The Fading Read online

  You can’t see me or my bag, he thought with vehement force. You can’t see anything around me. Not my hair, not my clothes, not my jewels, not my shoes …

  He rounded the corner into a different wing of the mall. To his left, past half a dozen more shops and benches and tree planters where at least twenty people strolled, there stood a bank of glass doors with glowing green exit signs above them.

  Freedom had never looked so far away, and it was very tempting to scoop up the bag and run, damn the consequences. But more than the thrill of his stolen treasure, he was riding the high of outsmarting them, the people inside the jewelry store, the other shoppers, the maintenance man socking a new bag into the trash can, everyone walking by with no clue what he could do, what he had done, what he was.

  Go ahead and look, he wanted to shout. I’m too good for you!

  Eight long minutes later he crouched, took the bag in both hands, and put his shoulder down. He hit the doors with a barely repressed scream and fled into the October night.

  Seven and a half hours after the bubble took him, he parked the Honda behind the building on Kalmia, chained it to a small tree and let himself into the apartment. He was thinking of clothes he could fit into his backpack and the two or three books he would take with him, but his mother was waiting for him on the couch. She was smoking, staring at the front door the moment he stepped through.

  ‘He’s home,’ she said into the phone, her eyes rooting him where he stood. ‘Not now. I’ll call you later. I can’t tell you that because I don’t know. He’s still your son, John.’ She slammed the handset to the cradle.

  They stared at each other. Noel hugged the backpack. She didn’t ask him why or how. She did not leap up to hug him or assure him everything would be all right.

  Instead she said, ‘The doctors said her mother won’t be able to walk for a long time. Maybe ever again.’

  Noel said nothing.

  ‘Of all the places, you had to go there? How could you? How could you think that was even remotely a good …’ She shook her head, unable to finish. Her eyes were blackened with streaked mascara and her skin was an ill shade of gray.

  Noel moved a few steps into the living room. He unzipped his pack and turned it upside down. He shook it until the entire contents spilled out on the carpet.

  Rebecca covered her mouth. The enchanted girl was gone. In her place was a steam-ironed mother who’d just been told her son was dead.

  ‘We can run away,’ he said. ‘There’s enough here to last a long time. I counted the tags. It’s over two hundred thousand—’

  ‘Stop it!’ she screamed.

  He let the pack fall onto the pile.

  ‘I can’t protect you,’ she said. ‘I love you but I can’t protect you. Not from the rest of the world. Not from yourself. Not even from me.’

  She cupped her face in her hands, and he knew she couldn’t stand to look at him.

  ‘I did it for you,’ he said.

  ‘I didn’t ask for this!’ she screamed. ‘I don’t want it! I can’t live like this! Do you understand me? I can’t live with you!’

  Rebecca hurried from the room and her bedroom door slammed.

  Noel sank to his knees and set his hands on the pile of jewelry, thinking of nothing, nothing at all but how beautiful they looked slipping through his hands, hands that seemed capable of almost anything.

  12

  At the age of nineteen, having reached his full height of six feet two inches but weighing only one hundred and fifty-five pounds, black hair unfashionably long and stiff, his spine bracketed to the rake of constant anxiety planted in his life, weary of sunlight and solid human beings, Noel had become a pale scarecrow of a man without a Dorothy.

  Food held little interest, but he forced himself to hoard extra stores between his spells (when acquiring food and having an appetite was nearly impossible), sometimes binging for weeks without ever filling out his lean frame, his facial features made severe by hollow cheeks and a steep forehead. He barbered himself only every six months or so – once while in the blink, watching it reappear in the sink twenty-seven minutes after he cut it, and re-emerging four hours later deciding it wasn’t a bad job for a blind man.

