The Fading Page 26

  The truth was no, but that would sound pathetic. ‘When I need them.’

  Dalton took this with skepticism, pursing his lips around the straw until the soft drink gurgled on empty. ‘I used to be just like you. Wandering around the country, looking for something to do, somewhere to call home. But eventually I learned how to fill the void.’

  ‘I’m not looking for anything except answers,’ Noel said.

  Dalton seemed not to have heard him. He was in a minor reverie. ‘That’s what the weaker ones are for, of course. To pass the time, keep us company.’

  ‘Weaker ones.’

  Dalton smiled. ‘I envy you, I really do. So much of the discovery ahead of you. All the things you have left to do, to learn. There is nothing like the flowering.’

  Noel shifted in his chair.

  ‘Waking up to the possibilities,’ Dalton added. ‘For you, right now it’s money, but I think you will find that a passing charm. There is so much more to life than money. The things we acquire, they become us. Which is why it’s so important to choose carefully.’

  All of this airy discussion was frustrating Noel, and making him a little queasy.

  ‘Look, Mr Dalton—’

  ‘Theo, please.’

  ‘Theo. I need to know what it is. If I don’t get a handle on that, I’ll never—’

  ‘No,’ Dalton said. ‘You don’t need to know what it is. That part is easy and you’re probably on the cusp of it. You want that very badly, I can see. But what you need to know is who you are, what to do with yourself. Isn’t that the eternal question for all of us? For them?’ He gestured at the other patrons, the people entering and exiting the mall. ‘What is my purpose in life? What is my place in the world? The fading means nothing without that. In this regard we are no different than them.’

  ‘Okay, I get that,’ Noel said. ‘But can’t you just tell me—’

  ‘It’s a gift,’ Dalton cut him off, turning pious. ‘The greatest gift in the world. One that must be put to exceptional use or not used at all.’

  Now they were getting somewhere. ‘Turning it on and off, can you show me how to do that?’

  ‘I can.’ Dalton squinted. ‘But the question – and it’s a serious one, I’m not being coy for the sake of entertainment – is why should I?’

  Noel stared at the former teacher, this rumpled boy-man in his thready tweed jacket. ‘I can pay you. I have a lot—’

  ‘Money I have no use for.’

  ‘What do you want, then? Why wouldn’t you tell me? If you’ve lived with this for half as long as I have, then you have to know how badly … I mean, come on.’

  ‘But can I trust you? Because the things you can do with it, we’re talking about power now.’ Dalton’s eyes blazed with an appetite that had not been sated by the two chili dogs. ‘This is not a power of the sort you see thrown around by politicians, bankers, randy athletes with eleven children and their own brand of sneaker. This is a power only the gods once knew. And I don’t know if you’re ready for that. I think – yes, I think it would be better if you proved to me first that you are up to the task. The mission. Or maybe it’s a calling, I don’t know. But it is a matter of a higher purpose and dedication counts. It counts for so very much.’

  ‘What do you want me to do?’

  Dalton grinned in the manner of a prisoner who’s finally found the leverage he needs to dominate his whimpering new cell mate. ‘This is sensitive stuff. There are things, things I haven’t shared with anyone. I see signs of worthiness in you, but this isn’t a clubhouse, you understand? There are no rules and some people can’t handle that. Some people need boundaries, discipline, religion. They come unhinged without it. Others need to be set free.’

  ‘I understand,’ Noel said, struggling to maintain his patience. ‘What am I going to do? Call the FBI? I’m like you. I don’t want attention. I just want some answers.’

  ‘So you keep saying. But the mentor–disciple relationship is a very delicate thing. The knowledge I pass on to you, it’s part of me. You ask me to help you manage your condition, you’re asking me to share something that is sacred. How do I know you won’t hop on an airplane and do some real damage? Topple some head of state, igniting another sand war? For that matter, how do I know you won’t use it against me?’

  ‘I won’t. Why would I? You know enough about me, if you’ve been following me. You could call the police and I’d be just as screwed.’

  ‘Pffft.’ Dalton waved a hand. ‘You act like this stealing business is something of consequence. What if you find yourself up against the wall and you are forced to make a sacrifice? Do you have the mettle to do whatever it takes to protect yourself, to protect the secret at all costs?’

