The Fading Page 12

  Noel turned to the mirror slowly, but before he could face it the bathroom door opened and John was there. He looked at his son, concern transforming into a gentle smile of relief.

  ‘Hey, sport. Everything working all right in here?’

  Demons. You mother actually believed a demon had attached itself to you and wanted to take you away.

  Was that what Noel had seen in the mirror? Is that what the men were, the apparitions who’d been whispering about him before the fire took them away? Demons?

  ‘I don’t believe in demons,’ Noel thought, then realized he’d spoken aloud.

  ‘I should hope not,’ John said. ‘Is that why you came in here? To convince yourself?’

  ‘I had a stomach ache.’

  ‘Better now? Do you want to go home?’

  Noel looked into the mirror again. His own reflection was staring back at him, none other. In minutes, a few hours at most, that would disappear, too. He could almost feel it building inside him, a storm front of pressure in his cells. He did not want to fight it. Better that his father see for himself. See what was wrong with his son.

  ‘No, I’m ready for that dessert.’

  *

  On the way home, in John’s rental car, Noel remembered a question he had been wanting to ask one or both of his parents for years.

  ‘What happened to Dimples?’

  His father sat up a little straighter in his seat. ‘Who?’

  ‘Remember Dimples? That clown who used to be on Channel Two. He did the birthday show every morning. He always had that same huge yellow cake, like seven layers high. I always wondered what that tasted like until one day I realized it was a cardboard prop they wheeled out for each show.’

  ‘Oh, yep,’ John said. ‘Sad story. What made you think of him?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Noel lied. The dead men in the bathroom, perhaps. ‘He went off the air a long time ago, right?’

  John nodded. ‘Your mother wanted to get you on that show, as a matter of fact. She wanted to take you down the studio in Denver for, oh, I guess it would have been your first or second birthday. She was really sad when it didn’t work out. You were so young. I’m surprised you remember that now.’

  ‘Why didn’t it work out?’

  ‘Well, I forget what it was, but it was sort of a tragedy. Dimples – the old guy who played him on TV, I think his name was Hal something. Lichtman, Luckenbach, I don’t know. Anyway, yeah, he died on air. It was in the news, parents were all messed up about it.’

  ‘Are you kidding me?’ Noel’s arm began to tingle again.

  ‘I don’t know if it was standard procedure, but the day it happened they were taping the show live. The poor old guy had a heart attack or a stroke, something severe. He keeled over during one of the musical numbers, right there in front of the parents and kids in the audience. And apparently the cameraman or producer was sleeping off a dose of NyQuil or some damn thing, because they didn’t cut away for almost two full minutes. Dimples died on live Colorado TV.’

  ‘Jesus.’

  ‘Yeah, that was the end of that show.’

  ‘That’s … disturbing.’

  ‘But you didn’t see it,’ his father added. ‘I know because I asked your mom if she’d left you in front of the TV that day and she swore up and down she didn’t. Good thing. No two-year-old needs to see something like that, though of course a bunch did.’

  Noel didn’t ask any more questions until they got home.

  ‘Oh, I almost forgot,’ John said as they walked to Noel’s front door. ‘Good news. Lisa called this afternoon while you were napping. She spoke with Julie this morning.’

  Noel fished in his coat for the apartment keys. ‘Oh?’

  ‘Turns out she was in Vail for the weekend, skiing with friends. Lisa said she sounded fine. I wish I had more time, but Lisa has therapy tomorrow and her parents are due in Santa Barbara for the week. I’d feel a lot better if I had been able to visit Julie in person while I was here, but maybe that wasn’t the real point of this trip.’ He glanced sideways at Noel.

  ‘Glad she’s okay,’ Noel said.

  ‘That’s the thing with you kids. Who knows, right? And I don’t remember Julie skiing. You see what I’m getting at.’

  What did he want Noel to say? ‘She was always very smart. I’m sure she’s fine.’

