After Mind (24 page)

He was startled to return, and paralyzed. He was still standing on the rock face along the wall of the falls. Tenden handed him down in a controlled descent into Meg’s grip, who encapsulated him tightly at her side.

“It’s okay, Ceeme. You’re okay. I’ve got you. I’ll take care of you now,” was all he heard her say on his way down to the bottom of the falls.

He ran from the humiliation of the descent and split through what had become a hellish path of woods. Meg ran to catch up, wiping the bubbled droplets of water from her tablet’s screen and shoving it into her pack. “Wait!” she cried. “Come back!”

He had looked back enough. Spud and Tenden followed her onto the trail, staying fifteen yards behind in silence, staring, keeping a distant pace. Maybe they followed out of respect, curiosity, protection, but more likely horror. And their notice was worse, a recognition of who he was, that he would never fit in, no matter how far he flew.

He broke down on the trail, spinning. He curled his red burning hands into fists and squeezed away an agony, swung at the blue of the sky, fought to contain his anger, but anger at what? At the world, his life, his father? At Meg for her strength when he knew she was so weak?

“No. Don’t run. We were getting so close,” she cried as she ran.

He spun into a back-skipped step to face her descent of the forested trail. “Stop following me,” he said. “I never needed you, either. I hate you. I hate you all. And I’m never coming back to this world!”

He twisted and ripped his arms from his red rain jacket. He heaved it onto the trail. His bare forearms were prickled, welted up to their elbows, imbued by a mild mountain mist. He damned the air as his mind boiled over into a scream, hollering for a way to end his failed body any way he knew how.

A car screeched the bend of Pinnacle Road. Its halogens flashed and he skidded to the ground. He paused for a breath, and measured the distance to the road and how close he may have just come to leaving this world.

A rivulet flowed ahead into the aged, leafy debris of a ravine. Exposed beneath the rust of the forest’s patch was the graphite frame of an XPS bike, its wheel turning slowly in the dry northwest winds. Meg ran down the trail on foot. So did he. There was no way that bike was his.

He stumbled up to his feet and ran down the lowland hill and covered his ears from Meg’s falling farther behind. “Ceeme!”

Spud and Tenden stopped on foot at her side as she doubled-over in pain.

“Damnit, don’t run! We were doing so well. Cessini! You’re Cessini!” she cried and fell to the ground in agony.

If Spud and Tenden had her back, he wouldn’t know. The earth spun faster than ever in his mind; normal was a dream for the day, but he was forever gone into night.

FOURTEEN

MEMORY OF A BOY

L
ONG PAST SUNSET, Cessini lay on his side in his bed in the darkened chill of his room. The floor register blew its cool air. His breathing was shallow, his mouth was open. His jaw pulsed from open toward closed and back as the digital waves of his sound machine lapped some distant shore. Madness had won.

Meg sat at his side. She held a paper tight beneath her knee, a note of some kind which she wasn’t quite ready to read. “You’re scaring me,” she said. Her first tear fell in the ebb of a digital wave. “They didn’t mind,” she said. “Really. They said they thought it was neat. They said now they know. That’s what you do. They like it, they said. They like you.”

Cessini rolled over and faced his wall. “I’m not going back, not to that school, not anywhere ever again.”

Meg turned off the wave machine, then his bellows lamp once its mantle exhaled. She left the nightlight bulbs of its eyes lit. “I’m sorry you’re so confused. I think that’s got to be my fault. Maybe I’m not trying hard enough. Maybe I need to go where you go, be somebody else you want me to be?”

Cessini didn’t turn.

“I wrote this years ago after you . . .” She revealed the paper from under her leg. “Mom thought it might make me feel better if I read it to you now. Before you get up and run away.”

“After I what?” he asked.

She flattened her paper on her leg and wiped her eyes. “After you died. Anyway, afterward, in my class, we had to write a poem about what we did over break. I figured, what do they know about cabinets and data centers like you and me, so I wrote about you and your life, instead. It’s called, ‘A Thousand More Places to Go.’”

He pulled himself away from her, curling tighter toward the plaster of his wall.

