The Fading (9 page)

After a couple minutes Julie said, ‘You should go soon.’

‘Show me your room first.’

She glared at him. Her neck turned spotty pink.

‘Please?’

‘No way, you pervert.’

‘I bet you have a doll collection. Like a hundred of them, don’t you?’

‘Oh, my God, you are such a loser. Go away.’

‘Can I come back tomorrow?’

She ignored him. The bailiff, an old man who was always grinning slyly, carried a folder from the plaintiff to the judge.
Photos of the ruined couch spilled out. The broken TV. The judge whistled and the bailiff’s belt of cuffs and gun holster
jiggled with mirth.

Noel stared at her, waiting, but she wouldn’t give in. The cross on her necklace was crooked over the smooth pad of her left
breast. He imagined her ribs underneath, her tiny belly button, her bony hips. His heart felt like it was dangling on a string.

He spoke slower and quieter than he planned to. ‘I have a medical problem, all right? It makes me do strange things. It’s
like I’m not here, even when I am. When it happens I can’t, like, interact with things or people. I’m just gone. It only lasts
a few hours, but it
kinda messes up my whole life. It creates problems. For everyone.’

She looked at him with neither sympathy nor warmth. ‘I don’t get it. What, like schizophrenia?’

‘It’s just a change that comes over me.’

‘“A change that comes over you?” Dude. That sounds a little psycho.’

‘Hey. I’ve never hurt anybody.’

She was frowning. ‘Does it have a name?’

‘No.’

‘I don’t get it,’ Julie said. ‘Is it mental or physical or what?’

‘Forget it. It’s not a big deal.’

‘How long has it been? Since the last one?’

‘It happened about five or six times right around the time John decided to move out, but then it stopped for about a year
and a half. The last one was right around spring break before last. And maybe once in summer, but not for a while now.’

‘Well.’ She twirled her hair around two fingers. ‘Maybe you’re cured.’

He smiled, doubting it was so, but appreciating her effort. ‘Maybe.’

‘Why hasn’t your dad ever said—’

‘Don’t tell him!’ Noel all but leaped from the chair. Julie froze and he knew she thought she was in the house with a crazy
person. ‘Sorry, just. He doesn’t understand. He doesn’t want to know anything about me and it caused a lot of problems between
him and my mom. So please, don’t bring it up around him.’

‘Okay, I won’t.’

Could he trust her? Too late for that. ‘I gotta go.’ He headed for the door.

She changed the channel just before the verdict was announced. ‘It’s not my house either,’ she called after him.

When he figured out what that was in response to, he smiled the rest of the way home. He came back next day, and the next,
until their afternoon routine spanned sixteen days, skipping the weekends. He didn’t know yet that he was falling in love,
or that his fall was about to destroy what remained of his family, though it was unlikely knowing these things would have
kept him away.

Noel began arriving and staying later, after Julie told him her mom didn’t come home until at least five. She watched a lot
of TV but sometimes did a bit of homework. They weren’t family, but one day they might be, if John and Lisa were married.
And yet he felt the way he felt. He’d never spent this much time around one girl, just the two of them. Beyond his attraction
to her, he was fascinated with the mere presence of the other gender, one his age. He was taking a new class, Girl 101.

On the fifth day she made macaroni and cheese. She set it out on the dining-room table, on wicker place mats with napkins.
The formal setting seemed to put her in charge, allow her to open up. She talked about Florida, missing her best friend, Bailey,
who was supposedly rich but didn’t flaunt it. Julie’s dad, whose name was apparently Big, was a real estate person. He lived
in a condominium development and threw lots of parties for people who lived there or who he wanted to move there. He sounded
cool, but Julie liked her mom better and her dad hadn’t fought her decision to move. Julie called his casual indifference
‘the clincher’ to the actual
decision. Lisa hated Florida, the humidity and the heat, and after she met Noel’s dad at a sporting goods expo in Orlando
they started having long conversations by phone. Lisa was a traveling sales rep for Spalding and as long as she sold enough
stuff they didn’t care where she lived, so it was easy to move to Colorado.

