Текст книги "Passenger"

Автор книги: Andrew Smith

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Текущая страница: 23 (всего у книги 24 страниц)

But things always changed.

When an echo comes back to you, the song is always different.

It was why the pictures disappeared from my camera back in June, and why Conner saw Henry sometimes, but other times it was like Henry didn’t even exist.

So maybe I’d never gotten back home to begin with.

From the very first time I went to Marbury, things got moved, rearranged. And once those things shifted the slightest bit, they never went back to exactly the same spots they’d come from.

That’s what I thought.

Conner elbowed me below the ribs.

That was it.

We stopped running.

I shoved him. Hard. I wanted to punch him so bad I was shaking. Both my hands tightened in fists. Of course he saw it.

“What the fuck, Con?”

He shook his head; his brow tightened up like I was speaking a different language.

“What’s wrong with you, Jack?”

“Stop fucking with me! Leave me the fuck alone!”

Conner’s tone was pleading. “What’d I do, Jack? Tell me what I did.”

I spun around, away from Conner, and threw a wild hook punch at the air. Then I put my hands on top of my head, squeezing, pulling my hair.

“What is fucking wrong with me?”

I wasn’t asking Conner. I was just sending the words out across the slate surface of the lake, skipping like stones, going nowhere but down. I didn’t even want an answer, and Conner knew it.

So we stood there like that for the longest time, absolutely silent except for the panting breaths we gulped. And I think Conner was starting to get scared too.

“I’m sorry, Con.”

He stepped toward me. I didn’t see him, but I could feel his heat as he got close. Finally, he put his arm around my shoulder and squeezed me tight. He was sweating.

I said, “Dude. You fucking reek like BO.”

He gripped my bicep and pulled me in to him.

“It’s all okay, Jack. I’m not fucking with you. We’re here. Safe. Together. Everything is good now. Finally, dude. We made it. I swear to God, everything’s good now.”

I swallowed a lump and nodded.

“What if—”

Conner cut me off. “There is no what if, Jack. This is fucking it. I promise.”

He patted his hand on the back of my neck.

“This can be it, Jack.”

“You think?”

“It’s good enough for me, bud.”

The sky began darkening again. It would rain soon.

And Conner said, “Don’t you think this is far enough? Let’s go get drunk out of our fucking minds.”

This is it.

*   *   *

Conner didn’t say anything else about the things that were eating us inside.

He just made small talk and teased me, picked on Jack like he always did, calling me gay, testing me.

And we didn’t even clean up. Sweaty and stinking, we got dressed in the same jeans we’d worn on the train, slipped into our T-shirts and pullovers.

Conner put on his wool cap, and said, “There!” like we were racing each other out the door or something; and I just let my damp hair hang in darkened strings that went past my eyes.

It didn’t matter.

Nothing mattered.

Because this was it.

And I knew what I needed to do.

I had a plan.

As soon as we shut the door behind us, I took out my phone.

Conner asked, “Nickie?”

“No. I owe someone a beer.”

We walked to The Prince of Wales.

thirty-four

By the time Henry Hewitt showed up, Conner and I were drunk.

The place was noisy and alive.

I didn’t even try to pace myself with the drinking. I wanted to poison every fear I held on to, work up the courage to finally let go of everything Jack kept balled up in the center of his fucked universe.

Conner laughed. “You know? You know what Gino fucking Genovese and Ethan call this? They say this is getting piss maggot drunk, Jack. We are piss maggoted.”

He stood up, sat, and stood again, wavering unsteadily while he carried our empty pint glasses to the bar for refills.

And that’s when Henry walked in.

Conner glanced at the door one time, but didn’t pay any attention to Henry at all. He turned back to the bartender and noisily ordered another round for us.

I waved and held three fingers up, then pointed to the man at the door.

“Make it three.”

It was almost funny to me, how after all this time when they’d both been so important in my life—in my worlds—Conner and Henry had never yet spoken to each other, sat face-to-face. And now that they were finally here together, it was almost like I could rest my case once and for all that this—whatever this was—was real.

