Near + Far Page 6

  Lewis flipping through TV channels. The trees rattled their fingers on the dark window, swished their leaves against the glass as though asking to come in.

  "They're called Dhami," he said.

  "Who?"

  "The shamans in the school of teaching I'm studying." He smirked. "Now you'll tell me how nice it is I'm doing something outside the house."

  "I didn't know you were interested in shamanism," she said. She could see, given the list of other groups, why he might have chosen it.

  His tone altered, slipped out of its usual snakeskin coated form. Became more sincere. "They teach what might happen after death. How you can prepare."

  The honesty stunned her. The first moment like this they'd had, since he'd become a nuisance. A nuisance but also something she loved fiercely, had missed like a lost forearm ever since he'd withdrawn from her.

  She groped for words like someone trying not to scare an exotic, unimaginable bird, phoenix or quetzalcoatl. If the shamanism class had taught him this, she was all for it.

  "What are you learning?"

  But the moment had passed, sudden as a cloud's shadow slipping away.

  He folded his arms. "I'm going in Sunday mornings as well, for a drumming workshop at the coffeehouse."

  Did she need to stay and wait, in case he needed her? She could take her pad and wait in the car. He shook his head in answer.

  "Some nurses from the hospital are attending too. They know what to do." He sneered. "It'll get me out of the house, I knew you'd approve. You can make more of your little books."

  That stung enough that she retreated to her workshop. She took her buzzer. It would alert her if he fell prey to a fit.

  She curled in the chair. How had she come up with Everkind? Stories she wrote as a child, crude wish-fulfillment, a kingdom of magical ponies battling a villain called Brutescruel. She'd drawn them whenever she could.

  Eventually she added more characters, made more and more sophisticated stories. She listened to concepts, dramatic tension, denouement, foreshadowing, in a creative writing class, and found them familiar, like learning a language you knew as a child. Find your voice, one teacher kept saying, but she had already found hers.

  The stories had possessed her. They emerged beneath her pen, flowed like a fountain. Even when she'd graduated and gone to work as a graphic designer, she'd still drawn them. An art director who liked to mentor had sent one off to a publishing company.

  The rest was history. The Everkind graphic novels, her "little books," might not be wildly popular, but they did provide enough to pay the rent and for the medicines that ate up four fifths of her income. He knew as well as she did that she could be living much better. His illness was responsible for the shabby but clean house that they lived in, the ten-year-old car she drove.

  Downstairs, Lewis moved about, restless, turning to a nature show on the TV, then talk radio, the kitchen mini-TV sending out the ping of a bat, a crowd's roar. Battling soundtracks. The inevitable precursor to a fit.

  She was downstairs before the device in her pocket buzzed.

  He lay on the floor, shuddering for breath. She thumbed the hypo-spray, pressed it into his forearm. He moved from side to side, helpless, staring up. She looked away, didn't meet his eyes. Her fingers rested on his inner arm, letting his pulse race against her fingers, agonized, slowing at an imperceptible rate.

  Her hand drooped like a sad little animal.

  She wanted him to live.

  She wanted, more than anything else in the world, for him to die.

  Pain and hate and despair twisted his face.

  Twisted her heart.

  A childhood memory:

  They'd insisted on going by themselves through the fun house, twelve-year-old Amber, seven-year-old Lewis.

  Amber knew it a terrible mistake the moment the cart jolted forward into darkness. Bones and red cloth and LED-lit eyes swooped at her. Lewis screamed. She flinched into him and put her arm around him.

  "Close your eyes," she said. "Nothing can hurt you if your eyes are closed." She did the same.

  There were noises, of course, shrieks and cackles. Twice string brushed over her face. Lewis clutched her; she held onto his reassuring presence. The cart shuddered and tilted, ascended an incline. Doors swung open. Sunlight flooded around them, almost blinding them.

  The second floor balcony track led along a ledge before returning to the funhouse. Amber could see her father and mother in the crowd below. They waved up, smiling.

