A Matter of Life and Death or Something (22 page)

THE MAN IS sitting on the rock. He wears white. Though it's late fall the morning is warm. He moves his dark hair out of his eyes. He stares.

We are here and watching. We are listening. See us standing over him and leaning close. Across the water more of us stand. In every direction more are watching.

He folds his right leg over his left. He opens his book. His pen writes quickly, then he studies the words. He strikes them out.

We are still here and have always been here. And this is what we've seen and will see, though we still look. He will stand, the book will be left behind—was it his intention?—he will disappear. Though we knew before he began to write, before he came to us, before. Though we always knew, we did not know.

Even as we lean and creak above him we do not know. We hear him, we see him but it is not enough. We will not feel him. We will listen and watch, and we will not stop. But we do not touch him. He tells us nothing and does not hear us.

In his last moment, just before the breathing swells we wait. He stares and is still. For now he is frozen inside this last breath, as are we, and we wait. Before he stands, before the book falls we are
here:

There is no wind. The calm water makes no sound. And he stares and is still.

He is the size of a human. He is the shape of every one we have seen. He weighs as much as a human and moves as one does. This we know.

So we stand staring in this quiet breath and we wait, even though the next sounds have already echoed loud, as they will again, and now as they do.

–
This has nothing to do with her (She knows this)
This was before her

–
This was forever

–
(I'm SORRY)
I'm sorry I didn't get around to it before I met you.

–
I CANT SEE MYSELF one day crawling out and being OK and I've known that forever.

–
I always had to keep looking for a reason to keep looking. You KNOW this.

–
And what kind of place is a place where you can't help imagining better

–
the beach is a good place
The perfect place

–
the freezing water will take me so immediately and I'll be part of it and absorbed into nothing

I DID ALL I COULD TO MAKE NO ONE MISS ME

–
I can't remember the last time I didn't feel

– I
only
wanted
to give or know that something of me was worth giving.
I wanted
to be received.
I wanted
to not matter and for that to not matter.
I wanted
someone to know and not run away.
I wanted
some part of me to be worth sticking around for.
I wanted
to stick around.
I wanted

CLUES:

– Someone named Phil.

I started jogging down Francis's mucky driveway. My thoughts were moving around in a circle and putting themselves together like bricks in an igloo building itself inside my head. Some of them were things about Simon, and other ones were things about Phil. I still couldn't really tell what was going on inside my brain, but I knew something was.

I jogged as fast as I could without slipping and falling on all the leaves on his driveway. All the dead leaves from last fall that had landed on the ground and got covered in snow during the winter were exposed again. They squished under my wet boots, and my boots and the driveway were slowly composting them. It was weird to shine my flashlight on the old leaves and think about how they were still there, even in the spring, even after all the snow. I thought those leaves would have been history, since they were already getting replaced by new ones anyway. So there was something strange to me about the ghost leaves from last fall, basically, and if I owned money I would have used it to bet that Francis would have agreed with me.

I squish-squashed down until I reached the road, and the half-pavement half-gravel felt way less exciting on the feet. What I did though, was I stepped out of my boots and took off my socks and carried them. I don't know why. My heels got stabbed by sharp rocks every once in a while, but I didn't care. My brain was all screwed up sort of, because it was after three in the morning, and also I had never heard less noise. The parked cars in the driveways weren't making noise, the dark houses weren't making noise, the telephone poles weren't making noise. I thought that if someone was having a special late-night phone call on my street right then, maybe if it was kind of a sexy one, I would have been able to hear it come out of the wires. It was the quietest morning I had ever found.

Everything was asleep except me. The part of the street just before my house where the oaks make a ceiling sounded like it was snoring. That was the only sound: the trees all standing side by side, reaching as high as they could without having to stand on tiptoes, holding hands so they'd sleep safe without falling over, and the breezes making them snore and snore. They even smelled like what quiet smells like to me, like cinnamon, raisins, and something else. I was a little scared, to tell you the truth, but I kept my flashlight on the whole time and I walked all slow and silent in my bare feet.

(Meanwhile my real dad was the mayor of a quiet city where everyone had to wear silence boots all the time. He had made the law because the city was just getting
so
noisy, with everyone walking in so many directions at once and running into each other, and whenever anyone said anything no one could tell who was talking, if they could even hear them, and they definitely couldn't understand when anyone was telling the truth. So everyone learned how to not hear anything.