  Noel tried to make sense of such questions. ‘All I know is, I want to live a normal life. I’m prepared to—’

  ‘Wrong. See, that’s your first mistake. There is no normal life, not in this. You should have learned that much by now. This thing of ours, it runs on your emotions. If you run around hot and agitated and crying every time someone gets hurt or gets in your way, it will rule you. Cold. Absolute zero. That is what you want to achieve. That is the only way to make it work for you. It must be governed with the remorselessness of a hangman.’

  Runs on your emotions. ‘Are you telling me this comes from us? From something inside us?’

  Dalton giggled. ‘Where else could it come from? Outer space? Do you own a special suit? I don’t. How do you think I was able to see you when no one else could? It’s the mind, my young friend. Mine happens to be stronger than yours.’

  Noel’s thoughts were spinning off in ten directions. ‘Wait, wait …’

  Dalton continued, ‘All this time you’ve been in Las Vegas waiting for it to come back. Did it never occur to you maybe it was here all along? Well, don’t beat yourself up. Maybe you just weren’t strong enough. All these people coming and going, everywhere you turn, it’s no wonder. But you’re still growing, I can see that. You’ve survived this long and that’s no small feat. Someday you’ll be able to walk on the field during Game Seven of the World Series and wipe out the entire fan base just before the winning pitch. Imagine what kind of curtain that’s going to take. Fifty thousand people, blinded. Now that would be something, though of course the viewers at home wouldn’t be affected – my point is, you’re not ready. And until I know I can trust you won’t lose control of your bladder when the, ah, let us say the authorities come down on you, why should I give you the keys to the big machine?’

  Curtain. Machine. Earlier he’d said something about an eraser at the end of a pencil. Now he was talking about emotions, blinding people. Noel thought about his mother’s weak mind. His father’s strong one. A few kids on the playground, then Julie, then half a dozen people inside a jewelry store. Gestation, pressure, the casino floor. Something clicked inside of Noel, lighting him up with epiphany.

  ‘We don’t disappear.’

  Dalton raised his eyebrows but said nothing.

  ‘We don’t go anywhere, or change at all,’ Noel said. ‘It’s them. The witnesses, observers, whoever they are. My mother. I did it to her first because I could, because I was closest to her, and maybe … she was weaker, afraid of losing me. Then some kids on the playground when I was angry, scared. When I was a teenager it ran out of control like a hormonal rage. That’s it, isn’t it? We don’t vanish. We blind them.’

  Dalton winced. ‘Eh, “blind” is a wee bit of hyperbole. They don’t lose their vision.’

  ‘No, no, not everything,’ Noel said. ‘Just us, to us. We make them blind to us. Holy shit! This explains so much. The reason it works on our clothes, stuff in our pockets. That’s us, we see that as part of us, right? But it has to make sense, or, or, no, it’s like we have to believe it. We can’t take something with us unless we know we can take it with us! We have to factor that in and assume—’

  ‘Calm down. If you learn how to get a grip on this, a grip on yourself, I can show you how to take a lot more t
han what will fit in your pockets.’

  ‘Like what?’

  Dalton leaned back to enjoy the fawning. ‘Oh, I don’t know. A pair of sunglasses, a suitcase, a car. Maybe a house in an empty neighborhood.’

  Noel thought of the Funhouse, where he had found Julie. The way his time with Bryan Simms had kicked things to another level, walling him off from the party, screening death from thirty years ago by way of a haunting while all around him the furniture was hidden. He thought of Julie.

  ‘What about people, another person?’ Noel said.

  Dalton grinned, nodded. ‘If they don’t fight it, sure. But there are limits. Remember that the observers are always compensating, whether they know it or not. Their eyes continue to see us, but somewhere behind the eyes, in the visual cortex, the portion of the brain which translates visual sensory input, our eraser swipes. The body doesn’t like it when the brain does not respond to its office memos, so it works harder to relay the message, panics, sends out an SOS. The brain doesn’t know what to do with that blinking red light on the dashboard, or, in our case, the vacancy in its field of vision. If we blot out too much, there can be an equal toll on the gray matter. Some of my overtaxed witnesses have reported black spots, dizzy spells, crawling bugs of negative space in the broad daylight where I was standing. Plenty have simply fainted while I worked. Or worse. I believe I gave my father a stroke when I was sixteen.’