  He lived alone in a one-bedroom apartment on Canyon Boulevard in downtown Boulder, in the kind of anonymous building that exists one rung above squalor and conceals bland people living marginal lives. He did not have a job or attend college, but he always managed to pay his rent on time. He owned a used Toyota 4-Runner purchased with funds from the fenced jewelry, but he preferred to walk on his errands to minimize the risks of driving. He had never had a meaningful relationship with any woman beyond his mother, whom he had spoken to only a handful of times in the past five years.

  After her nervous breakdown, Rebecca voluntarily entered a psychiatric hospital in Colorado Springs, her stay paid for by her ex-husband. John lived in Calabasas, California, with Lisa and her parents, who funded her care. When John wasn’t lifting her in and out of bed, Lisa relied on a wheelchair to get around, though last Noel had heard she could stand for short periods of time. Julie had been exported with them, and Noel had not spoken to any of them since the accident. John had forbidden his son to come to the hospital. Noel had penned sincere and extensive letters of apology to John, Lisa and Julie, but when a bundle of fourteen was returned unopened, he stopped writing to them.

  Four months after her admission, Rebecca was deemed healthy enough to be released into her own care but stayed at a women’s co-op in Colorado Springs for another year. If she was diagnosed with something that would explain her belief that her son became a walking, talking ghost every few months, no one told Noel.

  For the first year, Noel continued to stay at the apartment on Kalmia. It took the state nine additional months to catch onto the Shaker situation – the father out of state, the mother hospitalized before going into self-imposed hiding, her fifteen-year-old son living alone – and, when they finally sent a social worker to the apartment, Noel ran away for three weeks, living off dumpster scraps from the restaurants downtown or stealing his meals from the grocery store, sleeping in parks at night until it was safe to come home. When he was sixteen, he retained legal counsel and petitioned the state for emancipation from his parents, and his petition was not contested.

  Rebecca answered his first few letters warmly, assuring him she was better now and would be home soon. But as the one-year anniversary of her release neared he realized she wasn’t coming home, that living with him would send her back to the hospital, or worse.

  Since his nearly seven-hour episode at age fourteen, the one that ended in the paralyzation of Julie’s mother and the final destruction of his family, Noel had dropped out of the spectrum twenty-two times. The stairway tragedy seemed to have in some way satisfied the beast or cleaned his cursed soul, for it spared him for thirteen months in the wake of Lisa’s multiple and unsuccessful spinal surgeries.

  But on Thanksgiving of his fifteenth year, it came back with a vengeance, claiming him from wake-up till three a.m. He rode the bus for hours, until it began to fill near rush hour, then skipped off at the downtown station, where he followed a homeless man in a railroad engineer’s cap all day, telling himself he was studying the lifestyle in case things got really bad. He reappeared as the choo-choo man finished a quart of Lucky Lager he’d bought at Liquor Mart, at which time the choo-choo man screamed and Noel ran home.

  The next three hit in rapid succession, scrambling his entire perception of the visiting curse as something with an even remotely predictable timetable. He dropped in two days before Christmas and stayed two minutes shy of twenty-six hours, in the midst of a major snowstorm. Determined to burst through the shell, he bundled himself inside enough clothes to stay warm in Antarctica, but the blink claimed every single layer of hat, gloves, scarf, sweater, long underwear, and both parkas, the Sorel boots. He went outside anyway and spent hours throwing snowballs at cars on Broadway, causing two accidents, one of which required an
ambulance, before tiring of the game.

  The third of that winter series was actually a string of forty or fifty episodes, but they came and went so quickly, Noel counted them as one horrific day at the carnival. Maybe it had something to do with the drinking. On 1 February, at three in the afternoon, he discovered a stash of liquor Rebecca had been keeping in the linen closet. Large bottles of cheap vodka for the most part, plus one odd smaller bottle of Wild Turkey he suspected one of her old boyfriends had left behind. He dropped out at the first slug of Tvarski. The timing frightened him, so he put the bottle back on the shelf until the blink gave him back to the world just seven minutes later.

