Invisible (11 page)

The thought of being locked in a room fills me with vacuum, a bottomless internal pit of dread sucking at my organs, threatening to devour me from within. I can't
believe they would put an innocent person in jail. My parents would never let them. I look at the cop, John Hughes. I look at his mustache, at his thick nose, at his heavy-lidded eyes. He stares at me as if I'm an animal, like a dog who crapped on the kitchen floor.

“It wasn't me,” I say. My voice sounds distant and weak.

I hear a bell go off. Is first period over already? Have we been sitting in this office for forty-five minutes? I look at my interrogators, like statues, silent and unblinking. The silence is heavy and hollow and unbearable; it cries out to be filled.

“It wasn't me,” I hear myself say again.

For the first time, Officer Hughes speaks: “Are you sure you want to go to prison, son?”

Something—maybe it is my liver—crumbles. I am getting smaller.

“Have you ever been locked in a cell?”

I am having trouble breathing.

“Son? Don't you think it's time?”

I shake my head, but my mouth is forming words. I try to freeze my lips, but the words are already flying through the air at the speed of sound.

“It was Andy.” I can't believe I'm ratting out my best friend. “Andy Morrow. Andy made the call. I was with him. I saw him. It was Andy. Oh my God.” I think I must be crying now. My face is wet. Ms. Neidermeyer is leaning toward me, eyes wide, arms out to embrace me. I slap her hands away and gulp air and shout at the walls, “I'm sorry! I'm sorry, Andy!”

“I
understand that you've been seeing Andy again, Douglas.”

I pretend not to hear her. I really don't want to get into this. I'd much rather talk about my bridge.

“Douglas?”

“What?”

“How long has this been going on?”

You would think she would want to talk about my bridge. “How long has what been going on?” I say.

“How long have you been seeing Andy?”

The easiest thing is to tell her what she wants to hear. “I haven't,” I say.

“Your mother tells me you've been talking to yourself at night.”

“Maybe.”

“What do you talk about?”

“We talk about the bridge.”

“We?”

“Me and myself.”

She makes a note in her folder.

“Have you been taking your medication?”

I don't answer her right away.

“Douglas?”

“I might have forgot a few times.”

She makes another note.

“Who called the bomb threat in to the school?”

“They say it was me.”

“And was it?”

“It was …” I remember it clearly. Andy putting the coins into the pay phone and punching in the number. Grinning at me. I can see his fingers gripping the phone and his white teeth as he speaks.

I know Dr. Ahlstrom wants me to lie now. I close my eyes. I see fire. I feel it warm on my face and hands. I sink into it.

“Douglas?”

I open my eyes. “What?”

“What were you thinking about?” She's peering at me. I am a specimen on a slide.

“Trains,” I lie.

“Who called in the bomb threat, Douglas?”

“It was Andy.” I slump down in the chair and wrap my arms around myself.

“Douglas, Andy is not with us anymore. You know that.”

I glare at her. She is so wrong. She doesn't know how wrong she is.

“Andy Morrow died nearly three years ago, Douglas. You remember that, don't you?”

I close my eyes. The fire is hotter now.

“Douglas?”

“What?”

“Andy is dead.”

I shake my head, marveling at her stupidity. I say, “You think he died at the Tuttle place, don't you?”

She nods and says softly, “That's right, Douglas. Don't you remember? It was a cold day.”

I remember the cold. A cold early spring day. Andy and I were in the Tuttle house. I was carving the sigil in the floorboards with my Swiss Army knife. Lying on my belly, staring into the hard, polished floor, dragging the knife blade across the grain of the maple flooring. We had been talking for hours. The sun had fallen behind a bank of clouds.

“I'm cold,” Andy said. Or maybe it was me who said it.

“We could build a fire,” I said. Or maybe Andy said it. I think it was me.

