Repossessed (12 page)

Homework was starting to lose its savor.

The assignment was to write definitions for the listed words, then use each word in a sentence. The purpose, I knew, was to help Shaun remember what these words meant.

But I already remembered. There was no point in
my
writing any of it down.

As I pushed the folder aside, there was a knock at the bedroom door.

“Shaun,” his mother called softly. “Your dad wants to talk to you.”

Shaun usually saw his father one evening a week, and every other weekend. But his father had been on a
business trip for a couple of weeks now. So he must be checking in.

I had nothing to say to the man. But the next thing I knew, Shaun's mom had opened the door and was holding out a phone.

I didn't know what else to do, so I took it. Shaun's mom closed the door and left.

The phone wasn't very big, nor was it heavy. Odd, to think that this machine would let my ears listen to sound waves being produced many miles away.

I lifted the phone to my left ear. “Hello?” I said, tentatively.

“Hey, buddy! How are you?”

There were no visual clues at all as to what Shaun's father might be thinking, or even doing. The telephone stripped away all the extraneous physical detail that I'd been enjoying so much.

But because I couldn't see his face, all there was to focus on were variations of tone and volume and resonance. That focus gave his voice shades of emotion that I wouldn't have noticed in person. Even the silences and pauses had meaning. And in just five words, his happiness at talking to his son was almost palpable.

He'd missed Shaun while he was gone; I could hear it in every syllable.

There was a pause now.

“Shaun?” One word, a worry and a question, because I hadn't answered him.

“I'm fine,” I said. Then I added: “Dad.”

“I missed you guys while I was in Florida. I didn't really have time to sightsee, but I did get to eat at some great restaurants. The seafood was fantastic! You'd love this one place, it was right on the ocean. You could watch the sun set over the waves while you were eating. Sometime you and me and Jason'll go there just for fun; spend some time on the beach, too. How's that sound?”

“Sounds good.” That seemed like the correct response.

“So how's school going?”

“Fine.”

“You managing to pass everything?”

“Yes,” I said.

“You ready to come over this weekend? I thought we could go see a movie. What do you think?”

“Sounds
really
good,” I said, trying to express enthusiasm.

“I picked you up a couple of souvenirs, but you're going to have to wait to find out what they are. There's one especially I think you're going to like. I saw it and I thought,
Oh, man, I gotta get that for Shaun!
No, I'm not going to tell you what it is, so don't even ask. It's a surprise.”

I felt dreadfully uncomfortable. He was so
glad
to
speak to Shaun. Whom he still wasn't speaking to.

I had already known that for some people, happiness depended on Shaun's being here on this earth. But now it struck me that Shaun had things to offer that I couldn't. He would have been gratified and pleased to see his father for the first time in two weeks. He would have been able to converse with ease, interest, and even excitement. He would have known what to do when his mother put her hand on his shoulder or called him an angel.

He would have known how to respond to an “I love you.”

“I know I'm supposed to come get you guys at seven o'clock on Friday,” Shaun's father was saying, “but since it's been so long since I saw you, I'm going to see if your mom minds if I come a little early. That okay with you?”

“That'd be great,” I said.

“Okay. So…everything's all right?”

“Yes,” I lied.

“You sure? You're not talking much.”

“I'm sure. I'm just a little tired.”

“You haven't been staying up too late?”

“No.”

“Okay. Well. Is Jason around anywhere?”

“Yes,” I said, and added hopefully, “Would you like to speak to him?” I did not like talking to Shaun's father. It was not pleasing.

“Sure. I'll probably see you around five on Friday, okay? Love you.”

I did not reply to that. I just carried the phone to Jason's room. When I knocked, the strumming stopped.

“What?” Jason's voice demanded.

I opened the door and held out the phone, as Shaun's mother had done.

Through the half-open door, I could see Jason sitting on the bed, guitar in his lap. He did not move. He looked annoyed at the interruption.

I walked in to hand him the phone anyway, and he took it slowly, as if it might bite.

“Hello? Oh,” he said, then visibly relaxed. “Dad. Hi.”