I was the worm and I was the hole. We all were—me, Conner, Ben and Griffin, Henry, Seth, and Ethan, too. But I was the King of Marbury. Somehow I’d been chosen to go through, as Henry was chosen before me. And every time I did it, I fooled myself into thinking, This is it, but I never once got back to a place I’d been before.

I never fucking got us back home.

Maybe I was just drunk, but as I sat there in The Prince of Wales, I decided that the reason I never told anyone except Conner about what Freddie Horvath did to me was that I believed everyone else would think it was my fault.

Everything was Jack’s fault.

But this could be it.

This was good enough, and I was tired. I wished I had the balls to hold Conner and tell him how sorry I was for everything I’d done.

This is it.

Henry stood at the door, eyeing me for a moment. Then he nodded and began snaking through the crowd.

I could say he looked older, but we’d both been through so much. As he made his way toward me, I wondered if he knew about the places I’d been, if maybe he’d had dreams, and in them, if he saw London falling to pieces, ghosts who came and went, Jack bleeding to death in front of him, and blue plastic drums with the tangled bodies of lost little boys sleeping endlessly inside them.

Maybe he had no stories except for the ones that trapped us together.

I wondered if he carried a small compass with him.

I was so sick of everything. I had called Henry here to say good-bye to him one last time.

When he got to our table, I stood politely and took his hand, but I didn’t smile. Behind him, Conner balanced three pints of beer and worked at navigating a zigzagged return.

“The last time I saw you, I promised I’d buy you a beer,” I said.

Henry cleared his throat and sat beside me. “And when, exactly, was that, Jack?”

“Funny. The exactly part. The day before yesterday, I guess. We stood together on a ridge of boulders and looked out at the desert in Marbury, the night before you left for Bass-Hove. Sound familiar?”

Henry shrugged one shoulder as if to say it didn’t matter whether it sounded familiar or not. “Well, it’s always nice to have a pint with a friend, I think.”

Conner arrived, centering three nearly full glasses of beer on the table. He stood there for a while, gripping the back of his chair with both hands like he was having a hard time figuring out what changed about this picture while he was gone.

He leaned across the table and put his face so close to my ear that he almost fell on top of me. He whispered, “Hey, Jack. There’s some creepy old guy sitting next to you. Just thought I’d let you know.”

Then he laughed and sat down.

I raised my glass. “Conner Kirk, meet Henry Hewitt.”

Our beers clinked together, and Henry said, “Cheers.”

So we sat like drunken veterans trading war stories for two hours. We spoke with low voices, at times in whispers, like we were all escaped inmates from the same asylum.

Maybe we were crazy.

Each of us told of things the others hadn’t seen, but the pieces all fit together in some rhythmic alcoholic order: the Odds, the battles in Glenbrook, the floods, Anamore Fent and the Rangers, the Under, the trip into the desert, the encampment, and, finally, Henry’s loss at the settlement, which brought us all back here, to London, to The Prince of Wales.

And the glasses.

“So you knew, didn’t you?” I said.

“I don’t know nothing.” Conner drained his beer. It was amazing to me how much he could drink.

“No. I mean Henry. You knew when you let us go out that night after the Ranger what was going to happen to you and the other boys, didn’t you?”

“I thought I did. But there’s always that chance, isn’t there, that things will change?”

“Like Jack’s briefs.” Conner put his foot on top of mine. Always screwing with me. “Drink your beer, kid, you’re lagging!”

My glass was still full. I couldn’t take any more.

“I’m good, Con.”

“Not me. I’m never good.” Conner got up. “Never.”

He pointed at Henry’s empty. “How about you?”

“Thank you, yes,” Henry said.

I held my glass to my lips, pretended to drink, but I had to hold my breath. The smell of the stuff was beginning to make me feel sick. Still, Conner and Henry hadn’t noticed that I’d stopped drinking three rounds earlier.

When Conner came back and sat down, grinning sleepily, Henry steadied himself, square and upright, as though he had finally worked up the courage to say what he and Conner had been dancing around all evening.

