The Fading (19 page)

‘What?’ Noel said.

‘Sorry, no. It must be one or the other. Light or time. There is no other explanation.’

‘What about this?’ Noel said.

‘What about what?’

‘You and me, here, now. This isn’t normal. You’re a …’

‘A ghost?’ Bryan answered for him. ‘Maybe. But there’s got to be a scientific explanation for ghosts, hasn’t there? Perception,
mind, hauntings, the soul. What could be behind these things if not psychology, cells, synaptic pulses, light? If I exist
here with you, there must be rules and some kind of natural explanation for us.’

‘This isn’t natural,’ Noel said.

‘What is not natural?’ Bryan said. ‘The supernatural? Fine, let us turn to anthropology. In ancient times of drought, the
rain was a gift from the gods. A Kodak camera is an instrument of supernatural power to primitive peoples who do not have
experience with or any foundation in technology. To them it is magic. Just because we can’t explain it or don’t understand
something now doesn’t mean it’s not real or that there is no science that can be applied to it.’

Noel didn’t know whether to be frustrated or hopeful at this reminder. It was better than thinking he had succeeded in killing
himself and was now walking around like some purgatorial version of Bryan, but not much better. He shivered, more from the
cold than the conversation.

‘What’s the girl’s name?’ Bryan Simms asked.

‘Why do you want to know?’

‘Maybe I’ve seen her. Or heard her name.’

‘She’s not here,’ Noel said. ‘I hate to tell you, Bryan, because I know you’ve been lonely for a long time. But whoever lived
here, they’re gone. That house is empty.’

‘Is it?’ Bryan was almost smirking.

‘Yes.’

‘A bubble, you said? That’s what it feels like?’

‘Sometimes. I don’t know. Why?’

‘I’m just thinking,’ Bryan said. ‘Maybe there’s more going on here than what you can see when you are in your bubble. Maybe
when you disappear, you see some things, like me, that no one else can see.’

‘You’re not the first,’ Noel said. ‘Others have followed me. Others like you.’

Bryan nodded. ‘But what if sometimes, when you are so close to my kind, in this level of things, you don’t always see what
else is going on? What if there’s another world going on all around us, and by helping me, by immersing yourself in this bubble,
you’ve blinded yourself to the rest of the world?’

‘What the hell does that mean?’ Noel said. ‘This is the world. Trees, snow, houses. The only thing out of place here is you.
And, in another way, me.’

Bryan Simms walked to one of the pine trees and reached out for the branch, as if to shake the snow from it. His hand disappeared,
or ceased to exist, as it moved through the branch and the snow was left undisturbed.

He looked back at Noel. ‘I don’t know the answer. I know that I felt you coming, before you ever set foot in that house, and
I think you felt me, too. Somehow, between whatever state I am in and whatever reality this affliction of yours put you in,
we were able to meet in a place that is neither here nor there, not quite then and not yet now, but a little bit of all these
things. And I think the best thing now, for both of us, is that I leave. I need to see my family one more time, or what’s
left of them, and then I am moving on. But I think you should stay awhile, Noel. Stay here and look for your girlfriend. Because
if I what I suspect is true, or close to true, finding her might be a lot easier once I’m gone.’

‘She’s not my girlfriend,’ Noel said.

‘Oh? Who is she?’

‘She’s just …’ He almost said ‘sister’ but that didn’t feel right either.

‘Someone important,’ Bryan Simms said.

‘Yes.’

‘Then don’t give up,’ Bryan said. ‘This is a popular house and things tend to look different when you’re not dead.’

Was that a joke? Noel didn’t know what to say to any of this.

‘Thank you for helping me, Noel,’ Bryan said, gesturing at Noel’s arm as if he could see through the parka. And come to think
of it, how did he know his name? That was the second time he’d used it and Noel did not remember providing it. ‘Whatever this
thing of yours is, it is rare and it helped me, so it can’t be all bad.’

‘It’s not good,’ Noel said.

‘To me it’s the most beautiful thing that ever happened. It’s all a matter of perspective. Or maybe a perspective of matter.
Or anti-matter. Or something. Anyway. Good luck, Noel.’

Bryan started to walk away, then paused and looked back.

