The Fading (11 page)

Smith yawned, tapped another cigarette against his wrist, stared at Noel expectantly.

The blonde saleswoman removed a green rubber spiral bracelet from her forearm. A number of keys were
attached to it. She used one to open a door on her side of the displays and extracted a felt panel with at least twenty rings
sunken into it. The young couple made pleasure sounds and caressed the rings, then the man pointed and said, ‘That one, darlin’.
That’s the honey right there.’

The girl tried it on, held it up to the lights. The tall blonde put the panel back into the case and Noel knew it was because
she wasn’t supposed to leave too many out on the table at one time.

While the three of them were talking, Weezy came out of the back room. She was heavily made up, with high curls of reddish
brown hair that fairly screamed off her lemon yellow pantsuit. She leaned into the tall blonde again, and the blonde nodded
before slipping the rubber bracelet of keys from her forearm and handed it to Weezy, who Noel knew was her boss.

His eyes followed the green rubber spiral as Weezy pushed between two small black saloon doors, into the back room. Noel walked
to the end of the display cases at the far corner of the store where a waist-high kennel door stood. He pushed against it,
but it was locked. He planted one hand on the top edge and the other on the glass counter, and hopped over, thinking of a
cat as he landed. The tall blonde was still talking to the young couple, and he knew she would be stuck with them for at least
another few minutes because they were having too much fun to decide quickly.

He passed Smith, who sighed with boredom as Noel ducked below the saloon doors, rising up inside a
shallow space that extended about fifty feet in either direction, with rows of steel shelves and drawers filled with paper
bags and folded gift boxes. He had expected rows and rows of jewelry but realized now that was stupid. Of course they wouldn’t
keep piles of diamonds and gold and all those rings lying around like Aladdin’s cave on that one
Bugs Bunny
episode where Daffy unleashes the angry genie Hassan from the magic kettle. It was all probably in a safe, a huge safe he
could not get into, so what was the point of this adventure?

Weezy’s voice came from Noel’s right, at the end of the shelves. He walked toward her, not understanding the terms she used.
She was talking about weights and carrots and clarity. At the end of the row a black door stood halfway open, revealing a
cramped office. Noel moved closer and saw her propped rigid in a leather chair on wheels, talking on the phone. Her back was
turned. She sounded very serious, almost angry. Beside her elbow, lying on the desk’s smooth surface, was the rubber key ring.

Noel stepped forward, leaned in, and reached … but couldn’t get there.

Weezy sat forward and said, ‘That’s all really impressive, David, but I’m going to be out of stock before Christmas, so what
are you going to do for me? South Africa I don’t want to hear about.’

Noel swallowed hard, took another half-step. His fingers touched the rubber spiral. He pinched and lifted it carefully so
that the keys did not scrape or jingle against
the desk. He backed away, walked calmly and ducked under the saloon doors, into the brightness of the store. Several more
people had entered and the tall blonde in her red dress was hurrying back and forth to greet them without losing her conversation
with the young cowboy couple, who were now kissing.

He crouched. Duck-walking to the other end of the employee lane, he tried the last lock first. The key didn’t fit. He tried
another. It fit but wouldn’t turn. Another. Another. And on the sixth key, the lock clicked and the key twisted to the right.
Noel slid the door open until the metal lock fell from its sawtooth tab and thunked at his feet. He looked down, then up quickly,
peeking over the counter, but no one had heard it land on the carpet.

On the felt stump neck, a thick gold necklace with a large gold music symbol shone at up him. The music symbol was lined with
at least thirty diamonds. He removed it and held it suspended in the air at his side where Red Dress would see it if she wanted
to, and then he plucked six more necklaces from their beige felt stumps. His head swam and his entire body went loose.

Beside the necklaces stood a horizontal arm of black felt ringed with bracelets of varying thickness. Silver and platinum,
some bare and clean, others dotted with blue gems. He dragged a dozen of them to the end of the arm, clutching them in a bundle
at his waist, as if this might still hide them. The cluster was as thick and heavy as a handful of cooked spaghetti. Noel
hurried to the end of the row and dropped his haul over the low door, onto the floor at the edge of the carpet.

