The Fading Read online

  There had to be more to it.

  This skin.

  The world.

  The secret to his secret.

  Soon he was sawing back and forth across his forearm in long patient strokes. He didn’t see the blood until he felt it spattering onto his bare feet. The pain was real but far away, stinging but tolerable. He was more interested in the layers of tissue and muscle he had opened up above his wrist, on top of his forearm, and this was interesting until the white edge of bone appeared, stopping his progress.

  He rolled his arm over and examined the network of green-blue veins there, the undulating cords of tendon that slid like puppet strings when he wiggled his fingers, the soft smooth white skin holding it all together. He wanted to see inside, autopsy this prop, delve into his own self. He brought the knife around and, pressing hard to make the dull blade do its stupid job, sliced a clean line halfway up to his elbow. The blood began to pour and Noel began to laugh at the mess he was making.

  Behind him the coffeemaker beeped that it was done. He turned and stared at the full pot, his feet sliding in the puddle forming on the floor. He felt light-headed and his vision magnified sharply before growing fuzzy with black and red clouds at the corners of the room.

  This was beautiful. Why hadn’t he thought of this before? All along he had been trapped, but here was his key to the cell door, right here inside him. The blood, his blood, was his key and if he let enough of it to flow from his disgusting body, his spirit would go with it. He turned the knife over using both hands to get the handle in his dry right fist, so that the blade was angled down, as if he were going to stab someone, and then began to stab himself.

  The first try his aim was off and he jabbed bone under his thumb. On the second swing the point pierced his skin where the buckle of his watch would have been and he shuddered with hot ecstatic searing pain. He was screaming, but the voice belonged to the prisoner in the cell and he ignored it. He raised the knife a third time and saw its dim reflection in the glossy black control panel of the stove, and halted.

  Beside the knife’s long shadow was a silhouette of a man in black clothes. Noel turned, slipped again on the wet floor, and saw Dimples standing in the living room. He had let himself in, sneaking up on Noel while he was busy with this messy task. How interesting. Had his visitor come back to witness Noel’s final vanishing act?

  The only problem was, this wasn’t really Dimples.

  This man wore none of the clown make-up from the early years. And besides, his face was all wrong. Dimples’s face had always been blurred, doughy, the eyes deep black holes of non-flesh. This man’s face was as clear as a photograph, as rosy and concerned as the face of a preacher on television, and his eyes were liquid green. No, this wasn’t Dimples, unless Dimples had stolen a more familiar likeness to present himself this time around. He was a little older and fleshier than Noel remembered, but in all other ways the visitor was the spitting image of John Shaker, his father.

  13

  Noel rode in the passenger seat of John’s rented Taurus, head against the cold glass separating his cheek from the bracing February air as his dad drove them into a neighborhood somewhere in south-east Boulder. His left arm was securely bandaged from elbow to palm, concealing the one hundred and thirty-seven stitches he had acquired in the aftermath of his failed – not that he was ready to accept it as such – suicide attempt. His mind was still dulled by the sedatives and painkillers they had given him at Boulder Community Hospital, where he had spent the past two and a half days, but he had presence enough to wonder if John was going to install him in one of these places where men in white clothes watch over you, and he realized he didn’t much care so long as there was a warm bed.

  ‘What now?’ Noel had asked this morning while waiting to be discharged.

  ‘I thought we’d stop for breakfast. You could use a real meal.’ John was sitting in a chair beside a window overlooking North Boulder Park, just three blocks from the house Noel had been born into. ‘Lost a lot of blood there, kiddo.’

  ‘Not really hungry,’ Noel said.

  ‘Well, can’t hurt to try.’

  John did not seem uncomfortable or gravely sad or ashamed of the situation, of his son. He was clear-eyed and composed, dressed in the relaxed, semi-professional slacks and sweater of the early retired. His hair was combed, his cheeks aglow with West Coast sun. He had conferred with the doctors and nurses but had not relayed much of the discussion to the object of these findings.

  ‘Doctor says the stitches will itch, but you’ll be back to have them out in ten days. Do you want some coffee? You’re allowed to eat and drink anything you feel like.’