Julie didn’t mind school, she said. It was easy for her, Noel sensed, the work as well as the structure, the rules, the brutal
cliques. She wasn’t popular but had made a few friends. But mostly she simply went to class, paid attention, did her homework
at lunch, and came home to veg out until she was eighteen, when she planned to go to college somewhere she could ‘study art
and business and then hopefully combine the two so I can travel a lot and live in London’.

Noel realized she was probably really smart; she didn’t have a rebellious bone in her body. She was getting along just about
as well as Andy and Opie in fucking Mayberry, adapting to the changes in her life with seemingly no discomfort, and he envied
her. He wanted to know her secret. His initial jealousy was turning to respect, but he wished he could find something wrong
with her so that they wouldn’t be so different. The cross resting at her chest convinced him she was a virgin in all things.
He wondered if she had ever kissed or smoked or had a drink, but didn’t know how to ask without sounding dumb and he realized
the answers weren’t that important. He hadn’t done any of these things, either, but he had done other things that set them
apart.

It was the middle of October and Colorado was experiencing an Indian summer with almost no rain, but the nights were getting
cooler and soon he wouldn’t be able to ride his motorcycle to see her. It was almost fifteen miles each way. Was there a bus
he could take? It probably didn’t stop near here. He grew antsy, quieter each day.

‘Why’d you want to see my room?’ Julie asked him on the last day. He hadn’t asked since that second day and was surprised
she remembered. The fact that she brought it up now made him nervous. Like she had stored his request somewhere, to be used
when it was to her advantage.

‘I don’t know.’ Noel was sitting in the living room, flipping through an issue of
Sports Illustrated
. ‘Probably because you keep the door locked.’

‘Did you try to get in?’ she said.

‘I didn’t even know there was a basement.’

She laughed. ‘I can’t decide if you’re really smart or totally dense.’

‘Maybe I’m so smart I’m dense.’

‘No, I think you’re just dense.’ Julie pulled her hair back and let it fall. She curled her lip again the way she often did,
as if she were disgusted by something unidentifiable in her presence. ‘Do you still want to see it?’

He dropped the magazine and walked over to her, feeling like a beast. He was more than a head taller than her. Slowly she
looked up at him and her expression, for once, was bare. She was frightened and adorable and he
had a crazy urge to lean down, tuck the thick hedge of her black hair around her tiny pink ear and lick it.

Julie hiccup-laughed. ‘You’re like my stepbrother, right?’

He realized she needed to square it as such. Not in some kinky way, only so that it wouldn’t be weird for him to enter her
room.

‘Sure,’ he said. ‘Close enough, I guess.’

She frowned and turned away. He followed her down the stairs. He had imagined a cold empty space, concrete floors, paint cans
and a big ugly furnace, but of course Lisa wouldn’t allow her daughter to be housed in a dungeon, and Happy John was all about
keeping his new sex wife lady happy.

The basement was entirely furnished, with thick white carpet that was, if anything, nicer than the carpet upstairs. There
was a whole ’nother couch and TV set up down here. An aquarium with plants and a school of small red and blue fish. Julie
had her own bathroom, with two sinks and bulbs that went all the way around the mirror. The counter was a mess of teen magazines,
make-up, nail polish, perfumes, bright purple and pink bottles. A damp waft of locker room, sweet fruit and chemically brisk
hair-product girlness nearly smothered him. Being inside it was like being trapped in her pillowcase, under her armpit. On
the floor beneath the vanity lay one of her bras, white and flat across the carpet as if it had been ironed there. It looked
so formless as to be unnecessary, a five-year-old’s swimsuit top, but the sight of it made his feet clumsy.

‘In here, dummy,’ she said, and unlocked the door to her room.

Crossing over, the inner sanctum. He felt more of a trespasser now than he ever had in his dad’s house. Immediately his gaze
was drawn above her bed – a silver silk-quilted queen with thick black pillows stacked against the black lacquer headboard
– to an expensive poster framed under track lights.

