He has so many questions for her.
“Get out,” she says. “I have much work left to do. Your business here is done. If you have any questions about the monthly payment plan, Johnston Funeral Services has an auto mated telephone system.”
“What about the strings? I have questions about the strings.”
The accountant points at the door and shouts, “Get out.”
“But—”
“I’ll call the police.”
Simon throws on his jacket and walks out the door. As he walks down the stone path, he hears some keys jangle behind him. He looks back without losing stride. The accountant is locking the door to her office. She must be scared or worried that he’ll return. He shrugs and sticks his hands in his pockets. At least he has his left arm back, and also confirmation that he’s not the only one who sees the strings. Maybe someday he’ll meet others. Maybe they’ll talk about it. Maybe he will tell the truth about Celia.
Maybe he will not.
It is his, this secret of the strings, of how he killed Celia and their unborn child. It is his secret.
Simon unlocks his bike from the FUNERAL PARKING ONLY sign. A parade of mourners crosses the parking lot.
Some of the people are wheezing and keeling over. As Simon walks past the mourners, an old man who looks like a walrus points at Simon’s bicycle and says, “How vulgar.
How dread fully vulgar.” None of the mourners have bikes with them. Biking to a funeral must be an improper thing to do. Simon lowers his head and continues on, ashamed.
He arrives at the main road and stops, allowing the last stragglers of the funeral march to pass before mounting his bike. The mountain is far steeper than it seemed on the way up. He feels nervous about riding down, so he takes a few minutes to admire the view, which he failed to notice during his ascent.
From the entrance of Johnston Funeral Services, he has a view of the entire city far below. It appears small and trapped, a pit of civilization surrounded by a plastic forest that swallows the horizon. The tinfoil bristling of the trees around him is ugly. He wishes the breeze would stop.
He has never biked down a mountain this steep. He might hurt himself. Maybe physical pain will distract him from the other pain. Considering the last few days, he’d welcome a broken bone. A smashed skull would be sublime. He’d lick gray matter from his lips and taste Celia.
He will not crash, although he likes to fantasize what would happen if he did. He just wants to go home. When he gets home, he will clean the apartment, take a hot shower and sleeping pills, and sleep for twelve hours. Then he can start making plans for the rest of his life.
He repositions his hands on the handlebars and kicks off. There’s no reason to pedal. He gains speed in no time at all. Every bump in the road vibrates through his entire body, his skinny bike absorbing none of the shock. The wind is deafening, like swallowing an ocean in each ear.
He’s moving faster than he feels comfortable moving. The wind stings his eyes and pries his mouth into a flapping smile. He’s crying, from the wind and from grief, but also from exhilaration.
A dark shape rolls into the road, directly into Simon’s path.Simon cannot use his brakes. He’s going too fast.
The dark shape stands and raises its hands above its head, urging Simon to stop. He can see it clearly now. The dark shape is a sloth.
He swerves to the right to dodge around the sloth while the sloth also moves to the right in a miscalculated attempt to avoid his bicycle. He tries to correct his move, but too late and too sharply. This could be fatal, he thinks.
He collides with the sloth.
The sloth acts more like a ramp than a road block, launching Simon off the side of the road.
The bike falls away from him. He is weightless and almost floating, then he’s falling after the bike, toward the bottom of a gulch so far fucking down it may as well be bottomless. Oh fuck stop falling, he thinks. Oh fuck stop falling, is all he can think.
He claws at the air out of desperation.
And he grabs onto something.
And he stops falling.
He’s hanging over the gulch by two of his own strings, suspended in midair. He grabbed the strings because they were the only thing he could touch. He should be dead right now. Instead, he swings in midair, hundreds of feet over fake trees and sharp rocks. The road is thirty feet away and maybe a hundred feet up.
How fast was he going and how high was he launched to soar thirty feet? He tries doing the math, but the numbers ooze like broken yolks across his mind. How possible or impossible his arrival to this point in time and space is irrelevant because he is here now, and he’ll die if he doesn’t get elsewhere.
No matter how hard he tries to hold on, he’s going to fall. His arms will lose the strength to hold him up. His death has only been delayed. He is still going to die in the gulch. He is still going to die today.
He starts to climb. His strings are taut, betraying no sign that they’re about to fall out of the sky.
He climbs fast. His muscles ache and his breathing is ragged, but he keeps moving. He fears that if he pauses to rest, he might never get going again. A short break might kill him.
After climbing for a while, he comes level to the road.
Now he has two options. He can climb a bit higher, swing from his strings, and hopefully land on the road, or he can forget about the road and survival, just say fuck everything and climb as high as the strings and his body will allow.
Neither option guarantees survival.
His body decides for him. It moves upward faster and faster, eating up strings at an incredible pace. He has no idea what to expect, so he expects nothing. He should be lying dead in the gulch. Or he and Celia should have had a child, grown old together, died together. They had talked about that, how when they got to be a certain age they would meet in a dream and leave their bodies behind.
They said that’s how they’d live forever, by running away.
Now Simon is running away. It is not a dream; he’s doing it alone.
He climbs faster. His limbs feel like burning match-sticks, but he does not dare stop. The air grows thin, hard to breathe.
The blue sky assumes a feathery texture. A chartreuse trembling gnaws at the edges. The sky is molting.
Strings crisscross everywhere.
Simon shudders with anticipation and exhaustion as he reaches an altitude where he can no longer breathe. He cannot go on, but he must. He must be close to breaking into outer space. He goes on. After a while, a square of darkness forms above. The strings are now so thick around him that he cannot see the sky. There are only the strings and the darkness above. The square of darkness must be the source of the strings.
Simon’s strings begin to merge with all the rest, forming one massive blue stalk.
I’m never coming down again, he thinks.
Closer, the darkness reveals its substance.
The darkness is made of wood.
The blue stalk hangs from the dark square like the cord of a household appliance.
Finally, Simon pulls himself up onto the dark wooden square that floats in the sky. He can see the charred remains of walls around three sides. This was once a room.
His hands are bloody leaves. The dark square has scalded his hands, but when he screams, he does not scream out of pain.
A dead, half-eaten shark lies on the wooden platform.
The tail of the shark is missing. Its blackened ribs jut out from rot ting folds of skin like broken cast-iron fence posts. The stalk of tangled strings vanishes into the festering, cave-like hollow of the shark’s head. The strings are sprouting from the shark’s brain.
The shark’s mouth is clamped shut, as if it died while grinding its teeth or smiling.