Separate Kingdoms (P.S.) Page 13

  “What the hell happened?” Bryan slapped his car lightly when he had parked and gotten out. He was tall and thin, a few years younger than Nick.

  “Fender bender.”

  “You OK?” Bryan pointed at the bump.

  “Yeah.”

  “This where your head hit?” Bryan pointed his torque wrench at the center of the crack in the windshield.

  Nick nodded. “I guess so. Or my hand maybe.” He ran his fingers over his forehead.

  “Concussion?”

  Nick shook his head. “Just a little one.”

  A few years back Bryan had been in a terrible accident; an old man pulled out in front of him on a country road. It shattered his knee, cracked his femur, and sent his girlfriend flying out the windshield and skidding twenty feet down the road. She had to have plastic surgery. But they each got a hundred grand from the insurance company. Bryan bought his Corvette, and his girlfriend left him for Florida.

  Nick realized then that they weren’t alone in the garage. In the ratty armchair near the staircase, in the shadow of a big arc welder, sat a girl with shiny red hair, cut short. She was maybe eighteen or nineteen.

  “Hi.” She waved when Nick finally noticed her.

  “That’s my sister. Bridgette.”

  “Bridge,” she said. She was holding a bottle of pinkish wine.

  Nick introduced himself. From across the room he could see that her face was cluttered with piercings. They flickered in the light when she turned her head. She was barefoot, in a stretched-out t-shirt and skirt. With her legs curled into her chest, her whole body fit easily into the chair.

  “I didn’t even know Bryan had a sister,” Nick said to the room at large.

  “Yeah, I keep her a secret.”

  “I’ve been living out west,” Bridge said.

  As Nick passed her on the way to the staircase he noticed a series of short whitish lines marking her calves. They were scars, all lined up and identical. She stared up at him with heavily made-up eyes that had been turned an unnatural bright green with contacts.

  “Take this to Mike’s on Twentieth Street,” Bryan said, slapping the car again.

  As if she had noticed and wanted to enhance Nick’s discomfort, Bridge opened her mouth, dark and pink, then flickered her tongue stud at him, so briefly he thought he must have imagined it.

  In his apartment the answering machine was picking up a call. On instinct he hustled over to it, but then stood there, trying to think of how he would explain himself. How could he say to his boss, his friends, his clients, I’ve got abnormal electrical activity in my brain?

  The caller hung up without saying anything. He put some ice in a towel and took the phone over to the couch and lay down. He turned on the TV and flipped through the channels, settling on a Bulls-Lakers game.

  The phone rang again, and he stared at it. Maybe it was the doctors, he thought suddenly. Maybe some test had come back explaining everything, showing how it was temporary, fixable—a vitamin deficiency, stress. Something psychological. He picked up the phone.

  It was Theresa. “I only wanted to know if you made it home OK. That’s all.”

  “I’m here,” he said. “I’m fine.”

  “OK,” she said, and the line went silent. “Well, OK. Good.”

  An image of her hands confronted him. She had stubby, nail-bitten hands that were always ink-stained, riddled with hangnails. And when she talked they wrestled around through the air, improvising their own sign language. He didn’t want her to hang up. He said, “I’m sorry I was so rude before.”

  “I’m sure it was a hard day.”

  On TV Kobe Bryant made a three-point shot and drew the foul. “You never answered my question, before.”

  “No, I didn’t,” she said.

  “Well?”

  “What was the question again?”

  “Have you been to that new restaurant by the river?” he said.

  And then there was the beeping sound of a call long dead. “Shit.” He looked at the phone in his hand. He’d slipped away, gotten lost, and right in front of her. He called her back, and her phone rang four times, five times, six. Not even voice mail.

  “Idiot.” The ice had melted some and was dripping down the side of his head onto the couch cushions. He set the mess down on the coffee table and probed the bump with his fingers. He wished the skin were broken. If it could bleed a little, he thought, the bump might go down and be invisible by morning. He had a sales pitch in Peoria tomorrow. Of course it wasn’t that kind of bump, though. It was firm, solid; no amount of bloodletting would delete it.

