Head Rush (30 page)

“From where I’m sitting, it’s already happened and it goes one of two ways. These things have already happened.” She closes her eyes.

“Nothing’s written in stone,” I say.

“Actually, lots of things are written in stone.”

“Tell me how to change it.” Silence. “You changed it by telling me the future. You opened another possibility and made it more likely I won’t fight.”

“Maybe I was always going to tell you.”

“Right…but…” My mind spins in circles as she pulls her face mask back down over her head. The eye holes don’t land in the right spot, so that all I can see is rosy cheek flesh showing through; she might as well have a giant sock on her head. She crosses her arms and hunkers down. Closed for business.

I have this impulse to grab her and shake her, tell her that it’s not fair.

Her breath steadies.

“I’m in love. Packard and I just found our way back to each other.”

Nothing. On her sleeve, a little mass of crystal beads that was probably once an earring flashes. A lump forms in my chest.

After a while, I get up from the bench and skate down the river path.

Nobody’s special. Everybody dies.

In my mind I search for ways that she’s insane, or wrong. But I keep coming up against her legacy of successful predictions; Dad and I learned of even more while calling around.

I skate on, scoffing, bargaining, railing. I decide I don’t believe it.
You can no more change these outcomes than you can change what is contained in this very moment
, she’d said. I ponder
what is contained in this very moment
. I focus on the word
contained
, like there’s some secret key there. Can I change what is contained in a moment?

I pass the Midcity Bridge and head into the neighborhoods, pushing my legs against the hard surface, muscle against inertia, like if I skate hard and fast enough, I’ll outrun the fate she’s seen. The feel of my quads working, even hurting, is a strange comfort.

I can’t die.
I can’t.
I run through the options. What if I call off the ceremony? What if I tell Packard and we escape together? Or I skate to the condo and confront Otto, or tie him up? But all those options feature my not going to the ceremony, and not fighting Otto. If I don’t go to the ceremony and fight Otto, Packard dies.

I can’t let Packard die. I can’t imagine choosing a world without him. There’s just no question.

I must fight Otto at the wedding. I must die.

Decision made.

Tears blur my eyes, and my thoughts whirl in trapped circles, a merry-go-round of grim options.

The idea of fighting Otto at the ceremony suggests that’s when they deliver the antihighcap glasses to me—the plan was to fight him whenever I got the glasses. I wish I’d asked about that. But does it matter? I just have to go forward with it. I skate toward Mongolian Delites. My stomach feels like it’s full of helium. My old friend, fear. I am going to die.

Screw her—I’ll fight to win!
I decide this as I pass the next block. Nothing’s new here. There was always a risk. And nothing is written in stone. I find myself wishing I’d told Fawna that somebody could drop a bomb on the Tangle—that would change her view, wouldn’t it? That would change what’s contained in her stupid moment.

Everything familiar looks new. The night air is fresh and cool. The shadows on the building create a magical contrast. If Fawna is right, then this will be the last time I see this street. The last night I see the moon. The last night of my life.

How would I die? Probably blood loss. I’m thinking a bullet to the head, especially if I die
with
Otto, because dying with Otto suggests quick death, and most body wounds are somewhat treatable. I try in vain to stop myself from imagining a bullet cracking through my skull, from deciding it would feel like a hard strike from a tire iron. Would the bullet pass through or lodge in? I imagine the alarming feeling of blood, cascading through my brain. The awful warmth and gurgling I’ve imagined thousands of times. Except it would be real. Panic thickens in my throat.

This life. My hands. My friends. Packard. My dead body in a cold metal box in the morgue.

I pass a shuttered pasta joint.
Last meal.

Tears stream down my face and angrily I scrub them off.
Screw it
! I’ll fight and I’ll win!

Do you think you’re so special that you cannot die?

Not tomorrow, I won’t. I careen on toward Mongolian Delites.

I love you so fucking much
, he told me he’d said. The moment of his saying that to me is lost forever from my memory. What did he look like as he said it?
I love you so fucking much
, I whisper back to him.
So fucking much.

My pulse pounds so fiercely, I think it might explode out my neck. Who said there’s nothing to fear but fear itself? The fear grows like crazy, destabilizing me as I make my way toward the Mongolian Delites neighborhood. I’ve never stoked up so much fear in my life. Death is closer, more real than it ever has been. And I can’t exactly zing it out now. I need everything I have to attack Otto. I have to make it good.