“Tell me about breaking the lens. How you put it back together.”

Conner leaned forward over the table, like it was story time and I was about to tell him something he didn’t already know.

“There’s nothing to tell, really. We … I used a hammer and vice, and when it broke, everything else sort of fell apart around us, and it all stayed that way, too—broken. That was why, everywhere we’d go, we were followed around by this big oozing hole in the sky. And every time we’d take a piece of the lens out, things would change again, get worse, like stuff was coming out of the sky, or out of the hole in my hand, just coming up out of the middle of everything.”

The center of the universe.

I turned my palm up and drew a line with my finger across the flesh where I’d been cut by the lens. “It was the other glasses that brought us—well, some of us—to different places, but everywhere I’d go, things just kept getting worse and worse.”

Ben and Griffin dead inside a fucking trash can.

Like what happened to Nickie, what you did to those boys on the train.

Conner gulped at his drink and swiped a forearm across his wet mouth. “We went back to Glenbrook, but it was like the fucking end of the world there.”

“Worse than that,” I said. “We almost got trapped for good. So when we finally found each other in the desert, it was almost too late again. Things had gotten out of control. But we got the pieces back together.”

Henry tipped his glass and looked from Conner to me, never blinking, like he was completely unfazed by the alcohol.

“What happened to it?” he said.

I shook my head. “I don’t know. I only felt it turn whole inside my hand. It burned me. I never saw it again after that.”

“And you don’t know where it is now?”

Fuck you, Henry.

“What does it matter?” I said.

“I thought—” Henry said. “I just wanted to see it.”

“That would be cool, Jack,” Conner urged. “Let’s see it.”

He bumped his knee against mine.

I felt myself getting pissed off again.

“I don’t know where the fuck it is,” I said. “For all I know, you have it, Con.”

Conner smirked. “I wish, dude.”

“Why?” I said.

“’Cause I’m drunk and I feel like fucking with shit. That’s why.” He slapped the table eagerly, like a kid waiting for his allowance.

I could only stare at him and shake my head.

“And the other glasses?” Henry wouldn’t let it go, either.

Conner was so drunk. “You know, the flip flip.”

He made a little flapping windshield-wiper motion with his finger in front of his eyes and said, “How about those ones? Did you lose those, too? You fucking lose shit all the time, Jack.”

“You don’t get it, do you?”

Conner was definitely too drunk to hear the edge in my voice.

I looked squarely at Henry, then Conner. “It’s done. I’ve had enough. And I don’t fucking care about ever going back again. I wanted to tell both of you that tonight. I only asked Henry here to say it, and to tell him thank you for helping us get out for the last time. But that’s it. The last time.”

I scooted away from the table and stood.

When Conner got up, he knocked his chair over. It sounded like a gunshot. We didn’t even notice how empty and quiet the place had become.

“Dude. Sit down. You’re not leaving.”

I sighed. “It’s late. I’m really tired.”

I stuck out my hand for Henry.

“Good-bye, Henry. And thank you.”

He looked shocked, pale. He shook my hand, but didn’t answer me.

And Conner nearly tripped over his upturned chair trying to steer himself after me when I left The Prince of Wales and went out onto the street.

*   *   *

This is it.

It sounds like Conner is puking in the toilet. I wonder how he managed to get back here without stumbling into traffic. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him this drunk.

The shower comes on.

Good.

Leave me alone, Conner.

There.

I pick up my bag and place it on top of the bed.

Zip.

I open it. The water runs loudly; Conner has left the bathroom door open.

There was never a question in my mind about what became of the lens, the glasses, too. I am so predictable, and this is my great disappointment. There is no wonder with me. I always know what Jack’s done and where he’s going, everything ordered.

Except now.

I imagine a time, ten minutes forward.

Measured motion.

The remarkable nothingness.

I swallow. The not knowing thrills me. I feel an excited tickle inside my chest, almost sexual, quietly churning.

One. My hand closes around a white cotton knot of underwear. The lens is inside, perfect, waiting.

Two. My socks. And here are the glasses. You know, the flip flip, Conner.

Here.

