“To me,” she said, “you are still nothing more than a little boy who is just like a hundred thousand other little boys. And I have no need of you. And you, on your part, have no need of me . . . . But if you tame me, then we shall need each other.”
The words call Mara to mind. Downstairs, oblivious to where I am, what I’m looking for—I’m not quite sure I know myself. Connections, I suppose. Between Beth and Sam. Between them and me.
I halfheartedly open my mum’s other books. Pictures slide out of them, many of her and friends—rarely do I find one of her alone. There’s this rare, magnetic thing about her that transcends the two dimensions of the photograph and catches me under my breastbone. It’s nearly impossible to look away.
Most parents, when asked why they want to have children, say that they want to raise a child to be happy. To be healthy. To be wanted. To be loved.
That is not why I had you.
Those are the words she wrote me, from the letter the professor had and sent to me. They’re branded in my memory. Her handwriting, elegant and frantic script:
Do not find peace.
Find passion.
Find something you want to die for more than something you want to live for.
Fight for those who cannot fight for themselves.
Speak for them.
Scream for them.
Live and die for them.
That was what she wanted for me. Not happiness. Not peace.
I shove her books back into the trunk, lock it, and pocket the key.
She certainly got her wish.
14
PLEASURES AND PAINS, THEIR KINDS
AS I LEAVE THE OFFICE, I run into Mara on the stairs.
“You,” she says.
“Me.”
“You vanished.”
“I did.”
“Pretty quickly.”
“That obvious?”
“To me,” she says, then rises on her toes to kiss me . . . or to look past my shoulder at the now-closed door.
“What’s in there?”
“I had some stuff sent over from England.”
“Stuff?”
“Papers and things. All the laughing and drinking downstairs made me a bit homesick.”
“Liar.”
“I take offence.”
“Keep taking it,” she says. “What were you doing in there, really?”
She knows me too well. “I thought I might go through some of it, see if I can find anything mentioning Sam’s family.”
“Did you? Find anything, I mean?” Her eyes dart from me to the door again.
“Not tonight.”
She tilts her head toward the stairs. “Everyone left while you were gone.”
I take a step closer to her. “Did they, now.”
“Goose went back to the Gansevoort for another night or two, and Jamie went back to his aunt’s. He’s going to think about it.”
“About . . . ?”
“Moving in.” She narrows her eyes. “You invited him to live here, remember?”
“Sorry, I’m rather tired.” I regret the lie as soon as I speak it—Mara sees through it immediately.
“What’s going on, Noah?” She twists a finger in the hem of her T-shirt, dark grey with a brontosaurus pictured below the words THEY’LL NEVER FIND US.
I run my hand through my hair. “I don’t know.”
“Are you ever going to tell me? What you saw?”
“Yes.”
“When?”
“Tomorrow.”
She bites her lower lip, but she’s really biting back words. I close the space between us and kiss her before she can speak.
Her body is stiff at first, but she begins to melt in seconds. Just as she reaches for the back of my neck, I pull away and ask, “Have you seen the rest of the flat?”
A single shake.
“Would you like to?”
A single nod.
“Follow.” I turn away from her and pass the office without opening the door.
We turn the first corner. “How many bedrooms did you say there are?”
“Six.”
“Which one’s ours?”
“Tonight, all of them,” I say, and stop. She crashes into me and I catch her, pulling her hair gently, leaning to kiss the hollow below her ear. “And the living room.” My hand slides up under her T-shirt. “And the dining room.”
She bites my lower lip. “The pool table.”
“The kitchen,” I say as she rakes her hand through my hair.
“Show me.”
Breaking apart is excruciating. I grip her small hand tightly enough to shatter it—she’s holding mine just as hard. I don’t even need to turn on the hall lights—the moon and the city are bright enough to guide us.
We take the stairs again to the top floor. There are two rooms; only one has a bed, I know, because the other, I tell Mara, is to be her studio, if she wants.
“What I want is you,” she says. She pulls me inside the bare room, the ceiling punched through with three skylights. The night is clear enough and we’re high up enough to see stars.
I tug her back out. “Come.”
“I’d like to, but—”
“Cheeky,” I say, and open the next door. “Careful, or I may have to punish you.”
“Why didn’t you say so?” she says, seeing the white bed in the centre of the room, surrounded by view. She pries her hand from mine and backs up against it. There’s a large beveled glass floor mirror in one corner of the room, reflecting the city. Reflecting us. She glances over her shoulder at it, then me.
“You’ve thought of everything.”
“I’m sure I don’t know what you mean.”
She hitches up onto the bed, her fraying denimed legs dangling from crossed knees. “You know I know you like to watch.”
I reach her. Uncross those legs. “I do.”
“So”—her voice juicy with malice—“watch.”
I lean in to kiss her, and she pulls her head away and gently pushes me back. “Nope. From there.”
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, how could I ever love anyone else?
She slays me, slipping out of her shirt, the city lights kiss her skin but I can’t, not yet. She lies back on the bed so I can see the rise of her breasts as she lifts her hips to slide off her jeans. The clink of the button on the wood floor rings in my ears.
