Passenger (45 page)

It didn’t matter.

Nothing mattered.

Because this was it.

And I knew what I needed to do.

I had a plan.

As soon as we shut the door behind us, I took out my phone.

Conner asked, “Nickie?”

“No. I owe someone a beer.”

We walked to The Prince of Wales.

thirty-four

By the time Henry Hewitt showed up, Conner and I were drunk.

The place was noisy and alive.

I didn’t even try to pace myself with the drinking. I wanted to poison every fear I held on to, work up the courage to finally let go of everything Jack kept balled up in the center of his fucked universe.

Conner laughed. “You know? You know what Gino fucking Genovese and Ethan call this? They say this is getting
piss maggot drunk
, Jack. We are
piss maggoted
.”

He stood up, sat, and stood again, wavering unsteadily while he carried our empty pint glasses to the bar for refills.

And that’s when Henry walked in.

Conner glanced at the door one time, but didn’t pay any attention to Henry at all. He turned back to the bartender and noisily ordered another round for us.

I waved and held three fingers up, then pointed to the man at the door.

“Make it three.”

It was almost funny to me, how after all this time when they’d both been so important in my life—in my worlds—Conner and Henry had never yet spoken to each other, sat face-to-face. And now that they were finally here together, it was almost like I could rest my case once and for all that this—whatever
this
was—was real.

I was the worm and I was the hole. We all were—me, Conner, Ben and Griffin, Henry, Seth, and Ethan, too. But I was the King of Marbury. Somehow I’d been chosen to go through, as Henry was chosen before me. And every time I did it, I fooled myself into thinking,
This is it
, but I never once got back to a place I’d been before.

I never fucking got us back home.

Maybe I was just drunk, but as I sat there in The Prince of Wales, I decided that the reason I never told anyone except Conner about what Freddie Horvath did to me was that I believed everyone else would think it was my fault.

Everything was Jack’s fault.

But this could be it.

This was good enough, and I was tired. I wished I had the balls to hold Conner and tell him how sorry I was for everything I’d done.

This is it.

Henry stood at the door, eyeing me for a moment. Then he nodded and began snaking through the crowd.

I could say he looked older, but we’d both been through so much. As he made his way toward me, I wondered if he knew about the places I’d been, if maybe he’d had dreams, and in them, if he saw London falling to pieces, ghosts who came and went, Jack bleeding to death in front of him, and blue plastic drums with the tangled bodies of lost little boys sleeping endlessly inside them.

Maybe he had no stories except for the ones that trapped us together.

I wondered if he carried a small compass with him.

I was so sick of everything. I had called Henry here to say good-bye to him one last time.

When he got to our table, I stood politely and took his hand, but I didn’t smile. Behind him, Conner balanced three pints of beer and worked at navigating a zigzagged return.

“The last time I saw you, I promised I’d buy you a beer,” I said.

Henry cleared his throat and sat beside me. “And when, exactly, was that, Jack?”

“Funny. The
exactly
part. The day before yesterday, I guess. We stood together on a ridge of boulders and looked out at the desert in Marbury, the night before you left for Bass-Hove. Sound familiar?”

Henry shrugged one shoulder as if to say it didn’t matter whether it sounded familiar or not. “Well, it’s always nice to have a pint with a friend, I think.”

Conner arrived, centering three nearly full glasses of beer on the table. He stood there for a while, gripping the back of his chair with both hands like he was having a hard time figuring out what changed about this picture while he was gone.

He leaned across the table and put his face so close to my ear that he almost fell on top of me. He whispered, “Hey, Jack. There’s some creepy old guy sitting next to you. Just thought I’d let you know.”

Then he laughed and sat down.

I raised my glass. “Conner Kirk, meet Henry Hewitt.”

Our beers clinked together, and Henry said, “Cheers.”

So we sat like drunken veterans trading war stories for two hours. We spoke with low voices, at times in whispers, like we were all escaped inmates from the same asylum.

Maybe we were crazy.

