The Fading Read online

  ‘It’s not good,’ Noel said.

  ‘To me it’s the most beautiful thing that ever happened. It’s all a matter of perspective. Or maybe a perspective of matter. Or anti-matter. Or something. Anyway. Good luck, Noel.’

  Bryan started to walk away, then paused and looked back.

  ‘Oh, please don’t worry. I won’t tell anybody.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘What you did for me. If word gets out, if this bubble of yours keeps following you, you could become a very popular guy in ways you probably don’t want to be.’

  Noel’s skin crawled at the thought. Bryan started off again.

  ‘Bryan?’

  The student paused again. ‘Yes?’

  ‘Aren’t you scared of what comes next?’

  For the first time, Bryan did smile. It was not a handsome smile, but it was a smile. ‘I don’t know what comes next. But I do know one thing.’

  Noel waited.

  ‘There is pain in life, but life’s worth a hundred years of what I went through. And there’s pain in dying, but that’s not so bad unless you go alone. It’s being stuck that hurts most, Noel. Moving on, accepting who you are, there’s no pain in that.’

  Bryan Simms walked into the pine trees. The branches did not bend and the snow did not fall.

  Behind Noel, a light began to glow and music began to play. Voices, alive and filled with laughter permeated the cold winter night. The sound of raucous conversation echoed from the other side of the house. The music gradually got louder, a slow melody carrying a balmy island breeze of marijuana smoke on a steel drum beat.

  A girl hollered, ‘Goodnight, Pamela! Be careful!’ and a few seconds later walked past Noel, throwing a fluffy pink scarf over the shoulder of her brown corduroy jacket and the spill of her blonde hair. He watched her hips sway drunkenly, knowing without seeing her face that she was real enough, alive, but not Julie. She pushed through the branches audibly, sending snow down in clumps, and reappeared a moment later walking down the sidewalk on the other side.

  Noel turned back toward the house and saw the porch light on, a mountain bike chained to a pillar, half a dozen plastic beer cups aligned along the rebuilt retaining wall, and the bodies of late-night revelers moving inside as the party – a party that had been happening all along inside 1024 – began to wind down with a modicum of respect for the coming dawn.

  Noel approached the porch steps one more time, wondering if Julie still lived in the house and, if so, in how many ways she, too, had become haunted.

  19

  If Noel had been hoping his accidental good deed in freeing Bryan Simms would restore him to the visible world just in time to mingle at the party, he should have known better. He was reminded of his status when he reached the porch and a hefty bearded burnout bedecked in a bright yellow Colorado Buffaloes sweatshirt and matching pajamas careened through the doorway and trotted barefoot down the stairs to regurgitate beer foam into the snow. He panted a minute, wiped his mouth and returned at a much slower pace. He looked right through Noel on his way back inside, made a U-turn into the small front bedroom, and bellowed, ‘The fuck outta my room!’ at two girls who had been conversing in there and collapsed onto his unmade bed.

  The girls – one a butch blonde with a nose hoop, the other a diminutive but fierce-looking brunette in a navy peacoat and Fidel Castro lid – moved into the living room, which was dark but for a few candles and the lights from the stereo system where Peter Tosh was singing about chasing down vampires in Buckingham Palace, took one last forlorn look around, and left the party without so much as a glance at the specter loitering on the porch.

  More evidence of the bubble’s expanding power: the front door was painted a dull shade of gray now instead of cream, yet still bore the legend FUNHOUSE (in red instead of orange), as if every tenant since 1964 had found the moniker too irresistible to remove. He peered in the front windows, noting none were cracked or broken now. Only two people remained in the living room, a couple or one-night-stand in the making judging by their moist embrace of one another. The rest (couch, love seat, coffee table, stereo system, rock posters, etc.) looked as if a hurricane of cigarette butts, beer cups and pizza had recently passed through it.

  Noel entered, watching his step but not worrying much about his audible signatures. The music wasn’t as loud as it had seemed a moment ago (now that the shock of it being here at all had worn off), but it masked any trace of his entrance. Even with the front door open, the house was warm inside. Somewhere a furnace was working overtime. Stepping around an overweight black Labrador snoozing on a nest of jackets and pilfered couch cushions, Noel wondered how he had navigated this mess the last time around. How had he not tripped, or bumped into somebody, heard the music or felt the heat? It made no sense and did not fit the pattern and rules of his usual episodes, where the real world remained the same for others as it did for him and only his appearance was altered.

