She ran to the street side of the building, skidded around the corner and pulled up short. Mark was not there. She looked up and saw the ledge and knew she was in the right spot. She looked at the sidewalk again. No Mark. She stood, dumbfounded, mouth hanging open.
* * *
The Devil was one block away, tucked into an alley, breathing heavily. He leaned against cold brick and tilted his head forward. This body ached and ached. He’d kept it from too much serious damage by meeting it at impact, but still…the body was in such bad shape to begin with. He coughed and blood splattered his shoes. This throat felt like it was tearing open. He coughed again and this time his diaphragm clenched and he threw up, trying to direct it away from himself, but not entirely successful.
“My brother just jumped from the top of…I don’t know what it’s called…the address is 901…yes, he jumped, and…no, I don’t need an ambulance, I need the police, he’s not…no, just the police, he got up, he got up and must have…I told you already, from the roof…I don’t know, ten stories? Seven? I don’t know, I’m not familiar with…”
The fretful, woman’s voice was coming closer. He’d seen her, briefly, when he’d opened his eyes. She’d been staring down at him from the ledge. He assumed it was the ledge he’d jumped from. Who was she?
The Devil shook his head, clearing his mind: she’d said brother. It was the suicide’s sister. And she was nearly to him.
He faded farther back into the alley, trying to be quiet, but this sick, clumsy body was not cooperating. Torrents of pain wracked it and the nausea was a continuous stream of torture, stirring his guts. Sick, this body was sick, but not just from the Transition. From the drugs, too. He’d have to find a place to lay up until he could get this body back to rights. Vertigo tilted the alley up and over him and he pinwheeled his arms but weakly, they were so weak. The vomit rose to his throat and he fell over, only semi-conscious. From far away but getting closer he heard:
“No it is not a joke, I am not drunk, my brother just…you have to send someone, you don’t understand…”
The footsteps getting closer, seeming to ring like chimes in his ears, even as the voice seemed to fade away, float away. Floating…
Then he heard:
“Mark!”
And:
“Mark, are you all right? How did you…”
And after a little while:
“I’m bringing my car around. We’ll get you to a hospital and…”
Then nothing more for another little while. He let this body drift, semi-conscious. It felt good to drift; it felt better.
Then the clunk of a car door and arms around him, trying to push him to sit up. He groaned, a trickle of vomit hot over his tongue and chin, and slitted his eyes open. She knelt before him, grunting and struggling, her dark hair hung untidily over her eyes and she flicked her head once, twice, to clear her sight. Her eyes were extraordinarily beautiful, a vivid emerald green that shone even in the small bit of streetlight that made it into the alley. He blinked. It reminded him of Heaven, where everything had been beautiful even without body, without mass such as here on Earth.
Her eyes were truly ethereal.
Now those eyes shifted to his and she paused in her tugging of his arms.
She smiled but the worried cast in her eyes would not dim.
“You’ll be okay,” she said.
And:
“I’m taking you to the hospital.”
And:
“I can’t believe you…”
Before she faded out again.
He awoke in the seat of a car and rolled his head left and she seemed to sense his eyes on her and she glanced at him. “We’re almost there. If I can just get these one way streets figured out…”
She leaned forward, struggling to read the signs as they drove under the streetlights. Light swept gradually over her face and then away, as if a photographer trapped in a slower time had decided to take her picture.
“No,” he said, rasping, swallowing. “No…hospital.”
She looked over, startled.
“Yes, hospital,” she said and turned back to navigate.
“No…I don’t want…I can’t…” he said, his voice trailing away into a cough.
“You are going to the hospital. Mark, you fell from the top of that building! You don’t know what might be wrong inside. You could be bleeding internally or–”
“I didn’t fall,” he said.
Her jaw tightened.
“No. I know you didn’t,” she said.
“I’ll do it…I’ll just do it again…if you make me go there.”
Anger flashed into her emerald eyes but was gone just as quick as it came, leaving resignation. Such sad, deep resignation that the Devil wondered briefly what she’d been through with this body, this man Mark, her brother. He could guess at some of it. He’d seen so much of Mark’s type in The Litany. But he’d never seen the other side of it, the consequences side. The loved one’s side.