  ‘Why aren’t you in California?’

  John blinked several times. ‘I wanted to make sure you got through this.’

  ‘No,’ Noel said. ‘I mean, how did you happen to be there right when …’

  ‘Oh. Yes.’ John smoothed a hand over his mouth. ‘I guess you didn’t get my messages. I called you four times to let you know I would be visiting.’

  ‘Messages? What messages?’

  ‘On your machine. Just a few days ago.’

  A dim light began to blink in Noel’s brain. He did and did not remember this. He wasn’t used to getting phone calls, so he rarely checked his machine. But a vague memory of his father’s voice babbling on returned now and Noel was dumbstruck as to how he’d walled off an event as significant as his father’s arrival, even factoring in the depression he’d sunken into. Had he been drinking before things got so bad? Maybe.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Noel said. ‘I guess I was a little lost in …’ he trailed off, meaning to add, what? Lost in my own thoughts? My life?

  ‘I was in town to check on Julie, actually,’ John said, avoiding the implication of Noel’s admission. ‘It was Lisa’s idea for me to stop by and see you. She’s forgiven you, which means I guess I have, too. I got your address from your mother, but I haven’t spoken to her since … I didn’t want to upset her with this.’

  Noel was thinking, Julie? Julie’s in Boulder? Why? How? For what? What does she look like now?

  ‘We thought maybe you’d seen her, but I guess you didn’t know,’ John said. ‘Julie enrolled at CU the fall before last. But we haven’t spoken to her in, well, maybe it’s been a few months now. Thanksgiving break was her last call home. Lisa’s worried, but obviously she can’t travel comfortably. I flew out Sunday. Was hoping to catch her at the house she’s been renting with those two other girls, but her roommates haven’t seen her.’ His father paused. ‘I don’t suppose she’s been in touch with you?’

  Noel swallowed, his throat thick with dried layers of something unpleasant. He sucked ice from a cup. ‘I haven’t seen or heard from Julie since I was fourteen.’

  John nodded. ‘Well, I’m sure she’ll turn up. Anyway. I’m glad I stopped by when I did.’ Just in time. Before you bled out.

  During the silence that stretched between them, his father regarding him as if he were a glass that might shatter under too penetrating a gaze, Noel entertained the alarming possibility that he had, at least subconsciously, known exactly when his dad was due to arrive and – was such a thing possible? if so, how pathetic was this? – that he had cut himself not so much to end everything as to scream for help.

  He groaned in disgust with himself.

  John cleared his throat. ‘How’s the pain?’

  ‘You don’t have to stay,’ Noel said.

  ‘Stop. I want to be here.’

  Before checkout, John handed Noel a clean t-shirt and a large green parka, the tags still attached. Woolrich, marked down 50 per cent from $199.99. Big as a fireman’s coat, only heavier. Noel reluctantly pulled the parka over his shoulders. He refused the wheelchair ride out.

  At The Village Coffee Shop, Noel’s appetite sat up and begged like a dog. The tiny greasy spoon was so busy, the air so tantalizingly heavy with the aroma of sausage gravy and pancakes and frying bacon, to decline breakfast would have brought the pla
ce to a screeching halt as all eyes turned to the young man who really must be dead. John had two over easy with links, coffee, dry toast. Noel ate every last bite of his breakfast burrito smothered in hot green chili, plus hash browns, four pieces of toast with grape jelly, and three cups of heavily creamed terrible coffee.

  Now he felt full and lucid but tired, not at all in the mood for whatever father-and-son talk John had planned as he pulled into a parking lot and turned off the Ford. Ahead of them was a winding strip of frosted dead grass and a formation of rocks that struck Noel as something constructed for a film set, vaguely familiar and not quite real.

  ‘I won’t do it again, if that’s what you’re worried about,’ Noel said. ‘I appreciate your help and I feel better now.’

  ‘Come out here a minute,’ John said. ‘I want to show you something.’

