“The medical examiner… he timed it, he placed the time at…” Floyd’s mouth once again began to quiver, and then, finally, it collapsed into convulsions and he was sobbing. I moved to put my hand on his shoulder, but he batted me away. His hand stung against my chin, and I dropped back onto my heels.
“I was there, at the fire, while he was out in the woods,” he finally managed, rubbing his palms against his wet cheeks. “And the mountain lions… there was absolutely no sign on his body, nothing, nothing trying to… trying to eat his body. There was no fucking… no fucking mountain lion out there in the night.” He paused once again, and after a final heave, the sobbing stopped. His face settled back into an emotionless mask. Thankfully, there was no hint of a smile this time, no eerie grin. “He was there as I was walking out. He was less than a dozen feet from the path. Bleeding. Unconscious. Dying. And I was stupid and oblivious, a little bit drunk, a little bit high. And he was there. Fucking dying. Alone. Alone in the woods. Alone in the dark.”
He shook his head, a slow arthritic shake.
“Jesus fucking Christ, I was probably laughing at the time, as I walked by. I was probably fucking laughing. And those mountain lion screams? Out there in the night?” He closed his eyes and let his head drop forward. “How… how could I be so stupid?”
He was silent for a time, and then he looked up. There was anger on his face as he turned toward me.
“What the fuck, Dean? Things were fine before, in the city. Things were cool. And then we had to go down there. Jesus Christ! Why the fuck did we have to go down there?” He picked the flashlight up off his lap and threw it across the entryway, through the cellar door. I heard it cascade down the flight of wooden stairs, and there was the sound of cracking concrete when it finally hit the bottom. “I was free, right? I was away from it all. Away from that house, away from my mom’s bland words and her distant eyes—it was like they wouldn’t focus anymore, at least not on me. I think she thought she had forgiven me, I think she genuinely believed that, but there was that look in her eyes. And she didn’t know about the screams. I never told her about the screams.” He shook his head angrily. “So I move on to San Diego, New York, motherfucking Brisbane. And then… I’m falling through the air, toward that wooden ramp, and fuck it if that plummet doesn’t feel right. And maybe I don’t turn when I should. Maybe I don’t go limp. And then I come here… and I’m away. Finally. I’m free! And I’m barely thinking about him. This place here—I don’t know—the weight of the air, the quality of the light… it’s not all that easy to think, you know? And I’m free.”
He nodded toward the cellar door. “And then we had to go down there,” he repeated. He closed his eyes and heaved a brief sob. “Why’d you take me, Dean? Why’d I have to follow? And should I curse you for that, or should I thank you?” After a moment, he looked up and managed a tortured little smile. “Right now, I’m thinking I should just shank you in the fucking face.”
His eyes held mine for several seconds, and then his shoulders collapsed. I could see all of that animation, all of that emotion, draining away, leaving behind an empty vessel. I moved closer and put my hand on his shoulder. This time he didn’t push me away.
“Maybe you shouldn’t be here,” I said, keeping my voice low, trying to radiate calm. “Maybe you should leave, get out of the city. It’s not good for you here.” And after a prolonged beat, I added, “It’s not good for any of us.”
“But he’s down there.”
“He’s dead.”
He shook his head. “But he’s down there. And I’ll find him this time. I won’t run away.”
He turned away from me and reached through the living room door on his far side. “Look,” he said, pulling something back into the entryway. “I found this. He wasn’t there this time, but I found this, down in the tunnels.” He handed me a skateboard. It was cracked in the middle and covered with mud. “It’s his, the one he loved. See—” He brushed aside some of the drying dirt, revealing a picture on the bottom of the board. “—it’s him. See? He’s flying.”
The board felt surprisingly heavy in my hands.
“We didn’t find it in the woods. We didn’t even know it was gone, not until later, not until after his funeral. I went to look for it, but it wasn’t in his room, it wasn’t on his dresser.” I looked up from the board and saw Floyd smiling. It was a different smile now. It was reflected in his eyes, in the subtle lift of his shoulders. It no longer looked out of place on his face. “It means he’s here, Dean, he’s real. Just like the board. It’s here. It’s real.”
I looked back down at the board and remained silent. No matter how much I wanted to tell him otherwise—tell him that he was wrong, that the city was just messing with his head, that his brother was gone, and that he should flee as far and as fast as possible—I couldn’t.
The board was here. The board was real.
And I had no idea what that might mean.
16.1
News clipping. “A Hole in the Map: Spokane, and What They Aren’t Telling Us,” the Seattle Times, November 7, pages 7A and 12A:
The article has been clipped from a daily newspaper—aged, yellowing newsprint with sharp, scissor-cut edges. It is in two pieces: a narrow lead column stapled to a wider three-column continuation. It has been well handled. The ink is smeared, and words have been lost beneath smudged fingerprints. The paper is a webwork of creases; it looks like it has been crumpled into a ball and then smoothed back out.
The article describes the quarantine, several months in, and revisits official press releases. It quotes government officials, and there are several “No comments” scattered throughout the text.
There are two pictures incorporated into the final column of type, stacked one on top of the other—large blocks of ink reduced to abstract blurs by excessive handling. The topmost picture is nothing but a dark morass of ink, with the barest hint of a face lurking in the bottom corner. The bottom picture is easier to parse but still difficult to understand. Underneath the maze of creases and beneath the smudged ink, where a sweaty fingertip has traced body and limb, it looks like a spider. A giant spider, perched atop seven spindly legs and one outstretched human finger.
16.2
I put Floyd to bed. Then I watched him sleep.
I don’t know how much oxycodone he actually took, but his breathing was shallow and he lay perfectly still. He didn’t toss and turn or fidget and mumble. In fact, there was very little motion in his body, very little life. I’m not sure what I would have done if his breathing had actually stopped—CPR, I guess, even though I didn’t have any training or knowledge on the subject—but I didn’t want to leave him alone. I wanted to be there in case he needed me. In case he needed me to—I don’t know—to do something, anything to keep him safe.
I just… I had the feeling that if I turned my back, if I shut my eyes, he would disappear. He would just… be gone. As if it were my attention, my concern that was keeping him rooted to the world, and without that he’d just fade into the ether.