The Fading (12 page)

Rebecca answered his first few letters warmly, assuring him she was better now and would be home soon. But as the one-year
anniversary of her release neared he realized she wasn’t coming home, that living with him would send her back to the hospital,
or worse.

Since his nearly seven-hour episode at age fourteen, the one that ended in the paralyzation of Julie’s mother and the final
destruction of his family, Noel had dropped out of the spectrum twenty-two times. The stairway tragedy seemed to have in some
way satisfied the beast or cleaned his cursed soul, for it spared him for thirteen months in the wake of Lisa’s multiple and
unsuccessful spinal surgeries.

But on Thanksgiving of his fifteenth year, it came back with a vengeance, claiming him from wake-up till three a.m. He rode
the bus for hours, until it began to fill near rush hour, then skipped off at the downtown station, where he followed a homeless
man in a railroad engineer’s cap all day, telling himself he was studying
the lifestyle in case things got really bad. He reappeared as the choo-choo man finished a quart of Lucky Lager he’d bought
at Liquor Mart, at which time the choo-choo man screamed and Noel ran home.

The next three hit in rapid succession, scrambling his entire perception of the visiting curse as something with an even remotely
predictable timetable. He dropped in two days before Christmas and stayed two minutes shy of twenty-six hours, in the midst
of a major snowstorm. Determined to burst through the shell, he bundled himself inside enough clothes to stay warm in Antarctica,
but the blink claimed every single layer of hat, gloves, scarf, sweater, long underwear, and both parkas, the Sorel boots.
He went outside anyway and spent hours throwing snowballs at cars on Broadway, causing two accidents, one of which required
an ambulance, before tiring of the game.

The third of that winter series was actually a string of forty or fifty episodes, but they came and went so quickly, Noel
counted them as one horrific day at the carnival. Maybe it had something to do with the drinking. On 1 February, at three
in the afternoon, he discovered a stash of liquor Rebecca had been keeping in the linen closet. Large bottles of cheap vodka
for the most part, plus one odd smaller bottle of Wild Turkey he suspected one of her old boyfriends had left behind. He dropped
out at the first slug of Tvarski. The timing frightened him, so he put the bottle back on the shelf until the blink gave him
back to the world just seven minutes later.

Enjoying the warm glow filling his limbs and making his head swirl, the fumes turning his thoughts loose, he took another
belt. As before, he disappeared within seconds of the vodka’s slide into his empty stomach. It was exciting. He believed he
had finally found the ON/OFF switch he had been searching for all along. Something about the clear burning liquid seemed to
be the perfect catalyst for his condition, erasing his image and restoring it as the vodka’s effect lessened. In and out,
on and off. The shots went in and the bubbles rolled over him and away like a tide, dragging him out to the sea of inebriation
and numbness and braying fits of donkey laughter.

With three-quarters of a bottle down, he stripped naked and watched himself in the mirror, rolling in and out of existence
with each shot. Sometimes minutes passed, other times mere seconds. Eventually the bottle was empty and he fell down, emerging
from the flickering bout to find himself wrapped in a blanket on the bathroom floor. He felt so awful he took another shot,
flashed out and returned while vomiting. The watery bilge he brought up splashed in the toilet bowl, reappearing on its way
down. He spent the night on the couch, head spinning as his hands and legs blinked in synchronization with his shivers and
he came very close to calling 9-1-1, consequences be damned.

But he wasn’t too drunk to forget that if his secret was exposed he would spend the rest of his life in one form of prison
or another. Hospitals at first. Then in science labs, government facilities, places where men in green
fatigues or radiation suits injected him with colored dyes and cut him open in a thousand places to find what could not be
found. The answer, the trigger, the secret.