When my real dad got his brilliant idea and made the law about the boots, not everyone followed it at first, but some people did. They went downtown to city hall to pick up the two clumps of moss that my real dad's government gave them for free, and they tied them onto the bottoms of their boots. When they walked, they barely made a sound. The people who were still being loud felt stupid after a while so they got silence boots too and then everything was silent, and every day the people walked just as much as they always did, and got as much stuff done, except it was so quiet that it wasn't so annoying to do it anymore. Soon they realized that they were actually walking seven times farther and actually getting seven times as many things done as before. So the city became the best city in the world because it did everything a city had to do, except way better than other cities, plus with less noise.

It got voted the nicest city to live in, and everyone wanted to move there, so lots of people did. The moss on the silence boots would wear out every couple of weeks, but it was OK because they could always compost the worn-out moss and keep growing more on the moss farms, and decades later the council voted yes when my real dad proposed to pave the streets with moss instead of pavement, and replace the floors in buildings with moss. The glass skyscrapers, the parking lots, the fire station, the old theatre and the chandelier, the houses, the grocery stores, the pizzerias, the zoo: everything would be moss. It was an exciting and record-breaking day when the world's best city got mossed over, and all the streets and buildings shined when the sun hit them, like they were actually paved with emeralds. But when the news reporters whispered questions to my dad to ask him how he felt about it all, he didn't say anything. They showed him that night on the news, being quiet and smiling, and everyone realized that instead of talking my real dad was listening.

Eventually the entire planet decided to live in my real dad's mossy city, and the city got really big and expanded to all the continents but it didn't get any louder, it somehow got even more quiet the more people moved in, and the farther the moss creeped. And every day was so silent that people actually believed they could hear a microscopic noise which was the soft crackling of all the burning stars billions of light years away. Some people thought that was impossible, and the soft noise was just the quiet rubbing of all the boots on the moss. Other people thought that both were probably true. And
everyone
listened to each other instead of ever talking, and they understood each other perfectly even though nothing was said. They knew where everyone was going and didn't get in each other's way so much—and even when they did they just smiled about it—and they knew how everyone was feeling, which was usually quiet and happy—and even when they were sad it didn't last forever—and they heard the answers to all their questions rushing gently at them one at a time, like the noise of each star.)

When I finally nudged open the door and stepped inside, I was extraordinarily glad to be back in my house. I put my boots down silently and I tiptoed through the kitchen and put the silly knife back and then carried my socks with me back to my room. If I was in a movie or a musical or something, I would have knocked over a lantern or a box of nails, obviously, on my way through the living room. And Simon would have woken up and gotten mad at me and put me in a boarding school for running away like that in the middle of the night. But I'm not moronic, and I made it into my bed safely, without a sound.

I switched my lamp on and took out Phil again. Right then, I was mostly interested in one part specifically. I opened to Page 43. I closed my eyes and read it with them closed for a while at first, because I had it practically memorized. Then I got braver, and opened my eyes and slowly read Page 43. I read it again, and then one more time. I already said my brain was all screwy and I meant it. I thought about that page, and how it was the last one, and what it meant, and whether I was even right about what it meant. I went back and forth between believing it and not believing it and as usual I ended up on believing it, which made my stomach crunch up. To be honest I was going a little crazy. And then, I started wishing about things.

I yawned and lay back on my bed making wishes. Maybe Brenda Beckham could have listened to me when I said not to call her stupid son. Or maybe Mr. Peterson could have made sense. Maybe that white cat was with me, cleaning my feet. I wished that maybe Victoria would be Finch's girlfriend for real, and maybe they'd actually french, but that I wouldn't have to know about it. Maybe I could pretend to be a better friend. Maybe I could be stronger, and old and wise, and magical, and I could make all these things the way they were supposed to be. Maybe everyone would get exactly what they wanted. Maybe I could have been less of a jerk to Simon lately. I'm telling you, my brain was malfunctioning.

As I was lying there with my eyes closed, my heart was shaking. No, it wasn't
shaking,
it was heavy. It weighed a thousand tons and it was choking me. Every time I made a wish I did it because I thought that maybe it would lighten up but instead it got heavier and choked me a bit more.

I wished that maybe I'd never gone into the woods and found Phil in the first place. Maybe I just wasn't there. But that wish was completely impossible. I
was
there.

Then I opened my eyes and grabbed a pen I had inside my pyjama shirt pocket. I knew what to do. It made just as much sense as how much sense it didn't make at all.

I flipped Page 43 over and stared at Page 44.