  John eyed him warily at the door, both father and son aware there was something sad and wrong about him leaving tonight, but each grateful for the other’s excusing of this awkwardness. Today had been more family drama than either had bargained for and they both wanted a break. Noel could see John waiting for him to offer some final reassurance that everything would be okay.

  Noel smiled. ‘Don’t worry, Pop. I’ll take the meds. I’ll eat the food. I’ll call you every night.’

  ‘A new beginning,’ John said with such earnest good cheer it made Noel’s heart sink. ‘For both of us, I hope.’

  ‘Yes. Definitely.’

  John lingered, squirming.

  ‘What?’ Noel said.

  ‘If you hear anything about Julie, if you should run into her. I mean, if you know anybody who knows her, maybe you could ask around? See what she’s doing, who she’s running with? Keep me in the loop? Lisa would kill me if anything happened to her.’

  ‘I doubt I know any of her friends,’ Noel said. ‘But I’ll keep my ears open.’

  ‘Good man.’

  ‘Thanks for everything,’ Noel said.

  ‘I love you, son.’

  Noel nodded and looked at his shoes. When he looked up again, his father was gone. The same could not be said of his demons, nor of the power that drew them to his dimmed presence like hounds before the moon.

  15

  In the morning it was a relief not to have to look at his arm.

  The night his father left, Noel fell into bed and stayed there for almost sixteen hours. He woke up alone and saw under the hollow tent of his bedding that it had taken him while he slept.

  Maybe it was all he had been through in the past few days. Maybe it was seeing two ghosts or demons or his own split personalities in the restaurant bathroom. Maybe it was seeing his father. But whatever it was, for the first time in his life, Noel did not despair over how long it would last, or what the cause might be. He was who he was, and if that sounded like surrender, so be it. He’d tried hiding from it, railing against it, crying over it, killing it. None of his reactions had changed a damn thing. None had helped him.

  Maybe some day he would find a cure. Maybe some day it would just stop. Maybe it would take him and never let him go. But right now, starting today, he needed some semblance of a life. He decided that it was okay if this life turned out to be something he didn’t ask for – whose didn’t? If he was doomed to live as a man who blinked in and out of visible existence at the whim of higher powers (or even his own damaged psyche), then like a prisoner who is granted a walk in the sun only now and then, he would find a way to carve a little happiness from his bizarre life sentence.

  He showered, shaved and changed the bandages on his arm as the nurse had shown him. He didn’t know how badly the wounds needed redressing until he discarded yesterday’s bandages and saw them reappear, blood-stained and dirty, in the bathroom trash can some ten minutes later. He swabbed the stitched cuts as a blind man reads Braille, with wads of cotton and Betadine solution. The purple-brown antiseptic liquid turned yellow against his transparent skin just before the bubble took it away, then he wrapped the invisible limb in fresh gauze, which also vanished by the time he finished pulling on clean clothes, which similarly were absorbed in a micro-blink of an eye.

  A bowl of Golden Grahams went into a hole, milk dripping from his clear-as-air chin, down a hollow tube, and came to pool in his grateful fish-bowl stomach. He knew from previous experience that the food and beverages took to hiding within him, within the bubble, as soon as he closed his mouth and swallowed, but he still resisted the impulse to lift up his shirt and peer down at his
belly organs just in case the rules suddenly changed.

  Embracing his condition, he returned again to ways he might capitalize on it. Aside from being a thief, there were a hundred other roles he could, in theory, play. The hero rescuing kittens from trees, but to whom would the victims and near-victims be grateful? He could play the voyeur, pervert, stalker, spy, but he had been observing from the outside for so much of his life, more than ever he craved intimacy, not artificial thrills taken from a distance. His unfulfilled moment with Julie, and the damage his longing had caused, had scared him off women, and in the years since, the other half of the species had become to painful to contemplate, let alone torture oneself with by following into gym shower bays.

  He had come close to playing the seething monster, destroying property and inflicting harm simply because no one had to know it was him. Sometimes he dreamed of setting fire to anonymous buildings, smashing clothing store windows, stealing a Mercedes for a few hours of joyriding before launching it into Sunshine Canyon. But always there was the fear of emerging from the blink in the midst of such hijinks. There was no telling when he would come back, in front of witnesses, and he didn’t want to wind up in prison, waiting for his next episode to make his escape.

