Ch 11: If You Have Ghosts
The Futureness Part Two
Methyl wakes startled, lying prone beneath Eric’s shipwreck aquarium.
“How long was I out?” she says without knowing where Eric has gone. It has grown dim behind his curtained window.
“Sixty minutes. You slept for sixty minutes on my floor,” Eric says from the hall.
He comes in scrawny, porcelain-skinned, fragile as a chick’s egg.
“You were asleep for an hour,” Eric says. “See? You needed to be comfortable.”
Methyl last slept on board Xavier’s wing, flying down from Canada, but feels she hasn’t slept since she met Richard behind the Golden Apple. Everything since then has been a blur that she can’t stop to think about. The few days she had in her tent after The Francesca ascended were the only moments she could think at her own pace, and even then, it was her spiraling lack of control that she brooded on. Police can at any moment appear and arrest her for Angela’s death if Xavier’s pressure, his bribes, whatever he’s using to keep her free, don’t work.
“We should have died that day at the Golden Apple,” Eric says.
“I know,” Methyl says.
“There were three of us,” Eric says, “There were three of us who they decided can’t function, after being there.”
“Three of us, yeah,” Methyl says. “The other two were in high school, so you didn’t know them.”
“But I know who you are,” Eric says.
“Who am I?”
“A girl who can fall asleep on my floor. A girl who is like me because you’re Sophia.”
“I’m not like you,” Methyl says.
“What did it do to you?”
“What?”
“The wall?”
Eric crosses to his single bed made to perfection, sheets creased tight. He sits on its edge. There’s nothing odd or off to Methyl about his question. The boy doesn’t look like he’s had an impure thought in his life, aside from his interest in the shipwrecked dead.
“Okay. I’m one of them,” Methyl says.
“I knew it!” Eric says. “I knew it the second I saw you.”
“What gave me away?”
“You’re miserable.”
“So nice to say.”
“Am I so wrong?”
“No,” Methyl says. “You’re not so wrong. I’ve seen a lot of shit during the last few weeks.”
“What?”
“There’s only two of us now, for one thing. That just happened.”
Methyl watches as Eric’s mind works through her words.
“The girl in the rich neighborhood who’s dead,” he says.
“How come you know so many things, little kid?”
“I think about them.”
“You got zapped with a news channel running through your head?”
“My mom gave me a phone for my birthday. She says she regrets it.”
“So, you dream this stuff, or what?”
“I think I dream about what happened before and after things,” Eric says.
“What happened before she died?”
“There was a dog. It was in the woods,” Eric says. “Running around loose. And it ran into the road.”
She swerved, Methyl thinks.
“Right,” Methyl says. “But, Eric, I didn’t do it to Angela.”
“I know,” Eric says. “Did you know something? That you haven’t told me what did the wall do to you yet?”
“What can we do with a radio?”
“I asked first.”
“Something with fire. I’m ready to be on fire all the time.”
“I knew it.”
“You’re getting pretty annoying,” Methyl says.
“Sorry.”
“But keep going.”
Eric brightens.
“Okay. Angela kills herself, you can breathe fire, and you can kill Xavier’s best robot.”
“How do you know about his robot?”
“Why are you visiting us?”
“Good one. I’m not telling you that just yet. It’s going to take some explanation.”
Her legs ache. Methyl stands and collides with a low-hanging ceiling light in Eric’s oddly shaped room. Triangular and attic-like, with one dormer window jutting out from this first story room, three feet above the ground and looking like a death trap.
“Let’s get out of here. Eric, your room is going to kill me.”
In the living room, Eric’s mother dozes on the couch, sitting upright.
When they reach the backyard, Methyl says, “What did the wall do to you?”
She thinks of Eric’s shipwreck and suddenly doesn’t want his answer, not entirely wanting to witness the weird work of skrip on another kid.
“Ever since the wall,” Eric says, his voice trailing off.
Methyl senses that she should wait him out. She listens.
Eric starts, stops, tries talking again.
“I feel like I can see things coming, but not tomorrow or next week. It’s more like I’m seeing things coming in a million years from now. I’m worrying about hundreds of millions of years from now, and it’s not tolerable. The main thing is to be comfortable. What I’m worried about is the end of the world and that it comes in so many different ways at once, or one thing after another, or it’s just the one thing, the one big, horrible thing and it’s over. In millions of years—as though I’m going to be around, as though any of us are. I mean, humans. Can I tell you a secret? I’m a ghost.”
“I believe that you play like a ghost on the bottom of the ocean,” Methyl says.
“No, for some people I am a ghost. I’m not crazy.”
“This sounds crazy.”
“You asked me, you wanted to know, the wall, what happened to me. You asked.”
“Okay, hey, Eric,” Methyl says.
Eric turns to a shade tree in his backyard and lays his head against its trunk.
Methyl’s vision flashes on Angela smashing herself against the windowpane. Suddenly terrified that she’s losing another one to madness, she’s on the verge of panic when she remembers.
“The radio. Where’s the radio you talked about using for The Francesca?”
Eric slouches against the tree, looking two heartbeats away from an emotional breakdown. He mutters something unintelligible. Methyl steps closer to hear him better.
“I can’t tell you, then. All right. Okay. Eric, you can’t ever tell anyone. Stop being so stupid.”
“Eric,” Methyl says gently. “Your idea about the radio. Maybe there is a way. Can you show me it?”
Eric’s voice cracks on the edge of tears.
“But what if they’re light years away by now? We’ll never be able to talk to them.”
“I don’t think that matters, somehow.”
“It’s in my grandma’s old bedroom. It has shortwave.”
“Let’s go.”
The radio sits on a bureau in a stuffy bedroom only partially cleared of Eric’s grandmother’s possessions.
“It still works, sort of,” Eric says. “I can’t get any stations. Just static.”
“How can we make this work,” Methyl says, feeling more foolish by the moment, standing before this antique. She feels a sudden pang of grief for her old life before the wall, when she had friends. When her life hadn’t dissolved into this madness. And yet, the radio is beautiful, Methyl thinks. She runs her hand over its wooden frame then turns it on.
A spark fires between her hand and the radio knob with a sharp crack. Methyl jumps back.
She yells, “Damn it, that hurt, Eric, this thing’s—”
Eric shushes her and puts up his hand. He leans into the radio’s speaker.
“Listen.”
A faint crackling sound. Static. Then, another boy’s voice comes into the room through the speaker.
“This is your radio kill report, Richard Dennison reporting,” the boy says, his voice nearly indistinguishable from the static. “And this is what you can’t become in the future.”
To be continued