The water runs.

I place both gifts on Conner’s pillow and I scratch a note for him on the hotel stationery pad.

These are for you.

I hear Conner cough and gargle in the shower and I remove all of my clothes so I am naked. I do not need anything.

A thick cloth belt from one of the robes in the closet knots and knots again around the shining crossbar. I’m watching Jack’s hands tie it, like they aren’t attached to me.

Strong.

Standing with my eyes against the cool chrome bar, I can judge the perfect height where I tie the loop.

I listen to the shower, the sounds of Conner moving around in there.

Then I hear another sound.

Roll.

Tap.

Tap.

Tap.

And when I turn around, I see Seth.

“Get the fuck away from me!”

“Jack.”

My knees give and then catch. I cannot feel anything except the knot I hold between my fingers.

“Leave me the fuck alone. I did what I had to do.”

“Jack.”

It is tight. I feel the rope of the belt as I force it through my hair, down over my ears, and I fix my mouth straight because I will not say anything more. I watch the boy who stands beside the wall in front of me, the steam that rolls like the Pope Valley fog out from the open door of the bathroom as the water runs and runs.

“Jack.”

Seth begins hitting his hands into the wall, pounding, but I can’t hear anything over the rush of the water, the roar of the blood in my ears.

Tight.

There.

“Jack.”

And I drop.

“Jack.”

thirty-five

Nothing.

Just nothing.

It was the most beautifully complete thing Jack ever knew.

I floated in black, naked and warm.

Waiting, waiting.

Five seconds more and it would have been over.

Five fucking seconds.

Then I smelled a stale breath of alcohol, and from somewhere very far away, like it was slowly crawling out of a long dark tunnel, I heard Conner’s voice calling, softly at first.

“Fuck! Fuck! What are you doing? What are you fucking doing?”

And he was crying. Conner never cries. He’s never had a reason to.

He was scared, breathing hard.

I could feel his mouth on the side of my neck as he gasped and grunted. With one arm wrapped beneath my armpit, he squeezed me so tightly against his chest, and tried to hold me up off the floor so he could make enough slack to unknot the noose.

Leave me alone, Conner.

When the knots began to come off, the pain spread up and down from where the noose had been tied. It felt like my head was filled with needles, and now they were all rushing down through my neck. I tried to push him away from me, but my arms flopped heavily like soggy mop yarn. Once Conner pulled the noose over my head, he had to catch me as I collapsed, unbound, into him.

Then I was aware of the wetness on his face. Crying, struggling to pull me out of the closet, Conner carried me across the room, and I began to black out again.

Leave me alone.

“What are you thinking, man? What did you do this for? Why? Why?”

Conner shook me with every word, as though his punctuation would snap the life awake inside me.

Then I was down. He laid me on my bed and drunkenly tumbled on top of me. He was heavy and out of breath, dripping from the shower, and he pushed himself up. I felt him lift my feet, pulling the sheets out from the side of the bed so he could cover me. I knew my eyes were open, but everything looked purple and dark, out of focus, like Conner was just a big shadow hovering over me.

“You fucking asshole. Why are you doing this to me?”

He grasped my jaw and shook my face.

It started coming back then. The room began to grow lighter, as though the eye of some great pale sun were opening up above us.

Why couldn’t he just leave me alone?

Five seconds.

Conner had one of his hands on top of my head; his fingers rubbed my hair, and he pressed the side of his face against my chest, listening. And I could feel how his breaths came short and spastic from the crying.

“You better fucking breathe, asshole.”

I inhaled.

“I don’t want to go back.”

My voice was a dry croak.

“I’m sorry, Conner.”

He straightened up, kneeling beside the bed where I lay naked like an unclaimed mortuary cadaver, drained and numb, twisted in the sheets and covers. Conner grabbed my face in his hands and wiped the wetness from my eyes with his thumbs.

I wasn’t even aware that I’d been crying.

Maybe it was something else, because like Conner, Jack doesn’t do that, either.

Then he kissed my forehead.

“You dumb fuck, Jack.”

