claiming then to know about suicides before they happen? Are you claiming, like the newspaper says, to be gifted? Some kind of teenage prophet of death?”

Gran begins sobbing behind you. Pops stares down under the table, at his feet or something.

And you, Will? How do you feel, hearing that?

“Why is the phone not ringing?” you ask seriously. “I would figure the phone would be ringing mental by now. But it's not ringing at all.”

“Phone's unplugged. I asked, Will, if you are claiming—”

“I'm not claiming anything.”

“Do you know who is next? Do you have any information, about any upcoming—”

“The boy said he doesn't know any shit like that,” Pops growls.

You don't. You don't know any such thing. How could you know any such thing? The people who go go, and they take it all with them. You know that much, but that much everybody knows. Other than that, you have no information, right, Will? You do not know who is going to die.

“I am responsible,” you say.

“No,” Gran gasps.

“Talk to me,” Dahl says.

“I just did.”

“What did you do, to make yourself responsible?”

“Nothing. I didn't do anything to make myself.” You shrug. And even shrugging brings pain to your hand. “I just am. I don't have to do anything, and I'm not the
prophet
of anything. I'm just more like, the carrier pigeon of death.”

You start looking around the room. What are you looking for, Will? It isn't there. You look back at Dahl to find that he is now looking around the room. But he seems surer of what he is looking for.

“You should really get Will to a hospital, folks. He should
really . . . be looked at. That hand's probably causing him a lot of pain.” His focus suddenly, penetratingly, pulls in to you. He is looking well into your eyes, though you are barely looking back. “You're in a great deal of pain, aren't you, Will?”

You look at your hand, then slowly back at Dahl. “Yes. Yes, sir I am.”

“Okay,” Dahl says, standing, putting on his hat. “I'm sorry to have troubled you all. I don't think I'll be needing anything else.”

There is nothing but silence in the room. Uncommon silence, the kind you cannot create merely by being silent. It is too much.

“Don't you see,” you say to the officer, “what it's become? It's that now, kids are, like,
coming
to my sculpture . . .”

He holds up a hand, maybe something left over from his traffic cop days back in a helpful uncomplicated part of his career when he used to be able to help people.

“I know. You don't need to be thinking about this stuff. Go with your grandparents and get fixed up. And take a few days off. Get yourself a nice rest.”

And, he wants to tell you, this'll all blow over. He wants to tell you that.

Don't you think it is fairly decent of him not to tell you that? Points for this guy.

“Thank you,” you say as both of your grandparents
bundle him off and you tuck left-handed into hot cereal gone cold and the morning paper.

•  •  •

A lot of doctors for one hand bone. A lot of interviews to be giving, considering until yesterday you had gone an entire life without giving a single one.

The X ray didn't show a broken bone. That's because the X ray barely showed
any
bone. Too much swelling. You know anyway.

Splint, instead of cast. Take it off when you need to. Not a bad deal. One splint to hold you together.

One splint, and a whole lot of medicine.

And what was with the priest, do you suppose? Will? Suppose they're expecting you to
die
from this? That's what they bring in the priests for, isn't it? Or is it the other thing? A confession?

Does either one bring absolution? Think you should ask? Think you should offer?

Bless me, father, for I am death.

•  •  •

You don't want to take the pills. You don't. For a while anyway, you don't. But without them, there are problems. Pain, is a problem. Related sleeplessness, is another problem. You endure.

You don't have to, you know. You don't have to endure
any more pain. You don't have to take the pills. You know this, don't you? You know this, that the choices are all yours, and that there is no predestined anything to stop you, or to start you, doing anything that does not suit you.

What suits
you
?

You don't want to take the pills, and it is good that you don't want to take the pills. It is admirable that you do not want to take pills.

But do you want to be admired? Or do you want the pain to stop? And the sound. You could use the peace. Couldn't you use the peace, Will? Wouldn't you like this to stop, even for just a while?

“Yes, I would like it to stop,” you say. Finally, finally, finally. You say.

No shame. There is no shame. You take your pills. You take your peace.

•  •  •

Are you still sleeping? You are seeing, that much is certain.

Certainty. It is the opposite of faith, isn't it? Which would you rather have now?

Reach out your good hand. Try and touch. Tables and shelves and gnomes and whirligigs of all description. A phantasmic, freakish familiar gallery of your own unintentions.

“I was supposed to be a pilot. This all never should have happened.”

You are awake, for certain. And you are going to school today. All advice is that you stay exactly where you are, but you will not be taking that advice. Though you will compromise by taking your medications.

And anyway, you are not going to school per se. You are going to
the
school, but not to school. This is not a situation you are condemned to live with, just as nothing in this life will be.

Nothing has to be, Will. It is up to you.

So you are not going to school to work in wood. You are going to tie up loose ends. You are going to finish unfinished business. You are going to clean out your locker.

You are not an inmate of Special Programs.

You are not a woodworker.

You are a pilot.

You promise your teary grandmother and steely grandfather that you will be at bocce ball in the afternoon. She is always teary grandmother these days, isn't she, and he is always steely grandfather.

“Promise,” she says.

“I promise,” you say.

“No,
promise
,” she says.

“Yes,
promise
,” you say. And wonder why it is you have to repeat everything.

•  •  •

You are no sooner in the door—and not the little door into the little isolated freezer case of the woodworking gulag, but the big door into the healthy free-range world of the general Socratic population—than Mr. Jacks is right up there in your face, glad-handing and oversmiling you back to lifelike civilization.

“Great to see you back so soon, Will,” Mr. Jacks says, putting an arm around your shoulders.

Like you were Charles Lindbergh. Before he misplaced his baby. They taught you stuff like that once. When you were suitable for history.

Or maybe not Lindbergh. Maybe more like the guy who murdered the baby.

He is squeezing you awfully tight. “I won't try to escape,” you say.

He laughs out loud. Mr. Jacks is a decent enough guy, but you have never heard him laugh. Kind of like hearing a cat yodel.

“No, no, no, Will, not at all . . .” He is not only squeezing you, but steering you down the hall. “I'm just really surprised, and pleased, to see you up and around, and back with us.”

You can't even manage it, to do the self-preservation thing briefly. To attempt to even look like you are paying hard attention to the man. He is talking, and you are drifting, like a kite.

People look like they are retreating as you pass through
the corridors. You see faces—not clearly, but they are there—seemingly forever. Two girls, bumping shoulders, hush-toning as girls do. But they don't seem to pass. They are looking at you—well of course they are—and you are looking at them. You are going your way and they are coming this way, but you don't ever reach, ever pass. You look at Jacks, like for an explanation, then look at the girls, only they are boys.

They are looking at you, though. Make no mistake.

You want to talk to students. You want to talk. You want to shake somebody's hand and say, listen, I am sorry just like you. Sorrier than you, even.

But as you feel yourself pulling ever gently out of Mr. Jacks's benevolent grip, you feel him tightening up. No matter anyway. Faces are not opening up to you. They are closing, or shrinking or—inasmuch as you can tell as the viscous shield between you thickens—clenching at the sight of you.

The only certainty is that you are noticed.

Why? Why should you matter now? And why should Jacks even be aware of your arrival? Even if he cared, which you must seriously doubt no matter how genial a guy he is, why would he know? You are one problem amid his hundreds of problem chores, and you're not even supposed to be back for another while yet.

Finally, you feel, hear, see, something different.

“Yo, nice work,” comes the muffled voices as you are
bumped by a passing student. You turn from Jacks to catch just the black coat, dark hair, black hat, swinging side-to-side gait.