  It’s either light or time, Bryan had said. The manipulation of light or time. Nothing else would make invisibility possible.

  Noel had never given the concept of a time-shift much thought; he’d never had a reason to. In all his other dropouts, his perceptions of the world and people and his (limited) interactions with them had remained in sync. When he tripped over Lisa’s foot at the top of the stairs, there hadn’t been any delay before she tripped over his and fell down the same stairs. Julie hadn’t frozen in another time capsule while their romantic tragedy played out. True, the fire at The Cork seemed to have been a glimpse into the past, but even that had been contained, hitting him with the rapid insight of a psychic vision. He hadn’t walked, talked and been himself in it.

  So, were you so in the zone you couldn’t see more than the abandoned house as it had been at some point in the past thirty years, even as your subconscious or some part of your brain in charge of spatial awareness compensated and guided you along? Or did your bubble take you to another time altogether, when the house was empty and none of these things existed? Perhaps the bubble is expanding, blinding me to larger and larger pieces of the world as it blinds the world to me. Either that, or the thirty-year agony of Bryan Simms’s soul left one hell of a psychic splatter all over these walls.

  He was too tired to dwell on these questions. He wanted to have a quick look around for Julie and go home. Unless he really had jumped back in time, it would be almost five a.m. now. What were these people doing awake at this hour? At a certain point, doesn’t the night deal you your final hand? You will either be drunk or not drunk, about to get laid or not even close. Shouldn’t everyone have made a decision by now and gotten on with it?

  Noel walked into the kitchen. The cabinets and counters were the same mid-century holdovers from before, but the appliances had been updated. The oven was on low, the door cracked open a couple inches. Noel could feel its heat filling the room. He bent to look inside and saw eight cut-open cigars resting on a cookie sheet. The West Coast rapper lifestyle had officially reached Boulder. Someone was baking blunts.

  He continued to the back, down the single step into a sunroom. The cold was seeping in from all sides, but someone had turned the space into a makeshift bedroom, with a fold-out futon couch-bed at one end and a dresser at the other. Piles of clothes, stacks of textbooks, the stale smell of athletic socks and wet laundry hanging in the dank cold air.

  In the backyard, a tapped keg sat leaning in the snow, beside a circle of lawn chairs occupied by two girls and three guys. All were bundled in heavy coats, knit caps, gloves. They were talking, but he couldn’t make out the words. He thought they must be very drunk to sit in the freezing dark like this, but none raised a bottle or cup. Maybe it was drugs. He thought of pushing through the screen door to get closer to them, but he’d just leave tracks and he didn’t seem to be missing much. And somehow he knew neither of the two girls was Julie. The way they sat, the set of their jaw or shoulders. She could be any size by now, her hair any color, but this didn’t feel right. She was
probably asleep in one of the rooms, if she even lived here.

  Noel was half asleep on his feet when one of the guys in the yard stood in slow motion, stretched his arms and mumbled something to the others before heading toward the door. They laughed and wished him goodnight.

  Noel backed into the corner of the darkened sun-room. The guy, who was short and chubby with a lock of carrot-red hair hanging from his gray wool ski hat, fumbled the door open, took one step inside and looked around as if sensing someone was here.

  The guy eyed the futon with dazed longing, and Noel was sure this was his room and that he was going to fall into bed any second now. But he only swayed on his feet, burped and laughed at himself tiredly before continuing up into the kitchen. Noel heard his feet clap across the linoleum floor, then pause.

  ‘You okay?’ the guy said, not overly concerned about whomever he was talking to. ‘Hey, you. Hello? Oh, wow. You are gondy with the windy, whoever you are.’ The guy laughed again and a few seconds later the front door slammed.