Andy found a broken chair in one of the upstairs bedrooms, and there were some dusty old boards and newspapers in the basement. We broke up the chair and built a loose pile of paper and wood in the fireplace. I had a book of matches in my pocket. I lit the fire and we watched as the paper flickered and fluffed into tongues of flame, and the dry boards caught and filled the fireplace
with heat and hissing and the dull, distant roar of hot air rushing up the chimney. We sat on the floor close by the fire, throwing on chunks of chair and broken pieces of board whenever the fire slackened.

“If we'd had a fireplace in the treehouse, it never would've burned,” I said.

“We should build another one.”

“Another fire?”

“No, stupid, another treehouse.”

“That would be cool.”

I remember the conversation, but not who said what.

“Douglas?”

“What?”

“What do you remember?”

“It was Andy.”

“What was?”

“The knife.”

We fell asleep in front of the fire on that hardwood floor. We drifted off, each of us to our own dreams. Then came the nightmare: a roaring, sucking monster shaking me and shouting, “Doug! Wake up!”

I claw my way out of the dream and Andy's fingers are digging into my shoulders and it is dark and orange. We are under a cloud; the room is filled with smoke. The fireplace is roaring. The bottom few feet of the room is clear, but above us is a layer of dense black smoke.

“The house is on fire,” Andy shouts.

I jump to my feet. The smoke is low and thick. I take in a lungful and double over, coughing. Andy pulls me back down to the floor.

“We gotta get out of here!” We head for the front door on our hands and knees and a few seconds later we are outside.

The top of the house is in flames. A huge spire of flame is coming from the chimney.

“We're in big trouble now,” Andy says.

“We got out,” I say.

“
You
got out, Douglas. Andy didn't.”

“Yes he did.” I'm shaking. “We got out of the house. We were watching it burn. …”

“I forgot my Victorinox,” I said to Andy.

“The one I gave you?”

“I left it by the fireplace.”

Andy looks at me as if I left a part of him inside that burning house. And suddenly he is running back toward the front door. I shout after him, but I don't know what. He is in the house. He is inside, and the house is burning. I imagine him bent over running through the foyer into the living room, seeing the red plastic handle of the Swiss Army knife, grabbing it, heading back toward the front door. …

Where is he?

The house is engulfed in flame.

I shout his name. I run toward the front door, but it's too hot, I can't get close. I can't get in.

“He went back in,” I say. I'm not shaking anymore.

Dr. Ahlstrom nods. “You remember now.”

“He went in to get my knife.”'

“That's very good, Douglas.”

“I don't like thinking about it,” I say.

“I don't blame you.”

“Everybody blames me.”

“That's not true.”

“I blame me.”

“Well, maybe we can do something about that.” She is writing in her folder again. “I'm giving you a new prescription for a slightly higher dosage of Proloftin, and I don't want you to skip any doses this time, all right?”

“I still see him,” I say. “He still lives next door.”

Dr. Ahlstrom is shaking her head. “No he doesn't, Douglas. Andy's parents moved away a few months after he passed away. Someone else has been living in the Morrow house for the past three years, a man named Fuller.”

“But I see Andy.”

“Not anymore.” She hands me a slip of paper. “This is your new prescription. I believe your mother is waiting for you outside. I'd like to speak with her for a moment. Perhaps you could ask her to step inside?”

I let myself out of the interrogation room. Everything looks sharp edged and bright, even my mother.

“She wants to see you,” I say.

T
he new pills are larger and bluer, but they are still shaped like triangles. My mother watches as I put one in my mouth and swallow it with a gulp of water. I feel it tumble slowly down my esophagus. My mother smiles, and I head downstairs to work on my bridge.

I once read a magazine article that said that Proloftin was originally derived from a powerful rhinoceros tranquilizer used by zookeepers. I believe it. One moment you are standing in a room painfully bright with sunlight, and an hour later someone has pulled the shades and you want to take a nap. But this larger dose hits me
like a sledgehammer. I am fitting the last deck segment into my bridge and …

… time …

… passes …

I become aware of a small wooden contrivance in my hand. Interesting. It is made of matchsticks fastened together with some sort of adhesive substance, a protein or collagen of some sort. … What is it called? The word eludes me. I turn the assemblage in my hand. Somehow I know that it is part of a bridge.