  The February chill drove his balled fists into his pockets. His jeans were still stained and one of his dirty white hi-tops was streaked with more blood gone brown. John stood before the few hundred small boulders, stacked and piled together to create dozens of tunnels, holes, entrances and exits and open spaces to look out over the park. Noel remembered now. He had played here as a child. Inside was a series of caves and chutes for children to crawl through, climb up, burrow into. Memories of himself on his hands and knees, wiggling his way through sharp-edged walls and the cool damp sand at its floor, playing pirate. How old had he been when Rebecca brought him here? Five? Seven? She had called it the Rock Park, and back then it had seemed almost infinite, a magic castle where ogres and dragons had made their home.

  Now it looked like a dirty frozen lawsuit waiting to happen, far too small to admit anyone over three feet and fifty pounds. The entire edifice stank of mud and mildew, the scallop of playground sand around its borders dotted with frozen cat shit.

  ‘You remember this place?’ John said.

  Noel nodded, folding the parka’s collar up to his ears.

  ‘You used to beg your mom to bring you here, but she didn’t like it. She didn’t like it at all. Do you know why?’

  Noel sighed. So here it was. Punishment for trying to off himself – we’re going to talk about The Family. As if there still was one. As if there had ever been. He kept quiet and stared at the rocks.

  ‘She was convinced that one of these days you’d crawl into that heap of rocks and never come out. She thought you were going to vanish inside and even if they tore the entire thing apart, they would never find you.’

  Noel snorted.

  ‘The truth is, your mother had a severe case of the mental apron strings. She had a paralyzing fear of losing you, her one and only child. It started in your infancy. She used to come to bed at night after nursing you sometimes, crying because she was convinced something had tried to snatch you from her arms. Soon as you learned to crawl, she worried constantly you would just up and disappear, beamed away like one of those spacemen on that dumb TV show. Didn’t take long for me to figure out this was not your typical motherhood fear. She became pathological with it and, frankly, I don’t think she ever got over it.’

  This sounded unsurprising to Noel, but hearing his father say it aroused his interest. What did John know? How much had she told him?

  ‘She was delusional, of course,’ John continued. ‘By the time you were three, she was no longer worried about you disappearing. She was convinced you had been disappearing. Many times. In your bedroom. In the yard. From pre-school, once you started attending Bixby out there on 30th. She couldn’t stand to be away from you. Took you out of school in fourth grade. Said she was trying to protect you, but she couldn’t take care of herself without you. She believed – and I can’t stress enough how literally she believed this, believed it the way I believe it’s cold today – that some diabolical power had attached itself to you and was hell-bent on using you, stealing your likeness. Does this sound familiar? Some of it must.’

  Noel nodded. All of it did, just not the thrust: your mother was crazy, that’s all.

  ‘I suppose a lot of it’s my fault,’ John said, squatting to pull some grass from the tundra at their feet. ‘I wasn’t a nurturing father like these young guys nowadays. I know that now. Hell, back then your job was to bring home a paycheck, put a roof overhead, food on the table. Let your mother handle the rest. A lot of dads aren’t really interactive on any kind of emotional level with their offspring until the kid starts talking, walking, playing. That’s not an excuse, and I’m sorry I wasn’t there more. I worked seventy, eighty, sometimes a hundred hours a week when the store was expanding. I was what they call nowadays a workaholic, diseased. Back then it was a virtue.

  ‘But please understand, by the time I could afford to have a relationship with you, your mother and I were already deep into our own problems. We fought too much. We avoided each other. She had her own issues, repressed memories and traumas I had no idea how to cope with, even if she had wanted to, which she didn’t. She used you to validate her fears and be her security blanket. Took me a while to understand it wasn’t just stress, but real mental illness. Delusions, psychotic episodes. Total breaks from reality. And also, I think, what they call Munchausen’s syndrome.

  ‘By her own actions and fears, she made you think you were sick, different, at risk, so that she could keep you with her as much as possible. So that the two of you would be special and draw the attention I wasn’t giving. She pushed me away, and sure, okay, I let her. I thought maybe if I wasn’t around, if we made that decision, there would be less conflict. But it only got worse. When you got older, she believed you were afflicted with … well, something a mother should never think.’