  Enjoying the warm glow filling his limbs and making his head swirl, the fumes turning his thoughts loose, he took another belt. As before, he disappeared within seconds of the vodka’s slide into his empty stomach. It was exciting. He believed he had finally found the ON/OFF switch he had been searching for all along. Something about the clear burning liquid seemed to be the perfect catalyst for his condition, erasing his image and restoring it as the vodka’s effect lessened. In and out, on and off. The shots went in and the bubbles rolled over him and away like a tide, dragging him out to the sea of inebriation and numbness and braying fits of donkey laughter.

  With three-quarters of a bottle down, he stripped naked and watched himself in the mirror, rolling in and out of existence with each shot. Sometimes minutes passed, other times mere seconds. Eventually the bottle was empty and he fell down, emerging from the flickering bout to find himself wrapped in a blanket on the bathroom floor. He felt so awful he took another shot, flashed out and returned while vomiting. The watery bilge he brought up splashed in the toilet bowl, reappearing on its way down. He spent the night on the couch, head spinning as his hands and legs blinked in synchronization with his shivers and he came very close to calling 9-1-1, consequences be damned.

  But he wasn’t too drunk to forget that if his secret was exposed he would spend the rest of his life in one form of prison or another. Hospitals at first. Then in science labs, government facilities, places where men in green fatigues or radiation suits injected him with colored dyes and cut him open in a thousand places to find what could not be found. The answer, the trigger, the secret.

  After the vodka, he resolved to stay sober and not break any laws, as if bargaining with whatever cruel god was in charge of his karma and the cloak. His parole from the bubble-cell lasted ten weeks. A spring thaw was on and he felt better than he had in years. He made a to-do list. Cleaned the apartment. Ventured out for longer periods of time. He was pushing a loaded grocery cart down the pasta and sauce aisle at three in the afternoon when a single erasure swooped down from whatever cloud held his reserve stock and made checking out impossible. He abandoned his cart and walked home, where he spent the next thirty-seven hours, his longest episode to date, watching the one thing he could focus on besides himself – television.

  The weeks and months and intermittent episodes of his life became a blur. The strain of constantly waiting for it to hit ruined any chance of living a life outside of the thing. He felt starved: for downtime, for social interactions, for money, for food, for a reason. He couldn’t hold a job or pursue any goal that required planning, consistent effort, commitments. He was forced to take what he could not earn.

  But stealing had its drawbacks for the simple fact there were limits to what he could take. Sure, he could walk into a bank vault this afternoon, if he followed the right employee. But he couldn’t hide two duffel bags filled with a million dollars on the way out. As soon as someone saw the bricks of cash floating across the room, the party would be over. The bubble seemed capable of harboring nothing larger than what he could stuff in his pockets. As a thief, he was a petty one, if for no other reason than he lacked the ambition and imagination to concoct the big score.

  He stole money from open cash registers and purses when backs were turned. He stole small valuables while in the void to pawn for cash when out. He grew to hate and fear the solids, his term for normal people.

  Even with his ability to move undetected, sustaining a decent living was an endless process of foraging for scraps. Large quantities of money simply did not appear before you, invisible or not. Most of the time he lived as a man who collects two thousand aluminum cans and plastic bottles to redeem, only to find himself with barely enough money to cover a few days’ worth of expenses.

  He entertained a phase of breaking into Boulder’s large but not overly fortified suburban homes, taking during the day, but always he returned to the problem of transportation. How to get the goods out. How to get to and from the site of the score. How to transform the stolen property into usable funds. His residential burglary phase came to an end one summer morning when he slipped, invisibly, through the unlocked patio door of what he was sure was a vacant house, only to find himself confronted by a hundred and twenty pounds of slobbering Rottweiler. It did not matter whether the dog could see him. Its fat black muzzle scented him in an instant and charged, driving him against the dining-room table and putting three puncture wounds the size of bullet holes in his calf muscle. He beat the dog back with a silver candlestick holder and escaped before it relaunched for his throat.