After the vodka, he resolved to stay sober and not break any laws, as if bargaining with whatever cruel god was in charge
of his karma and the cloak. His parole from the bubble-cell lasted ten weeks. A spring thaw was on and he felt better than
he had in years. He made a to-do list. Cleaned the apartment. Ventured out for longer periods of time. He was pushing a loaded
grocery cart down the pasta and sauce aisle at three in the afternoon when a single erasure swooped down from whatever cloud
held his reserve stock and made checking out impossible. He abandoned his cart and walked home, where he spent the next thirty-seven
hours, his longest episode to date, watching the one thing he could focus on besides himself – television.

The weeks and months and intermittent episodes of his life became a blur. The strain of constantly waiting for it to hit ruined
any chance of living a life outside of the thing. He felt starved: for downtime, for social interactions, for money, for food,
for a reason. He couldn’t hold a job or pursue any goal that required planning, consistent effort, commitments. He was forced
to take what he could not earn.

But stealing had its drawbacks for the simple fact there were limits to what he could take. Sure, he could walk into a bank
vault this afternoon, if he followed the right employee. But he couldn’t hide two duffel bags filled with a million dollars
on the way out. As soon as
someone saw the bricks of cash floating across the room, the party would be over. The bubble seemed capable of harboring nothing
larger than what he could stuff in his pockets. As a thief, he was a petty one, if for no other reason than he lacked the
ambition and imagination to concoct the big score.

He stole money from open cash registers and purses when backs were turned. He stole small valuables while in the void to pawn
for cash when out. He grew to hate and fear the solids, his term for normal people.

Even with his ability to move undetected, sustaining a decent living was an endless process of foraging for scraps. Large
quantities of money simply did not appear before you, invisible or not. Most of the time he lived as a man who collects two
thousand aluminum cans and plastic bottles to redeem, only to find himself with barely enough money to cover a few days’ worth
of expenses.

He entertained a phase of breaking into Boulder’s large but not overly fortified suburban homes, taking during the day, but
always he returned to the problem of transportation. How to get the goods out. How to get to and from the site of the score.
How to transform the stolen property into usable funds. His residential burglary phase came to an end one summer morning when
he slipped, invisibly, through the unlocked patio door of what he was sure was a vacant house, only to find himself confronted
by a hundred and twenty pounds of slobbering Rottweiler. It did not matter whether the dog could see him. Its fat black muzzle
scented him in an
instant and charged, driving him against the dining-room table and putting three puncture wounds the size of bullet holes
in his calf muscle. He beat the dog back with a silver candlestick holder and escaped before it relaunched for his throat.

Dragging himself back across town, leaving a trail of red drops over the sidewalks and vacant dirt lots, hospitals and doctors
and even a regular pharmacy out of the question until the bubble released him, the predicament of his mortality and the reality
of how quickly he might perish without access to basic human services hit him full force. What if it hadn’t been a dog but
a stay-at-home grandpa who was also a member of the NRA? What if he was digging through someone’s jewelry box and took two
rounds in the back, shattering ribs and collapsing a lung? After the dog bite, after walking almost three miles home before
he was able to clean and bandage the wound with Dawn dish soap and paper towels and duct tape, after spending another seventeen
hours waiting to become whole and worrying about rabies, he swore off home invasion.

It was an ironic discovery, then, to realize that stealing brazenly, while a regular visible young man, was easier. He dressed
in delivery man clothes bought at the Army Surplus Store. He carried a clipboard and pen. Sometimes he just fucking took what
he needed and ran. Three times he had run from security guards and police, dumping the merchandise (a basket of steaks, a
Walkman, stacks of video games, a floor model 20-inch TV) but so far he had not been caught.

The guilt took its toll, of course. He felt like slime. A sub-human spider living in the shadows and fringes. With no one
to talk to, no trusted ally who might offer counsel, he experienced deep valleys of depression between manic summits of glee.
He lived in his own head, drove himself to misery with introspection.

His next birthday was two months in the rearview before he realized he had turned twenty. It was something of sucker punch
for the fact that 29 February only really happened once every four years and he’d missed it. The next time he would be able
to celebrate his actual birthday wouldn’t come for another four years. He’d be twenty-four. He didn’t like to imagine what
his life would be like then.