  Noel said, ‘What?’

  John shook his head.

  ‘Go on.’ Noel had a vision of himself striking his father.

  John looked at him. ‘A demon. She said it was a demon.’

  Noel almost laughed, but something angry inside him hissed and writhed like a snake on fire. Again he imagined bloodying John’s nose, standing over him and kicking him in the ribs.

  John walked to him and rested a hand on his shoulder. His eyes were red. Red and tired from crying last night or this morning, red with regret. The slashes of gray in his hair weren’t handsome or dignified, only reminded Noel that his father was aging. Soon to be old and sad with what had happened to his women. First madness, then paralysis. Both because of Noel.

  ‘She was very sick,’ John said, his voice breaking. ‘Demons. Talk of spirits capable of erasing our son from the world, claiming his soul, stealing his image for their own wicked purposes. For God’s sake. It’s disgusting the way she filled the house with that trash talk. I can handle a lot of things, Noel, but your mother’s ranting, raving irrationality. Her faith in metaphysical crap. That’s when she truly lost me. “What’s so bad about our world?” I used to ask her. “What’s wrong with this life? With you and me and our family? Why isn’t this good enough for you?”

  ‘She threw me out when I accused her of mental abuse. That sounds harsh, perhaps, but considering all you’ve been through … she infected you worse than I ever knew, my son. She abused you. She made her sickness your sickness. Do you understand what I’m saying? Do you see how we got here?’

  Was John really suggesting, after all this time, after all Noel had been through, that his bubble was not really real? That it was nothing more than another form of mental illness?

  Well, pardon me, motherfucker. I’ve seen and done too much to swallow that.

  ‘I don’t have an answer for what went wrong with your mother,’ John went on, closing in, setting a hand on Noel’s shoulder. ‘But I know you have to see the past in order to have a future. I know it hurts to look at your whole life with a new pair of glasses, but it won’t always. All of this can get better, if you want it to, Noel. But we’ve got to fix you up with a new pair of glasses. You need to see yourself in a different light.’

  Can the fucking talk show patter, Dad. Memories of Julie floated up, a piece of evidence in his scattered
defense.

  ‘Julie saw it,’ Noel said, backing away. John’s hand slid from his shoulder and a dazed expression came over him.

  ‘Saw what?’

  ‘It. She saw it happen.’ Noel felt a hot rush of vindication building within. ‘The day of the accident. When Lisa fell on the stairs. It happened in Julie’s bedroom. I disappeared. There’s no other word for it. I was there, then I was gone, and Julie saw it. I was talking to her and she couldn’t find me. It scared her. Scared her bad.’

  John’s face reddened. ‘Is that right, Noel? Tell me, how does a fourteen-year-old kid disappear? Was it magic? How did you do it?’

  ‘I don’t know how it works. But it fucking works.’

  ‘Can you do it now? Help me understand. Show me how you disappear, for Christ’s sake—’

  ‘Stop pretending you don’t know! It’s real! It’s the reason Mom lost her mind. It’s the reason you left us. It’s the reason Lisa’s wearing a diaper and the reason I woke up in a hospital today. You arrogant asshole. Think you know everything. You can’t see it, and so you don’t believe it. But whether you want it to be or not, it’s real, a separate entity, a medical problem or disease as real as Lisa’s broken back.’

  ‘All right!’ John shouted. ‘Since you brought it up, fine. Let’s talk about that day. You let yourself into our home without permission. You would have been welcome there anytime, but you had to break in and steal things that didn’t belong to you. And then you got mixed up with Julie. You charmed her with this bad boy bullshit, and then you got cozy, and then minutes before the accident you forced yourself on her. Forced yourself on Julie. Her words, Noel. “He tried to kiss me. He attacked me. He grabbed me on the stairs and covered my face and blinded me!” That’s what she told me, her mother, and the police. She allowed you to stay a few days and tried to be your friend, and what did you do? What did you do? You attacked my daughter—’