Austin tried telling the man that he was wrong, that she was almost thirty, kids weren’t older than their mothers, but the man just grinned again as though he had a secret and ate more beans.
“Sir?” Austin said. “Will you answer me a question? Does this mean I can’t ever be hurt or nothing?”
“You can hurt yourself. You can always hurt yourself. I were you, I’d not go jumping in front of any more locomotives just to see what I could get away with. And in a few years when you start shaving, don’t get the idea you need never worry about nicking your chin. It’s all a matter of degree.”
He recalled feeling like Superman at the time, or maybe Superman dreaming of being a boy again.
“I never heard of nobody else being this way. Why me?”
“Well now, there’d be two answers to that. The short one and the long one, but young as your mind is, neither one would do you much good today.” The man shook his shaggy head. “Besides, it’s a thing you should really be figuring out for yourself.”
The man, if a man he was, treated himself to another helping of beans, then sighed and gazed toward the faint greenish glow at the opposite end of the tunnel. Telling Austin that he had to go back outside now, there would be people looking for him and that the kindest thing he could do for them all was turn up alive. For Gabrielle especially, inconsolable Gabrielle who was sure she’d watched him die.
Austin trudged through mist and chill, and the nearer he got to the entrance, the brighter grew daylight’s sheen upon the moist and dripping walls. He looked back only once, and saw a fading glow of embers.
At the entrance he blinked away the glare in his eyes. The world had never looked so clear, so green. But he and Gabrielle said so every time they came out. He walked farther, until he could hear voices calling to each other over on the tracks, and none of them sounded as though they were having a very good day.
It was nothing he would have noticed back in the dark of the tunnel, with other things vying for attention, but out in the daylight he spotted it the first time he looked down: Slashed across the front of his jeans, along the top of both thighs, was a fat stripe of oiled grime, as though he’d draped his empty pantlegs over the rail and waited for the train wheels to grind it in.
Whipping for sure. His mother would never get a stain like that out in the wash.
*
“They’re called the Kyyth,” he told Gabrielle. “If there was ever a language it meant something in, it’s dead and long gone by now. He hasn’t said much about that. He gets evasive about certain things.”
“So what you’ve got back there floating in that room is the same as whatever you said talked to you in the tunnel.”
“Same species, different individual. The big difference is, the one thirty years ago had his shit together, I think. This one, he’s a bit … touched in the head, is how our families might’ve put it.”
“All these years I’d decided that never happened, that you’d dreamed it or had a concussion from the fall,” she said. “So what you have back there sleeping on your ceiling—”
“He has a name, why don’t we use that. Memuneh. Or it’s what he likes to be called now. I get the impression they don’t keep the same names indefinitely.”
“Memuneh, then. Memuneh was responsible for the things that happened in the town last year.”
“Sad, but true.”
“Why sad?”
Austin almost told her but reconsidered. “Maybe you should make up your own mind about that after you talk to him. You might see it differently. You might not think it’s sad after all.”
“You called him a lying prick.”
Austin grinned. “I did, didn’t I? Don’t let it bias you, it wasn’t without affection.”
She was up and off the porch in another moment, going nowhere but in circles, compelled to move all the same. He knew the urge. You couldn’t take these things in and just sit on your ass. You felt you had to do something with the knowledge, right that very moment, and there was nothing to be done but let it settle in and begin reweaving the fabric of the world you thought you knew. Some days he believed that being given hints of a higher design was far crueler than the coldest shoulder an indifferent universe would have to offer.
Gabrielle was barefoot now with her slacks rolled up, and he watched her feet on the warm ground, watched the dust cake between her toes. What a privilege that he’d been able to see them over so many years, in so many circumstances — child-size to full-grown, wading in streams and kicking in lakes, running through grass and skipping over hot pavement, and, more languidly, tracing chills of pleasure along his legs, his chest. Her feet. He thought of them in New York, crammed aching into professional shoes, and could scarcely tolerate the thought. Her dear feet.
Congratulations, she was telling him, and he knew she meant it but there was bitterness too. Congratulations, you solved the grand mystery of your life, and was it worth everything you gave up to do it? Worth your blood and scarred skin and the pain you caused others when they realized they could never possess you more than a vision from a head injury? Congratulations, after years of obsessive pursuit you tracked down your angel, and is he all you hoped he would be? Does his conversation answer all the questions that roasted your heart alive? Now you must know things the rest of us can only guess at or dream about, and how pleased with your choices that must make you feel. So congratulations. Was it worth the life with me you traded for it? Was it worth the children we never had?
Suddenly Austin wasn’t sure if she was saying all this, or only part of it and he was filling in the rest with everything she left unsaid but smoldering in her eyes. Or maybe she’d said none of it and this had lain in his heart all along, waiting until the sight of her would make it scream.
He wasn’t even sure she was really here.
It’s a world of illusion you live in.
Was it worth it — and what price Paradise for those who refuse to wait?
My god, he thought, what have I done?
He left the splintery porch, found Gabrielle to be as solid as anything he could hope to believe in. Her jacket was gone now and she wore a sleeveless top, buttery-gold skin of her shoulders so real to the touch, hot with the sun. Stiff and resistant at first but this was good; illusions wouldn’t bother to fight. No illusion would give in so sublimely. And then, such quiet bliss to hold each other again after eleven years of forever.
“I hate you,” she murmured into the side of his neck, her eyes and nose almost as wet as her mouth.
They held each other in the silent heat, before towering watchers of red stone, their bare feet curled firm into kingdoms of dust.
And for now — and only now, he feared — it was enough. It was the world, or at least the best this one had to offer.
*
After that day on the tracks and in the tunnel, he had a harder time finding anyone who believed him than he thought he would. Disturbed kids looking for attention, some said, and making a bad joke of it in the doing. While it had happened before Austin’s time, the town still felt a persistent soreness over three boys even younger, killed on those same tracks.
Believers? Certainly not his parents. The intercession of a divine guardian made no difference. Angels didn’t eat beans from cans. Period. He’d hoped that the preacher at his parents’ church would take his side, but while Reverend Hollis showed no annoyance over suspicions of hoax or the price of a ruined pair of Levi’s, even at that age Austin knew when he was being talked down to.