Passenger (36 page)

Every time.

I lay there in a doorway, half in, half out, staring at the little creases in the jamb’s wooden frame, the finishing nails, a spot where the varnish didn’t soak into the surface, the uneven texture of the plaster wall at the baseboard. Nobody cares about those parts of walls; they are always canvases of imperfection. I heard an electric hum and bubbling water. It struck me as funny that I was lost again, in a dimly lit room, and wherever it was, there was an aquarium in here with me.

And cigarettes.

I swallowed.

Good. My throat still worked.

My legs stopped thrashing on their own, but my shins ached like fire.

I moved my eyes, tracking along the surface of the floor and into the room where my head was. I saw something. It took a while—maybe ten seconds—for the words to come into my head, but that’s how it always was.

A rusted radiator heater stood against the far wall.

I marveled at the perfectly slatted ribs, how they were coated in thick green paint—an entirely nauseating color—with small cuts of tarnished rust showing through. I counted the ribs. I don’t know why. Maybe it was the only thing I was capable of doing at that moment.

Counting.

And watching.

Then I moved my hand.

It was a remarkable thing.

It was almost as though I had forgotten I had arms—or a body—at all.

This is my hand.

I had to think again—right or left?

I couldn’t remember.

I spread open my fingers above my eyes, a bloom, a firework.

My palm was cut.

Bleeding again.

Drip.

I didn’t even flinch when the blood dropped, warm and heavy, onto my lips.

It tasted good.

I squeezed my hand shut and ran the other one over my body, feeling—what I was wearing, if everything was still connected.

Jack always did that, too.

Inventory time: a T-shirt. My fingertip snared inside a hole over my belly. I could feel my skin. I felt smaller, empty. Jeans. I ran my hands over the thick metal buttons.

Where is this, Jack?

You’ve been here before.

Think.

Everything felt clean, not like it was after scrambling out from the Under and then surviving for days on horseback in the desert. And I became aware of my feet, that I was wearing shoes without any socks.

These were not Jack’s clothes.

A phone began ringing.

Double rings.

I knew this sound.

I was in England again.

Somebody pick up that goddamned phone.

I moaned, tried to sit, but my head weighed as much as a fire truck.

Something crashed to the floor. The phone.

The noise was so loud it almost hurt, but at least the ringing stopped.

And somewhere, Henry said, “Fucking hell.”

“Henry?”

“Where are you?”

I put my hands down on either side of my hips and pushed myself up, so I sat with my spine pressed into the doorjamb.

“On the fucking floor.”

Every day is just like being born again.

I looked at the smear of blood I’d wiped across the floor beneath my palm. I was in Henry’s apartment. In London.

Sitting in the doorway between the bedroom and the toilet.

And it was raining outside.

Maybe this was it,
I thought.

Maybe this was really it, and Jack was home.

And maybe I’d step outside into a wriggling mass of those fucking worms.

The clothes I wore belonged to Ander, Nickie’s younger brother. I remembered how I’d shown up at their house, soaked from the rain, and he’d given me his stuff—jeans, a T-shirt, tennis shoes, and a jacket—so I had to go barefoot inside his shoes, with no underwear, too, and Nickie took all my clothes from me, so she could launder them.

Ander’s black T-shirt that said
THE RAMONES
on it. I stared at a small circle of pale skin where there was a finger-sized hole over my belly.

This had to be it.

I was home.

And that night, maybe it was tonight when I showed up drenched from the rain at Nickie’s front door, I remembered that I had the lens in my pocket. Lost and found, after Conner and I got into a fight on the beach in Blackpool.

I could feel it there now.

This had to be it.

I was home.

Henry’s feet moved, covered in sheets and blankets, twisted around on his bed.

“Are you okay?” I said.

His hand swung over and dropped onto the small stand where he’d knocked down the phone.

“Fuck. I need a cigarette.”

Paper and cellophane rumpled in Henry’s hand. For some reason, the sound turned my stomach. Then came the grating friction wheel of a lighter, and I could almost smell the metallic spark that preceded the flame, before the sucking sound, the burning of paper and tobacco. And all this over the sickening and constant percolation from a bubbling, lukewarm aquarium.

