Those six words are said in Johnny’s voice.
I detect that he’s conflicted. He’s breathing hard.
“Nate, wake up.” Barely awake myself, I find it hard to separate Nate’s words from Johnny’s, the dream world from this one. They overlap and I am unsure. “Please, Nate, wake up and talk to me for real.”
This kid sitting up and staring past the flashlight glare speaking in monotone had my pulse going, the reality of now thrumming through me.
I yelled at him. “Nate! Wake up!”
I beat on his legs with my open palm. He blinked, turned his face toward me. Growling from Maggie. Maggie leaning into me, ready to pounce.
Nate’s face gathered up into a fearful shudder. He recoiled and pulled his legs away from me. “Oh, no! It’s you!” His eyes grew wide and he shook his head with petulance like the child he was. “No. I don’t want to. I don’t want to.”
“Don’t want to what, Nate? C’mon, it’s me. Kevin. You’re okay. You’re safe here.”
“No, I’m not safe. Never safe.” The voice wavered between old and new.
“That’s not true. Don’t you remember? We’ve been together all day today. I’ve told you all about me.” I reached out to touch his shoulder. He jumped back onto his heels on the couch, his knees at his chin. Maggie startled but I made sure she stayed put with my other arm.
“Why did you come here?” he asked in a whisper.
“I told you.”
“They’ll find me!”
“Nate—”
“And I don’t want to go back to them and I don’t want to be with you because you make my head hurt. I just want to be left alone.”
“Nate—”
His eyes shot back and forth and his breathing shallowed in rapid hitches. He huffed his breath and whimpered in abject pain, overwhelmed.
My presence confuses things for him.
“When they find me, they’re going to…”
“What?” But I already knew. I flashed onto Simon’s freckled face, fish-belly white, peering through the curtain of green.
“Because I’m not… I’m not… complete.”
He looked up at me and his eyes implored that I believe him. I took the flashlight beam off his face, no longer interrogating him. “And they’ll just kill you for it.” I remember saying this without derision. I said it quietly, stating fact.
Though he did not respond, his face was grim.
The night’s black didn’t allow me to see that puddles in the gravel quivered with droplets until I waved my beam out across the drive. Lifting the light up, I saw the dogs’ eyes spark yellow. They sat still, watching, ears perked to our conversation. I lit new candles on the bar. Sleeping no longer occurred to us.
I sat and slumped back into the couch next to him. Nate sighed deeply, chin to his chest.
“You’ll stay with me. Here. I like it here,” I said.
“You can’t protect me.”
“Worked so far.”
“They wait.”
“For what?”
“For you.”
“I’m not leaving.”
“Yes you are.”
“No I’m not.”
“Yes you are.”
“Forget it, Nate. We’re staying here. We’ll wait them out. Things’ll settle. They’ll stop being so scared and after a while we’ll be able to make contact and work together.” I embellish that line a bit, because right now, floating along, I feel this is true.
“No. You don’t understand. They’re not scared of anything anymore. Except you.”
“Hush—”
“Haven’t you ever needed something so badly that you were afraid of it?”
There’s need and there’s want. Wants came to mind. Publishing my first book, the bookstore letting me play my trombone at the first reading. I thought of wanting to be with Kodie, watching her ring up customers, wanting to be with her. No, that felt more like a need.
I thought of Grandma Lucille with her eyes closed listening to me play, then eyes closed laying in her coffin. I thought of how badly I wanted the world to be different as I sat up on that boulder smoking… and then here came that single rolling wave…
It needs you to need it.
“Of course,” I said.
“That’s how we, they, feel. They need you but they’re scared.”
We sat there looking at each other in a bit of a standoff. The tension of the moment tormented Maggie and she jumped down and looked back and forth at both of us and whined. I found myself questioning this kid. He’d stayed behind, sure. But now I’m really wondering why. Is it even possible that they’d let him, that they’d not notice? Or did they leave him here to serve a purpose?
In the old world we’d call him a plant, a spy, or in this case, a double agent.
These thoughts bearing questions had no answers. If I asked him, I don’t think he could give me a real answer if he wanted to.
“When you were talking in your sleep you said something to me. Do you remember what you said?”
“What did I say?”
“I’m asking you.”
“Uh…”
I scrutinized his face. He seemed confused by my behavior.
“Um, I think I said, ‘oh no it’s you’?”
I shook my head. “Before that.”
He shook his head back at me, shrugged. If he was lying to me, he was a thespian extraordinaire. If he was lying to me, it wasn’t intentional.
“I don’t remember saying anything before that. What was it?”
“It doesn’t matter, okay?” I could see trying to remember pained him.
“Tell me.”
“No, Nate.”
“Why won’t you tell me?”
“Because it doesn’t matter and because I don’t think it was you telling me. It wasn’t you talking.”
His shoulders hopped up and down as he immediately began crying. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry…”
“For what?”
“For what I told you. Whatever it was.”
I slid over and hugged him. He hugged back hard and desperate. His mouth was to my ear and mine to his. “I won’t ask you to remember, okay?”
His chin drilled into my neck as he nodded. He sniffed loudly in my ear and deep in his throat his little boy voice whined. He tried to contain it but he burst out in a hoarse cry.
“It’s all right, Nate. I’m glad I came here. I’m glad I found you.”
His chin dug in more, his grip on me tightened. His whispers came out wet, not in his new-world voice, but in his old-world mucosal little boy’s voice, the voice he’d have used if talking to his daddy after he’d taken a nasty fall off his bicycle. I felt his breath there, and into the swirl of my ear he pleaded, “Please don’t leave me. You can make my head hurt. I don’t care. Just don’t leave me here.”
He clung and his body shook.
The morning is an amethyst sky that melts away into blue by full dawn. November cold comes with it. Here in the hills, winter’s prelude arrives early. Uncontrollably shivering on this couch, I understand what it means to need wood. The steel wood rack lining a wall of the carport stood empty save for maybe enough wood to burn through in one cold day. Today, the front and the rain having passed, was that cold day. Halloween’s celebration of the harvest, of mocking the death promised by winter, was over. Now, the cold.
We could see our breath indoors. We’d need wood to keep warm and to cook, there being neither power nor gas. We’d need it for flickering comfort.
My old life had its fires and fireplaces, but those were always novel, weren’t they? Winters in Austin got below freezing, sure, but we didn’t really need a fire. It was extra. A blazing hearth in the room was for atmosphere, a First World aesthetic.
This morning is the first time I’ve ever felt the cold as a threat. It’s a threat when you’re not sure you can escape it, that it might seep into your bones and remain.