Freewill (7 page)

He will not be coming into your world, if this is what you choose to make of it. Know this. He won't come near.
He cannot. He is afraid, and will allow you to go there rather than risk reaching out and being pulled all the way under.

•  •  •

The bed is comfortable, the food robotically delivered by your grandmother is life-sustaining, even if you only consume the merest niblets of each dish of
pasta alla olia
with white beans or bowl of Tuscany tomato soup. You do not move around very much and therefore don't sweat and therefore don't need to shower as regularly as usual.

And anyway why would you need to go to the world when the world comes to you out of the box. Game shows and talk shows and soaps and game shows and talk shows. But that is all filler, in between news broadcasts. Broadcasts which cannot seem to avoid presenting the airbrushing of two otherwise unremarkable young folks as if it mattered.

Still investigating, the beautiful-haired television man says, the connection between the two deaths. What is not in question, however, is the magnificence of the tribute. Even tamped down into that small pixilated TV picture, that bridge scene is one breathtaking monument to young life that will stay young.

“Will?” It is your Gran. “Will?” she calls again. “You have company.” It is an effort for Gran not to sound giddy at this announcement, and she only partly manages it.

“No I don't,” you say because the thought is simply too ludicrous to contemplate.

“Well . . . yes, I believe you do,” she says.

“No, I don't think—”

“Hope you're decent,” Angela says, “because I'm coming in there.”

Panic. Why? Didn't you want to be missed? Weren't you hoping that somebody would miss you if you removed yourself? Isn't that, in fact, what people like you are up to?

That's right, people like you. Don't dare think there are none.

“So can I come in?”

“Can she? Can she come in, Will?” Gran adds with such unbridled hope in her voice that she somehow manages to make you appear even more pathetic than you are.

“Yes,” you sigh. You prop up in bed, rigid as a corpse at an old Irish wake. You make a dismal attempt at presentability, buttoning the top button of your N.Y. Yankees pajamas and smoothing your hair, which by now has become as moldable as Play-Doh.

All wasted effort anyway. Angela sweeps into the room and your Gran sweeps away from it just as conspicuously. Before you have even had the chance to apologize for the state of the place and the self, she is seated on the side of the bed, practically in contact with your blanketed hip, as casually as if you were working in shop. She doesn't care a lick what you look like. Which is a good thing.

“So,” she says. “Having a little vacation, are you?”

“I guess,” you say. “Why are you here?”

“Jacks asked me to.”

“You? He did?”

Angela shrugs. “I'm the only person ever witnessed talking to you, so I suppose I was a natural choice.”

“Natural enough, I suppose.” You don't like it, do you, Will? The clinical sound of it. You almost expect her to produce some Department of Social Services paperwork for you to sign, attesting to your still-alivability, so she can be on her way. So. What did you expect then? You make yourself a non-person flyspeck of a creature of no consequence, and then what? Long to be of consequence? You wanted maybe for her to come in on bended knee, begging you to rejoin the race? You wanted her to bring flowers from the class and balloons from Jacks and a teddy bear from the headmaster and a great big gigantic card signed by everyone you don't know wishing you a speedy recovery and return? Well, unfortunately, you are a victim of your own success. You don't hardly exist.

“Okay, it wasn't
only
that Jacks asked me to do it. I also, maybe, felt a little responsible. Like, you know, the last time I saw you you were asking me to bag out of school with you and I said no. So I thought maybe you were, I don't know, killing yourself over that.”

That may have been a joke. You have no idea.

“And you wouldn't want to miss
that
,” you say flatly.

You look at her and she looks back. Refusing to respond. Refusing to acknowledge. Or to deny.

Fair enough.

You look at the TV, in that way that tells a person, without pointing or speaking, that you want them to look at what you are looking at. She does not need to be told twice.

“Ya, and there's that,” she says sadly.

Then you both just watch. It lasts about a minute. Long by local news standards. This is big news in a small town.

“Sculpture looks nice, though,” she says. “Everybody says so.”

Everybody says so. Everybody is saying.

You look and look until the image goes away and an infomercial for revolutionary cookware replaces it.

You start nodding, nodding, agreeing with something, long before you begin speaking. She is watching you getting more sure of the agreement, nodding harder and quicker.

“You want me to go?” Angela asks.

You continue nodding.

“My dad drove off the road,” you say.

This is the first time you have yet caught Angela at all off guard. “Oh,” she says. She starts to say more, but says the same again. “Oh.”

“Into the water. With my stepmother.” You continue to
nod, as if you are not
telling
the story but are instead listening to it, and agreeing with it.

“Oh. I'm, you know, sorry. Was this . . . do you mean, like, recently?”

You nod. “ 'Bout a year ago. He adored Sinatra. Sinatra died right after. The truth is I think my dad was some kind of
carrier pigeon
of death. The real surprise is that people around him actually lived, not that they died. Or maybe not surprise, maybe accident is a better word. Or mistake, even, is a better word.”

Angela looks sad. You had not achieved that before. How does that feel? Did you want that? Careless. It is easy to be careless, no?

“But he did love Sinatra, though. Loved him nuts.”

He certainly did.

“I'm sorry to hear.”

“You don't like Sinatra?”

“No . . . sorry to hear, about the accident.”

“Wasn't any accident.”

You do not know that. That is not knowable.

“ 'Scuse?”

“There was no good reason for them to have gone off the road. They could find no good reason for the crash. He just killed them both. They were only married a year, just like he was with my real mother before she died. Maybe there was,
like, a time limit . . .” You shrug. Your great lying cowardly shrug.

What would they know, investigators, about
good reasons
? What would they know? What would
you
know?

“He thought he could fly, was the thing. He used to say that. That he could fly, was the thing. He used to say that. That he could fly, but he just didn't know how. He was trying, I figure. He wasn't trying to hurt anybody. He was just trying to fly. I figure.”