“Just take me home,” he said and tilted his head back against the seat. The lights flashed faster, leaving bright spots on his retinas even under his closed lids. After a while, the tires bumped and then began to hum–they were on the bridge, heading out of the city.
The Devil tried to relax but the nausea was a constant discomfort and now this body was getting chills and fever, chills and fever, and he was overtaken by an enormous thirst. The streetlights ended and now they were in mostly unbroken darkness, not even another car on the road this early in the morning, and the Devil wondered if he’d made a grave error in choosing this body.
Then he dozed.
Beside him, Kelly was silently berating herself for falling for her brother’s threats. She knew he should be in a hospital, but of everything he’d threatened in the past, he’d never threatened suicide.
She knew he hadn’t called her last night in the hopes that she’d save him. He’d been determined to kill himself.
She hadn’t heard from him for at least six months and when she’d answered the unknown number displayed on her cell phone, she hadn’t recognized his voice at first. It was slurred but quiet, almost a whisper. He’d told her that he loved her and loved their parents and was so sorry for everything that had gone wrong. Everything he’d put them through.
She’d heard this before, heard all of this from him before, and was at first merely annoyed. This was part of his pattern: get wasted, get ecstatic, get sad, get depressed, and then, if he was still cogent (which wasn’t very often, not by this point in the pattern), call sister and cry.
But it hadn’t been the same. His voice hadn’t been the same. He was calm, not hysterical. He wasn’t crying or begging for anything…he’d sounded matter-of-fact. Sad, but determined to get said what he wanted to say. And then he’d hung up.
She’d been left with a pit in her stomach and a sudden certainty of what he was planning.
It was only luck that she’d found him.
Kelly was six when her parents adopted Mark. They had decided after five years and three miscarriages that adoption would be a less heartbreaking solution to expanding their family. They’d fallen in love with Mark the minute they’d laid their eyes on him. With his coloring, he even looked as though he could have been their biological child.
He’d been an orphan since he was four, and he’d been returned from two foster homes for behavioral issues by the time he was seven. Kelly’s parents adopted him the day after he’d turned eight.
At the time of the adoption, they’d lived in the building Mark had fallen from. This was the first real ‘home’ Mark had known. He’d sit on the roof for hours and watch the theater next door. He liked to watch people trickle in by ones and twos and then after a time, pour back out in a busy crowd that blackened the sidewalk and quickly dispersed. Then the pattern would start all over again.
It had only been three years they’d lived there, but for Mark, they were the best three years of his life. He was learning to control his emotions and was starting to finally get over his fears of the unknown–of instability. Then, when Kelly’s father had changed jobs, they’d moved to the suburbs.
It was in the suburbs of Central Jersey that Mark had first tried drugs. By his junior year he was addicted and had already been to three treatment facilities. He turned eighteen during his senior year and at his first arrest as an adult, his parents had let him sit in jail for a week. They were tired of the lies and stealing but even more so, they were tired of the abuse Mark heaped on them–and he did pile it on. He blamed them for everything. He told them they’d ruined his life by moving him away from everything he was familiar with. It was their fault he’d even tried drugs. Their fault he’d gotten hooked. Their fault he’d had to turn to theft to support his burgeoning habit.
None of it was his fault. He’d done nothing wrong, just been a victim of his parent’s selfishness and self-centeredness.
Even at sixteen, Kelly had been smart enough to realize that everything Mark accused their parents of–especially the self-centeredness–were really things he despised about himself and therefore couldn’t face. He couldn’t take the responsibility. He was weak.
She glanced at him now, slumped against the car door. His mouth hung open, arms crossed over his thin chest. The darkness was not kind to his ravaged face. Deeply socketed, his eyes could have been the empty holes of a skull and his cheekbones stood out, shadowing the area below, reinforcing his skeletal appearance.
An almost physical weight seemed to settle around her. The lead-lined mantle of taking responsibility for him. Again.