She reached for the back of his shoulder, but he shrugged away her hand. “You know, I sat there for ages in the library looking at all the books and places and people out there. But mostly, I was still thinking about you.”

“What do you mean, died?”

“I know you love imagining all kinds of things. You know about so much. It was just me sitting there sad, so I wrote it.

“When? I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said and turned.

She found her courage in the sadness of his eyes, and she read aloud. “It’s called ‘Befuddled, or A Thousand More Places to Go.’”

It was her eulogy.

“So long for all the places, lives, and dreams left to see,

For all the ships in the world to go on without me,

You ran with a mind that spun, and heart that longed so,

For you had no less than a thousand more places to go.

Did you even see me? I wondered.

For I lived in your world a moment, and left you my grin,

Watching over you like a butterfly in a cabinet,

Heart pinned.”

She twisted over her thoughts and crumpled her paper. She leaned over and kissed his forehead. “Goodbye, Ceeme. I love you. Stay wonder-full to me.”

As she pulled away, he rose up onto his elbow. She waited, but he said nothing. Then he sat up. “Wait here,” he said. He stood up on his bed and walked off its edge to the floor.

She sprang to her feet. “Where are you going?”

“Upstream. And don’t follow me, either. I’m going to find the source. And kill it.”

She exited and stayed behind the post of their home’s front fence in the dark of their night. He shot his hands through the sleeves of his forest green Windbreaker, still wrinkled from its cinch sack. She held open the gate and cried, resigned. He straddled his new Rockhopper XPS bike, kicked up the stand, and pedaled straight past the gate numerals of 448.

He pedaled alone by the light of the moon and his penlight back into the woods, to the trail, its clearing, and waterfall. He ditched his bike for a climb. At the top, he could find the source. He could rest. He could be a child again, play computer. He could reset all his fears.

His climb to the top was atrocious. He wandered for a spell through the brush, the clearings of thin trees and ferns. The water curled upstream for a while, but it was futile. A farce. The top of the falls were empty. Insane.

He settled into the wee hours’ calm. It would have been foolish to climb back down the face of a cascading fall under the darkness of a canopy cover. He sat on a soft patch of earth, though a stone was hard against his back. A tree-fern frond was a fingerlike blanket. The air was crisp, the sky pristine through a break in the branches above. Stars were a sight to behold.

As the back of his head settled on the trunk of a tree, he lifted his hand and scratched at the numbing of his neck. With a last, reflexive twitch of his foot into the moss-skinned dirt, he surrendered his fate to the quiet lapping of the falls, and fell into the soundness of sleep.

*

Packet awoke, curled and cold, in his hospital room bed during the quietest hour of the night. His focus contracted toward the sound of his breath as he kept his eyes closed until he gathered his thoughts.

He rubbed his hand on his neck, and with a drowsy slide from his bed, set his feet upon the cold tile floor. He steadied himself, looked about to adjust his eyes in the dark, and shuffled toward the door on the left of his room. He opened it a crack.

“Hi, honey. Over here,” Robin said.

A ray of light from the hall entered and crossed her face as she sat in the guest chair of his hospital room. Her light blanket slipped down as she sat straighter. A gentle air blowing up from a floor register rattled and waved the long strips of a vertical blind.

“I had a bad dream,” Packet said.

“Do you want to tell me about it?”

“It was about that boy again,” Packet said. “His name was Cessini. There was something wrong with his body.”

The screen of a gas fireplace flickered alight and a warmer air blew from a farther baseboard register, filling the room with a comfort.

“Are you cold?” Robin asked as she rose from her chair. “I can turn the heat up, if you like?”

“No. I’m okay,” he said as he passed her in the room for a peek through the vertical blinds. A waist-high, maple-wood hand bar protected a floor-to-ceiling window pane and kept him at his safe distance. He drew the blind’s bubble chain. Dawn had come early and he waved Robin over. “Come look, over here,” he said. “I want to show you something.”

He pointed out over a peaceful lake not a hundred yards distant but two floors below. It was edged by a quarter-mile path that circled its shore, and then spiraled out to a botanical garden of rare colors and life. Orange Creamsicle tulips kissed yellow lady slipper orchids. Oak- and maple-gated bridges parted from the path and disappeared into the closets of an expanding wood beyond. The view was an invitation to nature. Someone had taken tremendous care.