Each of us told of things the others hadn’t seen, but the pieces all fit together in some rhythmic alcoholic order: the Odds, the battles in Glenbrook, the floods, Anamore Fent and the Rangers, the Under, the trip into the desert, the encampment, and, finally, Henry’s loss at the settlement, which brought us all back here, to London, to The Prince of Wales.

And the glasses.

“So you knew, didn’t you?” I said.

“I don’t know nothing.” Conner drained his beer. It was amazing to me how much he could drink.

“No. I mean Henry. You knew when you let us go out that night after the Ranger what was going to happen to you and the other boys, didn’t you?”

“I thought I did. But there’s always that chance, isn’t there, that things will change?”

“Like Jack’s briefs.” Conner put his foot on top of mine. Always screwing with me. “Drink your beer, kid, you’re lagging!”

My glass was still full. I couldn’t take any more.

“I’m good, Con.”

“Not me. I’m never good.” Conner got up. “Never.”

He pointed at Henry’s empty. “How about you?”

“Thank you, yes,” Henry said.

I held my glass to my lips, pretended to drink, but I had to hold my breath. The smell of the stuff was beginning to make me feel sick. Still, Conner and Henry hadn’t noticed that I’d stopped drinking three rounds earlier.

When Conner came back and sat down, grinning sleepily, Henry steadied himself, square and upright, as though he had finally worked up the courage to say what he and Conner had been dancing around all evening.

“Tell me about breaking the lens. How you put it back together.”

Conner leaned forward over the table, like it was story time and I was about to tell him something he didn’t already know.

“There’s nothing to tell, really. We … I used a hammer and vice, and when it broke, everything else sort of fell apart around us, and it all stayed that way, too—broken. That was why, everywhere we’d go, we were followed around by this big oozing hole in the sky. And every time we’d take a piece of the lens out, things would change again, get worse, like stuff was coming out of the sky, or out of the hole in my hand, just coming up out of the middle of everything.”

The center of the universe.

I turned my palm up and drew a line with my finger across the flesh where I’d been cut by the lens. “It was the other glasses that brought us—well, some of us—to different places, but everywhere I’d go, things just kept getting worse and worse.”

Ben and Griffin dead inside a fucking trash can.

Like what happened to Nickie, what you did to those boys on the train.

Conner gulped at his drink and swiped a forearm across his wet mouth. “We went back to Glenbrook, but it was like the fucking end of the world there.”

“Worse than that,” I said. “We almost got trapped for good. So when we finally found each other in the desert, it was almost too late again. Things had gotten out of control. But we got the pieces back together.”

Henry tipped his glass and looked from Conner to me, never blinking, like he was completely unfazed by the alcohol.

“What happened to it?” he said.

I shook my head. “I don’t know. I only felt it turn whole inside my hand. It burned me. I never saw it again after that.”

“And you don’t know where it is now?”

Fuck you, Henry.

“What does it matter?” I said.

“I thought—” Henry said. “I just wanted to see it.”

“That would be cool, Jack,” Conner urged. “Let’s see it.”

He bumped his knee against mine.

I felt myself getting pissed off again.

“I don’t know where the fuck it is,” I said. “For all I know, you have it, Con.”

Conner smirked. “I wish, dude.”

“Why?” I said.

“’Cause I’m drunk and I feel like fucking with shit. That’s why.” He slapped the table eagerly, like a kid waiting for his allowance.

I could only stare at him and shake my head.

“And the other glasses?” Henry wouldn’t let it go, either.

Conner was so drunk. “You know, the flip flip.”

He made a little flapping windshield-wiper motion with his finger in front of his eyes and said, “How about those ones? Did you lose those, too? You fucking lose shit all the time, Jack.”

“You don’t get it, do you?”

Conner was definitely too drunk to hear the edge in my voice.

I looked squarely at Henry, then Conner. “It’s done. I’ve had enough. And I don’t fucking care about ever going back again. I wanted to tell both of you that tonight. I only asked Henry here to say it, and to tell him thank you for helping us get out for the last time. But that’s it. The last time.”