  Lewis screamed, trying to climb out onto the balcony. She held onto him, terrified he'd be caught in the machinery. She was the only thing protecting him. Anger flashed through her. Why had her parents left her with this terrible responsibility?

  "Close your eyes. Close your eyes," she repeated.

  They returned to darkness and clamor.

  Afterwards they emerged, shaken and hand in hand, to eat hot dogs and throw up without preamble. Their displeased parents took them home.

  In later years, they were uneasy allies. Sometimes they stole toys or candy from each other's rooms. Other times generosity moved them. Lewis made Amber an elaborate Christmas crèche in his art class that was still a treasured decoration in her study. She spent a month making him a dollhouse/space station in which his Star Trek figurines and her Barbies played.

  Coming into the kitchen, she saw him with saltshaker raised over the pot bubbling on the flat stove surface.

  "Don't put that in," she said. And exasperated, "For Pete's sake, you know I have to watch that for my blood pressure."

  He shrugged. "Guess I forgot. I don't have to watch that sort of thing."

  He picked up his socks and jacket after himself, as though he had more energy. The lines around his eyes plumped out. He was nicer.

  He still smelled of sage and lavender, and now other things, musk and sweet-amber and something with an odd metallic edge. Still muttered almost beyond her hearing, a phrase that sounded like calling for an errant dog.

  Did she trust Lewis? No. And disliked herself for not being able to go that far. When had she gone so cynical, so cold?

  She kept waiting. Had a character ever taken such an agonizingly long time to come to her before? She wondered what a shaman would suggest. How to invoke it.

  What had she ever known of this unseen world that Lewis dabbled in? Once, when she was eight or nine, she'd been upstairs, standing near the head of the staircase, when she'd heard a woman's voice shout, "Help me, someone help me." It had been so real, so close that she'd called out to her parents.

  But there were no alarms from neighboring houses. Her father convinced her that she must have heard something from the downstairs television. For years after, thoughts of that woman obsessed her. She imagined her trapped, buried underground. Attacked. Lost. Alone. That mysterious figure became a motif in Everkind, was rescued in three separate episodes, once by Mrs. Mountebank, twice by the Whistling Gypsy.

  In the current storyline, she was under siege again.

  From The Annals of Everkind:

  MRS. MOUNTEBANK:

  Sometimes you must waltz, even with Madness in his best ball gown.

  THE WHISTLING GYPSY:

  I never thought I'd hear you say such a thing, Madam!

  MRS. MOUNTEBANK:

  These things are the very bones and sinew of our world, if not the ichorous blood itself.

  THE WHISTLING GYPSY:

  Words were ever things of madness.

  Exhibit A:

  Pulling up to get him, she'd seen a mousy woman trying to talk to him. Trying to chat him up. Lewis stared straight ahead, ignoring her. The woman faltered, tried again, glanced at the sound of wheels pulling up, walked away slump-shouldered as Lewis got into the car.

  "Who was that?" Amber asked.

  "No one," he said.

  "Is she from your Shamanism group?"

  "No, it's men only."

  "It looked as though she wanted to start a conversation with you."


  "Shall we begin the conversation about how important it is to build friendships? Let me cut to the chase—I'll be dead. It won't matter."

  She refused to speak again, turned on the radio, let his jeers contend with a right-wing talk show discussing Mars' drain on the global economy, commercials selling gold and colon remedies, a tuna fish selling car insurance.

  "All right," he shouted over the last. "We'll play it your way. I'm sorry."

  Exhibit B:

  Too unspeakable to be mentioned.

  Exhibit C:

  Was it something she could point to, or rather a series of things? The way her alarm clock turned itself on, on the days when she could have slept in, or how it went off twice at 3:00 am, a time she knew she hadn't set it for? Dogshit smeared inside her Crocs; her favorite zinnias blackened and drooping after he'd spent an afternoon contemplating them.

  But still. Face to face, it was so much better that she thought she could endure this covert war for now.

  After all, it was true. He would die and move on. All she had to do was outwait him.

