Surrender (21 page)

She comes close to the bed, strokes my bruised arm. She lays two fingers on my wrist, and her face, for a moment, is concentrated. It’s a beautiful face, a petal. I remember the purity of my father’s flowers — the bleeding-heart reds, the titanic whites, the Indian-spice rusts and yellows. I feel my pulse labor, and she frowns.

I’ve noticed that my vision is growing cloudy, darker than the darkening room. I’ve noticed a sluggishness behind the eyes. Every atom in me feels composed of lead. This is what dying is: a pull to the ground. I am thin as a shadow, yet clotted as dough, my blood as thickset as mud.

I don’t want to go.

She’s looking at me, brushing my hair. “If I bring some soup, will you eat it? Will you try? Just for me, Gabriel?”

I shake my head heavily, stubborn and proud.

“Not even a spoonful?”

“No.”

Sarah’s mouth twists; she sighs. One of her hands is on mine. I’m a continual source of defeat for her. “You’re safe,” she says. “You know that, don’t you? What happened before — none of it matters here. Only you matter here. Nothing that hurts you will come through that door.”

I look up at her silently. There’s nothing to say. It makes her wonder if I’ve understood. “Not your mother or father,” she adds. “Not anyone.”

I glance at the door, to please her. She has such trust in it. She doesn’t understand that doors, walls, fences, ceilings — they’re helpless to keep out what determinedly desires to get in. My gaze slips around the room and I’m struck by how colorless everything seems. As colorless as the moon; as bleached as a talon, a warlock’s cat, a child’s cradle or casket. The walls, the floor, the articles, me: there’s a washed-up, heavenly drabness to us all. Like an empty shell found half-buried on a beach, where I have never been.

I think I’m becoming confused. Certainly, my head aches. To the depths of their core, my bones pain.

Sarah, too, is clad in white. It’s all she wears, her favorite color. “The color of peace,” I breathe.

My aunt says something, shaking my arm, but I’m no longer listening. I’m imagining what it’s like, to walk across sand. I look up at the ceiling, my longtime companion. Slow, slow, things are slowing down. The thunderstorm in my lungs revolves, with gigantic slowness, atop the point of a pin. There’s a great congealing, a solidifying within.

I don’t want to go.

I am not brave — I’m afraid. There are surely things I’ve always wanted to do. I am young — I must have had horizons to reach. I must have wanted to climb a sand dune. But I’m bound to this bed, there’s locks on the door, I am committed, now, to my fate. My feet are washed clean, shrouded with a sheet. My fate is pooled in the center of my palms; it’s blackened the bed of my nails.

I would like one last look at the world, the silver world into which Finnigan has gone. Maybe — the truth is — I wanted nothing beyond the town limits. The truth is I never dreamed of the sand. Mulyan is a tiny nondescript town, but it was large enough for me. “Sarah,” I say, diving for the words, “would you open the curtain?”

She almost turns; then hesitates. Her rubber soles yelp on the floor. “Why do you always call me
Sarah
?” she asks. “You know that’s not my name.”

“Gabriel,” I reply, “isn’t mine.”

“But it’s what you prefer.”

“My preference isn’t to be who I am.”

She says nothing — she studies me. Then, with a squeak of sole, she turns. The curtain is light and flies back on its cord. A haze of starlight tumbles into the room. The glass is misty with the bitter cold; beyond it broods a dingy sky. I see black steel bars spanning the height of the window. They are stalagmite and stalactite, reaching both skyward and down.

I see Vernon, outside, looking in at me.

He stands very close to the glass. His chin is level with the height of the sill. Wisps of hair float on the night air. His blue eyes are unblinking, sheened as pearls. They stare through the glass as calmly as doom.

Sarah leans on the windowsill, her face striped with shadows. She gazes thoughtfully out at the view. She hasn’t noticed my brother. His eyes roll slowly up at her until the blue irises almost disappear. He stands quite still, listening to Sarah speak. He could bite her stomach, were the glass not between them. “Look at the lights,” Sarah says. “Isn’t the city pretty at night?”