I told myself it was OK to do it. I took my pen and wrote some words at the top, but they were so stupid, and I crossed them out. What the hell was I doing? It wasn't going to make any difference. Still, it felt like what to do. But it was impossible. I didn't know what to write. I chewed on my pen, and I didn't start crying, and inside my head I said:

“Hello God, I hope you'll make me finish this.”

Then I realized why it wasn't working. I wasn't in the right place.

It was almost four o'clock, and it was still dark and scary outside, but it made sense to go. I took Phil and my pen and my flashlight to the front hall, and got ready to go outside one more time. I almost put my jacket on upside-down, that's how tired I was. I put on my boots but didn't bother bringing my backpack. I crept out the door again into the darkness.

My treehouse was exactly like it always used to be, except it was dark. Dark, but not scary. I shone my flashlight beam into every corner and then climbed the slimy ladder up to the top floor. The floorboards and the wall were a little damp where I always used to sit but I sat there anyway.

I used to do the most important things in the treehouse there, on the top floor. Maps and lists and plans and things. Some of my very best drawings were drawn right there. But there was never anything at all like the thing I was doing that morning in the dark. Nothing
that
important. I shone the flashlight at the blank Page 44 in the notebook and thought hard. So hard. I saw the words I wrote in my room and they looked so horrible. They were like black rotten spots on a banana. I felt like I was at a funeral and I was laughing at the person who died and everyone there was embarrassed to know me. But I convinced myself that I wasn't doing that. I wasn't just trying to mess up the book. Every time I thought about adding something I thought about it too much until it became a bad idea, and I felt sick, and like I was doing something wrong. Like I was doing the avoiding kind of circumnavigating instead of the brave kind that draws a scribble around the entire world. Like maybe Phil would have been disappointed in me. It was like I was pretending, and I didn't want to pretend. What did I want?

I waited for the right idea, but ideas weren't coming. Usually I always had ideas in the treehouse. Sometimes I had so many of them that I couldn't even do them all. I never even thought about not having them. I waited. My page was still blank. There was no one around to give me anything to start from, it was only trees, but trees can't talk. I took off my boots and counted my toes for a while. I made a shadow puppet on the wall with my flashlight and my hand. I tried a lot of things to take my mind off of not having something to write. I was sitting there forever, trying everything. I even knocked on wood for good luck, on the soggy floor, but my page was still nothing.

Then, everything came. I made myself write one word and it made sense, so I wrote more words and I didn't stop. I don't know how, but suddenly inside my brain the only things were me and Phil and the page and my imagination, and my imagination was working so hard, and I concentrated so hard on what it was telling me that I didn't really have to concentrate anymore. I wasn't worried about pretending because I knew everything I was writing was the exact truth. And I wrote it all excruciatingly fast, without thinking about the last word I'd put down. I just wrote the next word I had to write, and then the next word and the next sentence and the next page. I even wrote more than one page. I was writing faster and faster and for so long that the sky started to get brighter than it was before.

When I finished writing it was almost 6:00 AM and I realized the sky was transforming into daytime. I climbed down the slippery wooden ladder and then down the stairs to the ground. It was bright enough that I didn't even need the flashlight anymore; I could see pretty much perfect. The sky was slowly turning orangey-blue instead of black and making the shapes of the treehouse and all the tree trunks into the hugest shadow puppets. I think that was the first sunrise I ever found. It felt weird.

I went to the sea turtle rock and walked down the hill a bit and leaned against the bent tree that Phil was near when I found him. I took five steps away from the river, and one sideways towards the house. I kneeled down and put Phil on the ground.

I took a last look at the cover of the notebook. I could see why Phil said he liked that pattern. It really was beautiful. It was just black and white, so it was simple, but at the same time it was extraordinarily complicated, and hard on the eyes. The black splotches jumped all over the white background. Or maybe the white patches were on top of the black background. It was both at the same time. It was like the splotches were fighting, or like they'd just stopped fighting and were becoming friends again and slow-dancing. If I stared long enough at it and covered some parts up by holding my hand out in front of my eyes, I could find pictures in there: maybe a little animal, or a face. The shape of a planet, or a whole solar system. Maybe if you zoomed way out in space, like maybe if you flipped your field glasses around and carefully looked through the big side, maybe that was what the whole universe looked like. Not just white dots on blackness, but maybe huge white patches and black patches the size of whole mysterious galaxies, reaching for each other, and it makes no sense and who knows what's on top of what, but anyway it's really pretty.