  Nick went into the bathroom to inspect it. Though the bump was the result, not the cause of his blackout, he felt like placing the blame there. It was still numb from the ice, but when he pushed down hard enough he could tell it was tender and bruised. He pressed again, this time with the heel of his hand to spread the pain across his forehead.

  “Yup.” Across the knuckles of his right hand another bruise was blooming, where he figured he must have smacked the windshield or the dashboard.

  The painkillers weren’t in the bathroom so he started searching the cabinets, but in the middle of this the lights flickered and failed. It was dark.

  His heart surged; his back started sweating. This was it, he was going under again.

  He could hear every last little sound on the block. Traffic and rain and heartbeat commingled. The A/C unit started making dripping noises. Wait. He was here, awake. It wasn’t his head, but the power. A power outage.

  He groped his way down the stairs to the garage. Bryan and Bridge had pulled the couch and chair over by the garage doors and were sitting near the opening, just out of the rain, watching the storm evolve.

  “God’s telling us to take a break,” Bryan said.

  “There’s lightning.” Bridge patted the couch cushion next to her. “Have a seat.”

  Nick slouched into the sofa reluctantly and tried not to stare at her. She had a series of silver hoops threaded through the side of her right eyebrow. There must have been six or seven of them. A thick silver bullring hung from between her nostrils. “Have you guys got any painkillers, by chance?” he said.

  Bryan handed Nick a beer from the twelve-pack on the floor, and Bridge rifled through her bag, boasting about her resourcefulness. She pulled out a passport, a ruler, a toothbrush, a switch-blade—she had all the essentials of life in there. She shook the bag up and down near her ear, listening.

  “Aha.” With a flourish she pulled out two bottles—Tylenol and Advil.

  Nick pointed at the Tylenol.

  “How many?”

  Nick didn’t know. “Two?”

  “I usually go for three,” she said. “It’s quite a bump.” She stretched her hand out to his head slowly, as if preparing to pet a mean cat. Nick leaned away.

  “OK.”

  “Actually…” She pulled out another small bottle and waved it at him. “These are some kind of homeopathic remedy thing.” Nick decided to stick with the Tylenol.

  The sky cracked open in a flash, and they all ducked their heads to see more of the storm through the garage doors.

  “Getting closer,” Bryan said.

  “Maybe we should order a pizza,” Bridge said.

  Nick felt one of the pills stuck in his throat and swallowed hard against it. “I’m in.”

  By ten o’clock they’d run out of beer and the storm had passed, but the power hadn’t come on. Nick went up to his apartment with a flashlight and found a bottle of Scotch a client had given him. He flashed the light at his answering machine, wondering if Theresa had called back, what she was thinking of him, if anything. But of course the machine was dead. Nick imagined her over in a little house with her dog, alone with her collages in the dark. He dialed her number again; she had called him first, after all. That was something. And maybe this whole episode today, the mixup with the hospital contacting her, maybe it was fate. Maybe, as people said, things happened for a reason. But she didn�
��t answer.

  Back downstairs, Bryan said, “I hate that stuff,” when he saw the Scotch.

  “Me too.” Nick poured three glasses anyway. He had felt pretty good since the Tylenol and the beer, and was almost entirely adapted to Bridge’s piercings, though he still had trouble keeping his eyes from the scars. She had them on her triceps too. They were having a good time though, the three of them, and Nick hadn’t had a single episode, as far as he could tell. Maybe the faulty circuits of his brain weren’t getting worse. Maybe he’d just had an exceptionally bad day and tomorrow his life would do the right thing and ease on back toward normal.

  “I wish we could go to a movie,” Bridge said.

  “Too late,” Bryan said.

  “I know. You should get a home theater.”

  “Yeah,” Bryan said idly, as if he just hadn’t found the time yet.