  Noel hadn’t seen anyone in the kitchen. The music stopped while someone changed the disc or the machine rotated a new one into play. A song Noel had never heard began, first with piercingly simple acoustic guitar chords, then a plaintive voice that sounded like a younger, more innocent version of Sting’s. The beat slipped into a soothing progression of drums and was joined by a kindly massaged keyboard and some kind of clopping instruments, like sand blocks, finding the perfect composition of crisp pop longing, reggae leisure and a lyrical pathos that subverted the otherwise pretty song with what struck Noel as grave sadness.

  diamond waves through sunglass days go byyyyyyy

  so beautiful to be here and aliiiiive

  though I’ve built sometimes so hard

  did I surviiiive?

  Feel us shaaaayyy-kinnn’

  He was thinking more about the music than his purpose here when he stepped back up into the kitchen, walked no more than three steps and felt the hairs on the back of his neck prickle hotly as if someone had blown a creeping kiss on him. He turned to his left and saw Julie standing in the corner pantry that had been closed on his first pass. She was staring right at him and his heart boomed thunderously before he remembered she could not see him. He knew immediately it was her because she hadn’t changed at all. She was the same rail-thin waif with straight jet-black hair and pale doll skin he had seen five years ago and so often in his memory ever since.

  He was frozen with a fear greater than that in finding Bryan Simms on the floor, and he dared not speak.

  Backed all the way into the dark pantry, a cardboard can of oats and two bags of tortilla chips on the shelf above her head, Julie was swaying to the music, hands in the air painting with colors only she could see. She wore dark jeans, black sneakers and a thin, camisole-type shirt under her blue denim jacket, but she did not appear the least bit cold. She closed her eyes, lost in the song, and her hands dropped to her sides. It was a lonely dance, private, and a pang of guilt for observing her without permission coursed up from his stomach into his throat.

  When the song ended, Julie’s mouth pulled into a frown and she squeezed her eyes tight, as if she were trying to reclaim something that had been stolen from her. Then she opened them and stared at him, through him and into the vacant kitchen with childish wonder. Her lips moved but no words came out. Her eyes were solid black but briefly shiny with fleeting starlight reflected from sun to moon to snow off the window over the sink, or perhaps from another source, inside her.

  She was on something. He did not have experience with drugs or people on drugs beyond what he had gathered from TV, but he knew she was not really here, even less so than he was. He reminded himself she had been this way before he arrived, and that she didn’t appear to be suffering, in pain, or scared, so maybe it was no big deal. Probably she was hallucinating, on mushrooms or LSD or ecstasy, which would also explain the others out back, not drinking but awake and talking in the freezing cold of five a.m.

  Julie looked happy, even if it was an artificially generated happiness.

  But now that he was here, staring at her, standing less than eight feet from her, he had no idea what to do and in truth gave his next actions no thought at all. He began to move closer, step by tentative step, the better to see her small narrow nose with its rounded tip, the high wide corners of her white cheeks, the full thickness of her black eyebrows, the sweeping fall of her night hair, the thin peach-toned lips he had come so close to kissing once, before his cruel erasure took him away and sent her screaming for help. He was close enough now to catch the sweet herbal tang of her natural perfume, sweat and flowers, the moist peat smoke of her party-soaked clothes, and behind her the dry dust and pasta whiff of the pantry where she had taken shelter. He was three steps away, two, and then towering over her while she watched the psychedelic film playing behind her eyelids, and she lifted her chin just so.

  Noel stopped, his heart tolling like newly formed bell of wet clay.

  Julie’s eyes came to rest in direct line with his own. If he were solid-state they would be staring into each other, and he could swear, despite his condition, that she really was seeing him and that she was glad for his arrival. What does a blind woman sense when someone enters her sphere, changing the air, breaking the clean surface of her placid aura? Julie closed her eyes again but did not lower her chin. Her bottom lip was moist, and an eternity later fell open with a searching tremor.

  ‘It’s you,’ she whispered.

  Or maybe she said nothing at all.

  Noel leaned down and touched his lips to hers, soft as cooling ash settling on torched remains, touching without will, without pressure, but tasting through molecules of breath her sweet wine palate and something stronger with the grainy darkness of dissolved dark chocolate.