It was a mounted cloth tapestry of some four feet by four feet, featuring a guy who looked like a skinnier, stranger and far
sadder version of Elvis sitting on a bar stool underneath black letters that were either the name of a band or a movie. He
wore a dress shirt open at the collar and was smoking with beautiful royal disdain for the entire world. Pouting lips. A woman
trapped in a handsome man’s body. He was a new twist on a familiar type: the rebel, the stray cat, the crooning bad boy, but
he had taken it all to new extremes of who cares. His large presence in her room, placed so prominently over her bed, no less,
filled Noel with aspirations and heartsick envy. This was what
she
wanted. This was the object of her dreamy longings, her innocent pillow-grinding two a.m. sweats. He had no idea who the
man was, but the iconic pose and leering sad eyes and sideburns immediately rooted him in Noel’s consciousness as an evolutionary
marker to be reached as soon as possible. Julie was in love with this creature, he had no doubt, and she should be. Noel fell
in love with the man, too, in the way of a boy who wants so badly to be more than a boy, who falls in love with Superman or
Evel Knievel or his fireman father, his idolized future self.

Sometime during this fugue, Julie stopped talking, her warm curiosity turning to concern. Her big round eyes. Her pale cheeks.
Her glossy hair. Her reality becoming more real with every heartbeat. What was he supposed to do? What would that guy lounging
above her bed do? You think a guy like that cares what anyone else thinks of him? You think he’s afraid to walk into a girl’s
bedroom?

It was like stepping off a bridge unable to see the water below. He leaned down to kiss Julie on her lips, hesitated less
than an inch away, waiting for the slightest tension in her body to tell him this was what she wanted, or didn’t want, or
maybe didn’t know until it happened. But she only stood in slack paralysis, and for a moment everything blurred, he wasn’t
touching her but the air between them firmed and pushed back and just this, this being so close, locked into the almostness
with her, allowed him to soar.

Until she broke the trance and pressed her face to his neck, her warm breath coming in fierce little blasts at the hollow
of his throat. Her arms encircled his waist and she squeezed him, all pent up with lonely from her mom not being there the
way she used to be when it was just us two girls, her dad not giving a damn whether she was in Florida or Colorado or in outer
space. A hug. What she really wanted was for him to comfort her, be here. She was as terrified as he was, and this was a relief
and a disappointment.

He was disappointed he didn’t get to kiss her but he liked the feel of her small body against his. He held her, looking down
the slope of her shiny black hair. It was so straight and perfect, all he could think to do was settle his moist palm over
the back of her skull and gently let it slide down, drawing the heat from beneath the silken layers, knowing that when his
hand got to the end of the hair he would be a failure, the boy who didn’t kiss her when he had the chance. Already sinking
in regret, he tried to make it last, wanting nothing more than to feel her pampered strands gliding at his wrist for an hour.
But too soon he had reached the bottom and his hand fell to the back of her neck, corded and hot as pavement, and it was the
end of something that could never be gotten back and he felt a piece of his life fading away, going with time, vanishing for
good.

‘What are you thinking about?’ Julie said into his shirt. She shifted her weight and hugged him again.

Noel breathed in her citrus hairspray and the faint catch of natural oil beneath that, and looked up again to the tapestry.
He was about to ask what The Smiths meant when the man in the poster turned his head and looked directly at Noel. His pouting
lips spread into a smile and his puppy dog eyes widened in recognition. His entire lean frame slithered from the barstool
as he stepped down, out of the black-and-white poster and onto Julie’s bed. His body and clothes and high forehead retained
their granulated black-and-whiteness as he entered the three-dimensional world of color. He reached back into the smooth plane
of art and, with
impossibly long maestro fingers, retrieved a burning cigarette from the bar. He took a drag, squinting, and held the cigarette
out to Noel, clamped between his thumb and first finger, the nails of which were painted fuzzy newsprint black.

Smoke and its raw sick tint roiled at Noel, the snaking tendrils swirling in the space between them. He lost whatever inertia
he had gathered from Julie, slumping as he watched the smoke curl and settle into a gray reef roaring with the silence of
hallucination, revealing black holes and edge-scapes dense with dark amoebic life forms, glass fish and electric eels that
darted and burrowed in knots of darkness.

‘Don’t you think it’s time we show her? I do,’ the man said, his gray sickle moon face rising through the smoke reef. His
voice was nasal and British, swerving from falsetto to baritone with the stilted affect of lounge singer lyrics. ‘I think
she can handle this, I think she can handle every little fish, boy-o, how about yooooooouuuu?’