‘Oh, please don’t worry. I won’t tell anybody.’

‘About what?’

‘What you did for me. If word gets out, if this bubble of yours keeps following you, you could become a very popular guy in
ways you probably don’t want to be.’

Noel’s skin crawled at the thought. Bryan started off again.

‘Bryan?’

The student paused again. ‘Yes?’

‘Aren’t you scared of what comes next?’

For the first time, Bryan did smile. It was not a handsome smile, but it was a smile. ‘I don’t know what comes next. But I
do know one thing.’

Noel waited.

‘There is pain in life, but life’s worth a hundred years of what I went through. And there’s pain in dying, but that’s not
so bad unless you go alone. It’s being stuck that hurts most, Noel. Moving on, accepting who you are, there’s no pain in that.’

Bryan Simms walked into the pine trees. The branches did not bend and the snow did not fall.

Behind Noel, a light began to glow and music began to play. Voices, alive and filled with laughter permeated the cold winter
night. The sound of raucous conversation echoed from the other side of the house. The music gradually got louder, a slow melody
carrying a balmy island breeze of marijuana smoke on a steel drum beat.

A girl hollered, ‘Goodnight, Pamela! Be careful!’ and a few seconds later walked past Noel, throwing a fluffy pink scarf over
the shoulder of her brown corduroy jacket and the spill of her blonde hair. He watched her hips sway drunkenly, knowing without
seeing her face that she was real enough, alive, but not Julie. She pushed through the branches audibly, sending snow down
in clumps, and reappeared a moment later walking down the sidewalk on the other side.

Noel turned back toward the house and saw the porch light on, a mountain bike chained to a pillar, half a dozen plastic beer
cups aligned along the rebuilt retaining wall, and the bodies of late-night revelers moving inside as the party – a party
that had been happening all along inside 1024 – began to wind down with a modicum of respect for the coming dawn.

Noel approached the porch steps one more time, wondering if Julie still lived in the house and, if so, in how many ways she,
too, had become haunted.

If Noel had been hoping his accidental good deed in freeing Bryan Simms would restore him to the visible world just in time
to mingle at the party, he should have known better. He was reminded of his status when he reached the porch and a hefty bearded
burnout bedecked in a bright yellow Colorado Buffaloes sweatshirt and matching pajamas careened through the doorway and trotted
barefoot down the stairs to regurgitate beer foam into the snow. He panted a minute, wiped his mouth and returned at a much
slower pace. He looked right through Noel on his way back inside, made a U-turn into the small front bedroom, and bellowed,
‘The fuck outta my room!’ at two girls who had been conversing in there and collapsed onto his unmade bed.

The girls – one a butch blonde with a nose hoop, the other a diminutive but fierce-looking brunette in a navy peacoat and
Fidel Castro lid – moved into the living room, which was dark but for a few candles and the lights from the stereo system
where Peter Tosh was singing about chasing down vampires in Buckingham
Palace, took one last forlorn look around, and left the party without so much as a glance at the specter loitering on the
porch.

More evidence of the bubble’s expanding power: the front door was painted a dull shade of gray now instead of cream, yet still
bore the legend
FUNHOUSE
(in red instead of orange), as if every tenant since 1964 had found the moniker too irresistible
to remove. He peered in the front windows, noting none were cracked or broken now. Only two people remained in the living
room, a couple or one-night-stand in the making judging by their moist embrace of one another. The rest (couch, love seat,
coffee table, stereo system, rock posters, etc.) looked as if a hurricane of cigarette butts, beer cups and pizza had recently
passed through it.

Noel entered, watching his step but not worrying much about his audible signatures. The music wasn’t as loud as it had seemed
a moment ago (now that the shock of it being here at all had worn off), but it masked any trace of his entrance. Even with
the front door open, the house was warm inside. Somewhere a furnace was working overtime. Stepping around an overweight black
Labrador snoozing on a nest of jackets and pilfered couch cushions, Noel wondered how he had navigated this mess the last
time around. How had he not tripped, or bumped into somebody, heard the music or felt the heat? It made no sense and did not
fit the pattern and rules of his usual episodes, where the real world remained the same for others as it did for him and only
his appearance was altered.

It’s either light or time
, Bryan had said.
The manipulation of light or time. Nothing else would make invisibility possible.

