After the People Lights Have Gone Off (14 page)

“We won’t talk about this,” he told us, and he was right.

Nineteen years later, though, after my wife and daughter had what happened to them out on the interstate happen, I used the insurance money for a cinderblock warehouse on the east side of town. The old part of town.

From our father, I’d inherited a box of measurements, of crumbly Polaroids, and I was an engineer besides, and had been having wrong dreams even before the wreck.

I took out the north wall of the warehouse, had it rebuilt eight feet, two and one half inches in, and I had the roof removed, had what I said was going to be a loading bay cut out up near the top of the east wall, and I cut out some handles for giant hands, decorated them with a cut-out saw while I hung from the bucket of a rented truck.

And then I swept the floor, unrolled a sleeping bag, and waited. And waited.

It was the cement pad, I decided. It had to be. At some point it had heaved, it had buckled, throwing the secret geometry off just enough.

I leveled it, un-leveled it, re-leveled it, used the last of my savings for one last day of work from the crew, then finally—it was so obvious—had them pour some fresh, like wide steps at either end, except those two steps almost met in the middle. Flaps, I’d forgotten the flaps we’d restapled, just slightly off, making an unevenly-sided butter in the middle, like a channel that might run off an altar, for blood. It was what had originally pulled the north side of our box in that necessary amount—which I’d already done to my warehouse, in spite of the warnings about instability and zoning. To appease the contractor, I’d let him install a guide wire on the backside of that leaning wall, like a buttress, except pulling instead of pushing. He’d left the nut in the cable, too, so that, if anything settled, I could pull back on the wall.

And then he was gone, and his crew was gone, and it was just me and the box, all around me now.

The heat rising from the concrete kept me warm in my sleeping bag. I thought again of my wife’s last moments. Of my daughter’s next soccer game. Of a baby horse, trying to stand on legs that had had to be broken, to fit into a refrigerator.

Instead of sleeping, I stared straight up, through the roof that wasn’t there, and imagined I could see a giant, silent spider with its legs out. It was drifting down through the galaxy like I wanted, like I needed, like this world deserved, for what it had done to me.

Or, a hundred of them were drifting down, a thousand of them, crawling from planet to planet to get here.

Either way.

The box was smart, though.

It always had been.

One street over, just past the old park with the rocket ship pointing into space, is the cemetery. The graveyard.

And the thing about that box was, we never had a lid for it.

I’m the one who started all this, yeah. But it’s not my fault. We never should have moved to this town. My dad should have gone to work more. And who buries dead animals in refrigerators? And why isn’t the breakdown lane on the interstate wide enough for somebody to actually park there if they need to, when their husband’s just called them on their new phone?

At least that graveyard by the park wasn’t the one they were resting in.

Not that it matters, now that death’s become an infection.

To be continued.

But I guess that’s a lie.

After picking her up, too, saving her from the bus, there’s the kids at three-thirty and three forty-five. Nolan from his school, Samuel from the corner just down from the junior high; Samuel insists it’s faster like that, and that he doesn’t care if it’s snowing, or whatever.

Shane remembers being thirteen, yeah. All too well.

The corner’s fine, even on a day like today, where if you let the delay on the wipers space out too far, a crust of ice will form on the windshield, and, bam, like that, twenty dollars for new blades.

Behind him in the parking lot are the mounds of dirty snow, months of it already. On Saturdays, when Nolan’s here with him to pick Mommy up from work, Shane always pretends to have just seen a miniature door kind of embedded in one of those big snow piles, or a window, and—is that a chimney? Is somebody living there?

Each time he circles slow around the mounds, trying to stay ahead of the security Jeep, Nolan’s head will track those igloos, his mouth held in that doubting, pre-smile mode. Because what if, right?

Shane doesn’t remember exactly what it was like to be eight, no. But he knows what he would have liked it to have been like.

He plans, one day, to come out here, fix some mock window—just a pipe, even, up top—into the snow, watch Nolan’s chest swell with magic, but it’s always cold, wet, impractical.

Like the man coming into focus by the empty fountain.

Shane waits for the wipers to sweep the snow dust away again before leaning forward from his magazine.

Yep.

Guy’s standing there in short sleeves, the cuffs of his jeans rolled and hanging loose, cigarette dangling from his lip like this is an audition for a fifties musical.

Except the bowler hat, Shane supposes.

Is this the new breed Molly’s been calling “hipster,” maybe? And, aside from being famously poor tippers, are hipsters impervious to the elements as well?

Shane smiles to himself, goes back to the article.

It’s something about current trends in education. He flips through to the end—four pages—gauges that against the time left: thirteen minutes. Three pages every thirty seconds, then, with time to keep an eye out for Security.

Golden.

It’s a word that hipster should know, and use.