Conner stood, grunting. He didn’t need to say anything else; I could feel how he seethed with anger, spinning around, looking for something that might give him a clue as to how we’d get out of this now.

This is it, after all.

We are home.

At that moment, I was so sorry for hurting him. I knew it was the worst thing I’d ever done, and I kept thinking about those five goddamned seconds.

It had to have been Seth.

He made Conner find me.

“I’m calling the fucking cops.”

It was like an electric shock. Freddie’s stun gun again. I felt every disconnected muscle in my body contract when he said it.

I tried to sit up. “No. Please don’t do that, Con!”

He paced the floor like an animal in a cage. He stopped at his bed, looked down at the note I’d left. Of course he knew what was inside the two small bundles.

“Is that what it’s about?” he said. He picked up the socks and underwear I’d used to hide the Marbury lenses from everyone. He cocked his arm back like he was going to throw them against the wall.

“Don’t!”

He stopped himself.

Conner knew what would happen if he did it.

He dropped my little gifts to him on the bed.

And then I said it.

“I’d rather die than go back again, Con.”

“I’m calling a fucking ambulance, Jack. I can’t take this shit.”

He went to the desk and picked up the handset for our room’s phone.

“Conner, please don’t do that.”

I swung my feet around onto the floor. I thought I could stand up, try to stop him, but my head pounded so hard it felt like I was going to explode.

Conner inhaled deeply, closed his eyes, and hung up the phone. Then he wheeled a desk chair across the floor and sat down in front of me with his hands clasped between his knees, just watching me, waiting for me to fix things.

“What am I going to do with you?” he said.

“I don’t know.”

He smeared his forearm across his eyes.

“I would die without you, Jack.”

“No, you wouldn’t.”

“You’re full of shit!” Conner’s voice shook. “You’re not the only one who gets hurt in this world! You’re not the only one who fucks things up and then has to fix them! Stop being so goddamned selfish for once!”

He was right.

“I … Shit, Conner.”

He exhaled and loosened his shoulders, slumped back in the chair. “Dude, if you want to stay, I’ll stay with you.”

I lay on my back, shivering and staring up at the creamy blankness of the hotel room’s ceiling.

“I’m afraid if one of us goes back to Marbury, we’ll all end up getting sucked into it again, Con. And I…”

Conner rubbed his hands together and shook his head. He sniffled loudly. I could hear all the wet snot that bubbled in his nose.

“What about Ben and Griff?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know what to do anymore, Con.”

And so he just sat there and watched me for several long and silent minutes until I rolled onto my side and pulled the sheets up around my shoulders.

It was so cold.

Conner got up and put the wadded-up lenses back inside my bag. He zipped it shut and placed it on top of his bed.

He turned out the lights, and then Conner lay down beside me.

He was still crying.

I felt so bad.

Conner got under the covers and slid his arm around me. He put his hand flat on the coldness of my naked belly, so his face was pressed tightly against the back of my neck.

He whispered, “I’m not ever going to let you leave, Jack.”

*   *   *

I could lie and say that sleeping next to Conner wasn’t sexual at all, even though we didn’t actually do anything. But feeling him beside me was good, genuinely safe, and neither of us was ashamed of it.

For the first time in my life, it was like nothing could ever make me afraid again.

And I’m not scared to admit that it felt safer and closer than lying naked in bed with Nickie.

In the morning, we were awakened by an embarrassed housekeeper who walked into our room and quickly offered pleading apologies as she backed into the hallway.

I groaned. “That is totally fucked up.”

Conner still had his arms around me. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah. I’ll be all right. I’m sorry, Con.”

“For what?”

“Nothing.”

Conner pressed closer into me, like he was covering me against something poisonous. “Let’s just stay here for, like, ten more minutes, okay?”

“Okay.”

And more than an hour later, it was nearly noon when we got out of bed and put our clothes on, silent and awkward, nervously avoiding each other’s eyes.

*   *   *

Outside, the air was so cold and heavy.

Feeling it was an amazing thing to me.

To feel.