Then I have a truly horrifying thought—what if I just can’t handle this much fear? What if she’s right and I don’t come through? What if I fall apart? Maybe that’s why she said it was becoming more likely I would fail to fight Otto. My fear has made me fall apart before.

I think about something Helmut once said—back when he was a soldier, huddled with his fellow soldiers in the back of an air cargo plane shipping off to the first Iraq war, he told me that he’d known two kinds of fear. The first kind of fear was the fear of being killed in battle. The second kind of fear was in not knowing what kind of man he’d
be
in battle. He’d said that every soldier he knew worried that he’d be the one who falls apart, the one who runs away, instead of the one who bravely fights to the last.

Chapter Seventeen

I reach Mongolian Delites just before 3 a.m. and pause in front of the door, clutching the brass handle. My black mitten glows red from the CLOSED sign.

I have to be the one who fights bravely.

I’ll control my fear enough to get to Otto. I’ll put on the glasses and zing him, and I’ll fight to win. And whatever happens, happens.

I trace the cool curve of the handle with my mitten tip, stomach aquiver, thinking about the olden days when the door was Otto’s face, and time was unlimited. Back when I didn’t know what it was like to love, and to be loved back.

The door moves toward me. I step aside as it opens. Packard stands inside, outlined by candlelight. His bright smile quickly fades. Of course he notices how much terror I’ve stoked. “What happened?”

I slip in and walk partway into the empty restaurant. Candles light the perimeter of the dining room, making the white tablecloths glow and the knickknacks on the walls shine. I hear him lock the door. He comes up behind me and pulls me into his arms, kisses the top of my head. “Talk to me.”

I pull off my mittens and turn to him. “Just jacked up.”

He smells like soap, and he’s changed his clothes. Clean, green shirt, faded to nearly white in places, small buttons down the front, and his favorite old jeans. His worn and faded clothes contrast with his fierce energy, his flushed skin, his bright hair. He slides his hands down my arms, and, with intense concentration, he takes the time to fit his fingers in with mine, as though our hands are interlocking pieces that must be perfectly and minutely connected. And then he looks into my eyes, gaze steady.

Slow smile.

“We know where the glasses are,” he says. “A storage locker out in Wild’s Way. We’ll drive out there tomorrow. Shelby’s going to pose as Pinbocker’s widow—we’ve got a guy working on identity and death certificates tonight, though we may bribe the operators. I’ll take a look and see how to handle them.” He’ll use his powerful insight, of course. He can see a person’s moral edge plain as their nose. “It doesn’t open until two on Saturdays,” he continues, “but the ceremony isn’t until seven-thirty or so. We’ll get to you before then. This is going to work, Justine!”

With a look of happiness that borders on silliness, he lowers himself slightly, coming down to my level to catch my gaze. “This is going to work. Once we have the glasses, you can zing him. We’ll do a tag team.” He squeezes my hands. “This is going to work! It’s a little unorthodox, but if you fill him with all this fear you’ve stoked, and then Shelby and Simon give him grimness and recklessness, that’ll destroy his will. He’s wound so tightly right now, he’s brittle. His breaking point is right there. So close. And the Felix Five are working on the official side of it. Once he's disillusioned, it'll be easy for them to grab the power back.”

“You were looking at him? You shouldn’t go anywhere near him!”

“I had to assess him.” He brushes his thumb across my cheek. “Have you been crying?”

“Hazard of winter skating.” I brush my other cheek.

“This will be over soon. And with the amount of fear you have right now? Devastating. I don’t know what you’ve been doing—I didn’t know you could stoke so high. You should be careful.”

“I will.”

“Once that force field goes down, we have him. I feel like we could even get a confession.”

I try to picture the sunny outcome he imagines, just to pretend for a while.

“I only wish we knew what he was planning for the ceremony,” Packard says. “I don’t like not knowing this whole
something big
of his.”

“It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter what he’s got planned.”

“Are you sure you’re okay? Is your dad okay?” The tender way he looks at me hurts my heart.