I scooted away from the table and stood.

When Conner got up, he knocked his chair over. It sounded like a gunshot. We didn’t even notice how empty and quiet the place had become.

“Dude. Sit down. You’re not leaving.”

I sighed. “It’s late. I’m really tired.”

I stuck out my hand for Henry.

“Good-bye, Henry. And thank you.”

He looked shocked, pale. He shook my hand, but didn’t answer me.

And Conner nearly tripped over his upturned chair trying to steer himself after me when I left The Prince of Wales and went out onto the street.

*   *   *

This is it.

It sounds like Conner is puking in the toilet. I wonder how he managed to get back here without stumbling into traffic. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him this drunk.

The shower comes on.

Good.

Leave me alone, Conner.

There.

I pick up my bag and place it on top of the bed.

Zip.

I open it. The water runs loudly; Conner has left the bathroom door open.

There was never a question in my mind about what became of the lens, the glasses, too. I am so predictable, and this is my great disappointment. There is no wonder with me. I always know what Jack’s done and where he’s going, everything ordered.

Except now.

I imagine a time, ten minutes forward.

Measured motion.

The remarkable nothingness.

I swallow. The not knowing thrills me. I feel an excited tickle inside my chest, almost sexual, quietly churning.

One. My hand closes around a white cotton knot of underwear. The lens is inside, perfect, waiting.

Two. My socks. And here are the glasses. You know, the
flip flip
, Conner.

Here.

The water runs.

I place both gifts on Conner’s pillow and I scratch a note for him on the hotel stationery pad.

These are for you.

I hear Conner cough and gargle in the shower and I remove all of my clothes so I am naked. I do not need anything.

A thick cloth belt from one of the robes in the closet knots and knots again around the shining crossbar. I’m watching Jack’s hands tie it, like they aren’t attached to me.

Strong.

Standing with my eyes against the cool chrome bar, I can judge the perfect height where I tie the loop.

I listen to the shower, the sounds of Conner moving around in there.

Then I hear another sound.

Roll.

Tap.

Tap.

Tap.

And when I turn around, I see Seth.

“Get the fuck away from me!”

“Jack.”

My knees give and then catch. I cannot feel anything except the knot I hold between my fingers.

“Leave me the fuck alone. I did what I had to do.”

“Jack.”

It is tight. I feel the rope of the belt as I force it through my hair, down over my ears, and I fix my mouth straight because I will not say anything more. I watch the boy who stands beside the wall in front of me, the steam that rolls like the Pope Valley fog out from the open door of the bathroom as the water runs and runs.

“Jack.”

Seth begins hitting his hands into the wall, pounding, but I can’t hear anything over the rush of the water, the roar of the blood in my ears.

Tight.

There.

“Jack.”

And I drop.

“Jack.”

thirty-five

Nothing.

Just nothing.

It was the most beautifully complete thing Jack ever knew.

I floated in black, naked and warm.

Waiting, waiting.

Five seconds more and it would have been over.

Five fucking seconds.

Then I smelled a stale breath of alcohol, and from somewhere very far away, like it was slowly crawling out of a long dark tunnel, I heard Conner’s voice calling, softly at first.

“Fuck! Fuck! What are you doing? What are you fucking doing?”

And he was crying. Conner never cries. He’s never had a reason to.

He was scared, breathing hard.

I could feel his mouth on the side of my neck as he gasped and grunted. With one arm wrapped beneath my armpit, he squeezed me so tightly against his chest, and tried to hold me up off the floor so he could make enough slack to unknot the noose.

Leave me alone, Conner.

When the knots began to come off, the pain spread up and down from where the noose had been tied. It felt like my head was filled with needles, and now they were all rushing down through my neck. I tried to push him away from me, but my arms flopped heavily like soggy mop yarn. Once Conner pulled the noose over my head, he had to catch me as I collapsed, unbound, into him.

Then I was aware of the wetness on his face. Crying, struggling to pull me out of the closet, Conner carried me across the room, and I began to black out again.