And Marcel and Vasco need not synchronize their steps as they lead the way down to the shore. And Durga has no need to stop to catch her breath as she follows. No, the tribe realizes this is, indeed, the last chapter. Realizes that there are no more Goldfaden Freaks. It is, suddenly, a story ready only to recede into a suspect history.
They break in two, their feet in the water up to their ankles and no more. Bruno walks between their columns, coffin lid under his arm like a surfboard. He places the lid on the surface of the water, puts a palm on it and makes sure it will float, and then he holds it in place as it bobs, trying to ride the gentle current pulling outward.
Kitty comes to the water now, her Chick in her arms. She wades in to her waist and the water laps up to her breasts. Bruno grips the lid with both hands and it fights him. Kitty places her love on his back, on the wood. She leans down, brings her mouth to the hard beak that she has known so well for so long. The kiss lingers and Bruno must take one hand from the board and place it on Kitty’s shoulder. She straightens, as her whole body heaves. Behind her, someone, maybe Jeta, maybe Aziz, begins to keen with a kind of grief that the world has not known in ages.
Bruno takes this as a sign to let go. He shoves the coffin lid into the current and the body of the chicken boy begins to float off toward the horizon. The rising sun neither mocks nor comforts. The gulls begin to follow the tiny barge. The erstwhile freaks fall to their knees, one by one, the surf swirling in their laps. They make themselves study the progress of the barge through blurring vision.
The last picture of the last issue of Limbo is a close-up of the chicken boy’s face, eyes open but lifeless, the rising sun looming in the upper right-hand corner of the frame. Inked below the face is the last message from the artist and author, from the creator of Limbo.
Not everyone
it reads
is meant to be normal.
Not every story
it reads
has a happy ending.
27
The final picture loses focus and stability, turns into a piece of carnival spin art, as Danny throws the comic book into the air. It hits the poster above his bed and knocks it to the floor.
What comes next is a moment that someone with medical knowledge might term fugue. Danny sits up as if prodded by electricity. But then he holds in place. Were he a cartoon boy, and were we able to remove the back of his skull like the lid of a cookie jar, we might see a literal overload of circuits, a convulsion of charges running too fast or too slow, but all in the wrong direction. This lost moment lasts under three seconds. And when it ends, the boy begins to scream.
At that moment, Kerry is in the kitchen, mixing up a homemade yogurt dressing for her salad. But Sweeney can’t see this. He still can see only the squint-compressed vision of his son, his cartoon boy, in the midst of a nonsensical rage that has him shredding the Limbo pillow on his bed.
This is when Kerry enters the picture. She runs into the room to find the air filling rapidly with white and gray feathers. She tries to yell over Danny’s screams.
“What’s wrong?” she cries. “Danny, what’s wrong?”
Sweeney knows the look of growing panic on her face. He hadn’t seen it often but the few times it did appear made an impression. Danny throws what’s left of the pillow at his mother. It hits her in the chest, falls to the floor. She moves to the bed, tries to grab the boy, her sweet, sunny child, who is pounding his bedroom wall hard enough to bloody his fist and to poke a hole in the plaster, using his stubby fingernails to tear off the Limbo wallpaper. Kerry climbs up onto the bed, grabs Danny around the waist, manages to turn him toward her. He is hysterical and enraged and incoherent. Kerry is on her knees, level with him, and Danny hauls off and hits her across the face.
Stunned, she releases the boy and he jumps, animallike, off the bed in one leap and flees the room, but not before he runs his arm down the length of his little bureau, sending Limbo lamp and Limbo coin bank and chicken boy action figure to the floor in a pile of glass and ceramic shards.
“Danny,” the mother screams, now terrified.
She chases the boy into the hall, where he’s catapulting himself from wall to wall, kicking and screeching and punching, trying to break and gouge everything he sees. He runs into his parents’ bedroom, grabs a cast-iron doorstop from the floor, somehow hoists it and heaves it. The mirror above the dresser shatters as Kerry steps into the room. And on the heels of her disbelief comes her own outrage and anger.
“Danny,” she screams at him, “what is wrong with you?”
He dashes past her but manages to kick her in the shin. It shocks more than hurts — he’s not wearing his shoes. Kerry runs after him, catches up with her son on the second-floor landing, at the mouth of the stairway. She snatches an arm and goes down on one knee in the same motion. Danny flails, spitting, screaming, wailing. When he realizes he is caught, again he pulls back an arm and again he arcs it with all his might across his mother’s face.
This one both shocks and hurts. This one dislodges her grip on rationality if only for a second or two. Which is all the time it takes for her to release the son’s arm, cock back her own, adult arm, and bring it forward to crash across the boy’s cheek.
Danny’s head snaps with the blow. It carries his body out over the stairs. He sails into the air until gravity casts him halfway down the stairwell. He falls on a wrist and it breaks, shatters, in fact, small bones fracturing, splintering into rubble. But the body continues to fall. He bounces again on the second stair, makes a quarter turn, thus positioning the head to smash on the flagstone of the foyer.
An instant and an eternity, the fadeout is tipped sideways and involves Kerry’s diminishing scream and the lake of blood that runs in a puddle until resolving into the last image — a red plain with a single bubble in its center.
And then sound and vision terminate.
SWEENEY SITS STILL for a moment and then, as if someone has whispered instructions, he stands and exits the surgical theater. When he pushes open the door he steps, not into the attic corridor, but outside into the cool salt air. At the end of the walkway, sitting on the edge of the cliff, legs dangling, he sees his chicken boy, waiting.
Sweeney joins his son on the lip of the cliff and they both stare out at the ocean for a time before Danny says, “I thought you should know what happened.”
Sweeney nods. After a while, he says, “You didn’t want the chicken boy to die.”
Danny looks at him, somewhere between exasperated and confused.
“That’s why you got so upset,” Sweeney says. “Because the chicken boy died.”
Danny remains calm, takes a breath, lets out a sigh, and shakes his head.
“I don’t know what happened to me,” he says. “But I got upset cuz the doctor changed the others. Cuz they weren’t themselves anymore.”
“But he made them normal,” Sweeney says.
Danny shakes his head and says, “Right.”
“And you didn’t want them to be normal?”
“I wanted them,” Danny says, “to stay themselves.”
Sweeney tries to think about this.
“What is it you want now, son?”
Danny looks back to the ocean and says, “I want you to forgive me. And then I want you to forgive Mom. And then I want you to stop hating yourself.”