Shane looks up as if to tell him that across all this distance, through all the glass and steel and unfamiliarity, and sees him instead in the rearview mirror. The back seat.

“Hey—!” he blurts and pushes on the brake for some reason, cringing up against the wheel in a way he’s already ashamed of.

The hipster isn’t hip anymore, either.

Instead of a t-shirt and jeans, it’s now a shabby three-piece suit with an antique wool overcoat, like one of Shane’s professors used to wear. The only thing the same as before is the snugged-down bowler, the snow on it not even melting yet. And the eyes. They penetrate, don’t look away. Are amused somehow, at how Shane’s swaying his back in, preparing himself for the gun, the knife, even just the hand, reaching all the way to him.

“If you have a minute,” the non-hipster says, making a production—elbows, three layers of sleeve—of opening the leather briefcase now on his lap.

“What are you—you can’t just—” Shane tries, his heart beating again now, and the non-hipster waits this out, his hands still holding the briefcase open.

Is he wearing eyeliner too?

“You can’t—” Shane says again, still stuck on that.

“It’s about your, your…” the man begins, shuffling through papers in the briefcase “…Nolan, is that his name?”

Shane fixes his eyes into the rearview mirror against this man.

Is this how it starts? Ransom situations? And what kind of competent kidnapper would target him, Shane?

But never mind all that right now.

“What about him?” Shane says, the world narrowed down to just the two of them now.

If need be, he can drop the Impala into gear, bound ahead twenty yards in one surge, through the glass doors of that store that keeps changing names every season.

It’ll accomplish something, surely.

“I’m sorry to tell you this,” the man says, and hands a stiff brown paper over the top of the briefcase to Shane.

No, not paper at all, but—film? Like an x-ray?

It makes a noise like small, fake thunder when Shane tries to flap it straight enough to read.

It is medical film.

Only, this isn’t—the skull’s shaped all wrong. Not like Shane’s seen before. He angles the film to the side, turns it all the way over, and finally sees it: the skull’s not the same because the shot was taken from above, some angle like that. Looking down. The shadow of a backpack zipper floating at the bottom of the sheet.

It’s not quite an x-ray, though. More about soft tissue.

The brain.

“I don’t know how you got in here,” Shane says into the rearview mirror.

The man nods, acknowledging that difficulty but not bothering to address it, and then cocks his left arm up, for his watch.

Shane studies the film again, touches it with the pad of his index finger, half-expecting his finger to dip into something syrupy, or for the image to flicker, slide like a touchscreen.

It’s just what it is, though.

“Do you see it?” the man says, clicking his briefcase shut now, leaving it on his lap, the base of it angled up.

A gun in there, pointed at Shane? A pinhole camera?

“How do you know his name?” Shane says.

And no, he can’t see it on the film.

The man smiles with one side of his mouth, watches a tall woman in tall boots walk by, her purse slung all the way around to her back.

Shane looks to her too but she’s nobody.

“Security will be here in about half a minute,” he says. “They make rounds every — ”

“A bike rack turned over in front of the foodcourt,” the man says.

Silence, silence.

“What is this?” Shane finally says.

“This is opportunity,” the man says, knocking on the plastic back of the passenger headrest.

So he’s real, then. At least that.

Shane breathes in, breathes out.

“What is this,” Shane says, waggling the film.

“Glioblastoma multiforme,” the man shrugs. “That would be a type four. Basically inoperable, at least when situated like that.”

Shane feels his face heat up. He doesn’t know if that means the blood’s all left at once, or if it’s all swirling there under the skin.

“What are you saying?” he asks.

“I’m going to need that image back, of course.”

“Who?” Shane shakes the film for emphasis. Doesn’t give it back.

The man purses his lips, looks out the window again. This time there’s nothing. Just not-Shane, Shane suspects.

“Nolan,” Shane says.

The man does his shoulders in apology.

Now the heat’s all in Shane’s eyes. Going to spill out.

“What are you?” he whispers.

“Not who?” the man says, a flicker of a grin there.

“I don’t—” Shane starts, can’t finish.

“Tumors like that are unusual in a boy his age,” the man anticipates. “But, you know. It’s a crazy world, right? Anything can happen.”

Shane’s studying the film again.

This is Nolan?

In twenty-two minutes—no, fifteen, now—he’ll be stand-ing at the curb in the hug ‘n go lane, his insulated hood pull-ed up over his head. He’ll be doing what he calls “switching feet”— going back and forth in a stationary waddle, to keep warm. The whole way to the junior high he’ll be looking around the side of the passenger seat, to be the first one to see Samuel.

“No,” Shane says.

The man just nods, though. “Fourteen months,” he says. “Not all of them good.”

“But I can—”

“Even if you take him to the hospital today. Right now. Last week. I’m sorry.”

“Who are you?”

“And if I said you just get one more question here?”