Down to a simple black bra and plain black boy-shorts and she’s still wearing too much. We both are. I start to pull my shirt up and over my shoulders until I hear, “No.”
I hear her breath and blood moving under her skin, a spiralling ache that matches mine, and it gives me a kick of surprise—it feels like ages since I’ve heard her last. Watching the fast rise and fall of her chest, I know she’s as tortured as I am. The power of her fizzes my blood, the lure of me burns hers.
This is not our first time, but it’s our first time here, in this place that’s ours, in this new age of us. And even though every second with Mara is different, this is different from even that. She knows it too. She takes off what she’d left on, and the swollen air between us weighs a thousand pounds. My muscles strain under the pressure of not touching her, but when she reaches up for me, I say no. I do what she did, but instead of extending that excruciating wait, I climb onto the bed. Even in the dark I can see her flushed cheeks, her berry-stained lips parted, the few scattered freckles that dust her cheeks. I don’t touch her skin, but I fill my hand with her hair, and let the strands that look like double helices fall from my fingers, the dusky city light making the few amber strands in her dark hair shine. I’m getting high on the scent of her, when she says, “We’re home.”
If I’d been standing, her words would have brought me to my knees. She touches me first, pressing her palm against the back of my neck.
Her touch throws off sparks of colours I’ve never seen and notes I’ve never heard, and I slide her beneath me and press my mouth to hers. The feel of her tongue sings hig
h in my ears, but her body is low and purring. When she moves, I move with her. She shimmers with heat, that tortured ache rising in both of us as I get drunk on the taste of her. The sounds she’s making are dizzying, and when I hitch her long, lovely, coltish limbs around my waist, she’s shivering and—
If I believed in God I would pray, beg, anything to stop time, to live in this moment with her forever. Tonight is a perfect thing in a broken world, and she is the queen of it. Her pleasure, searing white, arrows through mine, and I would let the Earth ice over to keep the sun from rising, but after hours of her, it rises anyway, sunlight staining our sheets, our skin. After, I fall asleep with Mara in my arms.
I wake up in someone else’s mind.
15
UNIMPROVED END
IT’S A BOY, THIS TIME. His longish mouse brown hair lies on the pillow, sideways, as was my view, which was slitted. His brain is clouded, heavy, and the stench of sick permeates his nostrils.
On his nightstand, among books and pictures and empty glasses, are clusters of bottles; phenobarbital, Klonopin, Benadryl, alprazolam, Vicodin, and clorazepate. Who knows how many he took? He probably doesn’t even know himself. He just recognises the feeling in his stomach, and in his head, and he’s trying not to throw up again.
I can’t hear his thoughts, but after the others, a space has opened up in my mind, and I try and cast around for something, anything, to tell me who he is. Why he’s doing this. Where he’s doing this so I can—
“Noah!” Small fingers grip my shoulders, bruisingly hard. The film of his reality slips, and when I open my eyes, it’s Mara’s face that I see.
“What’s wrong?” I ask her, sitting up. I feel sluggish, hazy, but here. Normal.
Her face becomes mask of disbelief. “You were having a nightmare. You were curled up and your shoulders were heaving and I thought—I thought you were having a seizure.”
Maybe he was having a seizure. Epilepsy would explain some of those drugs . . . .
“What happened?” Her eyes narrow, search my face.
“I saw someone die.”
“How?”
“He overdosed,” I say, and hesitate just a fraction of a second before adding, “On purpose.”
Her hands round into fists in the sheets as her spine straightens. “So, that’s three now.”
I get out of bed, begin getting dressed. Technically, she’s right, but there’s something different about the boy I just saw. Or rather, not different. “This wasn’t like the other night, with that girl. Or in England.”
She’s out of bed now too, the sheet wrapped around her body. Her arms are crossed. “Tell me.”
I sit back down on the bed, staring out at the Manhattan Bridge. “I could hear their thoughts,” I begin. “The girl who jumped the tracks, her name was Beth. She played piano.”
I struggle for words to explain what it feels like to inhabit someone else. To see what they see in their worst moments, to smell what they smell, and to live their experience—it’s not a gift. It’s a curse.
“What about Sam?” Mara asks.
I itch for distraction. Could do with a cigarette. I exhale slowly. “His last thoughts were ‘Help me help me help me,’ over and over again, until his mind went black.”
Her face loses its expression. She turns quickly and reaches for her shirt from last night, pulls on jeans.
“I couldn’t help him, Mara. I wouldn’t even know Beth’s name if she hadn’t thought it before she died.”
She’s quiet still, with her back to me.
“What?” I ask her.
She looks at me over her shoulder, fakes a smile. “Nothing.”
“Liar.”
She smiles again, a real one this time. “I take offence.”
“Keep taking it,” I say, and try forcing a smile but can’t quite manage it. “I don’t know what he was thinking. I felt the way I usually do when someone like us dies.”
Mara doesn’t flinch at that, and I love her more for it. “So, still no idea who he was, then?”