I went back to Shaun's room, not to do homework but to sit and think.

I had assumed that a human was bound by its activities and habits, its way of speaking and acting. But now it seemed that there were other threads that wound around someone like Shaun, connecting him to other beings—threads of affection and trust.

Shaun was gone, but his place
hadn't
been quite empty. No matter how I tried to act as he would have, the threads he'd been associated with would always hold
his
unique shape.

Well. It looked like I had just learned something.

Hey!
I thought.
Maybe that's why they didn't take me back
right away—so that I could learn.

It was a sobering thought. Might
I
have actually been the focus of a plan from on high?

If it was true—even if the plan turned out to be a minor one that required little thought and no interaction on the part of its maker—it was certainly
very
satisfying.

I
was sure now that they'd come for me during the night, so I didn't go to bed right away. I sat up one last time, looking through Shaun's high school annual. I tried to imagine what it must have been like for him as he walked down the halls of the school I'd come to know. How it had felt for
him
, looking out of these eyes.

It was quite late when I finally, regretfully, crawled into Shaun's bed, pulled the covers up, and let sleep come.

But when I awoke again, it was a human waking.

I was still lying on Shaun's bed. The hazy feeling in my head, combined with the silence and the dark, told me that it wasn't morning yet; that it was, in fact, the middle of the night.

I quickly became aware that I wasn't alone.

There was someone in the bedroom with me.

I rolled over. Through bleary vision I saw a massive shape in front of the closed door, darker and more menacing than the shadows all around it.

The Boss
.

I sat up. I had forgotten what that particular fear feels like. It's a jolt that rips your nerves out of their rightful and accustomed berth.

I didn't mind so much now about being taken away. I just didn't care to suffer on the trip.

My breath felt like a knife in Shaun's body. Stabbing shallow, in and out, in and out. It rattled noisily in the room.

The shape drew closer, towering over me, something between a bull and a man, more powerful than either.

I squeezed my eyes shut.

But once I couldn't see, the air around me felt…normal. There was no power in the room. It was an illusion.

There was nothing behind what I saw. Nothing behind my fear.

It wasn't the Boss.

I opened my eyes. The shape was still there, looming like a poisonous cloud.

It spoke.

“You don't belong here.” The words came, not from
a throat, but from all of the shape at once, deep and booming.

“I—I know,” I whispered, my voice hoarse.

“You can't leave your duties behind,” the shadow went on.

But its tone rose oddly at the end. There was something very strange about it. It wasn't doom laden and sonorous.

“You can't just…just…take off whenever you
feel
like it.”

It was peevish, I realized. The tone was
peevish
.
Petulant
.

There was only one unearthly being I knew who would sound like that.

“Anus?” I asked, still not sure.

“Quit calling me that!”

“What are you doing here?”

“It's Anius. An-
nye
-us.”

Anius, overseer of the overseers. Middle management of Hell. Just as my function was to reflect sorrow and guilt, his was to reflect anxiety and worry, to fret over dotted i's and crossed t's.

“Why are you here?” I asked him. “What do you want?”

“I'm not talking to you till you say it right.”

“An-NYE-us. What are you doing, coming here when
I'm trying to sleep? And looking like
that
?”

“What are
you
doing, trying to sleep? You don't sleep. You don't
need
sleep. You shouldn't be
sleeping
at all.”

“I do too need sleep.”

“In that body, you do. In that stolen body. And the reason I'm in this form is because
(a) I
don't steal bodies, and
(b)
to show you the seriousness of the situation.”

Of all the beings to send for me, they'd picked the one who annoyed me the most. The one I couldn't stand to listen to.

“Wah wah wah,” I said, and lay back down, although I was too shaken now to be sleepy. “Go back to Hell. I'm on vacation.”

Anius sputtered. “You don't get a vacation!”

“That's why they call it
taking
one.”

Anius drew himself up, and the top of him took the form of a shadowy head with horns. “You're breaking about a million rules right now,” he said. “You're supposed to oversee the torment of souls.”