  Noel was aghast. ‘How did you learn all this?’

  ‘Experience. Once you get it under control and realize you don’t have to run like the Gingerbread Man every time you want to go out for a coffee and newspaper, you notice things. And I’ve, ah, interviewed some of my quote-unquote victims, but I fear we’re getting ahead of ourselves.’

  Noel rubbed his eyes and laughed with relief. ‘All this time. The way people get uncomfortable around me. It’s like they can feel it. And they do, because it’s in me. It’s so obvious. How could I not see it?’

  ‘People are usually blind to what’s sitting right in front of them,’ Dalton said. ‘Many of them are grateful, because who wants to look at the problem? Who wants to deal with the unpleasantness? See no evil? That’s our want ad. We just push their own desires to ignore the problem. We tidy up the messy scene. I like to think of it as a sponge. A clean little sponge that I can slip beneath their skulls and smear away the stupid pictures on their television-rotted brains.’

  ‘My God. My God.’ Noel was lost in a string of memories. Seeing himself change so many times over the years, making himself vanish not before their very eyes, but in their minds. In the mirror, in his own mind, from himself. Hiding from his problems, then unable to do it for Julie because he wanted to be with her, not lost. But to himself? That didn’t fit Dalton’s explanation.

  ‘One thing,’ Noel said.

  Dalton sipped more Pepsi.

  ‘If what you’re saying is true, this works on us too, on the self. When I blinded others, I blinded myself. I could not see my own face in the mirror, the clothes on my body. How do you explain that?’

  Dalton parried with a sly smile. ‘Are we not as others see us? Do we not construct our models of ourselves on the reactions of those closest to us, on the lingering glances of strangers passing by, on the face in the mirror? Why is it that some people see a green shirt and call it blue? A blue shirt green? We call this colorblindness, but all it really implies is that reality is not fixed, is not ultimate, is nothing more than the collective perceptions of a family, a society. There was a time when automobiles didn’t exist, computer chips, the Bible. A thing has to be imagined – seen by the mind – before it can be born. Whatever is in us that allows us to do what we do, it must be wired into the imagination, literally where things, including the self, are imagined so that they may become real. Or, in our case, real but invisible.’

  Noel laughed. ‘You know something crazy? I think I can feel it. Just knowing all this makes it feel more … accessible. Is that possible?’

  ‘Confidence matters. You see this in the arts. With musicians, painters, writers, and in sports, where winning breeds winning. A man who believes he has control of his talents is much more likely to execute his passions. Doubt is the killer. Hesitation doesn’t keep twenty spinning plates from crashing to the floor.’

  ‘But is this really, what’s the word? Innate? Natural?’ Noel said. ‘I was born this way? Or did I grow into it? How do we know it’s not environmental?’

  Dalton yawned. ‘Maybe it’s both. Nature and nurture. I have to believe that at some point the seed, whatever kernel of it is there to begin with, finds its reactive property for germination.’

  Noel continued to nod, drinking it all in. Something big was missing, though. Something he wanted to know but was afraid to ask. It would sound crazy, but then so did everything they were discussing.

  ‘What about the dead?’ he said. ‘The lost ones. Spirits.’

  Dalton became very still. ‘What about them?’

  Noel took a deep breath. ‘They appear before or during for me. Do you see them? When you are in the bub— when you are, whatever you called it, faded? Do you see the dead?’

  Dalton seemed to melt in his seat a little. ‘Noel, I do. I see them.’

  ‘I thought I was losing my mind.’

  ‘Yes, I get headaches.’

  ‘It’s fucked up, isn’t it?’ Noel said, wound up and glancing around in all directions as if vengeful spirits would at any moment spew forth from the stores and Dalton would show him the trick to vanquish them. ‘I didn’t know what they were, not for a long time. I saw them when I was a kid. I thought they were my imaginary friends. People from TV. Actually, one was.’