  Contrary to the books and movies that exploited his condition, opportunities did not flower before him. He didn’t need excitement. The simple life would do, if only he had someone to share it with. He was like a blind and deaf man, a schizophrenic or an epileptic like his former classmate Jesse Lubbens. Hostage to his sickness, his ON/OFF switch. He was a young man unique in his particular ailment and yet, in all other respects, shared so many of the challenges and needs of any other disabled person.

  What he really needed was a partner – in the simplest definition of the word. Someone to share the burden, and help him grow to manage it on his own. Someone who could fill the role of caretaker, mentor, trusted confidant, coach and friend. Someone who accepted him for what he was, and who would be there during the long climb out. A partner, and some kind of job.

  Noel was slopping the last of the cereal into his mouth, staring out the patio window, watching as a guy layered in winter work clothes shoveled the courtyard, Walkman headphones clamped over his knit Broncos cap. He was bobbing and weaving as he cleared a path in the last of the white crust, scattering rock salt the way a farmer feeds his chickens. Mindless labor. Simple work.

  There appeared to be some pleasure in this until a tall older man in a dark suit and long wool overcoat approached the snow-shoveler. He was long in the legs and trunk, a big loping dullard of a guy with chapped lips and, when he removed the beige Isotoner gloves, obscenely large raw fingers. Wiggling pink bananas, flexing and clapping together as he attempted to warm them. The shoveling dude removed his headphones, blew a wad of phlegm into the nearest snow bank, and cocked an ear.

  They chatted for a minute, but the exchange was not a happy or casual one. They were standing too close and their lips hardly moved. Noel did not figure them for family or friends. Maybe employer and employee, but he’d never seen either on the apartment grounds before now and he’d lived here over two years. Something linked them, something he could not name but could almost taste.

  Well, their sunglasses for starters. Hard to be sure from here, some thirty feet away, but they seemed to be wearing identical Ray-Bans. The classic Wayfarer design, square at the top, round below. Popular sunglasses ever since that movie star wore them in that huge comedy hit a couple years back. But still a curious coincidence, the two men being of such obviously different social strata.

  And why did they look so frustrated with one another? The older man, who might have been an All-American basketball player in his youth, like that loose cannon in the Rabbit novels Noel had read when he was fifteen, was now playing the role of the coach. Stabbing his obscene fingers into the shoveler’s sweatshirt. What the hell – it wasn’t like the guy had been doing a poor job. The entire courtyard’s concrete and flagstone square was immaculate, clear of all snow and ice …

  That was it. The patio had been clear all morning and, Noel was almost certain, yesterday morning, too. He remembered looking at it when he and John went to the store and again when they left for dinner. He had been watching every step because he felt so weak from his stay in the hospital. Also, it hadn’t snowed last night.

  So why was the dude shoveling the same patch over and over, pushing little spilled piles of the stuff back into the banks lining the perimeter?

  ‘Because it’s bullshit,’ Noel said, walking to the glass sliding door. The shovel job was just cover for something else.

  As if they had heard him speak, both men turned their heads. He was standing in plain view behind the glass, but of course they couldn’t see him. The veil still had him, but that didn’t change how it felt. Two sets of dull eyes in their pinkish cold faces, staring right at him.

  ‘Go fuck yourselves,’ Noel said.

  They didn’t react, simply returned to their conversation. Were they just a bit calmer now? Less animated? Trying to look ordinary, as if this were just a property manager rattling off a to-do list to his hired hand? Maybe.

  Or maybe the shoveler had been hired to watch Noel’s apartment. To watch him. Maybe they knew he was in here, invisible or not, and were waiting for him to venture out again. Maybe some shady people or some organization had caught onto his activities. Maybe this was CIA shit creeping around his home, about to get up in his business. There could be surveillance mikes up on the roofs, aimed at his sorry pad, recording every word and flush of the toilet.