“That's not a rule.”

“Is so.”

“It's a
custom
. It's what I've always done. That doesn't make it a rule.”

“You know very well that the Creator set us to specific tasks.
My
task is to oversee the overseers. You're making
me
not fulfill
my
function. You're making
me
look bad.
You're going to get
me
in trouble.”

“The Creator never set me to any task. Never said a word about anything. In fact, I've never even met Him.”

“Oh! Oh! You blasphemer!”

“That's about the size of it, all right. Make a plain statement of fact and it counts as blasphemy.”

“You're going to be in such trouble!”

“Oh yeah?” I pulled the covers up under my chin. “From who?”

“From the
Boss
, Kiriel,” said Anius.

That opened my eyes.

The Boss. Of course I'd met him; I'd once followed him even to my doom. Beautiful and terrible and endlessly compelling—that was the Boss. Even the thought of his anger a few minutes ago had sent me rigid with fear.

But I had control of my wits again. “The Boss doesn't have much room to complain about
me
, does he?” I pointed out to Anius. After all, hadn't the Boss led the Rebellion, the whopper of revolts, the insurrection to end all insurrections? “And it can't be that important anyway,” I added, “if he only sent
you
to straighten it out.”

“Nobody sent me. I came of my own accord.”

I blinked into the dark. Nobody sent him? Nobody was ordering me to return?

A terrible thought occurred. “Were…were you the one IM-ing me?”

“Yes, of course. Who else?”

I lay there, stunned. Could it be that Anius was the only one who'd even noticed that I was gone?

He hadn't come because he was told to. He hadn't even come because he was concerned. The only reason he'd come was out of obsessive worry and attention to detail. That was the only reason he ever did anything.

I sat up again. “You can tell the Boss that I've had it with watching souls suffer. Now go away, you whiny obsessive-compulsive sycophant.”

In the dark, two glowing red eyes formed in Anius's head. As if
that
would intimidate me.

I lay down and pulled the covers up to my chin.

“All right, fine,” Anius huffed. “Just remember that
I
tried to talk to you.
I
tried to get you to come back.
I
did
my
duty.”

“Yeah, whatever.” I snuggled deeper into Shaun's bed, as if I were looking forward to the comfort of slumber. “Good night,
Anus
.”

When I felt his presence dissipate, I opened one eye. Yes, he was gone.

But after that, I couldn't sleep. I rolled onto my side and lay there, looking at Shaun's wall.

No one had sent Anius.

No one cared if I had learned any lesson. No one had made a plan for me.

No one even felt compelled to protect
my
place in Hell. My identity.

Shaun was lucky. He, at least, would be missed. Shaun Simmons had made a specific mark on his little world, simply by
being
.

A discontent rose in me. I thought,
This must be Envy.
It didn't feel particularly good
or
particularly bad. The only thing about it that seemed even slightly sinful was the way it clung and gnawed, as if it could easily take on a life of its own.

Shaun's pillow cradled my head. I'd stolen a boy's body and the Creator didn't even care! If mankind was of such great import in the overall scheme of things, by George, shouldn't He Himself have shown up to take care of this?

But He hadn't. He hadn't even
sent
anybody.

It was as if nobody was running the universe.

I sat up, punched Shaun's pillow a few times to make it puffier, and lay down again, this time on my back, facing the ceiling.

Maybe the reason no one cares about my absence,
I thought,
is that I don't
have
to be there. Maybe my job is superfluous. Maybe the souls don't really
need
a mirror.

I thought about the big reckoning, after the Rebellion.

No one told me what my punishment was. I just
knew
.

But now I wondered.

Maybe that punishment was entirely self-imposed. Maybe I never
had
to be in Hell, not for a single moment.

Hey. Maybe the souls didn't have to be there either, for that matter. Maybe
their
punishment was self-imposed, too.

Maybe it was a cosmic joke that we'd been making ourselves miserable all this time. Maybe the Creator never really cared about transgressions. Or rebellions.

Maybe He never cared about
me
.