Another light.
“Look at me,” he said. “This time, we’re staying together. This time, you’re taking me back home. Or I’ll fucking kill you, Billy.”
His words smeared like the trailing flashes of light.
Faster and faster.
“It doesn’t work that way.”
“Fuck you, Billy. Look at me.”
And Quinn held the lenses in front of my face.
I made it up to my feet. And I looked at the kid, thinking, I’m taller than you. I should fuck you up, you little prick.
But I nearly fell down.
And Quinn said, “Give me your hand, Billy.”
He swiped the glasses across my belly, flipping the green lens across the eyepiece as it dragged against my skin.
I saw things there.
Everything.
And Quinn said, “Give me your fucking hand.”
Then he yanked the bloody shirt away from my hand and slid his fingers between mine.
I heard an accordion playing.
Wind in trees.
The sound of a small wooden toy horse; rolling, tapping.
twenty-eight
I was Seth Mansfield.
* * *
I remember so clearly being him, that sometimes, lying in my own bed at home in Glenbrook, I could recall the smell of the bedding in the house where Seth slept as a boy, the particular coldness of the plank floors beneath his bare feet in the morning; the feel, awkward and scratchy, of Davey’s hand-me-down clothes against his skin.
The room at the end of the hallway, upstairs, where he and Davey’s sister, Hannah, would meet, hidden in the absolute quiet of night.
I was Seth Mansfield.
I remember the small window in Davey’s room where he slept alongside his adoptive brother, his curiosity about the great wooden hoops Ma used for stretching fabric; how they’d been stacked neatly against the wall opposite the stove in the downstairs of the house.
I thought about this when we were on the train.
Me and Quinn.
The thought was maybe a second, perhaps shorter.
A flash of light.
I remembered the wagon they rode in the day Russ and those other men took Seth and Pa out into the woods, away from Pope Valley. How the day seemed to crystallize in frozen brilliance as they tightened the rope around the boy’s neck.
I was Seth.
And I remember one time, how he and Davey started a fire atop a hill of red ants. They’d used dry grass wound together in tight yellow broom whisks, bound with strings of willow bark. And when they set fire to the brooms, Seth watched, almost hypnotized by how the orange embers would come alive, brighten, breathe, migrate up and down along the strands of grass like they were living things, and they were alive, because they could jump across the fibrils of grass, from string to string, skipping from one to another every time Davey would turn the whisk in his hand and blow.
Quinn squeezed my hand.
I couldn’t feel anything anymore, but I knew he was holding tight to my bloody hand.
And I thought, this is what it’s like to be the fire, to skip across the strings.
* * *
The train was going so fast.
Jack slumped against Quinn’s chest.
I said, “It doesn’t work this way, Quinn.”
And that was all.
* * *
Outside, in the tunnel, there is a light.
This is the arrow.
Jack is the arrow.
The light begins in the car ahead of me. It passes back like an electrified drape of blazing dust, or the train, the arrow, Jack, passes through it.
I can’t tell, and it doesn’t matter.
Sometimes, standing still is moving forward.
We are drifting through a membrane, and Seth vanishes. It’s Davey turning the wad of grass over in his hand, blowing to fan the flame.
Watch as it skips.
Instantly, through the first wall of light, Quinn disappears.
For a moment, I feel the lingering stickiness where his hand clasped the drying gum of blood. And the bleeding has stopped, but the train moves forward, silently, now, rocking, trembling.
Sunlight and color flood through the windows.
I can feel warmth.
On the other side of the glass there is a brilliant blue sky and endless undulations like the surface of a calm sea: the waving stalks of an infinite field, ablaze in green. Black stilt-poles pike up from the field, jabbing into the sky.
Crosses.
Scarecrow frames.
But these are no scarecrows.
The first is Conner.
Nickie, Ben, and Griffin follow.
Another wave of light.
Another wall.
The door ahead of me opens and a man stumbles awkwardly, drunk legs from the motion of the noiseless train, arms swimming through the air to counter the ricochet pulse of the swaying path he’s on. He comes directly toward me, his eyes pinned with such intensity to some point beyond me that I want to turn and see, but I can’t take my eyes from him.
Avery Scott.
The cop.
He stops directly in front of me.
He says, “You’re dirty. You’re a dirty fucking kid.”
Light washes down the aisle, and it pushes him forward like he’s been caught in an unexpected shorebreak.
He falls toward my feet and vanishes.
Everyone here is a ghost.
We are moving through trees. I can smell Pope Valley in the morning, in summer.
I hold my hand up. Open, close. The wound has healed, but there is still the pink gash, the jagged scar from the edge of the broken lens. I take a deep breath. I am alive again, and I am here, jumping somewhere between a burning strand and one about to catch fire with me.
When I turn back, Uncle Teddy is lying on the floor at my feet, exactly in the spot where Quinn had thrown down Ander’s bloody shirt. The preacher’s eyes are open; his chin hangs slack. But he is not breathing.
There is a hole in his side. His blood pools in the lined grooves of the rubber mat I’m standing on. Beside him, on the floor, are the glasses. They flash and wink.
Burning.
“Don’t look, Jack.”
Seth is standing at the front of the car.
“So, you’re going to talk to me now?”
He’s scared. It’s a younger Seth. The boy, standing barefoot, scrawny in his worn dungarees, shirtless. He holds the wooden horse with both hands in front of his waist.
Seth shakes his head. “This may be our last chance, Jack.”
Outside, the trees open up and I can see the sky.
It grows lighter in the train.
He pleads again, “Don’t look, Jack.”
But he’s not talking about the glasses.
And I see the two figures hanging outside.
Then it’s as if everything—the bar I’m holding on to, the seats, the train itself—all fold inside a grainy fog to vanish beneath a battering barrage of exploding lights.
Everything disappears.
And it is dark and silent, everything.
When I see, it is a line.
Somewhere away from me, a distance that could be immeasurable or a matter of inches, there is a line, frozen, exact.
I am lying on my back and I see a line of light, the color of an old man’s teeth—not yellow, not white.
Not-here.
There is searing pain in my leg. I move my hands in the dark, track them across the surface beneath me, over my body, everywhere, staring at the line of light.
Where are your clothes?
I can’t move my foot.
And I realize the light I see is the narrow space beneath a shut door.
The room is hot, dank, and smells of my own sweat, sterile plastic, and cigarette smoke.
I am tied down to a bed.
I know this place.
“Seth,” I whisper. “Seth.”
Click.
A television goes on in the other room.
I watch the light.
Everything is everywhere.
Freddie’s house.
I see the shadow moving like a bead of oil trapped in the light of the gap beneath the door. But something is wrong. Not-Freddie’s house. I am sick, cold, completely naked on this stinking mattress. I try sitting up, but it hurts. Everything hurts.