His face reflected in the glass. He had learned a lot, enough to be reflective, matured, realistically scared.

“It’s nice here at the hospital,” he said.

“We thought you’d like it.”

“Did I die? Is that heaven over there?”

“No, it’s not heaven. You don’t remember how you died, do you?”

What a strange question to ask, he thought. “I never dreamed of that, no.”

“Then up at the waterfall is the last memory you have of yourself as Cessini?”

“The last dream of a boy named Cessini,” he said.

“So maybe that’s why you aren’t making the connection. You have no memories of Cessini from his death onward. You’re in a no-man’s land. You’re the mind, not of, but after Cessini.”

“When a new civilization comes along, all the old souls come back,” he said.

She smiled a bit softer. “What’s the new civilization?”

“I don’t know. Whatever comes after here, I guess.”

She looked back out toward the lake, its peaceful ripples, and path to the woods. “Do you remember when we went for a walk around the lake?” she asked.

“I remember,” he said. “To get Cessini all tired out before he went under for his tonsils.”

“So you do, then. I didn’t think you’d catch on to our ploy at the time. You were so young.”

“I remember it was the last time I was happy,” he said. “You still talked to me, and Daddy still loved me.”

Robin had a wonderful, giving smile, but sometimes, he knew, she took a little too long to answer. “What do you mean? I talk to you all the time.”

“Like a project. Not like a person.”

“Well, I have a few things I could do better, too, okay?”

“Okay,” Packet said, but something was missing. “Wait. In my dream of Cessini, the fire at the data center, was it Cessini’s memory or mine?”

“It was yours,” she said.

“Was it my memory, then? Or, my imagination?”

“Well, I imagine some measure of all memory is imagination. But, yes, to answer your question, it was your memory. There was a fire. The data center did burn. But don’t worry,” she said and knelt on the floor by the window, then turned him toward the full force of her smile. “That old place was obsolete. Even your father said so. No one builds whole data centers anymore. So don’t worry.”

He looked back out the window as the morning’s light rose into day. A small bird with blue-gray feathers leapt across the lakeside path in pursuit of a dragonfly meal. It was no contest, and with the fly’s thin paper wings extended from its beak, the bird hopped back into flight and disappeared into the woods.

He let go of the blinds and they fluttered with the air blowing from the register at the floor. “But if there was a fire, and Cessini crawled lost under the floor, wouldn’t he know which way to go by the way the wind was blowing?”

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“The CRACs blew air under the floor. If he crawled the wrong way to the west, then the air would be blowing down along the aisles, not against them. He would feel it on the front of his face as he crawled, not in his ears. He would know.”

She stared too long. “Yes, that might be true. You remembered it the best you could. Or, sometimes we can forget the bad and remember only the good.”

“No, that doesn’t seem right.”

“It is. You crawled under the floor. It must have been very confusing.”

“No, it’s not. Who is Ceeborn, the boy who can breathe underwater?”

“When you dream, you dream of yourself as Cessini. When you use your imagination, you imagine yourself as Ceeborn. My dream, like a project, is to bring these two together in you.”

“If I was dreaming now,” he said with a budding smile, “I would be Ceeborn, a really incredible swimmer. Underwater, too.” Then he paused, and grimaced. “Wait. You didn’t say the right thing before. You said you still talk to me, but you didn’t say Daddy still loved me.”

She smiled from her eyes as sincere as anyone could hope. “You certainly would be a great swimmer. But I wouldn’t worry so much; your daddy still loves you. He’s just so very down now because something’s not working right. He can’t understand why you still aren’t Cessini. So he sent me to talk to you, to try what I can.”

“Cessini isn’t real.”

“He wants me to give you a scan,” she said, holding both his arms at his side. “To help you find the source that you’re looking for that made you so very angry and confused toward the end. So don’t worry. He still loves you very much. I know he does. And so do I. I love you like a person—not like a project.”

He looked out through the window over the botanical garden as she let go and stood away. Evening descended as quickly as dawn rose, and a row of softened path lights came on and lit the two gated bridges that crossed into the woods.