“I think we should stay the night,” said Will, cutting the silence.
“You’re kidding,” Jonah said.
“What if we come back tomorrow and he’s gone? We won’t be able to ask him about Marcus. Plus they hit him in the head, too, Jonah. You know concussions better than I do. What if we leave and he doesn’t wake up?”
Jonah regarded him seriously. “One thing I’ve learned is that there isn’t enough help in the world for some people.”
“Come on, Doc, you don’t really believe that,” Will said. “Or are you planning on choosing all your patients?”
“It’s called triage, Will, look it up,” Jonah said. “I want to be a family doctor,” he added, “not a mortician.”
For a quiet minute the boys watched little birds flit in and out of the birdhouses, brimming with seed and grain. Will had once believed Jonah was fearless, but lately he’d detected in his friend a coastal shelf of fear sunk to a depth to which no person could hope to dive.
“Please, Jonah?” Will said, trying not to sound pathetic like his mother at the door. “You didn’t have to tell me to walk away that day by the creek or jump on that wolf. But you risked yourself then. And Marcus did the same for you the night he went missing. This might be our only chance to save him. But I need you. I have this feeling that we’ll be safe as long as we’re together, that nothing can really hurt us.”
“You’re sounding more like Marcus every day,” Jonah said shaking his head, half-smiling. Then he grimaced with disbelief at what he was about to agree to. “Won’t your mom be worried?” he said.
Will laughed. “Naw, she’ll be fine,” he said.
“Well I’m not crawling into one of those,” Jonah said, gesturing to the remaining sleeping bags on the mattress. He took a drag from an imaginary cigarette, then blew a puff of frost toward the ceiling. “We’ll need heat,” he said. “There’s plenty of burnable wood down there.”
“But do you think what he said about the gas from the grain is real?” said Will. They both regarded the man again, his rough mouth hanging wide and loose, his skin papery with scars and caked grain dust.
“I don’t think so,” said Jonah. “An elevator blew up down here like forever ago. But we’d know about it if it still happened.” The boys marched back downstairs and returned with an armload of scrap wood, Jonah passing it to Will through the boiler.
“Maybe they haven’t blown up because nobody is in them, except people like him …,” said Will, thinking of his dead uncle Charlie as Jonah was loading the stove, cursing himself for not paying more attention to Mr. Miller’s history speeches.
Jonah stood with his lighter held up in the air, thumb poised. “Ready?” he said.
In an instant Will was looking at the match bomb Marcus had set off in his front yard, the life-changing bang that had started it all, and he realized now that if he’d learned anything, it was that the Outside was one gigantic Destructivity Experiment. “Do it.”
Then came a raspy flick that made Will’s scalp prickle and his throat swell like a stepped-on balloon. Jonah waved the flame aloft and made the sound of a roaring crowd. “Thank you, Thunder Bay!” he said, then killed it with a quick puff.
With the stove lit and the windows mostly intact, the room grew warm. For a while the boys talked in the glow of the small fire, mostly about skateboarding—tricks they were amassing the courage to try, legendary falls they’d withstood—in an effort to normalize the situation. Will knew that boys their age would default into a discussion of girls at these moments—a comparison of their respective kisses with Angela, perhaps—but this subject never arose between them. Lately at school, a few girls, weirdly entranced by the boys’ apartness, their withdrawal, their griminess and scars, had been slipping notes into their desks. Though sometimes just a glimpse of a girl’s velvety collarbone under her tank top strap was enough to force Will to tuck himself discreetly into the waistband of his pants, Will and Jonah tore the notes to bits. While Will retained a secret loyalty to Angela, having an actual girlfriend seemed an unjustifiable risk, if only because she could turn out like his mother.
Before long, Jonah drifted off near the stove, his head propped by his skateboard and neatly folded jacket, his breath precise and easy. During the Wheezing Man’s patchy sleep and fugues of muttering incoherence, sometimes his eyes would bolt open and fix blankly upon Will as he called out strange names. He murmured of birds and ghosts, of cables and wires binding him, of ships and trains, of blood and water, of people being hurt, healed, and hurt again. Will lay there, remembering all the times he’d coached his mother down from the panicked summits of Mount Black Lagoon, the times he’d found her babbling on the floor in Venice, baffled with terror, her nightgown soaked in her own urine, and he detected the familiar tenor of her voice in the Wheezing Man’s raving, a sound that was oddly comforting. He thought then about his Outside life—how vividly he could conjure all that had happened so far, how at night his dreams were dazzling carnivals and his days lasted years—and felt so lucky that he nearly exploded. Even if his mother was right and the Outside was unthinkably dangerous, he was desperately in love with all of it.
After a while, Will gave up on listening and let the man’s words flood over him. And as Will’s own eyes drooped, he felt as though he could be just as easily thinking these things himself, the man’s pained dreams tinting his own like paint upon his palette, now sitting so far away in New York.
19
The boys woke in the chilled morning, the Wheezing Man still chloroformed with sleep.
They loaded the stove silently and lit it. Parched, they considered drinking from Will’s water bottle, the same one the man had sipped from and refused the previous night, but decided against it because of AIDS. Jonah stood watch while Will examined the man’s things but found nothing he could imagine had been Marcus’s.
Eventually, his eyes shot open and he struggled upright. “I reckon I can commence smoking tobacco again,” he said when he noted the coals flickering in the stove. He tried to stand, then looked down at his legs and seemed surprised by them. “Some specter put a crushing on me a doctor wouldn’t forget,” he said.
“It was the Butler who beat you,” Will said, approaching him cautiously. “Because you helped Marcus, and he thinks you know where he is, right?”
Some kind of confusion took him when he saw Will’s face. He managed to nod.
“Do you know where Marcus is now?” Will said, speaking slowly.
The Wheezing Man shook his head. “Met Aurelius scurrying around this structure. Exploring, he termed it. Took a shining to him. Sheltered him for a spell. Gave him some tribulations. Hauling, shoveling. Paid him staunchly for it. One day he said he had a thing to accomplish. Promised to resurface before he set out. But since then been no word. No dissertation. Nothing,” he said before shutting his eyes and murmuring incoherently into his pillow.
“So he could come back anytime?” Will said excitedly. “But what if the Butler finds you here? You’re helpless.”
He shook his head. “Doesn’t survey this little dwelling. His wolves drop the scent over that bridge and the ashes in the boiler. That doesn’t mean you boys shouldn’t vacate.”
“His bleeding has stopped. And he doesn’t have a concussion,” Jonah said.
“Do you have food? If we leave you?” asked Will.
The Wheezing Man glanced at the window near the birdfeeders. “I’ll do fine,” he said. “But what’d keep me propped up, boys, would be some unblighted for my substrates.”
“Un … blighted?” said Will.
“Lakes aren’t all one water,” he said, dragging himself up over to the window. “This cove is all taint. Solely rats and sicknesses imbibe themselves here. You boys trample up the shore to where the factories and the wharves discontinue. There you fetch me some unblighted.”