The Fading Read online

  ‘How should I know? I wasn’t here.’

  ‘Right. You were in Florida, with the alligators.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘Think about it,’ he said.

  She took a bottle of sparkling water from the fridge and left the kitchen with as much drama as she could muster. He followed her into the living room where she plopped down on the couch and used the TV as an excuse to avoid eye contact.

  ‘So, what was it? You steal John’s car or try to kill yourself or something?’

  Noel sprawled over a reading chair in the far corner. ‘I refused to go to school.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And that’s it. One day I just refused to go. My dad freaked out. He and my mom fought a lot. About their own bullshit, mostly, and me. Then my dad left.’

  ‘There has to be more to it than that.’

  Noel shrugged.

  ‘Come on. Seriously, tell me.’

  ‘First tell me something you did.’ He smiled at her and winked.

  She faced him, aghast. ‘I didn’t do anything.’

  ‘Never?’

  ‘Stop looking at me! You’re freaking me out.’

  ‘Yeah,’ he said, laughing. ‘You did something.’

  Julie chewed the inside of her cheek. They watched a talk show, then she changed it to The People’s Court. The plaintiff was suing for $847.00 because the defendant had ruined her couch and broke the TV.

  After a couple minutes Julie said, ‘You should go soon.’

  ‘Show me your room first.’

  She glared at him. Her neck turned spotty pink.

  ‘Please?’

  ‘No way, you pervert.’

  ‘I bet you have a doll collection. Like a hundred of them, don’t you?’

  ‘Oh, my God, you are such a loser. Go away.’

  ‘Can I come back tomorrow?’

  She ignored him. The bailiff, an old man who was always grinning slyly, carried a folder from the plaintiff to the judge. Photos of the ruined couch spilled out. The broken TV. The judge whistled and the bailiff’s belt of cuffs and gun holster jiggled with mirth.

  Noel stared at her, waiting, but she wouldn’t give in. The cross on her necklace was crooked over the smooth pad of her left breast. He imagined her ribs underneath, her tiny belly button, her bony hips. His heart felt like it was dangling on a string.

  He spoke slower and quieter than he planned to. ‘I have a medical problem, all right? It makes me do strange things. It’s like I’m not here, even when I am. When it happens I can’t, like, interact with things or people. I’m just gone. It only lasts a few hours, but it kinda messes up my whole life. It creates problems. For everyone.’

  She looked at him with neither sympathy nor warmth. ‘I don’t get it. What, like schizophrenia?’

  ‘It’s just a change that comes over me.’

  ‘“A change that comes over you?” Dude. That sounds a little psycho.’

  ‘Hey. I’ve never hurt anybody.’

  She was frowning. ‘Does it have a name?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I don’t get it,’ Julie said. ‘Is it mental or physical or what?’

  ‘Forget it. It’s not a big deal.’

  ‘How long has it been? Since the last one?’

  ‘It happened about five or six times right around the time John decided to move out, but then it stopped for about a year and a half. The last one was right around spring break before last. And maybe once in summer, but not for a while now.’

  ‘Well.’ She twirled her hair around two fingers. ‘Maybe you’re cured.’

  He smiled, doubting it was so, but appreciating her effort. ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Why hasn’t your dad ever said—’

  ‘Don’t tell him!’ Noel all but leaped from the chair. Julie froze and he knew she thought she was in the house with a crazy person. ‘Sorry, just. He doesn’t understand. He doesn’t want to know anything about me and it caused a lot of problems between him and my mom. So please, don’t bring it up around him.’

  ‘Okay, I won’t.’

  Could he trust her? Too late for that. ‘I gotta go.’ He headed for the door.

  She changed the channel just before the verdict was announced. ‘It’s not my house either,’ she called after him.

  When he figured out what that was in response to, he smiled the rest of the way home. He came back next day, and the next, until their afternoon routine spanned sixteen days, skipping the weekends. He didn’t know yet that he was falling in love, or that his fall was about to destroy what remained of his family, though it was unlikely knowing these things would have kept him away.

