“Whoo-hoo!” said Clark, utterly deadpan, whacking my palm with his. “He will live in our house, he will grow and grow. . . .”
(Will our mother like this? We don’t know.)
Once more, he smashed his lips onto mine without any warning but an exaggeratedly theatrical “MWAH!” Brief as a branding iron, hard enough to almost hurt—but only in the best way. I gathered him up and hugged him fiercely, trying to calm myself by matching his febrile heartbeat to mine, till he finally started to squirm. “You’ve to let me go!” he ordered, sounding like a Hong Kong movie subtitle.
“I might,” I said. “But there is a price, pretty boy, there is a price. Do you know what?”
Reluctantly: “The price is hugging . . . and kissing.”
“Exactly.”
Clark had learned to accept these bursts of affection phlegmatically, but this time he resisted even less than normal, just letting his heavy, hard head rest on my breastbone. I could feel his grin, though; he knew this game, and liked it, as long as it didn’t go on too long. So he kissed me again, lips smacking, and I managed to extort a third one before the door banged open again, causing him to break free.
“Who is it, Clark?” Mom called out, well aware he could tell even from here.
“Daddy!” he yelled back, scampering over. I heard Simon’s grunt of effort; probably swinging him into the air.
“That’s right, it’s your friend Daddy. And topsy-turvy means . . .”
“Upside dowwwwn!” Clark yelled, and it was almost as if I could see it, imagining Clark arching back as Simon steadied him, making sure his hair only brushed the floor, instead of his skull colliding with it.
“Family happens at Swiss Chalet,” Mom commented sidelong, echoing another longstanding piece of echolalic emotional shorthand. To which I simply nodded, reduced to silence once more, throat tight, eyes burning.
“Yup,” I agreed, eventually.
It was a good day after that, (lack of) eyesight issues aside. One of the best.
But all good things come to pretty much the same end, if you only wait long enough.
A week later, I woke cold and shaking in the middle of the night. I pried myself out of Simon’s grip and rolled to the bedroom floor, landing on hands and knees; the apartment seemed to reel around me, contracting and expanding, a seasick Hitchcock focus pull. What vestige of sight I’d regained over the last few days made everything around me just a series of vague lines and angles, but it was better than nothing. Good enough to navigate by, at any rate, as I felt my way up and into the living room, pulled my iPhone off its charge cord.
I thumbed it on, password disabled since Simon had been kind enough to download some voice-activation software, and coughed, clearing my throat. “Call Safie Hewsen,” I told it.
She picked up on the fourth ring; saw my caller I.D., obviously, since the first thing she s
aid was: “Miss Cairns?”
“That’s right, yeah.” I coughed again then swallowed. “We, uh . . . I mean . . . well, we might’ve made a really bad mistake.”
There was a pause.
“Oh, you think?” she said.
Later, I’d realize I didn’t remember falling asleep that night, not per se. Just what came after, and after that.
I knew it was a dream the second I raised my head and could see again, unoccluded. But I knew even more quickly that what I was dreaming must be a memory—a lost memory, the lost memory. My most recently lost.
First, a sort of light seed in the darkness, just beginning to bloom—the very start of an old-fashioned iris shot, unfurling outwards. And then I was back in the living room, my hand in Sidlo’s, at the moment of breakage—the same micro-instant, before my second trip down into buzzing, burning absence took hold. We were still murmuring together, he and I, but somewhere to the left of me I could hear Safie, stuck behind her camera; maybe I was making a noise she didn’t like, my words starting to slur, wincing as though in pain: oh, ah, fuck meeee. I couldn’t hear what she heard, what might or might not be coming out of me. Couldn’t do, or think, much of anything.
It was slowing down, all of it—everything slipping sideways into a kind of a pocket, a funnel twisting slickly. Like the gap where your tooth used to be, where your tongue longs to go: stick it in, twist it, taste the blood. Because you know you shouldn’t.
Free will, that bitch of a thing. Given the freedom to choose, we human beings will always make the wrong choice, every damn time.
And then there I was, right there. With—
(Her?)
In front of me, over Sidlo’s slumped shoulder, a figure was taking form, shouldering aside the blinds like two bloodless flaps of skin—an autopsy’s Y-section, cauterized from within. Extruding out into the world head first, dragging its train through behind, its floor-skimming veil sewn with dangling mirrors, tinsel, and glass reflective from every angle.