I search my memory for the still frames I sweep away after each death, those collages of misery. The pill bottles on the nightstand all have different names on them, different doctors, different addresses—
One of them matches the one scrawled on my arm. In imaginary fucking ink.
Fuck. Fuck.
“What?” Mara’d been watching me. Closely.
I regret saying the words before I even speak them, but it’s too late to lie. “There’s—I think I might know where he lived.”
“Really?”
“He took pills—there’s an address on one of the bottles.” I slip my wallet into my back pocket, head for the doorway. “I’m going to go.”
Mara slips something into her pocket. “No, we’re going to go.”
“All right, we’re going to go,” I say, but Mara hasn’t moved.
“All of us.”
“All of . . . whom?”
“You weren’t the only one who saw Beth die.”
“No . . .”
“We should tell everyone.”
“Everyone in the subway that night? The police, the random—”
“You know who I mean. Daniel. Jamie.”
I could talk to Daniel. He’s sort of become the brother I never had, and never knew I actually wanted, but more than that, he’s distanced from this—from me—in a way Mara isn’t. I can tell him about the suicides, and he might be able to help draw a connection without drawing a line through Mara.
Jamie, however . . . The issue of the professor scratches at my mind. “Why?”
“Because Daniel’s my brother, and—”
“I mean, why Jamie?”
“He was there.”
“On the platform, yes, we’ve established that—you want to tell Sophie as well?”
“God, Noah, stop. Jamie was there for everything. We were lab rats together with Stella, we had to break out of that fucking place together, we had to get to New York on our own together, with no money, and ended up exactly where your father wanted us. He was there.”
And I was not. Guilt heats the back of my neck.
“And he’s our friend, and the most loyal person I know. You want him to move in with us, for fuck’s sake!”
Not because I trust him, necessarily. Possibly in part because I don’t.
I give her a look, arrogant, condescending. “It can’t have escaped your notice that he’s wearing the pendant.”
“So?”
“Haven’t you ever wondered what was in his letter?”
Mara goes still.
“Jamie’s never mentioned it? What the professor wrote to him?”
“Why would he?”
“He couldn’t get his pendant on fast enough, as I remember it.”
“What are you saying?”
The air feels bruised, and I press on it. “Our friend’s thrown his lot in with someone who goes on about fate and destiny and made it quite plain that he’d like to use us as tools. Weapons, even, perhaps.” That’s a trigger of hers, and I pull it.
Her voice flattens out. “He doesn’t want to use me as a weapon.”
“No, he wants you to leave me instead.”
“And we decided to ignore him.”
“We did,” I say. “But that doesn’t mean he decided to ignore us.” That thought tramples every other. “We’re talking about a man who literally manipulated and lied to generations of my family and yours in order to breed us. He said it was our decision, our choice to make, whether we wanted to help him achieve his vision for a better world. We said no. Jamie said yes.”
“Do you want to know what Jamie said after you went down on the platform?”
“I’ve a feeling you’re going to tell me regardless.”
“After he helped me get you into a cab—you don’t remember that, do you? Leaning on Jamie because you could barely stand?”
I don’t remember it, and I’m glad of it. It’s shameful enough that it happened
in the first place.
“He said he could kill whoever’s doing this to you.”
“No one’s doing anything to me.” And why was murder where his mind went, after a girl, a stranger, supposedly committed suicide?
“Really? So you’re fine, then?”
“I’m alive. Beth and Sam aren’t.”
“Oh, okay, cool.”
“Don’t patronise me—it’s unbecoming.” Mara looks like she wants to hit me. I hope she does. “What makes you think what’s happening to them has anything to do with me? You want to tell your brother and Jamie, fine. Tell them. But the boy who killed himself this morning, he wasn’t like Sam, or Beth. They didn’t want to die. He did.”
“How do you know?”
I can’t explain it, the difference between the suicides I’ve witnessed before. It’s the difference between a kicked wasp’s nest and a hanging beehive, between violence and free will. “He wanted to die, Mara. I wish he hadn’t taken his own life, but it’s done now, and I’m not going to violate his dignity by bringing a parade of strangers to his home, or wherever he is, to pick through his life.”
“So, it’s cool as long as it’s just you? By yourself? Fuck that. It’s all of us or none of us. Your choice.”
“I choose not to choose.”
“Then I choose all of us,” Mara says. She crosses over to her mobile, to text Daniel and Jamie, presumably. And I let her. Because I love her anyway.
“He wouldn’t love you if you weren’t what you are.”
Father’s words, haunting me still, wherever I go.
16
EVEN IN PARADISE
WE’RE GATHERED HERE TODAY TO talk about some shit,” Mara says to Daniel and Jamie, having collected and deposited them in the sun-white living room.
“What shit?”
“Ours.”
Jamie looks from me to Daniel to Mara. “I don’t have any shit.”
“You’re full of shit, actually,” Mara says brightly. “But this isn’t about you.” She pats Jamie on the head, and he pouts as he swats her hand.
“It’s about the girl,” I cut in, before they have another go at each other. “From the subway the other day.”