“I’m fine!” I snap. “Just stop, you know, stop!” I turn and hobble away.
Stop loving me. Stop making me love you.
Because what if I fail? What if I’m the coward Fawna saw in her revised prediction? I pull my winter jacket and sweatshirt off and plop down on a chair to wrestle my skates off. My left skate won’t come off.

Two brown work boots appear on the plush, patterned rug in front of me. “Let me.” He kneels, takes my ankle in his strong, knuckly hand, and begins to undo the lace. “Something’s different. What?”

“Don’t do your thing on me right now.”

“Don’t look at you? Don’t care? Don’t want to help?”

All of the above
, I want to say. Obviously I can’t let him know what Fawna said. He’d keep me away from that wedding—probably lock me in the broom closet or something so that I couldn’t fight Otto. He’d go himself to fight. To die.

“It’s almost over,” he says.

“I know,” I say, voice steady. “It’s just this whole thing.”

He works at the laces. “A bit much, isn’t it?”

I chuckle.
A bit much.
“Yeah,” I sigh. “You know what would be nice? Instead of all this about the wedding tomorrow and glasses and zinging, I just wish we were normal for a day. I’d love it if we were sitting here trying to decide whether to go bowling tomorrow, or maybe lounge in bed with coffee and the newspaper instead. Or, thinking about going to a movie. And that was our only problem—what movie to see. We’ve never had a problem like that.”

He loosens the flaps enclosing my foot. “How about if we do that the day after tomorrow?” He takes my ankle, gently pulls off the skate. “What movie should we go to?”

“No.”

“Come on,” he cajoles, “no movie at all?” He tosses the skate aside and starts on the other. “Everything will be over. Otto will be defeated, fully disillusioned, or almost there. He’ll have freed our people, confessed. Henry Felix will be in charge. The curfew will be lifted. We’ll be bored. A movie is a great idea.”

“There’s no movie I want to see.”

“There’s always a movie to see. We’ll look online and find one and we’ll go to it. And we’ll have popcorn.” He looks up at me slyly. “With lots of butter.”

I don’t answer.

“Or should we get it with no butter?” He waits for me to answer.

I love him so much, I have to look away. “Butter,” I whisper.

“Butter then. And Milk Duds?”

Such a simple little thing. It rips up my heart.

“Milk Duds?” he asks again.

I shake my head. “This is stupid.”

He has the other skate off. He’s peeling off my sock. Damp toes cool in the air. “I hate missing the previews,” he says.

Me too
, I mouth.

“Where do you like to sit? Front? Middle? Back?”

“Don’t.”

“I always liked to sit in the back.”

“Way back?”

“Very back row,” he says. “Don’t tell me you’re a front sitter.”

“Fourth row.”

He looks incredulous.

“Your amazing gift doesn’t tell you that?” I joke.

“You know it doesn’t. And I’m glad, because I want to spend a lifetime finding out things like that.” He wraps his warm fingers around my cold toes. “Fourth row. Then that’s where we’ll sit when we go to the movies. I decree it.”

“Oh, you decree it, huh.” Tears blur my vision. It’s so like him. No compromise. No,
We’ll sit in the middle.
Packard makes the big romantic gesture even in this.

He kneels in front of where I sit, rubbing my toes. “I knew you would come,” he says. “I needed you to come, and here you are.” He kisses my big toe.

His trust feels like a gift I don’t quite deserve—what if I flake out? The more time I spend with him, the higher the stakes rise, the more frightened I am that I’ll let him down, and the more likely that I will. If Fawna were to look at the future again, right now, would she see only the option where Packard dies?

I pull back from him, sitting straight. “This is stupid. We shouldn’t do this. And I don’t want to go to the movies anyway.” I push back my chair and trudge off to the corner of the darkened bar area where I stop, staring at the empty nut bowl, thinking again about what Helmut said, about not knowing who you’ll be under fire until you’re there. It’s human nature to struggle in the jaws of death, and I’m not just any human. What if my courage fails me when it comes time to zing Otto? It’s not such a stretch, considering my level of fear now. I imagine myself passing out at the altar and they rush me to the hospital. Or I fumble with the eyeglasses so much, all crazed with shaking hands, that I can’t put them on, and then somebody takes them from me and subdues me and I never get to fight Otto. Or I’m paralyzed at the church door, knowing I’ll likely go in and never come out.