Vernon’s eyes roll liquidly down. Through the murky glass they settle on me. His hair drifts on the air. It is white and weightless. His consideration is frigid and damp. My heart jerks on its tether. “Sarah,” I whisper, “come away from the window.”

She does not respond. “Did you hear the commotion before? A car ran off the curb. Beeping horns: people are impatient.”

Sweat has soaked the back of my neck. Vernon stares without blinking through the glass. He has not aged — he is still a child. His skull shows through the fine skin round his eyes. His flesh is luminous against the pitch night. He must be cold, but he does not shudder. His lips, which were pink, are thin yellow lines. My heart flies like a bird in a cage that’s on fire. “Sarah,” I hiss, “come away!”

Now Vernon is raising a hand. The tip of a finger touches the glass. He radiates no heat, the frost does not melt, he uses a nail to scratch it away.

“I don’t think the driver was hurt,” Sarah says.

The breeze lifts Vernon’s gossamer hair. His face is empty, blanched of expression, his brow creaseless, the color of milk. His nail scrapes a crisp course through the frost, his death-mask face does not change. I should not be afraid — he always loved me — but my heart is a bird, my cool blood is cold. He has come back to me, the one who loved him, the one who stopped his insufferable life. I should be awed: I am horrified.

“A tow truck came. A big noisy thing.”

he scratches into the glass.

“Sarah!” I cry. “Come away from the window!”

“In a moment,” she answers beatifically. “I’m looking at the lights. Hundreds and hundreds of lights. All different colors — orange, white, red, blue. Can you see them, Gabriel?”

The name in the frost is already clouded by cold. The corners of Vernon’s mouth have lifted in a smile. His raised hand hovers near his chin, the fingers curled round on themselves. He seems to be waiting. He licks his lips.

Instantly I smell the smoke of Finnigan.

I struggle, mortally afraid. “Sarah,” I gasp, “unbuckle the straps —”

She looks at me. “No. Gabriel, no.”

I squirm like an eel, yank my arms, claw my fingers hopelessly. The bindings hold, creaking austerely, bonding my wrists to the bed’s frame. I smell the scent more strongly now, the hyena seeping into the room. I kick the blankets, scrabble with my heels. Vernon watches me fight, and smiles indulgently. “Please!” I howl. “Sarah, please!”

“You know what happened last time. I nearly lost my job. Maybe, if you’d eat something, I could ask the doctors if . . .”

She talks on; I don’t listen. I wrench my arms savagely, rattling the bed. I feel close to weeping with terror, close to begging like a child for the protection of my mother. A blanket bucks and slides to the floor. I taste blood on my lips and in my throat. Sarah picks up the blanket, puts her hands on her hips. “Gabriel,” she says, “now stop this!”

Finally, exhausted, I go still. I lower my head. There are tears in my eyes.

Sarah smoothes the blanket over the bed. “Are you finished? Or shall I call the doctor?”

I squeeze back the tears; my wrists ache and burn. I lift my gaze and see Vernon perched silently on the end of the bed.

He is colder than the night. His body is naked, and pallid as bird skin. Every bone is traced out on him. His limbs are folded in their old, awkward way. He contemplates me with wintry interest. When he speaks, it is with Finnigan’s voice.
You have two names. So do I.

“You can go now, Sarah,” I manage to say.

“I’ll see you in the morning.”

“Yes,” I say. “Good night.”

When she leaves the room, she closes the door. I hear the locks turn, unnecessarily.

Hello Anwell
, says the Vernon-thing.

I dredge up my voice through the quicksand of fear: “Hello, Vernon.”

The room has grown rapidly cold. The breath that clouds from me is grave-gray. The chill of him creeps up the bed. Vernon is placidly regarding the room.
This room reminds me of something. What is it, Anwell
.

His voice is metal dragged on a stone road. He never spoke, when we were boys. Now his voice is smooth, iced, untripping; familiar, like Finnigan’s. And the scent of him is that of some cave-dwelling creature — a smell that was Finnigan’s, leaf-mold, smoke, and clay. My heart scurries like a hunted rabbit; there’s sweat beneath my eyes.

Something small white close. Something airless. Something cold. What is it, Anwell
.