  9

  Noel began arriving and staying later, after Julie told him her mom didn’t come home until at least five. She watched a lot of TV but sometimes did a bit of homework. They weren’t family, but one day they might be, if John and Lisa were married. And yet he felt the way he felt. He’d never spent this much time around one girl, just the two of them. Beyond his attraction to her, he was fascinated with the mere presence of the other gender, one his age. He was taking a new class, Girl 101.

  On the fifth day she made macaroni and cheese. She set it out on the dining-room table, on wicker place mats with napkins. The formal setting seemed to put her in charge, allow her to open up. She talked about Florida, missing her best friend, Bailey, who was supposedly rich but didn’t flaunt it. Julie’s dad, whose name was apparently Big, was a real estate person. He lived in a condominium development and threw lots of parties for people who lived there or who he wanted to move there. He sounded cool, but Julie liked her mom better and her dad hadn’t fought her decision to move. Julie called his casual indifference ‘the clincher’ to the actual decision. Lisa hated Florida, the humidity and the heat, and after she met Noel’s dad at a sporting goods expo in Orlando they started having long conversations by phone. Lisa was a traveling sales rep for Spalding and as long as she sold enough stuff they didn’t care where she lived, so it was easy to move to Colorado.

  Julie didn’t mind school, she said. It was easy for her, Noel sensed, the work as well as the structure, the rules, the brutal cliques. She wasn’t popular but had made a few friends. But mostly she simply went to class, paid attention, did her homework at lunch, and came home to veg out until she was eighteen, when she planned to go to college somewhere she could ‘study art and business and then hopefully combine the two so I can travel a lot and live in London’.

  Noel realized she was probably really smart; she didn’t have a rebellious bone in her body. She was getting along just about as well as Andy and Opie in fucking Mayberry, adapting to the changes in her life with seemingly no discomfort, and he envied her. He wanted to know her secret. His initial jealousy was turning to respect, but he wished he could find something wrong with her so that they wouldn’t be so different. The cross resting at her chest convinced him she was a virgin in all things. He wondered if she had ever kissed or smoked or had a drink, but didn’t know how to ask without sounding dumb and he realized the answers weren’t that important. He hadn’t done any of these things, either, but he had done other things that set them apart.

  It was the middle of October and Colorado was experiencing an Indian summer with almost no rain, but the nights were getting cooler and soon he wouldn’t be able to ride his motorcycle to see her. It was almost fifteen miles each way. Was there a bus he could take? It probably didn’t stop near here. He grew antsy, quieter each day.

  ‘Why’d you want to see my room?’ Julie asked him on the last day. He hadn’t asked since that second day and was surprised she remembered. The fact that she brought it up now made him nervous. Like she had stored his request somewhere, to be used when it was to her advantage.

  ‘I don’t know.’ Noel was sitting in the living room, flipping through an issue of Sports Illustrated. ‘Probably because you keep the door locked.’

  ‘Did you try to get in?’ she said.

  ‘I didn’t
even know there was a basement.’

  She laughed. ‘I can’t decide if you’re really smart or totally dense.’

  ‘Maybe I’m so smart I’m dense.’

  ‘No, I think you’re just dense.’ Julie pulled her hair back and let it fall. She curled her lip again the way she often did, as if she were disgusted by something unidentifiable in her presence. ‘Do you still want to see it?’

  He dropped the magazine and walked over to her, feeling like a beast. He was more than a head taller than her. Slowly she looked up at him and her expression, for once, was bare. She was frightened and adorable and he had a crazy urge to lean down, tuck the thick hedge of her black hair around her tiny pink ear and lick it.

  Julie hiccup-laughed. ‘You’re like my stepbrother, right?’

  He realized she needed to square it as such. Not in some kinky way, only so that it wouldn’t be weird for him to enter her room.

  ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘Close enough, I guess.’

  She frowned and turned away. He followed her down the stairs. He had imagined a cold empty space, concrete floors, paint cans and a big ugly furnace, but of course Lisa wouldn’t allow her daughter to be housed in a dungeon, and Happy John was all about keeping his new sex wife lady happy.

