Grave Takings

Dark begat dark, swirling blackness, broken only by the swirling discs dancing in his eyes; the same ones you get if you close your eyes and press hard on your eyelids. Why did we do that as kids? What were we trying to prove? We’re lucky we could still see after trying to push our eyeballs into our skulls. He remembered this exact image from childhood, still feeling the strange temptation to press his eyes harder and harder, just to see what patterns would appear in this vision-dark world.

But now, he swirled, dark upon dark. Not colors. Colors would have been a delight. He’d kill to see colors right now. But there aren't colors, only the idea of colors, faint whispers of colors, greenish somethings and a red that isn't red, tumbling over each other behind his eyelids, like a wave of Legos rolled through again and again in search of just the right piece to finish his latest build. Now, joining the not-colors, a roar rises, swallowing his head. What the hell? That's new. It’s pulsing, drowning, driving him deeper in the dark. Shit, he thinks. It’s my blood. I can hear my blood. Can you hear blood? He’s never in his pathetic life heard his own blood before, and now it is the only sound there is, a tide going out somewhere behind his ear, patient, unhurried, in absolutely no rush to bring anything back in.

He staggered, doing a great weeble-wobble impression. He couldn’t tell if the floor had turned to a full wave waterbed mattress or if his legs forgot they were supposed to keep him upright. He feels something wet under his cheek, hoping distantly, without much investment either way, that it’s beer and not blood. At least, not his blood. Get up, he tells the legs, who’ve become obstinate and wholly uncooperative. His current predicament doesn’t strike him as urgent. Nothing strikes him as urgent in the swirling mirk, yet some part of him still capable of noticing things notices that this is the first time in longer than he can hold onto that nothing has felt urgent, and there is something almost like relief in it, obscene in how good it feels, like the first hour after you stop expecting the phone to ring.

Don't tell anyone.

What was that?

Don’t tell anyone.

Who said that? Scruggs? Philipp? No, no, not a voice. A memory. The memory-making voice hadn’t been a voice in thirty-one years. He had to remind himself of that fact a few times before it took hold. God, the world spins faster, then slower, then faster. World’s worst merry-go-round. Ever.

The non-voice returned. Not a voice, a memory. A heavy memory. A weight, a coin the size of a poker chip lodged just under the breastbone where the ribs make their little cathedral, burning white hot, turning over in syncopated rhythm with the tide filling his ears, warming, needing, burning, wanting something from him. Christ, even now, even here, it wants something from him.

He was seventeen the first time it spoke. It reminded him of what pain could be.

***

Corliss had hands like a man twice his size, big soft spade hands that didn't match the rest of him, and he'd put one of them flat on the boy's chest, over the sternum, and said the two things a man says when he's about to ruin somebody for good, and he wants it to sound like a gift. You're the one. And then, quieter, as it cost him something, though the boy would spend three decades deciding it hadn't cost him a single thing: Don't tell anyone. Not ever. Not the good ones, not the ones you love most, not the ones dying in front of you asking. You'll know when it's time. You'll feel it. The hand came away, leaving a heat exactly the size and shape of that hand; a brand burnt past the skin and into the soul. Squirming, the boy thought, this is what being chosen feels like, which was the last purely stupid thought he ever allowed himself the luxury of having.

He does not remember what Corliss told him. That's the joke. That’s the whole ugly architecture: he has never once, not for a single second in thirty-one years, forgotten that he knows. As certain as the earth will continue to spin about its axis, he knows that something is locked inside him. But what that thing is stays just beyond the conscious realm in some foggy ether, the way a locked room sits in a house you've lived in forty years, load-bearing, integrated into the plumbing. You stop being able to picture what's inside it because you've simply stopped going in. He understood that, whatever this was, he couldn’t tell anyone. That realization came early, leaving no doubt and no room to think; knowing something was there but accepting that not knowing what it was caused the least pain. He tried willing himself to remember once; the scars still hurt in the cold.

***

Renna left in October, not slamming anything, which was worse, bags packed with the terrible competence of a woman who grieved the loss of him weeks before and was only now getting around to filing the paperwork. At the door, she said the thing they all eventually said, or some version of it, worn smooth by however many women had said versions of it before her, though he never let himself count: I'm not asking what it is anymore. I stopped asking what it is. I'm asking why I'm less than it.

He hadn't had an answer that wasn't the coin turning over hot under his shirt, so he'd said nothing, which she correctly understood as the answer.

Before Renna there was a man named Voss who'd come too close, who'd started putting names to dates in a manila folder with the patient joy of a man building something he loved. The coin went incandescent for four straight days until he'd done what it wanted, in a stairwell, with his hands, because guns leave paperwork and hands, if you're careful, leave almost nothing at all. He remembers Voss's shoes came off in the struggle; one stayed on the third-floor landing for six weeks. He knew because he went back twice to check, appalled at himself both times for going back, going back anyway, the way you can't stop touching a burn.

