The Fading (15 page)

Easy, easy. We’re not alone
, Carlos said, his Spanish-accented English as careful as it was quiet.
He’s in there
.

Who, the kid?
his tormentor turned conspirator said.

Si, papi.

Well, what are you waiting for? You want to stand here all night with a face like that? We have places to go.

Let him be for now
, Carlos whispered.
Can’t you see he’s been through enough? I have seen this before. He is broken.

Oh, dear God. They were talking about him? Noel covered his mouth and could feel their heads turning to watch the stall.

I want my face
, the high-pitched man said.
Tell him I need my face!

If you push him now, you will kill him. The others feel we should allow him to grow stronger.

And then what?
the high-pitched man whined.
How am I supposed to go around looking like this?

You have waited a long time. Waiting a little more won’t kill you
, Carlos said.
When he is well, we will all grow stronger with him. There is no question he will learn to fade, and when he does he will
open doors for us. Many, many doors.

This was madness. He had to get out of here. Noel reached for the metal tab locking him in, but just then a series of slapping
footsteps came racing at him and a great weight slammed into the partition, shaking the entire stall.

‘What the fuck!’ Noel cried, backing into the toilet.

Fists pounded the wall as another stream of profanity-laced Spanish poured out, berating him, accusing him of something he
couldn’t understand.

Noel choked on the word ‘Help!’

The pummeling stopped. The verbal assault stopped.

The toes of two small polished black work shoes protruded beneath the stall.

Noel slid along the wall and saw a single shining black eye peering at him through the crack between the door and its frame,
all pupil, twitching side to side.

‘What are you doing?’ high-pitch said. ‘You said leave him alone.’

‘I jess want to see him,’ Carlos said. ‘I wan’ him to know how much pain I am in.’

The door lock jiggled. The Carlos eye continued to track him. Noel covered his mouth to keep from screaming.

‘Don’t forget about me,’ Carlos whispered. ‘Don’t listen to your father, Noel Shaker boy. You are not loco. You must be brave
now. You must be brave for all of us.’

‘Leave me alone,’ Noel said. ‘I didn’t do anything to you.’

‘I did my job!’ high-pitch shrieked, joining Carlos to rattle the door with renewed violence. ‘Now you must do yours! Do you
hear me, Shaker? I want my face! Gimme back my beautiful face!’

‘Stop it!’ Carlos said to his friend. Then more softly to Noel, ‘We believe very strongly in your potential, and it would
be a shame if all that potential went to waste because your father filled your head with such cruel things about your kind
and loving mother. You are not mentally ill—’

The other man’s footsteps raced away from the stall. ‘Smoke! I smell smoke!’

Carlos said, ‘Don’t listen to him!’

High-pitch careened around the bathroom. ‘Please! Don’t leave me in here! I don’t want to die!’

Within seconds Noel smelled smoke. Heavy, black, lung-smothering smoke that burned his eyes and tasted like chemical death.
And then the heat. The room becoming an oven. The walls rattled and the roof roared as flames erupted all around him. The
bathroom was at once consumed with flame and the screams of dying men.

Noel coughed and fell to his knees, clawing blindly at the stall and bathroom walls behind him. Ceiling panels melted and
dripped like wax. Globs of charred insulation rained down smoldering on him, burning his hair and through the back of his
shirt. The room thrummed and light bulbs popped, and then the walls exploded.

Noel covered his head and wished himself away, willing his bubble to shelter him from the fire. He imagined it carrying him
off, not just erasing him but transporting him home, across town, to France, anywhere but here. The fire’s consuming roar
reached a pinnacle of violence and there was a suction wind pulling him from every direction at once, and then only silence.

Noel blinked. He was still here. There was no fire. The eye in the door seam was gone. The polished black shoes were gone.
The room felt hollower than before. Noel coughed twice more but already his lungs were clearing and he breathed easily, though
a sour taste lingered on his tongue.

He exited the stall, inspecting his clothes for burn marks. There weren’t any.

No one was standing at the urinals or at the sinks
sunken into the vanity. He reached for the door but his hands were blackened with soot. Greasy and smudging his cuffs. He
wanted it off, now. He turned back to the vanity and ran the water, careful not to splash onto the bandaging, using the pink
liquid soap and lathering thoroughly before rinsing. He tore a brown paper towel from the dispenser and looked up, into the
mirror.