I had to throw up.

Welcome home, boys.

I leaned forward and dog-crawled to Henry’s toilet, tracking a smeared palm print of blood along his floor.

When I got up, I washed my face. I wound a strip of toilet paper around my hand and squeezed it shut, but the bleeding didn’t slow at all. Then I went back to the bedroom.

The place was a mess. I stumbled over the canvas jacket I’d been wearing—Ander’s—and kicked it onto a pile of newspapers. There were clothes, food wrappers, trash, scattered everywhere around Henry’s bed. The room looked like a place where junkies had spent the last few days cooking their brains out.

It was night, and through the rain-smeared panes of curtainless glass I could see rows of lighted windows from the apartments across the street, yellow rectangles blazing against the featureless silhouetted masonry of row housing.

I knew where this was.

The aquarium sat bubbling on a low dresser with three wide drawers. Its inner glass was so overgrown and blackened with algae that I couldn’t tell if there was anything at all swimming inside it.

Henry sat on the bed with his feet on the floor. He faced away from the window, smoking.

I shook my head. “How can you do that right now?”

“What? This?” Henry held his cigarette out in front of his eyes. I could see how pleased he was smoking it. It must have felt like years since he’d had the last one, even if it may have only been half a minute.

“Cigarettes stop me from puking. You should try one.”

He inhaled again.

I tripped over something, took two steps toward the bed, and sat down.

“Is this it? Are we done?”

Henry looked around, taking stock. I guess we all did that.

“This is it.” Henry nodded. “Home. Thank you, Jack.”

I ran my uninjured hand over my legs, pulling the denim away from my thighs. I didn’t want Henry to notice the shape of the lens in my pocket. Maybe he couldn’t go back now, anyway. Maybe neither one of us could.

And I didn’t want to ruin it for him. Henry was relieved, happy as he sat there smoking his cigarette, but I knew something had to be wrong. I expected it. The lens was still broken. And my hand was bleeding.

And something else.

I was supposed to have my cell phone in my pocket.

I remembered it being in the pocket of these same jeans the night Nickie hung up on me. I knew exactly where I sat—on a greasy bench in the Green Park Station—when she told me to leave her alone. I felt my pocket, but I knew my phone wasn’t in it.

Henry watched me. “What’s wrong?”

“I thought I had my phone.”

I looked at the jacket I’d kicked on the floor, calculating the distance, the number of footsteps. It was difficult to coordinate my arms and legs. I wanted to lie down.

Something was wrong.

Henry stood. He was a mess.

Henry was always a mess—unshaven, with the feeblest scrub of facial hair dotting his jaw, a dingy white T-shirt twisted uncomfortably around his emaciated frame, spider arms, burgundy corduroy pants that hung in draping columns over his knees and leg bones. “I believe I’ve got some beer in the fridge. Want one?”

“Huh? Oh. Yeah.”

Henry padded out the doorway. A light came on in the living room. I could hear him moving things, the clinking of glass, cupboard doors opening—all nauseating sounds that hovered like some avant-garde orchestral score above the flat, droning accompaniment of the aquarium. I picked up Ander’s jacket, knew by its weight that my phone had to be in a pocket somewhere.

Found it.

Henry came back, carrying two glasses. He pressed a light switch with an elbow.

I cupped my phone in my bandaged hand, took the beer in the other.

“What happened there?” Henry extended a finger from the side of his glass, pointed at the wrapping of tissue around my hand.

“Nothing,” I said. “I got cut.”

Henry’s brow pinched together, like he was thinking about something, remembering. Then he said, “Cheers,” and clinked his glass into mine.

I drank to the bottom of the glass without stopping. I don’t think I’d ever tasted anything as good in my life. Then I thought about what that meant. My life. What life? This life now? This life was only about five minutes old. The water in the fucking aquarium would have tasted just as good.

Henry drained his glass, too.

A couple newborns.

He said, “I’ll get more,” and took the glass from my hand.

It all looked the same. Henry’s apartment smelled the same. Sweat, cigarettes, and damp wool.