  A precious whole day to herself, to go into the city and talk to her editor. The nurse-aide arrived at 8; Amber was gone by 8:05.

  "You need something new," the editor said over lunch, tender mussels and saffron pasta and a wine like the end of summer. "How long has it been since you introduced any new characters? It used to be one—sometimes two—per book."

  Had it been that long? Was that why she found the latest one's imminence such a maddening itch?

  "I'm working on a new one right now," she said.

  "What is it?"

  "It's still coalescing," she said, seized with fear that discussing it too much would drive the new character away, back into the darkness outside Everkind's bright borders.

  The editor knew her well enough to shut up at that, to direct her attention to concerns of a possible change in paper, and where the e-rights might be picked up. It was delightful to eat and not worry about Lewis, to pretend that she was unencumbered by him.

  Riding down in the elevator, laden with several advance proofs, she could feel the elevator moving downward. It made her feel vertiginous, as though she was plunging, rocketing into some unknown.

  She leaned against the wall, its metal surface slick against her fingertips. The elevator was still plunging, still giving way under her feet. On and on. A dizzy reel, while the world whirled away. Amber was dizzy-dumb, and the fluorescent lights buzzed as though voicing her panic. She wanted to spread her arms, her wings and swoop upward. Escape this trap.

  Would they die when they hit the bottom? Of course they would. Would she throw up before they hit or would it be quick enough to spare her that?

  But no. The elevator was slowing, moving back to a normal speed. Water from a street vendor chased the taste of almost vomit from her mouth.

  She was determined, though. This would be her day. Tomorrow, when she took Lewis to the hospital, she'd stop in and find out what the dizzy spell might mean. Maybe nothing more than too much food.

  She went shopping, found two tailored blouses, a pair of shoes that were comfortable, strolled through a Picasso exhibit, then a set of smaller galleries.

  She could feel the new character, so close she could almost glimpse it in the crowd, following at her heels. She practiced the things she might have said to it if it showed up at her elbow, the pictures she might have pointed out to it: a serigraph of Tinkertoys in bright primaries; a skull and feather fan; a distorted face floating in an abandoned hubcap, broad-stroked in acrylic paint.

  She looked up. Reflected in the glass of the frame. Hawk or woman? The menacing curve of its beak. A flower-pupiled eye, cherry and amber.

  She spun.

  Gone.

  Breathlessness seized her. She stood in the middle of the crowd, half-expecting the dizziness to attack her again. It passed. The noise of the crowd eddying around her pressed in on her ears. She need solitude, craved it.

  She could not coax the vision back, but still—close. At the botanical garden, she sketched birds: starlings managing to be glossy and shabby all at once; rusty finches; a fat seagull; a smugly stupid robin; pigeon after pigeon after pigeon. None seemed right, but she lost herself in the detailing of lines forming each feather's vane: rachis and barb, plumy tufts of afterfeathers.

  When she returned, she was still giddy with the pleasure of the drawing. The nurse-aide's scowl ripped the mood away.

  "Don't call our agency again," he said.

  "Did he have a fit?"

  "Yes. It was after that. Client was inexcusably rude. I'm blacklisting you."

  Not the first time. But she had thought Lewis' recent good mood might extend to interacting with other people.

  He slouched on the divan, watching a feed of some event in a garden, people planting a tiny tree in a circle of cameras and tulips. Tired and drawn, hunched over himself.

  "What happened?" she asked.

  "The usual," he said. "You living don't understand."

  "We living?" she asked, incredulous.

  He looked up. His lips firmed. "It's what we call you. We who are about to die." He saluted her.

  "Lewis, I didn't cause any of this. Can't you cut me some slack?"

  "It is the nature of the wild bird to hate its cage," he said.

  "What does that mean? How are you analogous to a singing bird?"

  "I didn't say singing," he said. "I am a representative of the wild world, though. A dimension that you can't touch or comprehend."

  "You never even went to summer camp," she said. "The closest you've ever come to the wild world is grilling in the park."