I don’t answer: like Finnigan, he asks what he knows. I tug my arms, the bindings hold. Vernon looks blandly down the bed at me. He can’t have forgiven what I did to him. How could he? There isn’t forgiveness large enough to fill a small white tomb. I remember how he tumbled to the floor, blue at the lips, open-eyed, angular as books.

Anwell
. I raise my eyes. His skewed hands have forged the shape of a hawk. A broken-winged hawk that would never fly, but recognizably a hawk. He chortles to himself. His hands warp round and become a stunted dog:
Yap! Yap!
he squawks. I smile encouragement, testing my bonds. My brother’s fists clench and he utters a sound that tells me I’m viewing a cow. This is how he’s passed the time, all these years — practicing hand puppets, in the dark, to amuse his little brother. His hands twirl; my breath catches, I see a gallows, which becomes a giraffe. He’d seen giraffes in picture books I showed him on muted Sunday afternoons when Mother’s pain confined her to her bedroom and Father deadheaded his flowers. I remember it clearly, as if we sit there again: I on the floor with the book in my lap, he in his cot sucking his nightgown. I remember his face between the bars, round as an owl’s, slick as a seal’s. The cot was high-walled, a rattling cage.

His hands are like starfish on the linen. His pearled eyes watch me without accusation or grudge. My heart is still skittish, my blood still quick. But I loosen my fingers from the bed frame, no longer so afraid. It’s comforting to see that, in his absence, my brother has hardly changed. Colder, quieter, but still him. And why should he alter? The tempests of the world haven’t been his to endure. It was Finnigan who was weathered by the sun, sleet, and wind. Vernon looks as he always did, a wan celestial child. I lick my teeth and ask, “Why did you wait so long to come back?”

A sleek expression crosses his face. Not pleasure — smugness. The superiority of an older brother who revels in knowing more.
I wasn’t gone. I’ve been here. Underneath
.
Underneath
.

I think of Finnigan’s lithe free life, the breeze in his fingers, the sun in his eyes. His was a world of light and speed, of flame and trickery, spright and color. How much more desirable such a life would have seemed, viewed from Vernon’s cramped, glacial world. How liberating it must have been, to wear a wild boy’s skin.

I glance at him: he’s staring at me.
Just us now, Anwell
.

He means us — Vernon and Anwell.
Like before
. Not Finnigan; not Gabriel.

I try to imagine how it could have been.

A country town is a good place for two boys to grow up in. It is safe as a cradle. The streets are broad and lined with trees; there is little traffic, and what there is travels slow. On summer evenings the air is ticked with fragments of drifting hay; in winter the smoke from chimneys douses the valley fragrantly. There is a river, which rises and falls with the rain. There are weedy, unfenced blocks of land. Here boys can catch lizards, or occasionally tiger-snakes. Boys can kick footballs to one another on the road. Neighbors keep watch over each other — a boy’s sins are quickly and widely made known — and any boy’s mother will tend any son’s bleeding knees. There are grass hills for sliding down on a tatty piece of cardboard, there are adventure-filled dead-end lanes. There are farms that, imploding, shed ponies and pots and pans at weekend clearing sales.

There are long, drowsy afternoons for two brothers to roam the streets unfettered, as bold and cheerfully arrogant as anybody’s sons. The brothers are free to climb the steps of the store and, with coins their father gave them, buy sticks of bright chewing gum. They can race one another along the main street, ducking and weaving through the sparse crowd. A friend from school will join them in a fleetsprint to the end of the street, then return at a gallop, laughing, to his distant mother’s side. The young blond brothers will wander down a side street, laboriously chewing whole packs of gum, wave to an old man drooped on a veranda, drag a stick along the footpath to make the town dogs howl. It must be a warm day, perhaps the height of summer, for the younger boy sees sunburn on the nape of his brother’s slim neck. They go to the creek and wade for tadpoles and when they’ve trudged home in the evening, and half-heartedly eaten their tea, their mother will rub into their scuffed scorched skin a cream that smells like lavender before chasing them off to bed. They’ll sleep with mouths open, and chocolate on their lips, and in their sleep they’ll be entertained by colorful, perplexing dreams. Around them, the town continues ordinary and safe; this world the brothers exist within is a good, unremarkable place.