This was good enough, and I was tired. I wished I had the balls to hold Conner and tell him how sorry I was for everything I’d done.
This is it.
Henry stood at the door, eyeing me for a moment. Then he nodded and began snaking through the crowd.
I could say he looked older, but we’d both been through so much. As he made his way toward me, I wondered if he knew about the places I’d been, if maybe he’d had dreams, and in them, if he saw London falling to pieces, ghosts who came and went, Jack bleeding to death in front of him, and blue plastic drums with the tangled bodies of lost little boys sleeping endlessly inside them.
Maybe he had no stories except for the ones that trapped us together.
I wondered if he carried a small compass with him.
I was so sick of everything. I had called Henry here to say good-bye to him one last time.
When he got to our table, I stood politely and took his hand, but I didn’t smile. Behind him, Conner balanced three pints of beer and worked at navigating a zigzagged return.
“The last time I saw you, I promised I’d buy you a beer,” I said.
Henry cleared his throat and sat beside me. “And when, exactly, was that, Jack?”
“Funny. The exactly part. The day before yesterday, I guess. We stood together on a ridge of boulders and looked out at the desert in Marbury, the night before you left for Bass-Hove. Sound familiar?”
Henry shrugged one shoulder as if to say it didn’t matter whether it sounded familiar or not. “Well, it’s always nice to have a pint with a friend, I think.”
Conner arrived, centering three nearly full glasses of beer on the table. He stood there for a while, gripping the back of his chair with both hands like he was having a hard time figuring out what changed about this picture while he was gone.
He leaned across the table and put his face so close to my ear that he almost fell on top of me. He whispered, “Hey, Jack. There’s some creepy old guy sitting next to you. Just thought I’d let you know.”
Then he laughed and sat down.
I raised my glass. “Conner Kirk, meet Henry Hewitt.”
Our beers clinked together, and Henry said, “Cheers.”
So we sat like drunken veterans trading war stories for two hours. We spoke with low voices, at times in whispers, like we were all escaped inmates from the same asylum.
Maybe we were crazy.
Each of us told of things the others hadn’t seen, but the pieces all fit together in some rhythmic alcoholic order: the Odds, the battles in Glenbrook, the floods, Anamore Fent and the Rangers, the Under, the trip into the desert, the encampment, and, finally, Henry’s loss at the settlement, which brought us all back here, to London, to The Prince of Wales.
And the glasses.
“So you knew, didn’t you?” I said.
“I don’t know nothing.” Conner drained his beer. It was amazing to me how much he could drink.
“No. I mean Henry. You knew when you let us go out that night after the Ranger what was going to happen to you and the other boys, didn’t you?”
“I thought I did. But there’s always that chance, isn’t there, that things will change?”
“Like Jack’s briefs.” Conner put his foot on top of mine. Always screwing with me. “Drink your beer, kid, you’re lagging!”
My glass was still full. I couldn’t take any more.
“I’m good, Con.”
“Not me. I’m never good.” Conner got up. “Never.”
He pointed at Henry’s empty. “How about you?”
“Thank you, yes,” Henry said.
I held my glass to my lips, pretended to drink, but I had to hold my breath. The smell of the stuff was beginning to make me feel sick. Still, Conner and Henry hadn’t noticed that I’d stopped drinking three rounds earlier.
When Conner came back and sat down, grinning sleepily, Henry steadied himself, square and upright, as though he had finally worked up the courage to say what he and Conner had been dancing around all evening.
“Tell me about breaking the lens. How you put it back together.”
Conner leaned forward over the table, like it was story time and I was about to tell him something he didn’t already know.
“There’s nothing to tell, really. We … I used a hammer and vice, and when it broke, everything else sort of fell apart around us, and it all stayed that way, too—broken. That was why, everywhere we’d go, we were followed around by this big oozing hole in the sky. And every time we’d take a piece of the lens out, things would change again, get worse, like stuff was coming out of the sky, or out of the hole in my hand, just coming up out of the middle of everything.”
The center of the universe.
I turned my palm up and drew a line with my finger across the flesh where I’d been cut by the lens. “It was the other glasses that brought us—well, some of us—to different places, but everywhere I’d go, things just kept getting worse and worse.”
Ben and Griffin dead inside a fucking trash can.
Like what happened to Nickie, what you did to those boys on the train.
Conner gulped at his drink and swiped a forearm across his wet mouth. “We went back to Glenbrook, but it was like the fucking end of the world there.”
“Worse than that,” I said. “We almost got trapped for good. So when we finally found each other in the desert, it was almost too late again. Things had gotten out of control. But we got the pieces back together.”
Henry tipped his glass and looked from Conner to me, never blinking, like he was completely unfazed by the alcohol.
“What happened to it?” he said.
I shook my head. “I don’t know. I only felt it turn whole inside my hand. It burned me. I never saw it again after that.”
“And you don’t know where it is now?”
Fuck you, Henry.
“What does it matter?” I said.
“I thought—” Henry said. “I just wanted to see it.”
“That would be cool, Jack,” Conner urged. “Let’s see it.”
He bumped his knee against mine.
I felt myself getting pissed off again.
“I don’t know where the fuck it is,” I said. “For all I know, you have it, Con.”
Conner smirked. “I wish, dude.”
“Why?” I said.
“’Cause I’m drunk and I feel like fucking with shit. That’s why.” He slapped the table eagerly, like a kid waiting for his allowance.
I could only stare at him and shake my head.
“And the other glasses?” Henry wouldn’t let it go, either.
Conner was so drunk. “You know, the flip flip.”
He made a little flapping windshield-wiper motion with his finger in front of his eyes and said, “How about those ones? Did you lose those, too? You fucking lose shit all the time, Jack.”
“You don’t get it, do you?”
Conner was definitely too drunk to hear the edge in my voice.
I looked squarely at Henry, then Conner. “It’s done. I’ve had enough. And I don’t fucking care about ever going back again. I wanted to tell both of you that tonight. I only asked Henry here to say it, and to tell him thank you for helping us get out for the last time. But that’s it. The last time.”
I scooted away from the table and stood.
When Conner got up, he knocked his chair over. It sounded like a gunshot. We didn’t even notice how empty and quiet the place had become.
“Dude. Sit down. You’re not leaving.”
I sighed. “It’s late. I’m really tired.”
I stuck out my hand for Henry.
“Good-bye, Henry. And thank you.”
He looked shocked, pale. He shook my hand, but didn’t answer me.
And Conner nearly tripped over his upturned chair trying to steer himself after me when I left The Prince of Wales and went out onto the street.
* * *
This is it.
It sounds like Conner is puking in the toilet. I wonder how he managed to get back here without stumbling into traffic. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him this drunk.
The shower comes on.
Good.
Leave me alone, Conner.
There.
I pick up my bag and place it on top of the bed.