I walked in a fog as thick and stubborn as the cover of leaden clouds that pressed down on us from above. I couldn’t stop myself from wondering about everything.

Everything.

And how every day begins the same way.

This is it.

Maybe we were still drunk, I reasoned.

Maybe this was just another not-world.

I kept my eyes down and studied the backs of Conner’s sneakers, the faded upturn of the slight cuff on his Levi’s as he walked in front of me. He led me along the slate-gray sidewalk on Marylebone Road in the direction of the Great Portland Street Underground.

Conner stopped, and it was the first time since we’d gotten out of bed that we looked each other squarely in the face.

He said, “So. You want to get coffee?”

“Oh man, I am dying for some coffee.”

Conner’s mouth turned downward. He shook his head.

I said, “Um. Sorry. Bad choice of words.”

Then he smiled cautiously and pointed me to the door of a coffee bar.

It made for a long stretch of silence, finishing two full cups of hot coffee without saying a word. But nothing else needed to be said. Sometimes Conner and I could sit together for hours and just know, exactly, what we were thinking.

We didn’t avoid each other’s stare, though, because Conner and I could never be embarrassed about anything around each other. In fact, sitting there, having coffee with him, I understood Conner better at that moment than I had in all the years we’d known each other.

He swallowed. I watched the knot in his throat bob down and up.

I reached across the table and bumped his hand with my knuckles.

“You know, you’ve saved my life about a hundred times.”

I watched Conner bite at the inside of his lip. He shifted in his seat.

I turned and looked at the traffic outside the window, and tried to change the subject. But every subject only ended up being about us, anyway.

“I really like it here. I mean, at St. Atticus. I can feel it.”

Conner tipped his empty cup, like he was trying to read a message in the drying foam.

“This is it, right?”

“This is good enough for me, Con.”

“I’m okay staying here if you are, Jack.”

He sounded nervous, choked up.

I knew he was talking about much more than just England and St. Atticus Grammar School for Boys. We both knew it.

“Well, I’m okay staying here, Con. And, well … thanks.”

“No prob.” Then he squinted and smiled. “But don’t ever try that shit again.”

“Try what? The before thing, or … um … you know, after?”

Conner turned red and tried to clear his throat, pretended to look at the cars passing by outside, too.

“Hey,” I said. “In case you’re wondering, I’m not bugged about it at all. I thought it was totally cool. Really nice. Really. Okay?”

He looked at me and nodded.

*   *   *

“Oh fucking hell!” When I saw the station sign through the window, I shook my head. “We need to get off, Con. We’re going the wrong fucking way.”

We were on the Tube, at Finchley Road, heading in the entirely opposite direction, on the totally wrong line to get to the train station at Charing Cross.

We weren’t paying attention to what was going on around us—outside our little universe—that morning, so in our daze we ended up boarding a wrong-way train at Baker Street. And we barely made it out of the car before the doors whooshed shut.

But after spending a few minutes decoding the colored lines on the Underground map, we switched tracks and headed south on the Jubilee Line, which unfortunately also took us out of our way.

I sighed, and slapped my head when we passed the Baker Street stop.

“Why the fuck didn’t we get off there? What the fuck is wrong with me? I am so messed up today.”

Conner sat beside me, our bags on the floor between our feet.

He laughed. It was a real laugh, and it sounded good.

Like home.

He pressed his foot against mine. “It’s not like we have a plane to catch or something.”

When the train slowed into the Bond Street station, I pulled a small folding map from my back pocket.

Like Henry’s compass.

“We can switch at Westminster or Waterloo,” I said. “Waterloo’s probably better. Then we won’t have to get off again till we’re at Charing Cross.”

I tucked the map away. “I’m sorry about getting us lost, Con.”

Conner leaned forward and turned so he was looking straight into my eyes. He tapped his hand on my knee.

“I’m having a good time. Don’t sweat it.” He grinned. “It’s kind of fun being together in a place where nobody cares about us, and nobody’s trying to kill us.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Welcome home, huh?”

“Yeah. Home.”

The train stopped.

The doors swished open.

We were at Green Park.

And this was it.