Noel had never given the concept of a time-shift much thought; he’d never had a reason to. In all his other dropouts, his
perceptions of the world and people and his (limited) interactions with them had remained in sync. When he tripped over Lisa’s
foot at the top of the stairs, there hadn’t been any delay before she tripped over his and fell down the same stairs. Julie
hadn’t frozen in another time capsule while their romantic tragedy played out. True, the fire at The Cork seemed to have been
a glimpse into the past, but even that had been contained, hitting him with the rapid insight of a psychic vision. He hadn’t
walked, talked and been himself in it.

So, were you so in the zone you couldn’t see more than the abandoned house as it had been at some point in the past thirty
years, even as your subconscious or some part of your brain in charge of spatial awareness compensated and guided you along?
Or did your bubble take you to another time altogether, when the house was empty and none of these things existed? Perhaps
the bubble is expanding, blinding me to larger and larger pieces of the world as it blinds the world to me. Either that, or
the thirty-year agony of Bryan Simms’s soul left one hell of a psychic splatter all over these walls.

He was too tired to dwell on these questions. He wanted to have a quick look around for Julie and go home. Unless he really
had jumped back in time, it would be almost five a.m. now. What were these people
doing awake at this hour? At a certain point, doesn’t the night deal you your final hand? You will either be drunk or not
drunk, about to get laid or not even close. Shouldn’t everyone have made a decision by now and gotten on with it?

Noel walked into the kitchen. The cabinets and counters were the same mid-century holdovers from before, but the appliances
had been updated. The oven was on low, the door cracked open a couple inches. Noel could feel its heat filling the room. He
bent to look inside and saw eight cut-open cigars resting on a cookie sheet. The West Coast rapper lifestyle had officially
reached Boulder. Someone was baking blunts.

He continued to the back, down the single step into a sunroom. The cold was seeping in from all sides, but someone had turned
the space into a makeshift bedroom, with a fold-out futon couch-bed at one end and a dresser at the other. Piles of clothes,
stacks of textbooks, the stale smell of athletic socks and wet laundry hanging in the dank cold air.

In the backyard, a tapped keg sat leaning in the snow, beside a circle of lawn chairs occupied by two girls and three guys.
All were bundled in heavy coats, knit caps, gloves. They were talking, but he couldn’t make out the words. He thought they
must be very drunk to sit in the freezing dark like this, but none raised a bottle or cup. Maybe it was drugs. He thought
of pushing through the screen door to get closer to them, but he’d just leave tracks and he didn’t seem to be missing much.
And somehow he knew neither of the two girls was Julie.
The way they sat, the set of their jaw or shoulders. She could be any size by now, her hair any color, but this didn’t feel
right. She was probably asleep in one of the rooms, if she even lived here.

Noel was half asleep on his feet when one of the guys in the yard stood in slow motion, stretched his arms and mumbled something
to the others before heading toward the door. They laughed and wished him goodnight.

Noel backed into the corner of the darkened sun-room. The guy, who was short and chubby with a lock of carrot-red hair hanging
from his gray wool ski hat, fumbled the door open, took one step inside and looked around as if sensing someone was here.

The guy eyed the futon with dazed longing, and Noel was sure this was his room and that he was going to fall into bed any
second now. But he only swayed on his feet, burped and laughed at himself tiredly before continuing up into the kitchen. Noel
heard his feet clap across the linoleum floor, then pause.

‘You okay?’ the guy said, not overly concerned about whomever he was talking to. ‘Hey, you. Hello? Oh, wow. You are gondy
with the windy, whoever you are.’ The guy laughed again and a few seconds later the front door slammed.

Noel hadn’t seen anyone in the kitchen. The music stopped while someone changed the disc or the machine rotated a new one
into play. A song Noel had never heard began, first with piercingly simple acoustic guitar chords, then a plaintive voice
that
sounded like a younger, more innocent version of Sting’s. The beat slipped into a soothing progression of drums and was joined
by a kindly massaged keyboard and some kind of clopping instruments, like sand blocks, finding the perfect composition of
crisp pop longing, reggae leisure and a lyrical pathos that subverted the otherwise pretty song with what struck Noel as grave
sadness.