Carlos the bathroom butler was standing against the wall and his face was gone. He stood perfectly still staring at Noel from
ash eyes sunk inside a blackened skull, the face and nose scorched and flame-eroded beyond recognition. White teeth exposed
to the roots stood out from blackened gums. The larded hair was singed into bleeding tufts. The hand attached to the arm holding
the white towel was a deformed knob of burned flesh and pink bones. It was a corpse, Carlos’s charred remains standing calmly
in the pristine white jacket, black trousers and polished black work shoes.

Noel spun around, but Carlos was gone. In his place there was only a chrome-plated trash bin set into the clean white tiled
wall and, beside that, the push-button hand dryer. Once again Noel was alone.

Except that he knew he wasn’t alone. Noel knew that when he turned and looked in the mirror again, the butler with the charred
face and hideous ruined lips and broiled eyes would be standing right where he was a moment ago, watching him.

There was a fire here, he thought. Years ago. Maybe decades ago. And the ones who died in the blaze are still
here. They wanted me. They are waiting for me to blink out again. And it’s going to happen again, soon. I see the dead when
I am about to drop, or have already gone inside. But why? What does it do for them? What do they want me to do?

Noel turned to the mirror slowly, but before he could face it the bathroom door opened and John was there. He looked at his
son, concern transforming into a gentle smile of relief.

‘Hey, sport. Everything working all right in here?’

Demons. You mother actually believed a demon had attached itself to you and wanted to take you away.

Was that what Noel had seen in the mirror? Is that what the men were, the apparitions who’d been whispering about him before
the fire took them away? Demons?

‘I don’t believe in demons,’ Noel thought, then realized he’d spoken aloud.

‘I should hope not,’ John said. ‘Is that why you came in here? To convince yourself?’

‘I had a stomach ache.’

‘Better now? Do you want to go home?’

Noel looked into the mirror again. His own reflection was staring back at him, none other. In minutes, a few hours at most,
that would disappear, too. He could almost feel it building inside him, a storm front of pressure in his cells. He did not
want to fight it. Better that his father see for himself. See what was wrong with his son.

‘No, I’m ready for that dessert.’

*

On the way home, in John’s rental car, Noel remembered a question he had been wanting to ask one or both of his parents for
years.

‘What happened to Dimples?’

His father sat up a little straighter in his seat. ‘Who?’

‘Remember Dimples? That clown who used to be on Channel Two. He did the birthday show every morning. He always had that same
huge yellow cake, like seven layers high. I always wondered what that tasted like until one day I realized it was a cardboard
prop they wheeled out for each show.’

‘Oh, yep,’ John said. ‘Sad story. What made you think of him?’

‘I don’t know,’ Noel lied.
The dead men in the bathroom, perhaps
. ‘He went off the air a long time ago, right?’

John nodded. ‘Your mother wanted to get you on that show, as a matter of fact. She wanted to take you down the studio in Denver
for, oh, I guess it would have been your first or second birthday. She was really sad when it didn’t work out. You were so
young. I’m surprised you remember that now.’

‘Why didn’t it work out?’

‘Well, I forget what it was, but it was sort of a tragedy. Dimples – the old guy who played him on TV, I think his name was
Hal something. Lichtman, Luckenbach, I don’t know. Anyway, yeah, he died on air. It was in the news, parents were all messed
up about it.’

‘Are you kidding me?’ Noel’s arm began to tingle again.

‘I don’t know if it was standard procedure, but the day it happened they were taping the show live. The
poor old guy had a heart attack or a stroke, something severe. He keeled over during one of the musical numbers, right there
in front of the parents and kids in the audience. And apparently the cameraman or producer was sleeping off a dose of NyQuil
or some damn thing, because they didn’t cut away for almost two full minutes. Dimples died on live Colorado TV.’

‘Jesus.’

‘Yeah, that was the end of that show.’

‘That’s … disturbing.’

‘But you didn’t see it,’ his father added. ‘I know because I asked your mom if she’d left you in front of the TV that day
and she swore up and down she didn’t. Good thing. No two-year-old needs to see something like that, though of course a bunch
did.’