  The basement was entirely furnished, with thick white carpet that was, if anything, nicer than the carpet upstairs. There was a whole ’nother couch and TV set up down here. An aquarium with plants and a school of small red and blue fish. Julie had her own bathroom, with two sinks and bulbs that went all the way around the mirror. The counter was a mess of teen magazines, make-up, nail polish, perfumes, bright purple and pink bottles. A damp waft of locker room, sweet fruit and chemically brisk hair-product girlness nearly smothered him. Being inside it was like being trapped in her pillowcase, under her armpit. On the floor beneath the vanity lay one of her bras, white and flat across the carpet as if it had been ironed there. It looked so formless as to be unnecessary, a five-year-old’s swimsuit top, but the sight of it made his feet clumsy.

  ‘In here, dummy,’ she said, and unlocked the door to her room.

  Crossing over, the inner sanctum. He felt more of a trespasser now than he ever had in his dad’s house. Immediately his gaze was drawn above her bed – a silver silk-quilted queen with thick black pillows stacked against the black lacquer headboard – to an expensive poster framed under track lights.

  It was a mounted cloth tapestry of some four feet by four feet, featuring a guy who looked like a skinnier, stranger and far sadder version of Elvis sitting on a bar stool underneath black letters that were either the name of a band or a movie. He wore a dress shirt open at the collar and was smoking with beautiful royal disdain for the entire world. Pouting lips. A woman trapped in a handsome man’s body. He was a new twist on a familiar type: the rebel, the stray cat, the crooning bad boy, but he had taken it all to new extremes of who cares. His large presence in her room, placed so prominently over her bed, no less, filled Noel with aspirations and heartsick envy. This was what she wanted. This was the object of her dreamy longings, her innocent pillow-grinding two a.m. sweats. He had no idea who the man was, but the iconic pose and leering sad eyes and sideburns immediately rooted him in Noel’s consciousness as an evolutionary marker to be reached as soon as possible. Julie was in love with this creature, he had no doubt, and she should be. Noel fell in love with the man, too, in the way of a boy who wants so badly to be more than a boy, who falls in love with Superman or Evel Knievel or his fireman father, his idolized future self.

  Sometime during this fugue, Julie stopped talking, her warm curiosity turning to concern. Her big round eyes. Her pale cheeks. Her glossy hair. Her reality becoming more real with every heartbeat. What was he supposed to do? What would that guy lounging above her bed do? You think a guy like that cares what anyone else thinks of him? You think he’s afraid to walk into a girl’s bedroom?

  It was like stepping off a bridge unable to see the water below. He leaned down to kiss Julie on her lips, hesitated less than an inch away, waiting for the slightest tension in her body to tell him this was what she wanted, or didn’t want, or maybe didn’t know until it happened. But she only stood in slack paralysis, and for a moment everything blurred, he wasn’t touching her but the air between them firmed and pushed back and just this, this being so close, locked into the almostness with her, allowed him to soar.

  Until she broke the trance and pressed her face to his neck, her warm breath coming in fierce little blasts at the hollow of his throat. Her arms encircled his waist and she squeezed him, all pent up with lonely from her mom not being there the way she used to be when it was just us two girls, her dad not giving a damn whether she was in Florida or Colorado or in outer space. A hug. What she really wanted was for him to comfort her, be here. She was as terrified as he was, and this was a relief and a disappointment.

  He was disappointed he didn’t get to kiss her but he liked the feel of her small body against his. He held her, looking down the slope of her shiny black hair. It was so straight and perfect, all he could think to do was settle his moist palm over the back of her skull and gently let it slide down, drawing the heat from beneath the silken layers, knowing that when his hand got to the end of the hair he would be a failure, the boy who didn’t kiss her when he had the chance. Already sinking in regret, he tried to make it last, wanting nothing more than to feel her pampered strands gliding at his wrist for an hour. But too soon he had reached the bottom and his hand fell to the back of her neck, corded and hot as pavement, and it was the end of something that could never be gotten back and he felt a piece of his life fading away, going with time, vanishing for good.