  He snarled at her, his face so distorted with fury that it drove her a step back. "I can be anything I want to be!"

  "Of course you can," she said.

  "Don't fucking humor me!" He plunged his face into the side of the couch. Rope-skinny arms covered his head. "Just go the fuck away!"

  She did.

  Was he going crazy? She couldn't imagine the pressure of having Death a constant presence at your elbow. Had he become more himself, as he had said? Had he always been this mean at the core, just hid it better before?

  He'd been in her study.

  Nothing she could point to at first. Then she noticed the shelf where she kept her knick-knacks, inspirational objects, remembrances. The crèche Lewis had made her in childhood was off to one side.

  The figures had been smashed, reduced to terra cotta shards.

  She touched one little heap. The sheep, with its spiral curls signifying wool and funny, lopsided expression. A version of it was a frequent visitor in her novels. Mr. Wiggly.

  The fragments were beyond reassembly, almost pulverized. She swept them into a shoe box, closed the lid on it. Shoved it in the bottom of a cupboard.

  She rearranged her shelf to compensate for the absence. She touched a sheaf of feathers clustered in a vase. Eagle or hawk, she wasn't sure which. Gathered by a lake one morning at summer camp, long ago. They ruffled against her fingertips, soft comfort.

  The loss hurt.

  The intrusion into her workspace, always off-limits in unspoken terms, hurt even more.

  Middle of the night; waking.

  Something, someone stood there in the bedroom in the darkness. But she knew the door was locked, she did that habitually, couldn't sleep if she knew it was open.

  Moonlight sliced across the carpet. Was she dreaming?

  Something breathed immediately next to her ear.

  She couldn't move.

  Surely this was nightmare. All she had to do was force herself awake.

  The brass-framed bed creaked and tilted as it settled onto the mattress beside her. She smelled musk and smoke.

  Force herself awake.

  Weight, so great it hurt, even more than the pinprick of claws, settled onto her shoulders, directly on the joints.

  Another massive weight on her hip.

  The ashtray reek of its breath, stink-fumbling at her li
ps.

  Force herself awake.

  She managed to pull her hands under it, shove it away by digging her thumbs into the pits directly behind its forelimbs.

  She wasn't dreaming. Her eyes were open.

  She was frozen. She remembered being told what to do when attacked by a brown bear. Kick and punch and drive it away. If she was dreaming, couldn't she drive it into that shape, fight it off?

  It had seemed impossible, the idea of a human fighting off a bear, but people had, the instructor said. People had done stranger, more valiant things.

  It bore down on her. Claws drove into her side.

  She dug her thumbs as deep and hard as possible with a wild shriek like an eagle's squawk.

  It roared and tried to pull away from her. She let herself be drawn up, used the momentum to swing her feet under herself, clamber back away and over to the bed lamp, all in the space of one terrified breath.

  Screamed, "Help me, someone please help me." Heard it go ringing down the corridors of time.

  Wake.

  Clicked the light on.

  Nothing.

  Her room, ordinary, bedclothes askew, laundry hamper, paperback straddle-backed on the bedside table. Beige carpet. The sound of her heartbeat, hammer-blasting in her chest, her throat, her ears.

  She paused. Surely the commotion would have drawn Lewis. He was the lightest of sleepers.

  Only silence from the rest of the house.

  She crept down the hall in bare feet, paused outside his door. Her arm was sore, pain biting at it whenever she moved.

  Only the sound of his breathing inside. Nothing else. She waited. She had read you could tell when someone woke up, that no one could control the pattern of their breathing from sleeping to waking. But the sounds continued, deep regular inhalations, rhythmic as a saw blade in action.

  Faking? Or exhausted by his day, by the draining effects of his disease?

  In the bathroom she avoided looking in the mirror as she dabbed at the edges of the wound with a washcloth, then covered them with Neosporin and a gauze bandage.

  What had happened?

  But that was not the real question.

  Her mind crept around and around the real question.