He did say that, didn't he? You remember that. You remember?

“Oh,” Angela says. Could be worse. She could be tripping over herself and saying “sorry” all over the place the way people do. Oh is okay. At least it doesn't sound like pity, does it? Listen close, Will, because it matters. Does it sound like pity, coming out of this one?

“So that's why you're crazy then?” she says casually.

Not pity. Isn't that a relief?

“Yes,” you allow. “I suppose that is why.”

She nods. “You're one up on most of us. Least you
know
your reason.”

She looks all around your room. Even you are aware of the stagnant quality of the air and the weird way everything regardless of its actual hue seems to look yellow. What is she thinking? Can you imagine?

“So, you really want to stay in here?” she asks.

You shake your head.

Before she proceeds any further, she gets a bit of a worry flickering across her face. “Listen,” Angela says, and wouldn't you swear if you closed your eyes that she was speaking to more than one person? “Don't go misunderstanding. I don't want you thinking that we're going to wind up going to proms together and shit, because that's not going to happen. Right?”

“Right.”

“I just figure a soul that's destitute enough to attend track practices is a soul that could use a hand up. Right?”

“Right.”

This is reasonable enough. Angela is quite clear on the subject of not having much use for people. You are quite clearly not much of a person. Match made in heaven.

You get up, look about the room for clothes.

“Um,” she says politely, “you will be showering, I assume.”

You look down at yourself, as if that will tell you anything.

“I wasn't planning to.”

She shakes her head. “Whatever. Just don't be getting too close to me. You're kind of ripe.”

You wander the room, collecting bits of clothing from various surfaces, gathering them up in your arms in an aromatic
lump that even you have to admit bears a strong resemblance to the laundry pile. You stop, stare.

“What?” Angela asks.

“You really think I'm crazy?”

She stares back. And stares back. You may not know a great deal about this girl but you know that she is not one to shy from a question. She stares some more. Looks like she wants to say something. Then looks like she wants not to. After a bit, you both give up waiting.

How does that feel, Will? How does it feel? Are people so afraid of what will happen that they will not risk misspeaking to you?

“If you can wait ten minutes . . . I'll be out in ten. You won't go anywhere.”

“I won't go anywhere,” she says, graciously turning her attention to the important matters of television rather than your monumental decision to bathe.

It's been three days. Has it been three days? It seems that it couldn't have been. That would be too long, that would be crazy. But when the hot water strikes the virgin surface of your skin from face to throat to chest like thousands of poison needles, you know it has been some time, much time, too much time.

You love showers. You love showers even when you do not need them. How could it have been three days?

You soap yourself quickly, gently, slathering copious amounts of the liquid shower gel all over. When there is no unfoamed patch of skin left visible, you raise the bottle high and douse yourself, like a locker-room scene after a World Series victory.

Cleansing. Now don't you feel foolish? How could you not have wanted this? Foolish, foolish. Clean is good. Clean is very very good. You love that feeling. Make a note, William, to remember that you love that feeling of clean even when getting into the shower seems like too much work.

Toweling off. How many joys had you forgotten in three days? Even toweling off, the shedding of that new soapy skin, like a snake, shedding the old one only to emerge with more vibrant colors that were hidden underneath. Madly, you buff up the head, getting the hair to stand at attention to let the air coolly slide through, bracing the scalp, skull, possibly the brain. The stuff. That is the stuff. The stuff you forget, but that you must not, must not, must not forget, if you are going to make it. Promise not to forget, Will.

So much of the nonsense of you has run down the drain by the time you have left the bathroom you are fairly bouncing as you push open your bedroom door. You are in the early stages of a laugh, aren't you? Of a laugh at yourself, or at least that rancid self that would not groom himself. You are ready, to talk to Angela, to blow it all away, the foolishness that was
so inconsequential that all it took was for Angela to walk in and tell you you stink for the world to spin right once again.

Only she is not there to tell. Why is she not there to tell? What are you thinking, Will? Are you thinking you scared her off? Are you thinking that she just got you into the shower in order to make her escape once she saw what a lost cause you actually were?

Maybe you disappointed her by surviving.

Are you thinking that she was right to go? Are you thinking that she was wrong to go? Are you thinking this just proves everything? That it is all preordained? That it is a matter of time? That you are beyond reach, and that even if you were not nobody really can be bothered to do the reaching? You are nobody's responsibility in the end after all, isn't that right? As nobody is really anybody's responsibility.

You are calm on the outside. You are standing there in your clean khakis and T-shirt, staring down at your jumbled N.Y. Yankees pajamas on the bed. You pick up the top, put it on, button it all the way up.

Downstairs, you hear voices, and you follow.

At the kitchen table are Angela, Gran, and Pops. The women are sipping tea. The man is breathing into the knuckles of his folded hands. All conversation stops as you walk in. Gran's face is laminated as she lowers her cup, with smeary tears and runny nose. Pops's face is a granite sculpture, dignified
lifeless rendering of one of those great Greek philosophers who knew everything but never really existed.

“Hi,” Angela finally says.

“Hi,” you say. “Listen, I'm going to pass for today. I'm feeling really tired again. I figure by probably tomorrow I'll be feeling more up to it. So, thanks anyway. Thanks for coming. Sorry to disappoint.” You turn and start walking out of the kitchen, walking back to sanctuary or its opposite up there in your room.

Until you feel the small tug at the tail of your N.Y. Yankees pajama top. You turn around to face her.

“Nice getup,” she says. “You look like a total tourist.”

You put up no resistance. That can be a good thing, if you are not-fighting for the right reason. But you don't need to be told that. You know. You know all about this stuff. Possibly, you know too much about it.