  ‘What are you thinking about?’ Julie said into his shirt. She shifted her weight and hugged him again.

  Noel breathed in her citrus hairspray and the faint catch of natural oil beneath that, and looked up again to the tapestry. He was about to ask what The Smiths meant when the man in the poster turned his head and looked directly at Noel. His pouting lips spread into a smile and his puppy dog eyes widened in recognition. His entire lean frame slithered from the barstool as he stepped down, out of the black-and-white poster and onto Julie’s bed. His body and clothes and high forehead retained their granulated black-and-whiteness as he entered the three-dimensional world of color. He reached back into the smooth plane of art and, with impossibly long maestro fingers, retrieved a burning cigarette from the bar. He took a drag, squinting, and held the cigarette out to Noel, clamped between his thumb and first finger, the nails of which were painted fuzzy newsprint black.

  Smoke and its raw sick tint roiled at Noel, the snaking tendrils swirling in the space between them. He lost whatever inertia he had gathered from Julie, slumping as he watched the smoke curl and settle into a gray reef roaring with the silence of hallucination, revealing black holes and edge-scapes dense with dark amoebic life forms, glass fish and electric eels that darted and burrowed in knots of darkness.

  ‘Don’t you think it’s time we show her? I do,’ the man said, his gray sickle moon face rising through the smoke reef. His voice was nasal and British, swerving from falsetto to baritone with the stilted affect of lounge singer lyrics. ‘I think she can handle this, I think she can handle every little fish, boy-o, how about yooooooouuuu?’

  ‘No,’ he managed, barely audible. ‘Please …’

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Julie said, releasing him. ‘Did I do something wrong?’

  ‘No.’

  Julie followed his eyes to the wall, the bed. ‘What are you staring at?’

  The man twigged to the sound of her voice, springing from the bed with a cold sharp laugh. Of course Julie couldn’t see him, the old Him who kept changing disguises. He floated for a moment, hanging in the air, his battered brown boots above the white carpet, and then his heels landed without a sound and he loomed with a hysterical grin right up in Noel’s face.

  ‘I know, I know, it’s seriiiii-eeee-oooouuusssss,’ he sang, and Noel’s teeth clicked
on the edge of his tongue, drawing blood.

  Backing away from him, looking over her shoulder, Julie said, ‘Hey, what? What was … where did you go?’

  The Smiths man was humming deliriously, and Julie’s words scared him more than if she had started screaming bloody murder.

  ‘Noel? Seriously, this isn’t funny. You’re scaring me.’

  Noel closed his eyes but it did no good. He could see through the lids, through the hands he covered them with, through the bones and flesh of his windmilling panic, and he had no choice but to witness all that followed.

  10

  He didn’t know if it was the sound of his footsteps or his breathing that alerted Julie to the impossible fact that he was still here but no longer visible. He hadn’t dropped in so long, he forgot the basic commandments.

  Don’t speak. Don’t move. Don’t breathe.

  As far as anyone with you at the moment of change is concerned, you simply weren’t where they thought you were. They didn’t see anything because there is nothing to see. A person is either here or not here, but there is no ‘vanishing’ to witness. They will chalk it up to a mental lapse, a blink or distraction that lasted too long, but only if you let them. If you shatter the safety of their logic-hungry delusion with the reality of your invisible presence, you will only create chaos and harm, and the hell will come down on you again.

  After her first sharp intake of breath, Julie twirled, confused, half-formed words dying on the lips he had almost kissed. Trying to reclaim what was already lost, Noel forgot himself and said, ‘I’m sorry.’

  Julie yelped, his voice too close, emanating from nowhere. Her face paled and she backed into the wall. He should not have confessed to her earlier, let himself get attached to her, for something in the way they had bonded now allowed him to think he could explain. The Smiths man was grinning at him from her bed, hopping up and down, humming a new disturbing melody.

  Noel tried again. ‘It’s okay, don’t be afraid, wait, just listen to me—’