Fade (34 page)

Almost hypnotized, I watched the knife slashing at the air like a miniature sword. Then it became still, suspended, knife-point directed at me. Now it began to move toward me, dangerous, deadly. I cringed, bracing myself as it came closer, closer. The tip of the blade tore my shirt, then penetrated my flesh, pausing before the final fatal plunge.

But the plunge did not come.

Instead, laughter: lewd and lascivious, a chortling of triumph.

“First, you, then Sister Anunciata
…”

Her name leapt in my ears as I remembered Rose's voice—
Sister Anunciata, small, built like a fire hydrant
— the nun who had arranged for her son to be adopted, had helped her through the most difficult days of her life.

“Kill him:’

“Wait,” the boy said.

“Why wait? He has to die anyway.
”

“He's my blood. He's my uncle …”

“He's lying.”

“He said he has the power like me. My uncle would have the power. It's in our blood.”

“Have him prove it, then.
”

The knife was still at my stomach, only its tip in my flesh and the pain muted. But I knew my position was precarious, that the voice could at any moment command the boy to press deeper with the knife.

“Make him prove it,
” the voice demanded.

“All right,” the boy said, impatient, and harsh. And then softer as he addressed me: “Prove it to me,” he said. “Prove it to the voice. Make yourself gone, unseen.”

“Who is the voice?” I asked, low and whispering, playing the game, desperate as it was, of postponement.

“I don't know,” he said, whispering, matching my own effort at conspiracy. “But he brings the urges. And I can't do anything but obey the urges. I'm not me when the urges begin.” I heard his snifHe, wondering if he was again wiping that bulbous nose, like the nose of a ruined clown. “Please disappear, prove who you are….”

“I haven't used the power for a long time,” I said. “I made a promise many years ago. A promise to not use it. Whenever I use the power, bad things happen. Someone dies. I don't want anyone else to die. …” I thought of my brother Bernard and Rudolphe Toubert and me. The murderer.

“You
‘//
die.
” The voice harsh, commanding.

At the same time, the knife dug a bit deeper into my flesh and although there was only a pinch of pain, I felt something warm oozing from me and my knees grew weak.

“Do it,” the boy pleaded.

I pressed forward, against the invisible wall, that small movement I had not called upon for years, uncertain after all this time whether it would work. Yet, I had no choice. I had no doubt at all that the boy, controlled by that other personality, could kill me and go on to kill the nun and who knows who else? Then the pause and the flash of pain and the cold, all of it fast, never as fast before, and I was in the fade.

I heard the fierce whisper:

“He's more dangerous now. We have to kill him.
”

The knife flashed forward in a swordlike thrust but I swiftly stepped aside, nimble suddenly, as if the fade had given me energy and quickness along with invisibility.

“Where are you?” Puzzlement and awe in the boy's voice.

“Here,” I said, then moved away from the spot where I had spoken. “Do you believe me now?”

“Yes,” he said.

He disappeared, the stranger who was his uncle. Just like that. In the winking of an eye. Becoming a vapor, a cloud of mist in the moonlight and then nothing. Ozzie had seen it happening to himself when he had practiced in front of the mirror but was shocked to see it happen to someone else. Shocked and scared because he felt at a loss, his knife pointing at nothing in the air, useless now as a weapon.

“Where are you?” he whispered again, as fear crept over him. He felt unguarded, open to attack.

No answer. Was he playing games, his uncle? Was he near or far, to the right or left?

Find him. Kill him.

That voice again. He would love to kill the voice but could not do it because the voice was himself.

You ‘re wasting time.

The knife was suddenly struck from his hand, and his wrist leapt with pain at the blow. The knife dropped to the ground and landed at his feet.

Pick it up.

As he bent to retrieve it, the knife skittered away, glinting in the moonlight, like a fish out of water, leaping in the air and then dropping to the ground a few feet from him. He also heard the rush of receding footsteps.

“Wait,” he said. “Don't go away …”

A moment of silence, then: “I'm right here,” the voice of his uncle somewhere nearby. “I knocked the knife away because we can't talk with a knife between us. And I need to talk to you. To you, not to that voice I keep hearing. That voice isn't you, Ozzie. That voice is the killer, not you. You have to be separated from the voice. You have to resist the voice, fight it, hold it off …”

See what he's trying to do? He's trying to turn us against each other. And he wants to lock you up. Do you want to be locked up?

No.

That's what he wants to do to you. You have to get rid of him.

But how?

Get that knife. And stick him.

I was astonished to hear those voices in that moonlit courtyard, listening to the boy arguing with himself, the two voices so different, the one harsh and demanding, bent on destruction, and the other young and fragile.

As I listened a wave of sadness stole over me, the kind of sadness that comes from loss—all the people we lose through the years—and now I was losing this boy, my nephew, a poor fader like myself with a savage loose inside him.

Now.

I heard the word with all its urgency and insanity, a single vicious syllable, and saw a stirring in the air, like branches being shaken, a sensation of movement in the moonlight, a scurrying. And I moved, too, leaping toward the knife, half tripping, lunging forward, hands outstretched.

The knife soared into the air before I reached it—he had beaten me to the spot—but once more his possession of the knife gave me an advantage and I was able to see where he must be standing.

