“Jesus Christ.”
“No.”
“What do you mean, no?” But for my mouth, I didn’t dare move. He held the gun to his neck like he was his own hostage.
“The opposite.”
He shook his head, closed his eyes and gulped. The sheen of sweat of his neck shone in the light as he swallowed and spoke. He kept shaking his head in denial, sniffing, his lower lip quivering, the gun still very much there. “Close to sunup. I couldn’t sleep, I was listening to the ham and then…”
“I’m not moving, Bass. Okay? Just… put it down? Please.”
He lowered it from his throat, holding it flat and diagonal against his chest looking like a confederate soldier posing for a daguerreotype. He rocked back on his heels and leaned his shoulder blades against the wall.
“Why didn’t you come tell us?”
“I kept calling for you!”
I’d heard noises, but they were interpolated into my nightmare.
Two boys now, towheads, their twitching thatches of hair all that move. They stand under the magnolia tree with their arms to their sides. One wears a green long-sleeve T-shirt, the other a grey hoodie.
“Who’re the trick-or-treaters?”
Bass said, “Been there since right before… I… wasn’t feeling… well. They show up. When I picked up the gun, they just stood there.” He glanced at them and shivered. “I think they’re waiting for me now.”
Kodie stepped up behind me and coughed. “What’s going on?”
“Don’t,” said Bass. He stood erect again, gun wavering between us and him.
Kodie peered around me, saw Bass. “Oh my God,” she whispered. She seized my upper arm, her knuckles brushing my gun.
“No,” said Bass. “Definitely not.”
I asked, “Bass. What are you doing?”
“I don’t know I don’t know I don’t know.”
“Are you… do you want to…?”
He nodded vigorously. “Yes. I want to.” He burst out a single wet cry.
“Can you tell me why?”
“Feels right. Feels… good.”
“Don’t,” I said.
“But it’s coming on slow. The need. I’m so afraid. I don’t really want to go, but—”
“We can help you,” Kodie said from behind me.
He shook his head violently. “No. You can’t. You should stay away. You should go away and just let me. Your being here makes it hurt more.”
Kodie teared up and sniffed.
“That doesn’t help,” Bass said. “If you don’t leave me alone… it seems so glorious. It’d be wrong to leave you here. To suffer in this… this cesspool of a world. It isn’t ours anymore. They’re just waiting us out.” He nodded to the front.
Kodie got up on her toes and looked over my shoulder out the door. “It’s just like what they did that morning at my house. Goddammit, can’t they just leave us alone? Or… do… something.”
“You could come with me.” He lowered the gun at us, then back to his chin. “Please stay away, Kevin. I’m not sure what’s going to happen next, okay? I’m feeling very strange.”
“Bass? Now don’t get mad at me. I’m trying to help when I say this. Don’t shoot, okay?”
He shot me a basilisk glance, started to nod.
“What if I give you something to make you sleep? Knock you out? We could figure out what to do.”
“What could you do? Fix me? When I wake up, I’ll be right back to feeling like this. Except you’ll probably have me secured and then I’ll just go crazy.”
“You’ll still be alive—”
“So? What’s so great about that? Look around, Kodie. This is a nightmare. We’re in hell. Why would I want to stay here? Why do you?” He pointed the gun at us again, his shoulders squared to us, chest heaving, nostrils flaring. The sweat on his skin had become a full-body slick. I wondered how long he had been standing there, there within eyeshot of the boys outside. In my peripheral vision, I saw the boys drop down, out of sight. Not turn and walk away. Drop down.
Though frightened to have this gun pointed at me by my friend whose eyes held such terror and pain in them I cannot even begin to describe it, though to do so is the writer’s want, I felt impervious—calm, even. If bullets came, they’d miss. But I knew they wouldn’t come because I had an idea.
“You have to let me do this,” said Bass. He sounded exhausted now. Ready.
“Okay.”
“Please just go away and let me do this. Then it’ll all be over.”
“Okay. But can you go outside?”
Bastian’s face fell downcast, turned confused.
It was working. I wanted to get him thinking about it, to derail him. Though the white stuff seemed to be unstoppable, I wasn’t convinced the suicides were. It takes an intentional act to do it. I figured if I could disrupt Bass, get him thinking about something else, he could find a way to beat it back. I chose to act uncaring, resigned. I wasn’t, but that was my gut instinct: throw him off by doing something counterintuitive.
Bass lowered the gun and placed it back flat on his chest. Thoughts whirring through his mind’s infinite passages. I stood sick with fear, hoping that my friend in his last despairing moment wouldn’t feel I’d abandoned him.
Kodie nudged me in the kidney. “Kevin, what are you saying?” I counted on Bass hearing her and me not answering. I stood more erect and took in a deep breath to punctuate the fact that I meant business. I mustered a look that said go ahead, leave us, coward.
On his face hung disbelief and hurt. As long as he felt something, he had a shot, as we all did, as long as we didn’t go numb.
“Wait. What? You want me to go outside to…?”
“That’s right. I can’t stop you, but could you just step outside to do it?”
“I can’t believe you.”
“What can it possibly matter to you? You’re leaving us behind. So what does it matter where you do it? It doesn’t.” Brief pause, pregnant as hell. “But if it does matter, then things matter to you, and if things matter to you, then life matters. Being alive matters.”
Bastian held the gun in his hands like it was an alighted butterfly. He regarded it as an artifact of his past rather than a tool of his shortened future.
He considered. This is what mattered. With consideration, there is hope.
The three of us stood there breathing, our hearts beating, the moment turning back on itself over and over, not stretching forward into the next.
He dropped his hands to his sides and began crying. The gun was still tight in his grip and he beat it against his hip.
“Give it to me, Bastian. Okay? I’m going to step over there and you’re going to give it to me, all right? Slowly.”
As I took my first step toward him, the house went dark, as if the thickest of clouds swam before the sun. Eclipse dark. Just as quickly, that darkness lifted, and through the kitchen window I saw the massive shadow move along the garage, a neighbor’s roof and then gone. There was this final flapping flick to it.
The house light again, Kodie screamed into my ear. Bass pivoted toward us, his eyes expanded and shining. He lifted the gun, aimed, and fired.
I had closed my eyes. It happened so quickly, the shadow, her scream, his turning to us, I didn’t react. Maybe it’s because I thought I knew the bullet would miss.
I heard glass shatter and felt a burst of air. When I opened my eyes, I saw a broken front door. Jagged shards of wood, glass daggers. On the porch lay a kid, clutching a sucking chest wound weltering through his fingers. He struggled and cried out, inhaled and exhaled rapidly for a few seconds, then went slack, the last movement belonging to his blue tennis shoes.
“Oh—” uttered Bass. Though he had just shot a little kid to death, it had kept him from doing it to himself. That he cared he’d done it ratified his will to live. He dropped the gun to the floor. “Goddammit. I… I just reacted. He just appeared. Looking in. I don’t even know how to say what his face looked like. It was all… moving. His face wasn’t still.”