  Bridge told them about her friend Moon in Portland who had spent two years in a state forest, as a park ranger, with no TV, hardly any radio, just trees and trees. “She came out of it totally changed,” Bridge said. “A revelation, you know? First thing she did was buy a home theater with all the money she’d saved.” Bridge went on for a while, telling them how this Moon had decided to apply to film school and devote her life to making nature documentaries that people could watch instead of going camping. “Think about it,” Bridge said. She spoke with a slight lisp from the stud in her tongue. “It’s ecotourism squared. Nobody even has to ruffle the leaves. You send in a couple small camera crews, and everybody can just stay home, camp out on the living room floor with these videos in. No bugs. No littering. No spoiling the animals’ habitat.”

  She leaned back proudly, to let Moon’s dream sink in.

  “That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard,” Bryan said.

  “Shut up. This could be the wave of the future.”

  “Virtual camping,” Bryan said. “Right.”

  “What do you think?” She nudged Nick’s leg.

  “I don’t know.” Nick didn’t like to take sides. “I guess anything’s possible.”

  “See?” she said to Bryan.

  He ignored her. He was slouched so thoroughly in the armchair that only his head was still vertical and his Scotch glass balanced easily on his stomach.

  The rain had stopped but the pavement outside still shined wet in the streetlights. Occasionally a truck or an old car would drive by, the mist hissing up behind it.

  “So that’s why I had to leave town,” Bridge said.

  Nick blinked at her, then at Bryan, who was dozing soundly, his Scotch glass resting safely on the floor beside him. It had happened again. What had he missed?

  “Pardon?” Nick said.

  “You’re such a space case. I’m not going to repeat the whole thing.”

  “I’m sorry.” He touched his forehead again. He didn’t know where the ice pack had gone.

  “Are you OK?” She reached over. “Are you feeling all right? You don’t look very good.”

  “Really?” He scrutinized her expression.

  “Really. Do you want more painkillers?”

  He took a few more pills from her.

  “So what’s your problem?” she said without accusation. Her voice was low and calm. The rain started up again with a light patter, and they both stared into it. “Are you always like this?”

  He turned to face her. It was darker inside now, but he could still make out her features and the thin white lines along her calves. “What happened here?” he touched one finger lightly to the skin above her ankle.

  “Scars,” she said. “Don’t you have any?”

  Nick thought about his body for a minute. “On my knee. And my right hip. From a dirt bike accident.”

  “Anywhere else?”

  He pushed up his sleeve and showed her the back of his forearm, which was criss-crossed with thick, jagged scars. “Put my arm through a window once, by accident.”

  “Wow.” She leaned in for a closer look. “That must have bled.”

  A semi roared past down Madison Street, leaving a cloud of mist in its wake. “What about you?” Nick said.

  “Oh, me, yeah. I have that problem,” she said. “Cutting, you know, all the rage.”

  “Cutting?”

  “You know. It’s in the news and everything.” She made a quick slicing motion across her forearm, then rolled her eyes. “Totally stupid, of course.”

  He was trying to swallow but couldn’t. “Do you still do it?”

  Bridge sighed and glanced over at Bryan, who was still dead asleep. “When I was born,” she said, “I didn’t have a single birth-mark. Can you imagine? What would they do, I used to think, if they lost me? How would they ever identify my body?”

  “Is that why you do it?”

  “I don’t do it anymore.” She was getting restless. “And no.”

  “Why, then?”

  She stirred her finger through her Scotch. She had hardly drunk any of it. She looked at it, then put the glass on the cement floor with a clink.

  Nick felt like one of those doctors, so clinical, so aloof. “I have this problem,” he said. “I lose time.”

  Bridge’s face flashed to life in an excited smile.

  “That’s how the accident happened today.” He gestured toward his mangled car. “I’ll be going along like a regular person, and then, poof.” He snapped his fingers, this time without much energy. “It’s like the world has jumped ahead of me by a couple minutes.” He saw himself, for a second, as a tiny man balancing like a logroller on a miniature planet that spun and spun and sometimes bumped him off.