She pulled into her driveway, bumping gently over the apron. The house was a small, tidy Cape Cod on a street lined with similar homes. There weren’t yet any flowers in the beds, it was too early in the year, but she already knew she’d put impatiens, salvia, and snapdragons in the front beds and something trailing, ivy or bougainvillea, in the window boxes. Satisfaction settled her stomach and leeched some of the tension from her shoulders. It always felt good to be home. Like a little bit of Heaven.
She looked again at Mark and then opened her door. She got out and closed the door as quietly as she could–the houses here were close together and she didn’t want to wake her neighbors.
The night had gotten very chilly. She checked the time on her phone–4:30. She’d have to call out of work today and maybe tomorrow, too. Depending on how sick Mark was this time. She stood for a minute more, listening to the silence, broken only by one lone truck swishing past on the distant highway.
She went to the passenger side and eased it open, pulling slowly in case he was leaning on it. As it opened, he pushed himself back and deeper into the seat.
“Mark,” she said, whispering and laying a hand on his shoulder. Even his shoulder was bony.
“Mark,” she said again, shaking him. “Come on, let’s go in. Mark?”
He gasped as though she’d woken him in the middle of a nightmare. His eyes opened wide and he looked left to right. He brought his hands up near his chest, palms out, as if warding something off.
She squeezed his shoulder.
“Mark, we’re home, come on out,” she said and tried to smile. The night had been a little too long and difficult for her to produce anything near a real smile. It was more just a tired tightening of her lips.
His eyes found hers and he stared, looking dazed.
“Who are you?” he said.
Her lips tightened even more. Now that she’d been out of the car, she could smell how sour, almost rotten, the interior had become. Anger shot through her and she considered turning around and leaving him to fend for himself but the anger passed–she was probably too tired to sustain much anger–and she gripped his wrists and pulled him from the car. He was light, he couldn’t weigh more than 135 or so, and that brought the pity back, but tinged with disgust. I guess I am still a little mad, she thought.
“Ha ha Mark, come on, quit messing around. I’ve had enough. Really.”
He stood, swaying, and looked from her to the house.
“I’m so tired,” he said.
She nodded.
“I know you are. Come on, let’s get inside.”
He shuffled after her and leaned against her back like an exhausted toddler as she unlocked the door.
In quick succession she felt: pity, disgust, anger, resignation.
The resignation always won out, in the end.
She opened the door, reached behind her for his hand, and led him in.
* * *
Two days.
For two days, the Devil struggled in this body he’d commandeered. For two long days it sweated and discharged matter from both ends. It ached, it twitched, its muscles contracted so painfully that the Devil was reminded of his own torturous limbs. It bucked and buckled and leaked fluid from every orifice. It stank. And it hurt.
Not once did the Devil think about giving this body over and finding his way back. Torturous as detoxing was, it paled in comparison to Hell.
Kelly called out of work for three days, pleading a family emergency. She didn’t want to do it, but she had no choice. Watching Mark detox was almost as painful for her as it was for the Devil going through it. She wrestled a plastic sheet under him after he’d vomited for fifteen minutes straight, lying on his side the entire time. She wiped his face and put chapstick on his lips. She forced water on him sip by sip. She worried and she paced. She slept in a chair in the room with him, but never soundly, only drifting in and out as he grunted and groaned in agony.
She’d seen him go through this before, once at her parents, once here, and once she’d seen the beginning of it at the emergency room while he’d waited his turn to get his arm stitched where a bottle had cut it. The bottle had been wielded by one of his street friends on a bad trip. By the time the nurse took him back, his symptoms were obvious and after stitching him up they’d had him sent, via police car, to the closest treatment facility.
But she’d never seen him this way, never so…stoic. That was the only word she could think of for his behavior. Although tears of pain squeezed from his eyes, he never sobbed. He cried out, but only in grunts or groans, he never screamed for his fix. He didn’t accuse her of keeping drugs from him. He didn’t accuse her of holding him against his will. In fact, he didn’t acknowledge her at all. This was a private battle he was fighting. And she thought that this time, he might make it.