I followed Henry into the main room. I stood there in the doorway, watching him. I flipped open my phone.

Do you really want to do this, Jack?

This was Jack’s phone.

In the center of the universe that Jack built.

I checked the recent calls.

There were two calls to Nickie.

There were no calls between me and Henry.

But there was a call to Ander.

I never had Ander’s cell number.

I scrolled down and saw five calls in a row to Avery Scott.

The fucking cop.

And there were phone calls listed to the name Quinn Cahill.

No Conner.

No Ben or Griffin.

Another not-world.

Fuck you, Jack.

I had to sit down.

Drip.

I couldn’t stop the bleeding from my hand.

Henry poured beers, a fresh cigarette dangling like a white slash from his lips. I moved over and slid one of the wobbly wooden chairs out from his small kitchen table. I dropped my phone onto the floor.

Everything sounded so horribly noisy.

He put the beer down on the table and I stared at a spot on the floor between my feet.

Drip.

I didn’t bother picking up my cell phone.

Henry sat down, lifted his glass. “Cheers.”

I just looked at him while he drank. I don’t know why, but I wanted so bad to punch him at that moment. I was seething with anger and I needed to scream, to break something. Of course Henry could tell; how could he not notice something like that?

He took another long swallow. “Sorry about the place. Were you expecting something else? You’ve been here before, didn’t you say?”

I clenched my wounded hand into a fist. It stung.

I don’t know how I managed to sit there, to stop myself from leaping across the table and driving my fist into Henry’s face.

He laid on his soothing, condescending tone. “You should be happy. We’re finally home.”

I took a deep breath, filled up my lungs with the smell of Henry and his cigarette, the stale aquarium fog, his Chelsea flat.

“This isn’t the place. If it was the right place, you would know who I am.”

Henry didn’t react at all. I slapped the table. “Look at me! This is what I was wearing the last time I saw you! You don’t have a fucking clue who I am, do you?”

I sighed, looked down at my feet again. “We don’t belong here.”

I heard him take a long swallow. “I belong here.” Henry put down his glass and said, “What about you? Where do you belong, Jack?”

It was like he was telling me to get the fuck out of his house. He was done with me. I could leave.

I nodded. I drank the beer he’d poured for me. I stood.

I was horrendously drunk after two glasses of beer.

Stupid.

I almost felt like laughing.

“I’m going to get my shit and go,” I said.

My mouth felt numb. If he’d offered me another beer, I’d drink it, but then I’d want to fight for sure.

I kicked my cell phone toward the doorway, satisfied I’d made a goal into the bedroom with it.

I was drunk; and it was 5:44 in the morning.

As the sky grayed outside, the windows across the way didn’t appear so bright; the buildings paled to not-black.

Something was wrong.

“Where are you going to go?” Henry sat at the table in the kitchen.

I didn’t know where I was going.

“I have a hotel room.” I slurred the words. “Near Regent’s Park. Or my girlfriend’s house in Hampstead.”

I couldn’t know if any of that was true. I just said it.

I bent down, picked up the phone, and slid it into my back pocket. But when I tried scooping up Ander’s jacket, I lost my balance and ended up on all fours.

Jack is a fucked-up drunk.

Henry heard me, came in from the kitchen. The room was lighter now, all washed in gray, and I had my face pressed down into Ander’s jacket, trying to see if somehow it smelled like Nickie, like the house in Hampstead I remembered sleeping in.

There was a noise.

I knew it.

Roll.

Tap. Tap. Tap.

I took a quick breath. Maybe I was just drunk.

I turned my face so I could look at Henry. He’d heard the sound, too, but I could tell he had no idea what it meant.

“Seth,” I whispered.

I pressed myself lower against the floor and peered beneath the bed.

I felt the vibrations of Henry’s steps as he got nearer to me. “What are you doing?”

It was totally dark under the bed, just black corpses of trash and cast-off clothing.

“Looking for something,” I said. “You’re going to know this isn’t it, Henry. You’ll find out. I don’t know how it’s going to hit you, but it
will
happen.”