Most of his early teenage rage bled and thinned into something more disturbing. A detached amusement at first, then a loss
of all guilt and concern. He didn’t feel much. He almost wanted to get caught. He cried himself to sleep at night the way
most people brush their teeth before bed. By twenty he felt old. Time had become a cruel god, torturing him with empty days
that never ended.

He carried with him at all times a bubble that was worse than the bubble that hid him from the world. This other bubble was
the prison cell that living with the real affliction had constructed around his life. To make friends, to reach out for help,
to form attachments, was forbidden by his very real fear of discovery.

And then one day this too evaporated, his fear of so many possible bad outcomes. He gave up trying,
worrying. He lost himself in the drudgery of getting by and, as if responding to his lack of stress, woke up one morning to
realize the bubble had not taken him in over six months. He was alarmed by its absence, and his progress reversed. He had
squandered six months waiting for it to happen, time that could have been spent living like a normal person, working a job,
making friends.

But the thought of another spell filled him with such dull dread, such insistent malaise, that waiting for it became worse
than the event itself. The when and where and how long this time of it all consumed his thoughts. Then all at once his ability
to care about it, himself, all consequences, leaked from him mind and body and he found that he had nothing to live for or
against.

One morning soon after this, he woke in a solid state, got out of bed, urinated and walked into the kitchen to make himself
a fresh pot of coffee. Watching the black brew drip he grew listless, unable to reach up and pull a mug down from the cupboard.
Time seemed to stretch, the coffee taking an eternity to reach the four-ounce fill line. Drip drip drip. His whole life dripping
away, being filtered by this abominable curse. He looked at his sad set of four bowls and four plates and four silverware
and realized he had never entertained a single guest in his apartment, let alone used the entire set at once. In the utensil
drawer, under a masher his mother once used to make his favorite dish, fried mashed potato pancakes with maple syrup, he found
a heavy dull chef’s knife.

He tested the blade on his forearm and found it too blunt too cut the black hair growing there. He became frustrated that
he could not even scrape a few hairs with this knife, then fascinated by the dry powdery scrape of his skin. This skin, pale
pink and pliable. How could it disappear? Where did it go? Why did it hate him so much? Or was it the world his skin hated?
The world his skin?

There had to be more to it.

This skin.

The world.

The secret to his secret.

Soon he was sawing back and forth across his forearm in long patient strokes. He didn’t see the blood until he felt it spattering
onto his bare feet. The pain was real but far away, stinging but tolerable. He was more interested in the layers of tissue
and muscle he had opened up above his wrist, on top of his forearm, and this was interesting until the white edge of bone
appeared, stopping his progress.

He rolled his arm over and examined the network of green-blue veins there, the undulating cords of tendon that slid like puppet
strings when he wiggled his fingers, the soft smooth white skin holding it all together. He wanted to see inside, autopsy
this prop, delve into his own self. He brought the knife around and, pressing hard to make the dull blade do its stupid job,
sliced a clean line halfway up to his elbow. The blood began to pour and Noel began to laugh at the mess he was making.

Behind him the coffeemaker beeped that it was done. He turned and stared at the full pot, his feet sliding in the puddle forming
on the floor. He felt light-headed and his vision magnified sharply before growing fuzzy with black and red clouds at the
corners of the room.

This was beautiful. Why hadn’t he thought of this before? All along he had been trapped, but here was his key to the cell
door, right here inside him. The blood, his blood, was his key and if he let enough of it to flow from his disgusting body,
his spirit would go with it. He turned the knife over using both hands to get the handle in his dry right fist, so that the
blade was angled down, as if he were going to stab someone, and then began to stab himself.

The first try his aim was off and he jabbed bone under his thumb. On the second swing the point pierced his skin where the
buckle of his watch would have been and he shuddered with hot ecstatic searing pain. He was screaming, but the voice belonged
to the prisoner in the cell and he ignored it. He raised the knife a third time and saw its dim reflection in the glossy black
control panel of the stove, and halted.