  Dragging himself back across town, leaving a trail of red drops over the sidewalks and vacant dirt lots, hospitals and doctors and even a regular pharmacy out of the question until the bubble released him, the predicament of his mortality and the reality of how quickly he might perish without access to basic human services hit him full force. What if it hadn’t been a dog but a stay-at-home grandpa who was also a member of the NRA? What if he was digging through someone’s jewelry box and took two rounds in the back, shattering ribs and collapsing a lung? After the dog bite, after walking almost three miles home before he was able to clean and bandage the wound with Dawn dish soap and paper towels and duct tape, after spending another seventeen hours waiting to become whole and worrying about rabies, he swore off home invasion.

  It was an ironic discovery, then, to realize that stealing brazenly, while a regular visible young man, was easier. He dressed in delivery man clothes bought at the Army Surplus Store. He carried a clipboard and pen. Sometimes he just fucking took what he needed and ran. Three times he had run from security guards and police, dumping the merchandise (a basket of steaks, a Walkman, stacks of video games, a floor model 20-inch TV) but so far he had not been caught.

  The guilt took its toll, of course. He felt like slime. A sub-human spider living in the shadows and fringes. With no one to talk to, no trusted ally who might offer counsel, he experienced deep valleys of depression between manic summits of glee. He lived in his own head, drove himself to misery with introspection.

  His next birthday was two months in the rearview before he realized he had turned twenty. It was something of sucker punch for the fact that 29 February only really happened once every four years and he’d missed it. The next time he would be able to celebrate his actual birthday wouldn’t come for another four years. He’d be twenty-four. He didn’t like to imagine what his life would be like then.

  Most of his early teenage rage bled and thinned into something more disturbing. A detached amusement at first, then a loss of all guilt and concern. He didn’t feel much. He almost wanted to get caught. He cried himself to sleep at night the way most people brush their teeth before bed. By twenty he felt old. Time had become a cruel god, torturing him with empty days that never ended.

  He carried with him at all times a bubble that was worse than the bubble that hid him from the world. This other bubble was the prison cell that living with the real affliction had constructed around his life. To make friends, to reach out for help, to form attachments, was forbidden by his very real fear of discovery.

  And then one day this too evaporated, his fear of so many possible bad outcomes. He gave up trying, worrying. He lost himself in the drudgery of getting by and, as if responding to his lack of stress, woke up one morning to realize the bubble had not
taken him in over six months. He was alarmed by its absence, and his progress reversed. He had squandered six months waiting for it to happen, time that could have been spent living like a normal person, working a job, making friends.

  But the thought of another spell filled him with such dull dread, such insistent malaise, that waiting for it became worse than the event itself. The when and where and how long this time of it all consumed his thoughts. Then all at once his ability to care about it, himself, all consequences, leaked from him mind and body and he found that he had nothing to live for or against.

  One morning soon after this, he woke in a solid state, got out of bed, urinated and walked into the kitchen to make himself a fresh pot of coffee. Watching the black brew drip he grew listless, unable to reach up and pull a mug down from the cupboard. Time seemed to stretch, the coffee taking an eternity to reach the four-ounce fill line. Drip drip drip. His whole life dripping away, being filtered by this abominable curse. He looked at his sad set of four bowls and four plates and four silverware and realized he had never entertained a single guest in his apartment, let alone used the entire set at once. In the utensil drawer, under a masher his mother once used to make his favorite dish, fried mashed potato pancakes with maple syrup, he found a heavy dull chef’s knife.

  He tested the blade on his forearm and found it too blunt too cut the black hair growing there. He became frustrated that he could not even scrape a few hairs with this knife, then fascinated by the dry powdery scrape of his skin. This skin, pale pink and pliable. How could it disappear? Where did it go? Why did it hate him so much? Or was it the world his skin hated? The world his skin?