  Dalton chuckled. ‘Oh, yes. Just like on TV. They aren’t really human, are they? Another trick of the mind. It’s easier to see them that way.’

  ‘My scratches,’ Noel said, turning his arm over to reveal a faint pink welt. ‘Ten weeks ago I looked like a cat’s scratching post. They did this to me. Or maybe they made me do it.’

  ‘“They made me do it.’’’ Dalton repeated, his eyes full of wonder. Admiration. ‘My, you are a special one, aren’t you? They want to be released. They sense we have the power to set them free.’

  ‘That is exactly what it feels like,’ Noel said. ‘I hate them.’

  ‘I’m just amazed … it’s incredible that you understand all this, Noel. I might have underestimated you.’

  Noel did not understand why this seemed to please Theo so much, but he was relieved there was one more thing that was not his burden alone.

  Dalton stood abruptly, excitedly patting his pockets, sat back down. He looked at his watch and removed a pen and a small spiral notebook from his jacket’s inner pocket. He jotted something with a flourish, tore a slip from his pad and handed it over as he rose once more.

  ‘Where are you going?’ Noel said.

  ‘Stop by that address this evening, around six or seven.’

  Noel was unable to mask his disappointment. ‘Is this your house?‘

  ‘One of them.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘All this talk,’ Dalton said with a wink. ‘It’s easier if I show you.’

  Noel sat a while and wondered what else there was to see.

  31

  If Dalton was a slob in public, he became fastidiously composed at home. After a light dinner of curry skewers he’d grilled with a small kettle on his ninth floor terrace, served with a dry white wine and a large salad rich with avocados, the professor was at the sink, his blue striped shirt cuffs folded crisply to the elbows, washing dishes with nary a splash. Noel remained at the small but elegant dining table set beyond the alcove holding a plaster statue, a copy of something he’d seen in a book before: the woman with no arms or legs, reduced to a turning bust with a wreath at her curls, flat white eyes undefined, cast downward as if in modesty or shame.

  The rest of the condominium, one of several Dalton ‘kept around the country’ for when he tired of hotels and ‘felt the need t
o repair to a habitat of my own making’, had been appointed with thick brown drapes and white crown molding above the fibrous beige wallpaper. The place was tidy, the furnishings spare but soft, with lots of extra throw pillows and folded blankets tossed around the armchairs and small sofas. Track lighting beamed warm cones of light into all the right spaces without becoming intrusive. A tower shelf had been stocked with oversized art books and a few small, meticulously tended plants, and a discreet Bose system that suffused the apartment with classical music.

  Noel had to admit he had been expecting something weird and dismal out in the desert, the kind of place where one expected to find abandoned cars in the front yard, a dungeon basement outfitted with shackles, chains and glory holes. So he was relieved when the taxi driver took one look at the address and delivered him just five blocks west of the Strip, to this clean white stone and black glass plaza among commuter traffic, amid grocery stores and what appeared to be mild-mannered business executives and well-dressed young couples with nice hair and normal lives.

  ‘Put it in real estate,’ Dalton said at the sink, pausing to sip more wine between soap bubbles. They had been discussing money, how to maintain an income between fades, during the ups and downs of the lifestyle. ‘Tangible assets, preferably of the sort that can be lived in or rented. Hire a property manager. I get rent checks in the mail every week, at half a dozen PO boxes. Oh, you need those too. Use the little strip mall kind, the ones that provide other services. They can forward your mail, fax you things, run a new passport photo. Quite handy.’

  ‘Good advice,’ Noel said. He raised his wine glass, sniffed it for the third time, and set it back down. He didn’t care much for wine. He was growing restless again. In addition to finances, they’d talked about Colorado, Noel’s parents, Dalton’s short-lived marriage to a woman in Tacoma, Washington (it ended when she came home to find him singing in the shower and peeked around the curtain to discover there was no ‘there’ to Theodore Dalton). Dalton had talked of his travels through Europe and even threatened to haul out the slide projector, but so far they’d discussed nothing more of the strange talent they had in common. How to manipulate it, turn it on and off.