I straightened up and kicked, aiming for his stomach, judging its height from the ground. My shoe met the target, sank into the softness of his stomach, deeper than I had hoped, and he bellowed with pain. At the same time the knife fell to the ground, loosened from his grip, and I went after it.

The instant I picked it up, I knew my mistake, knew that I had betrayed where I stood the way he had betrayed himself a moment before. I had also forgotten youth's capacity to absorb and throw off pain and I heard the rush of his body just before he crashed into me, his head butting my chest, taking my breath away, causing me to drop the knife, to emit my own bellow of pain. Before I could recover, his hands were around my neck, not the hands of a thirteen-year-old boy but the steel-like hands of a deadly enemy, ageless, and mad, gaining strength from the madness. The fingers tightened around my neck, mashing my Adam's apple into my throat, cutting off air—this was how it was to choke—leaving me unable to cry out, my arms thrashing around convulsively. As I fell backward I tried to twist away from him and landed on the ground in a hard thump that sent pain shooting along my spine. My hands reached out desperately as I twisted and fought with all my strength. My right hand somehow found the knife. I managed to grasp the handle, barely aware of my movements but aware of his body pressing against mine, the sweaty cheek against my cheek, the fingers even tighter around my neck and a lassitude growing in me as the sense of suffocation took away all desire, all thought, all resistance. I felt myself fading, not the fading of invisibility but a fading away of my entire being into oblivion.

Die, you bastard, die.

The harshness of the voice lit a small fire in my diminishing consciousness. I knew that I had to resist that madman in the boy, had to make one final effort to defeat him, whether or not I gained breath again. I fought against a gathering darkness that threatened to swallow me up and obliterate me, and managed to open my eyes. Through the mist and fog of my dimming sight, I saw the glint of the knife and remembered that the knife was actually in my hand. I had only to bring the knife down into the flesh of this monster whose fingers were around my throat, who was murdering me. That was all I had to do, but it seemed impossible. I had no strength left. Do it, I told myself, do it. This one last thing. I focused on the knife, felt my eyes bulging achingly as I concentrated the final remnants of my thought processes on it. The knife became my entire world, shining in the moonlight, poised above the madman I could not see but who was slowly taking my life away. I willed the knife to descend, gathered everything that remained of me and my life into that desire. And I watched the knife finally descending slowly, in downward thrust, and then faster, and I was no longer aware of the fingers that had now become a part of my throat or the blackness threatening the edges of my consciousness or the breathless world in which I was caught and held, knew only that the knife was coming down, coming down. When it plunged into his body, a cry of pain filled the air, terrible in its anguish, and at the same time there was a great rushing of air down my throat into my lungs, sweet, sweet air that filled my life's crevices as his fingers loosened their hold, although I still felt their imprint on the flesh of my neck. I stabbed again and again, could not stop, did not want to stop, my own madness taking over. He clung to me for a moment and a sob escaped his lips, the sob of a child crying itself to sleep at night, then he slumped against me and rolled away.

He knew he was doomed and dying when the blade first slipped into him, before the other stabbings, reaching a place deep and vital inside of him where nothing had ever gone before. He wanted to let go, let go. The voice was telling him to hold on. But he didn't want to hold on. The hell with the voice.
Don
V
let go.
I will, I will.

The pain, demanding and insistent, spread through his body like fire eating him up. Ma, he cried, Ma. He started to cry, opening his eyes to see if she was here but he saw only blood, a curtain of blood, his own blood. Just before he closed his eyes for the last time, giving himself up to the dark, knowing he had finally overcome the voice, he heard another voice, his mother singing to him, couldn't make out the words or the tune, her voice far away. He went toward her voice. Into the dark. Into nothing.

The boy emerged from the fade into the moonlight, slowly, in stages, his body appearing the way a film develops in a tray, my tears the liquid. His body was limp in that final fatal way of bodies after breath has gone, face slack and loose, something almost sweet in the face, in repose, as if untouched by time or pain or injury, the abused nose not repulsive now, still bruised and broken but noble somehow, like an old battle wound.

“Oh, Ozzie,” I said, tasting my tears as I spoke, aware of lights coming on in the convent.

As I stood over the boy, something moved inside me, in some unknown and uncharted territory of myself, something shifting and letting go, deep beneath the surface. Standing there, I felt, impossible, that I was going away from myself, away from pain, away from loss. Not in the fade but gone in another way.

Good-bye, I said.

But did not hear my voice.

And did not, did not know to whom or to what I was saying good-bye.

iction, of course.

That was the verdict Meredith and I reached by the end of my Manhattan summer. The word, in fact, became a kind of lifeline, something to clutch and hold on to.

“You have to be slightly insane to survive in the agent business,” Meredith said. Then, pointing to the manuscript, she said: “But the fade would take me way beyond the pale….”

I agreed. Then.

Shit. I must agree
now.

Despite what I have pinned to my bulletin board here in my room, what I cannot resist reading over and over again.

Although it's November outside, it's winter here in the boardinghouse. My room is not exactly the Ritz and it's impossible to heat, but it is not a dump either. (Dorm rooms seem to be a myth at B.U. and I was lucky to find this place, from which, if I stretch at the window, I can see a patch of the Charles River.)