He was trembling badly and sweating, and there was no sign of Smith. He had to force himself not to breathe loudly as he turned
back and tried the keys in another lock. He did not even bother to look up this time. He couldn’t stand the sight of any of
them, the customers or the employees. He was in a tunnel, as blind to them as they were to him. He fumbled the keys and almost
dropped them, then managed to work through three before finding another that slid into the lock. It turned on the first try
and Noel began plucking rings with green and blue stones shaped like hearts, circles, squares, something ugly brown-yellow,
and then a dozen or more bare gold rings fat as caramels, into the basket he made of his shirt.

On the way back to the stash he glimpsed stacks of black plastic bags tucked into shelves built into the wall. He drew a medium-sized
one out and quietly dumped his loot inside. Better. But the bag would still be a problem. He carried it to the end of the
row and stepped over the waist-high door, scraping the inside of his thigh as his foot landed on the other side. His hair
was tingling. His chest heaved and the air blew through his nose in a hard whistling rhythm that seemed louder than anything
else in the store.

He bent, scooping the pile of necklaces and bracelets into the bag. The bag was nearly full, a black bulging square of reality
hovering three feet in the air. He couldn’t hide it. He had to find a way out right now, before he lost his composure and
started screaming.

Noel looked both ways down the mall. Dozens of
people were walking toward him, away from him, talking and smiling and looking in all directions.

‘The eyes, Noel. Look at their eyes,’ the Englishman crooned inside his head. ‘Put it where their eyes don’t go.’

Noel studied the passers-by, eliminating his options. Up high? Level with the store windows? Lower? Maybe he could fling them
behind a bench, then a trash can?

The floor
.

Smith said, ‘Brilliant, lad. Now take your time and don’t go cocking it all up.’

Noel set the black plastic Zales bag on the floor. If anyone saw it, it would look like a bag, maybe a piece of trash, something
any shopper might have set down for a moment. He nudged it with his foot, closer to the wall. If anyone came after it, he
could simply walk away. Or scare them. But no one looked at it. They just walked along, lost in their browsing.

Sweating, terrified but more excited than he had ever been about anything in his entire life, Noel sidestepped along the wall,
keeping his back against the storefronts. He edged away from Zales and passed another store, which through him and through
the window display shoppers could see an assortment of novelty items and gag gifts, magic sets, rubber monster masks and lamps
burbling blue and purple lava. The plastic hissed and twice he had to stop to bend over and repack some rings and a bracelet
that spilled out, but no one saw the bag.

You can’t see me or my bag
, he thought with vehement
force.
You can’t see anything around me. Not my hair, not my clothes, not my jewels, not my shoes …

He rounded the corner into a different wing of the mall. To his left, past half a dozen more shops and benches and tree planters
where at least twenty people strolled, there stood a bank of glass doors with glowing green exit signs above them.

Freedom had never looked so far away, and it was very tempting to scoop up the bag and run, damn the consequences. But more
than the thrill of his stolen treasure, he was riding the high of outsmarting them, the people inside the jewelry store, the
other shoppers, the maintenance man socking a new bag into the trash can, everyone walking by with no clue what he could do,
what he had done, what he was.

Go ahead and look
, he wanted to shout.
I’m too good for you!

Eight long minutes later he crouched, took the bag in both hands, and put his shoulder down. He hit the doors with a barely
repressed scream and fled into the October night.

Seven and a half hours after the bubble took him, he parked the Honda behind the building on Kalmia, chained it to a small
tree and let himself into the apartment. He was thinking of clothes he could fit into his backpack and the two or three books
he would take with him, but his mother was waiting for him on the couch. She was smoking, staring at the front door the moment
he stepped through.

‘He’s home,’ she said into the phone, her eyes rooting him where he stood. ‘Not now. I’ll call you later. I can’t tell you
that because I don’t know. He’s still your son, John.’ She slammed the handset to the cradle.

They stared at each other. Noel hugged the backpack. She didn’t ask him why or how. She did not leap up to hug him or assure
him everything would be all right.