Before Voss, a woman whose name he actually, mercifully, lost — not suppressed, lost, the way you lose a language you were only ever taught the danger-words in — and what he’d done to her wasn't killing. Some distant ledger locked behind a dozen safe doors he couldn’t examine kept the record of that incident. Three children lost the roof over their heads and the next ten years of their lives bouncing from foster home to foster home. He’d done it clean and fast, fast and clean, and told himself for years afterward that was a kind of mercy, the same lie every hand tells itself about the thing it's just finished doing.

***

Three decades of don't tell anyone wore the ethics off him one layer at a time, the way water wears a stone, except stones don't notice. They couldn’t care less. He noticed every single time, every single year, felt the exact width of what had worn away, and kept going anyway, because the coin promised him that somewhere out past all the ruined names was one person built to receive it. Built to hear it, whole, the way no one else could hear it even if he screamed it in their face, and on that day, whenever that day came, the coin would finally go cold and lie still in him like a stone let go to the bottom of a lake, and he would be, for the first time since he was seventeen, only a man, with no flaming cathedral in his ribs and no weight and no debt.

He has met, by his own careful and increasingly desperate count, four hundred and eleven people he let himself hope for. Four hundred and eleven times the coin stayed exactly the temperature of blood and told him nothing, no signal, no answering warmth, nothing at all, and four hundred and eleven times he lost a little more humanity. In the last several years, in the hours after midnight when time slows, and the whiskey stops helping, he began to think the thought he refused to let all the way up into the light, the one he kept down in the water with the rest of the drowned things, that Corliss made the one-who-can-hear-it up. Whether an old man with spade hands needed a seventeen-year-old to believe there was a reward at the far end of ruin, because a boy who believes there's a reward will do the ruining for free, for decades, gratis, and call it a calling.

He has never let that thought finish a sentence. It's finishing one now, down here in the dark, with nothing left to stop it.

The bar was called The Anchor and had been called that since before the highway came through and killed the town's other reason to exist, and he had been drinking there four nights a week for the better part of a year because it was the one place left where nobody's name-and-date folder was being built about him, where nobody was leaving, because nobody there had ever stayed long enough to have that conversation with him in the first place. That was its whole value. It asked nothing.

He had a rail whiskey he wasn't tasting and sat atop a stool with a rip in the vinyl that had learned the shape of him. Two men three stools down argued about a pool game with the specific gravity only men who peaked during their senior year of high school can bring to things that don't matter, and one of them threw a bottle — not at him, never at him, he wants that understood by whatever's left in the room to understand it, this was not the coin's doing, not Voss's ghost, not any name from any folder come to collect, this was nothing, this was two drunks and a green bottle and bad luck finding the one square inch on the back of a man's skull where an old clot had been sitting patient and unannounced for years, from some other fight, some other stairwell, waiting with no opinion at all about justice, and the bottle found it, and the clot, after years of minding its business, finally moved.

Thirty-one years of don't-tell-anyone, four hundred and eleven strangers auditioned and found wanting, a stairwell, a folder, a name he was grateful to lose, and it comes down, in the end, to physics. To geometry. To a man three stools down who will never, not once in the rest of his unremarkable life, learn what he did.

There is something almost funny in that, down here in the dark, if funny still means anything to whatever he currently is.

The bartender's face, close now, saying something, mouth moving with no sound attached to it, and for one full second stretched over so much more than those thirty-one years, the coin goes hot. Hotter than Voss. Hotter than Corliss's hand. A blaze under the sternum like it's finally, finally, found the shape it's been listening thirty-one years for, and he thinks, with the last coherent architecture his mind still owns: him. It's him. It was real. Corliss wasn't lying; it's real, and I can —

His mouth opens.

Nothing comes. Not the thing, not any piece of the thing, not even the shape of the thing. Thirty-one years of carrying it and his mouth opens onto absolutely nothing, no sound, not even breath, because whatever moved in his skull has already taken the road out, the last order it gives on its way is simple, and it is old, and it does not care anymore whether the man three stools down was ever the one, was ever anyone, was ever anything but a stranger with bad aim: don't tell anyone.

Don't. Tell. Anyone.

Three words with all the meaning boiled out of them, worn down now to pure sound, a shape his mouth still knows how to make with no weight left inside it at all, the way you can still hum a hymn's tune years after you've lost every word of the hymn itself.

The swirlies go a while longer. Green somethings, a red that was never red. Then, without any ceremony at all, without so much as the courtesy of a last word, they don't.

The bartender told the police the man had said something right at the end, three words, maybe, he couldn't be sure, the man's mouth barely moved and there hadn't been any sound to it that he could swear to under oath. Nobody followed up. There wasn't a case. Just a man with a bad clot and worse luck, and a coroner's report, and a stool at the far end of the bar that stayed empty out of no particular respect for eleven days, until somebody's cousin visiting from Ashland sat down in it without knowing any better, and ordered a rail whiskey, and nothing in the building minded at all.