Ah, yes, the adhesive substance is called glue. I smile happily, joyfully, ecstatically, Proloftily. The answer is glue. How nice it is to know glue.

… time …

… passes …

I am looking at a bridge constructed upon an enormous table. Somehow I know that it was I who constructed this marvelous object. My fingers, ingers, bingers, lingers. …

… time …

… passes …

The effects of Proloftin peak during the first hour, after which you begin to think again. Think, stink, bink, fink … I start laughing uncontrollably … and suddenly it is not funny. I want to weep. I am holding a section of bridge deck in my hand, and there is the bridge, bright orange—
International
Orange—and unearthly in its complexity. I must insert the final section into place. Lace. Ace.

But where? I am thinking, but my thoughts are sluggish and scrambled.

Wait.

I am remembering something.

Maybe not.

It doesn't matter.

I drop the deck section on the floor. The bridge is not important. What is important? I cast about blindly through the murk in my head. Names tumble through my head: Douglas. Haverman. Andy. MacArthur. Morrow. Hanson. Melissa. Mother. Freddie. Eddie. Die. I … I am thrown into a room filled with dangerous memories. A burning house. This should bother me, but my heart is numb. I stare without feeling as Andy runs into the burning house.

He is in there.

He is still in there.

Somewhere in my head a switch closes and I remember something that gives me a flash of hope. The knife. A few days after the fire, I remember Andy showing up at my window and giving me my knife.

“I saved it,” he said with a grin.

If Andy died in the fire, how could he have returned my knife to me?

I know where it is, in one of the old cigar boxes I use to store train parts. I start opening boxes and, on the third one, I find it. But instead of seeing a bright red plastic handle and seventeen shiny tools, I find a blackened, frozen, twisted metal mess. It's the knife, but this knife has been through a holocaust. A bleak and depressing memory drudges into my head. I remember climbing through the ruins of the Tuttle place, weeks after the fire. I remember kicking through the charred remains of the house, my shoes and jeans black with soot, and then finding the blackened, melted corpse of the knife. …

He never came out.

Andy is dead.

Nothing is important. No thing.

I reach out my hand. My fingers curl around a section of bridge. I am King Kong, Godzilla, Galactus. I squeeze. I hear the crackle of matchsticks.

… pain …

… passes …

I am sitting on the concrete floor and I can smell the sour, tangy reek of resinous pine. The smell of matchsticks. The smell of phosphorous. The smell you get just before a fire. I sit there with the smell and a brain as thick and fibrous as a wet, wadded woolen sweater. I remember some things. I remember Andy's parents putting their house up for sale. And then George Fuller moved in.

But Andy never left. Andy died … but he didn't. I
know this should upset me, but I just sit there on the cold floor and let my mind go dead.

Eventually my mother's voice reaches me. It is time for dinner, that thing we do every night, that thing where you push digestible matter into your mouth hole.

I can do that. I climb to my feet.

The bridge. Something has attacked the bridge.

Interesting.

The bridge has taken serious damage to its eastern approach ramp.

I wonder whether anyone will bother to repair it.

M
orning comes gray as ash. I shuffle out of my room down the hall to the kitchen, where my mother is working on one of her crossword puzzles. She looks up from her graph paper and smiles.

“Good morning, dear.”

“G'morning.”

A place is set for me at the table. A greenish blue pill on a white plate on a dark green placemat on the maple table. And a glass of orange juice. And a box of cornflakes. Carton of milk. Bowl.

“Take your pill, dear, and have some breakfast.”

“They make me sleepy.”

“Dr. Ahlstrom said that will pass. You'll get used to it.”

“They make everything fuzzy and gray.”

“That's just a temporary effect, dear.” She watches as I put the pill in my mouth and swallow some orange juice, then returns her attention to her puzzle. As soon as she is not looking I spit the pill into my hand and crush it and rub the wet powder into my pajama leg.