  Julie pressed to him, the wet corner of her mouth taking his lower lip in, then her tongue, alive and hot-slick against his own, accepting, allowing him to fall into the spell, forgetting what he was doing while simultaneously being here doing nothing else. He cracked his eyes to peek, still kissing her, and hers stayed closed. Was it abstract for her in a way it was not for him, because he was not altogether here and could not be real to her? Or was it that she wasn’t here with him, but lost in her chemical high? And if so, was this so wrong, or perfectly right? Fearing not, he began to pull away, but she stayed with him, raising from her toes to keep the connection, and he rode the slide of her lips, edge of teeth, the cold spot of her chin nudging his, and he wanted more than anything to wrap his arms around her, protect her and be protected by her, keep her safe here or anywhere else she would go with him, forever.

  And as swiftly as it had began she broke away, lowering and rearing back slowly, a dizzy child stepping down from a parked ferris wheel. She doesn’t know what but knows something is not right. Oh God, she was going to panic again. She was coming out of her daze now and seeing nothing where there should have been a stranger, her boyfriend, anyone but no one.

  ‘Are you an angel?’ she said, her eyes tracing but missing him.

  ‘Is that what you want?’

  ‘I remember you,’ she said with some relief.

  ‘I remember you, too.’

  ‘How did you find me?’

  ‘A ghost showed me the way.’

  She smiled wider, if that were possible.

  ‘Are you all right?’ he asked. ‘Do you need anything?’

  ‘I want to go home.’ Her initial playfulness dimmed. ‘I’m afraid to try.’

  ‘Isn’t this your home?’

  She closed her eyes as a bad memory strolled behind them. ‘Not any more.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘I moved. I don’t even like it here. I don’t know why I keep coming back, but I do.’ Her expression drooped and he thought she was about to cry.

  ‘It’s okay. We don’t have to stay. Do you have a car?’ When she didn’t answer, he added, ‘How did you get here?’

  ‘Don’t know.’ She lean
ed toward him as if about to fall, then corrected herself. ‘I’m so tired. How am I going to get home?’

  ‘I can walk with you,’ Noel said. ‘If you want me to.’

  ‘I thought angels could fly.’ She spoke this seriously, then laughed.

  Maybe she didn’t know who he was. Maybe she was so stoned she didn’t know angels from boys, Noel Shaker from the Quaker Oats man smiling down at the both of them. In which case he shouldn’t have kissed her. A violation. It always would be in some way.

  ‘I can’t fly, but I’ll get you home safe. Do you have a jacket?’

  Julie looked down and tugged at her denim. ‘This is a jacket.’

  ‘No, it’s freezing out. Here.’ He removed the heavy green parka his dad had given him and swirled it around her back, pulling it over her shoulders. She could not see it yet, but she felt its weight, his body warmth captured in its layers.

  ‘Oh, my God,’ she said, and shivered. The parka emerged from the bubble as she was reaching for the lapels. She closed the layers around her, folding herself in. ‘Wow, that’s so fucking cool. How did you do that?’

  ‘Angel trick. Don’t overthink it. Let’s get you out of here, okay?’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Do you want to try and tell me which way to go?’

  ‘I’m scared,’ she said.

  ‘I won’t hurt you. Take my hand.’ He offered it to her.

  Julie groped for it, bumped his forearm, clutched it, down, down, until she found his hand. Fingers intertwined, she held him tight.

  ‘There you are,’ she said.

  ‘There you are,’ he echoed.

  Two squeezes, like a pulse. ‘Don’t let go. Promise you won’t let go?’

  ‘I promise,’ Noel said, and led Julie from the Funhouse, into the night now turned to dawn.

  20

  Half an hour or so later they reached Julie’s apartment, a ground-floor two-bedroom unit in a three-story stucco building on 30th Street near Arapahoe. The sun was not up yet, but the sky was changing by slow degrees. The walk seemed to have re-energized her if not restored the full array of her sober perceptions. She knew this was home, but couldn’t stop commenting on the ozone layer, which had obviously dropped from the atmosphere to swim around their ankles as they walked. The brass numerals on her apartment door looked ‘like gold licorice, don’t you think?’ She’d been making harmless, oddball observations most of the way back, though physically she displayed no signs of inebriation.