Jack always did that, too.
Inventory time: a T-shirt. My fingertip snared inside a hole over my belly. I could feel my skin. I felt smaller, empty. Jeans. I ran my hands over the thick metal buttons.
Where is this, Jack?
You’ve been here before.
Think.
Everything felt clean, not like it was after scrambling out from the Under and then surviving for days on horseback in the desert. And I became aware of my feet, that I was wearing shoes without any socks.
These were not Jack’s clothes.
A phone began ringing.
Double rings.
I knew this sound.
I was in England again.
Somebody pick up that goddamned phone.
I moaned, tried to sit, but my head weighed as much as a fire truck.
Something crashed to the floor. The phone.
The noise was so loud it almost hurt, but at least the ringing stopped.
And somewhere, Henry said, “Fucking hell.”
“Henry?”
“Where are you?”
I put my hands down on either side of my hips and pushed myself up, so I sat with my spine pressed into the doorjamb.
“On the fucking floor.”
Every day is just like being born again.
I looked at the smear of blood I’d wiped across the floor beneath my palm. I was in Henry’s apartment. In London.
Sitting in the doorway between the bedroom and the toilet.
And it was raining outside.
Maybe this was it, I thought.
Maybe this was really it, and Jack was home.
And maybe I’d step outside into a wriggling mass of those fucking worms.
The clothes I wore belonged to Ander, Nickie’s younger brother. I remembered how I’d shown up at their house, soaked from the rain, and he’d given me his stuff—jeans, a T-shirt, tennis shoes, and a jacket—so I had to go barefoot inside his shoes, with no underwear, too, and Nickie took all my clothes from me, so she could launder them.
Ander’s black T-shirt that said THE RAMONES on it. I stared at a small circle of pale skin where there was a finger-sized hole over my belly.
This had to be it.
I was home.
And that night, maybe it was tonight when I showed up drenched from the rain at Nickie’s front door, I remembered that I had the lens in my pocket. Lost and found, after Conner and I got into a fight on the beach in Blackpool.
I could feel it there now.
This had to be it.
I was home.
Henry’s feet moved, covered in sheets and blankets, twisted around on his bed.
“Are you okay?” I said.
His hand swung over and dropped onto the small stand where he’d knocked down the phone.
“Fuck. I need a cigarette.”
Paper and cellophane rumpled in Henry’s hand. For some reason, the sound turned my stomach. Then came the grating friction wheel of a lighter, and I could almost smell the metallic spark that preceded the flame, before the sucking sound, the burning of paper and tobacco. And all this over the sickening and constant percolation from a bubbling, lukewarm aquarium.
I had to throw up.
Welcome home, boys.
I leaned forward and dog-crawled to Henry’s toilet, tracking a smeared palm print of blood along his floor.
When I got up, I washed my face. I wound a strip of toilet paper around my hand and squeezed it shut, but the bleeding didn’t slow at all. Then I went back to the bedroom.
The place was a mess. I stumbled over the canvas jacket I’d been wearing—Ander’s—and kicked it onto a pile of newspapers. There were clothes, food wrappers, trash, scattered everywhere around Henry’s bed. The room looked like a place where junkies had spent the last few days cooking their brains out.
It was night, and through the rain-smeared panes of curtainless glass I could see rows of lighted windows from the apartments across the street, yellow rectangles blazing against the featureless silhouetted masonry of row housing.
I knew where this was.
The aquarium sat bubbling on a low dresser with three wide drawers. Its inner glass was so overgrown and blackened with algae that I couldn’t tell if there was anything at all swimming inside it.
Henry sat on the bed with his feet on the floor. He faced away from the window, smoking.
I shook my head. “How can you do that right now?”
“What? This?” Henry held his cigarette out in front of his eyes. I could see how pleased he was smoking it. It must have felt like years since he’d had the last one, even if it may have only been half a minute.
“Cigarettes stop me from puking. You should try one.”
He inhaled again.
I tripped over something, took two steps toward the bed, and sat down.
“Is this it? Are we done?”
Henry looked around, taking stock. I guess we all did that.
“This is it.” Henry nodded. “Home. Thank you, Jack.”
I ran my uninjured hand over my legs, pulling the denim away from my thighs. I didn’t want Henry to notice the shape of the lens in my pocket. Maybe he couldn’t go back now, anyway. Maybe neither one of us could.
And I didn’t want to ruin it for him. Henry was relieved, happy as he sat there smoking his cigarette, but I knew something had to be wrong. I expected it. The lens was still broken. And my hand was bleeding.
And something else.
I was supposed to have my cell phone in my pocket.
I remembered it being in the pocket of these same jeans the night Nickie hung up on me. I knew exactly where I sat—on a greasy bench in the Green Park Station—when she told me to leave her alone. I felt my pocket, but I knew my phone wasn’t in it.
Henry watched me. “What’s wrong?”
“I thought I had my phone.”
I looked at the jacket I’d kicked on the floor, calculating the distance, the number of footsteps. It was difficult to coordinate my arms and legs. I wanted to lie down.
Something was wrong.
Henry stood. He was a mess.
Henry was always a mess—unshaven, with the feeblest scrub of facial hair dotting his jaw, a dingy white T-shirt twisted uncomfortably around his emaciated frame, spider arms, burgundy corduroy pants that hung in draping columns over his knees and leg bones. “I believe I’ve got some beer in the fridge. Want one?”
“Huh? Oh. Yeah.”
Henry padded out the doorway. A light came on in the living room. I could hear him moving things, the clinking of glass, cupboard doors opening—all nauseating sounds that hovered like some avant-garde orchestral score above the flat, droning accompaniment of the aquarium. I picked up Ander’s jacket, knew by its weight that my phone had to be in a pocket somewhere.
Found it.
Henry came back, carrying two glasses. He pressed a light switch with an elbow.
I cupped my phone in my bandaged hand, took the beer in the other.
“What happened there?” Henry extended a finger from the side of his glass, pointed at the wrapping of tissue around my hand.
“Nothing,” I said. “I got cut.”
Henry’s brow pinched together, like he was thinking about something, remembering. Then he said, “Cheers,” and clinked his glass into mine.
I drank to the bottom of the glass without stopping. I don’t think I’d ever tasted anything as good in my life. Then I thought about what that meant. My life. What life? This life now? This life was only about five minutes old. The water in the fucking aquarium would have tasted just as good.
Henry drained his glass, too.
A couple newborns.
He said, “I’ll get more,” and took the glass from my hand.
It all looked the same. Henry’s apartment smelled the same. Sweat, cigarettes, and damp wool.
I followed Henry into the main room. I stood there in the doorway, watching him. I flipped open my phone.
Do you really want to do this, Jack?
This was Jack’s phone.
In the center of the universe that Jack built.
I checked the recent calls.
There were two calls to Nickie.