  Bridge’s eyes were wide like she couldn’t believe her luck.

  “Do you know what I mean?”

  “Sure,” she said. She held up both hands like a film director envisioning a scene. “Like a crack in the facade.”

  Nick waited for her to explain.

  “It’s like, you know. We live out here, outside your head, and you live in there, inside. And sometimes the two get out of sync.” She matched her hands up palm to palm, then shifted one sharply to the side. “It’s like The Matrix.”

  He suppressed a laugh. “Well. Maybe.”

  “What do you see in those lost seconds?” she asked.

  This hadn’t ever occurred to him, and now he wondered about it, searched his memory, but came up blank. “I don’t see anything.”

  “Oh.” She nodded smugly, as if she were an expert on this now. “Maybe you’re not trying hard enough.”

  “I’m trying to make it not happen at all.”

  “Why?” she said. “Maybe they want to show you something.”

  He opened his mouth, trying not to smile, then closed it again. “Who?”

  “Well, I don’t know who. They,” she said. “Whoever it is you believe in.”

  He shrugged and sighed. “I don’t believe in anything like that. I believe in this world.” He leaned down and tapped the cold floor with his knuckles, reviving the bruises there.

  “Oh,” she said, disappointed.

  They sat in silence for a while, until he couldn’t take it. “What?” he said. “You think I’m being stupid?”

  “No. No, I don’t. You’re being perfectly normal.”

  “But I’m not normal.”

  “Right,” she said. “You have this problem.”

  He could hear the disdain creeping into her voice, and he thought to himself, she’s nineteen, what could she possibly know, go to bed. He imagined Theresa coming over to visit, letting herself in and slipping into his sheets until he awoke to the faint smell of her red wine breath, her Carmex. Her curly mass of hair would fill the pillow beside his head, and if she woke up in the night, he would be there, rapt. He would not fall asleep on her.

  “You have a problem too, you know,” he said.

  “Why?” She recoiled. “What? Because I…modify myself? Look at indigenous tribes and stuff. People have been doing it for ages.”

  “Not that.” Nick gestured at her f
ace. “This.” He reached out and placed one hand on those ridges of thin scars along her calf. He felt them, really felt them. It was like a topographical map brought to life under his palm.

  She smiled as if she held the secrets of the universe somewhere back in her throat, and wouldn’t he like to know.

  “You might be interested to know,” she said, “it brings a certain clarity, the cutting.”

  Just then the scene jerked ahead for Nick, but only by a second or so. Still, he could feel it, like the woozy rush of waking up with the sensation that you’re falling. And the glass that had been in his hands was now a mess of shards on the floor. He gripped his knees and tried to settle his breathing.

  “It just happened?” Bridge said.

  He nodded. “What did it look like?”

  She only shrugged. “It wasn’t so long,” she said at last. “Don’t worry.”

  “You were talking about clarity?”

  “Right. Like this.” She plucked a hair from his head. Nick flinched and scratched at it.

  “Were you awake just then?”

  He was. He could see it now, silly as it must be, but he could see it all unfolding before his eyes. Like when he would cry over a scrape as a kid, and his dad would swing his fist overhead, joking, I’ll give you something to cry about.

  “Does it hurt?” he asked.

  She shrugged.

  He turned his head from side to side, trying to shake the idea away. “What on earth is the matter with you? With us?”

  Bridge laughed. “Nothing. This is just living.”

  He felt revolted and sad and captivated all at once. The light was glinting off her bright, dyed hair and bouncing from metal to metal along the contours of her face. Was she the future or the past, a vision or just the flattest, basest reality? Had she come down to save him or pin him to the ground? He didn’t care. He felt the blood sizzling through his capillaries like the spray of the cars outside, and he wanted to see it, to pry apart the shell of his skin and see what he was made of. Still, he was afraid to look directly at her, so he stared ahead into the dark, empty street, and reached across the couch for her hand. He said, “Show me.”