Noel didn’t ask any more questions until they got home.

‘Oh, I almost forgot,’ John said as they walked to Noel’s front door. ‘Good news. Lisa called this afternoon while you were
napping. She spoke with Julie this morning.’

Noel fished in his coat for the apartment keys. ‘Oh?’

‘Turns out she was in Vail for the weekend, skiing with friends. Lisa said she sounded fine. I wish I had more time, but Lisa
has therapy tomorrow and her parents are due in Santa Barbara for the week. I’d feel a lot better if I had been able to visit
Julie in person while I was here, but maybe that wasn’t the real point of this trip.’ He glanced sideways at Noel.

‘Glad she’s okay,’ Noel said.

‘That’s the thing with you kids. Who knows, right? And I don’t remember Julie skiing. You see what I’m getting at.’

What did he want Noel to say? ‘She was always very smart. I’m sure she’s fine.’

John eyed him warily at the door, both father and son aware there was something sad and wrong about him leaving tonight, but
each grateful for the other’s excusing of this awkwardness. Today had been more family drama than either had bargained for
and they both wanted a break. Noel could see John waiting for him to offer some final reassurance that everything would be
okay.

Noel smiled. ‘Don’t worry, Pop. I’ll take the meds. I’ll eat the food. I’ll call you every night.’

‘A new beginning,’ John said with such earnest good cheer it made Noel’s heart sink. ‘For both of us, I hope.’

‘Yes. Definitely.’

John lingered, squirming.

‘What?’ Noel said.

‘If you hear anything about Julie, if you should run into her. I mean, if you know anybody who knows her, maybe you could
ask around? See what she’s doing, who she’s running with? Keep me in the loop? Lisa would kill me if anything happened to
her.’

‘I doubt I know any of her friends,’ Noel said. ‘But I’ll keep my ears open.’

‘Good man.’

‘Thanks for everything,’ Noel said.

‘I love you, son.’

Noel nodded and looked at his shoes. When he looked up again, his father was gone. The same could not be said of his demons,
nor of the power that drew them to his dimmed presence like hounds before the moon.

In the morning it was a relief not to have to look at his arm.

The night his father left, Noel fell into bed and stayed there for almost sixteen hours. He woke up alone and saw under the
hollow tent of his bedding that it had taken him while he slept.

Maybe it was all he had been through in the past few days. Maybe it was seeing two ghosts or demons or his own split personalities
in the restaurant bathroom. Maybe it was seeing his father. But whatever it was, for the first time in his life, Noel did
not despair over how long it would last, or what the cause might be. He was who he was, and if that sounded like surrender,
so be it. He’d tried hiding from it, railing against it, crying over it, killing it. None of his reactions had changed a damn
thing. None had helped
him
.

Maybe some day he would find a cure. Maybe some day it would just stop. Maybe it would take him and never let him go. But
right now, starting today, he needed some semblance of a life. He decided that it was okay if this life turned out to be something
he didn’t ask
for – whose didn’t? If he was doomed to live as a man who blinked in and out of visible existence at the whim of higher powers
(or even his own damaged psyche), then like a prisoner who is granted a walk in the sun only now and then, he would find a
way to carve a little happiness from his bizarre life sentence.

He showered, shaved and changed the bandages on his arm as the nurse had shown him. He didn’t know how badly the wounds needed
redressing until he discarded yesterday’s bandages and saw them reappear, blood-stained and dirty, in the bathroom trash can
some ten minutes later. He swabbed the stitched cuts as a blind man reads Braille, with wads of cotton and Betadine solution.
The purple-brown antiseptic liquid turned yellow against his transparent skin just before the bubble took it away, then he
wrapped the invisible limb in fresh gauze, which also vanished by the time he finished pulling on clean clothes, which similarly
were absorbed in a micro-blink of an eye.

A bowl of Golden Grahams went into a hole, milk dripping from his clear-as-air chin, down a hollow tube, and came to pool
in his grateful fish-bowl stomach. He knew from previous experience that the food and beverages took to hiding within him,
within the bubble, as soon as he closed his mouth and swallowed, but he still resisted the impulse to lift up his shirt and
peer down at his belly organs just in case the rules suddenly changed.