Instead she said, ‘The doctors said her mother won’t be able to walk for a long time. Maybe ever again.’

Noel said nothing.

‘Of all the places, you had to go there? How could you? How could you think that was even remotely a good …’ She shook her
head, unable to finish. Her eyes were blackened with streaked mascara and her skin was an ill shade of gray.

Noel moved a few steps into the living room. He unzipped his pack and turned it upside down. He shook it until the entire
contents spilled out on the carpet.

Rebecca covered her mouth. The enchanted girl was gone. In her place was a steam-ironed mother who’d just been told her son
was dead.

‘We can run away,’ he said. ‘There’s enough here to last a long time. I counted the tags. It’s over two hundred thousand—’

‘Stop it!’ she screamed.

He let the pack fall onto the pile.

‘I can’t protect you,’ she said. ‘I love you but I can’t protect you. Not from the rest of the world. Not from yourself. Not
even from me.’

She cupped her face in her hands, and he knew she couldn’t stand to look at him.

‘I did it for you,’ he said.

‘I didn’t ask for this!’ she screamed. ‘I don’t want it! I can’t live like this! Do you understand me? I can’t live with you!’

Rebecca hurried from the room and her bedroom door slammed.

Noel sank to his knees and set his hands on the pile of jewelry, thinking of nothing, nothing at all but how beautiful they
looked slipping through his hands, hands that seemed capable of almost anything.

At the age of nineteen, having reached his full height of six feet two inches but weighing only one hundred and fifty-five
pounds, black hair unfashionably long and stiff, his spine bracketed to the rake of constant anxiety planted in his life,
weary of sunlight and solid human beings, Noel had become a pale scarecrow of a man without a Dorothy.

Food held little interest, but he forced himself to hoard extra stores between his spells (when acquiring food and having
an appetite was nearly impossible), sometimes binging for weeks without ever filling out his lean frame, his facial features
made severe by hollow cheeks and a steep forehead. He barbered himself only every six months or so – once while in the blink,
watching it reappear in the sink twenty-seven minutes after he cut it, and re-emerging four hours later deciding it wasn’t
a bad job for a blind man.

He lived alone in a one-bedroom apartment on Canyon Boulevard in downtown Boulder, in the kind of anonymous building that
exists one rung above squalor and conceals bland people living marginal lives. He did
not have a job or attend college, but he always managed to pay his rent on time. He owned a used Toyota 4-Runner purchased
with funds from the fenced jewelry, but he preferred to walk on his errands to minimize the risks of driving. He had never
had a meaningful relationship with any woman beyond his mother, whom he had spoken to only a handful of times in the past
five years.

After her nervous breakdown, Rebecca voluntarily entered a psychiatric hospital in Colorado Springs, her stay paid for by
her ex-husband. John lived in Calabasas, California, with Lisa and her parents, who funded her care. When John wasn’t lifting
her in and out of bed, Lisa relied on a wheelchair to get around, though last Noel had heard she could stand for short periods
of time. Julie had been exported with them, and Noel had not spoken to any of them since the accident. John had forbidden
his son to come to the hospital. Noel had penned sincere and extensive letters of apology to John, Lisa and Julie, but when
a bundle of fourteen was returned unopened, he stopped writing to them.

Four months after her admission, Rebecca was deemed healthy enough to be released into her own care but stayed at a women’s
co-op in Colorado Springs for another year. If she was diagnosed with something that would explain her belief that her son
became a walking, talking ghost every few months, no one told Noel.

For the first year, Noel continued to stay at the apartment on Kalmia. It took the state nine additional
months to catch onto the Shaker situation – the father out of state, the mother hospitalized before going into self-imposed
hiding, her fifteen-year-old son living alone – and, when they finally sent a social worker to the apartment, Noel ran away
for three weeks, living off dumpster scraps from the restaurants downtown or stealing his meals from the grocery store, sleeping
in parks at night until it was safe to come home. When he was sixteen, he retained legal counsel and petitioned the state
for emancipation from his parents, and his petition was not contested.