  ‘I am coming for you tonight,’ he said to the window. ‘I will find you in your homes and pee in your Apple Jacks.’

  The men did not look at him.

  More likely he was being paranoid. But if anyone had a right to be paranoid, wasn’t that person him? He hadn’t broken any major laws. But what he was … what he could do … It was only a matter of time before someone with deep resources and big plans caught wind of that, wasn’t it?

  The shoveler was talking now, his apparent superior nodding along. Noel swore he could feel them resisting the temptation to look at his door again, but they didn’t. The big boss in his tweed overcoat patted his man on the shoulder and the two of them walked to the end of the courtyard, out of Noel’s view.

  He thought about walking out, coming up behind them screaming, ‘Hey, assholes, I’m right here! How about it? You want some?’

  But he didn’t do that. He pulled the louver blinds, and went back to the kitchen, pacing, hovering around his island, drank a glass of water. He sat on the couch, couldn’t concentrate. He flipped on the TV, got up, checked the courtyard again. Neither of them had come back.

  The afternoon sun came and went with impatience, and before he knew it he had wasted another day.

  He was in the kitchen microwaving one of the premium-brand TV dinners John had bought for him when the phone rang, making him jump. He hadn’t gotten a phone call in months and the ringing seemed ridiculously ominous. Then he remembered he was supposed to call his dad and report that he was still alive. This must be John, calling at almost ten p.m. California time.

  Noel picked up on the seventh ring. ‘Hello?’

  ‘Noel, it’s your dad.’

  ‘Hey, how are you?’

  ‘Just fine. How are you holdin’ up, bud?’

  ‘All good here,’ Noel said.

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Yeah, Dad.’

  ‘What’ve you been up to the past two days? Was hoping I’d hear from you last night.’

  Last two days? Hadn’t his dad just left last night? Did he expect Noel to call him in the middle of the night, after his plane ride home? Or had he slept all night, through the day and another night? Jesus …

  ‘Sorry about that. I meant to.’

  ‘No big deal, just so long as you’re feeling better.’

  ‘I am. Looking for a job, eating a lot. Healing.’

  ‘You clean the arm with the stuff they
gave you?’

  ‘Makes a hell of a mess, but yep. Looks real clean.’

  ‘Did you schedule an appointment with, what was his name, the therapist?’

  ‘Dr Albe. Next Tuesday, eleven a.m.,’ Noel lied, though actually telling the lie almost made him want to make it come true.

  ‘That’s good, son. I think a few sessions down that road will make you feel a lot better.’

  Make you feel a lot better, Noel thought.

  John took up the slack. ‘Listen, I hate to bother you when you should be resting, but I have a favor to ask and we don’t know anyone else out there. I’d come back and do it myself but I can’t leave Lisa now. Her parents are still up in Santa Barbara for an extended fundraiser for Hugh’s largest charity. It’s absurd the amount of money these people … never mind all that. We haven’t heard from Julie in a few days and Lisa’s getting worried.’

  ‘About …?’

  ‘Thing is, the more she told me about Julie’s last phone call, the more skeptical I am that she’s holding up her, uh, responsibilities out there. All I’ve got is her address and phone number, and between you and me, I think her roommates are shining me. Maybe Julie asked them to cover for her.’

  ‘What do you want me to do?’ Noel said. ‘Call them?’

  ‘Actually, you’re just down the street. A mile or two at most. House up on the Hill, next to campus. You know the Hill?’

  The Hill was a nickname for the University Hill neighborhood, but really just the three or four blocks of 13th Street where it split off Broadway near campus, a sort of informal mall with a barbershop, head shop, a few bars, a pool hall, late-night taco joints, record stores, the old Fox Theater that used to be a movie palace but was now a venue for up-and-coming bands and Disco Inferno throwback parties. Noel thought of the Hill as a poseur playground, a place where the trust fund babies and skate rats kicked around, trading dope for $5.00 concert tickets and Ralph Lauren socks. If you wanted drugs of any kind, he guessed the Hill was the place to find them.