There were two things in the black bag. It was roomy enough, being a repurposed wrapper from an economy-sized bottle of brandy that he’d bought so long ago he couldn’t even remember. He couldn’t read the gold embroidered label below the drawstring.
“The blue elephant-lady is back,” Erik said.
John bowed his head and tugged the bag shut. Dayashri. He didn’t know what Erik saw, but he always pictured her like she looked in the painting that hung over his mom’s nice sofa. A pretty lady with big, dark eyes, soft blue skin, and a long, demurely-coiled elephant’s nose.
He felt chastened and ashamed, as if his mother had just walked in. No, not her. His mom was a tough lady who didn’t take any nonsense. She’d swat him and tell him to cut that out. It was as if his fragile old Auntie Seeta had caught him pulling the wings off a fly, and he could hear her illusions shattering like glass.
“I’m sorry,” Erik said. “Did you want me to pretend I don’t see her? I forgot…”
“No, it’s okay,” John said. “What’s she doing?”
“She’s sad,” Erik said. “Her makeup is all runny. Ma’am? Yeah, sorry, I’m weird. I hurt my head before and now I don’t know what the heck’s wrong with me. Uh-huh. No, I remember you, but maybe I didn’t say hi because I didn’t want to scare you. Yeah? You’re nice. Do you want a tissue? Or a milkshake? We got room service…”
“Erik.”
“Actually, we don’t have room service, I don’t know why I said that. Oh, yeah?”
“Erik,” John said, looking down. “Please don’t bother Our Lady of Compassion, I’m sure she has other places to be.”
“She says she understands,” Erik said.
John nodded, heavily. “Thank you. I know. That’s what she does. Heh.” He hazarded a glance. “Is she…?”
“She gave you a hug and now I don’t see her anymore.”
“Oh. Well. That’s nice of her.”
It didn’t matter. She might understand, but she couldn’t do anything to help him. Not someone like him. He swiped his sleeve across his face and pulled the bag open again.
He had his choice of two objects for hurting Erik, so that Erik would have to stay with them, and keep helping them, and he couldn’t get away.
Regular or extra spicy? John thought helplessly. It wasn’t funny. It had never been funny. It was more like ritualized self-harm at this point. He snorted and shook his head at himself. Self-pity is not real estate we can afford, he thought. I promised him the list. Do I wanna be even more of a liar right now?
Erik couldn’t stop him, either way. And after, it wouldn’t make any difference.
Well, extra spicy was quieter. Easier. It still took Erik longer to recover from that.
Just not as long as it used to. For either thing.
John sighed and removed a small silver teapot from the cheap black velvet liquor bag. Under the bag, there lay a slender manila folder with only a few mismatched sheets of paper inside. It was slightly damp from the condensation on the window. He guessed he should be worried about that — the ink would run — but he didn’t have the strength. He was always losing his papers anyway. He’d be redoing the whole thing from scratch in a total panic soon enough.
Erik was sitting in a folding chair with his back to the window. He didn’t like to look out the windows — which was another reason the bag ought to stay on the sill. John saw him draw a deep breath and heard him let it out slowly, hoo, like when he was about to perform some new music on the street-corner.
He knows, John thought. Somewhere in there, he has everything I’ve taken away from him, it’s just that I keep moving it around so he can’t find it.
That was good, right? Once they stopped doing this, Erik could pull himself back together and pick up where he left off, with nothing missing and no damage. Even after all this time! Right?
But I’m hurting him. Even if he doesn’t cry out, or beg me to stop. You don’t brace yourself like that for a nice nap. You don’t… You don’t pick up where you left off and go back to normal when someone kidnaps you and hurts you over and over and over, for over a year.
Did she really say she understands, or was he just telling me that so…
So, what? Was he trying to tell himself that on some level, Erik was letting him do this?
He shut his eyes and shook his head, sickened.
Just get it over with, he told himself. You’re scaring him, making him wait like this, you piece of shit.
◆◇◆
There were two things in the black bag. He knew it and he didn’t know it. Sometimes one after the other, sometimes both at once. He couldn’t really be worried about it. There was a thing he would be worried about, if he remembered it, but he couldn’t. Either of those things. All he could manage to be was distracted and confused, which was not too different from what he was normally.
At least, all he could remember being normally.
It was no big deal and perfectly fine, and a scary decision in progress that he had no control over because it wasn’t real and everything was perfectly fine.
He heard John draw a breath close behind him and gave a little jump.
It was…
Oh.
It was a silver teapot, smooth and highly-polished. So shiny. He could see the light moving on it and the light wanted him and he wanted it.
“That makes me…” he said numbly. All his strength left him, what little he had. He slumped forward in the chair. “Mm.” It was on the table and he could look at it. He liked to look at it very much. He could only remember it when he looked at it and he remembered he liked it since always. He smiled at it.
“Please focus, Erik.”
“Mm-hm.” That helped him, those words. Everything else fell away. There was a vague memory of other words, something about the light, that occurred and faded. He let it. Focus. He was focused. When the teapot moved, was moved, he followed it without blinking or looking away. The eye he could close drifted shut. The metal one kept looking, with its lens racked open to the widest setting — focused.
“Do I… need to go?” He could hear himself talking, faint and a little bit dizzy, but not really feel it. He was an eye that looked and a mind that listened. There might’ve been some part of him that talked, but it wasn’t very important what it said. Now was to listen and understand.
“No, Erik. It’s just the list.”
He smiled. Or maybe felt like smiling but didn’t bother. It didn’t really matter. “Oh. That’s… nice.” There were a lot of things he thought were nice, like listening and remembering, and hotel rooms he couldn’t get out of. All that stuff. Nice.
“Yes. The list is nice. You’d like to listen and do everything on it. You don’t have to remember it, just remember to do everything it says.”
“Mm-hm.” He heard himself talking sometimes, he’d repeat and agree. “Yes,” or “no” — or “mm-hm,” and “mm-mm,” and sometimes just “mmm,” because his tongue didn’t work very well when he couldn’t feel it. It didn’t really matter. He listened, he looked at the teapot, and they did the list.
◆◇◆
He didn’t have to think, nor did he want to. He tried to read the words on the paper while assigning them no context or meaning, and bade his mind to wander off someplace better — past, fantasy, or future. Anywhere but here.
It didn’t listen very well. It kept scurrying back to ask him, Are we really doing this? Do we have to?
Yes. And there’s no way out, so stop looking. Just go away.
He hit the high points first, suggestions so well-worn they were almost a nursery rhyme: Don’t be nimble, don’t be quick, just let me help you, because you’re sick.
Sick, not hurt. Erik had spent most of his life being terrified of getting hurt again — losing everything he’d fought so hard to get back, having to start over from square one, or somewhere even worse. He knew it could happen, that recovery could take years, and that he might lose some things he could never get back. He had a large wooden cigar box at home, sitting on his dresser in plain view, inviting the storage of small objects, postcards, and photographs of significant events. Just in case. Almost as if it were inevitable.
John had known Erik a long time — John had, in fact, personally participated in Erik’s injury, then as now — so he knew that.
Sick was a better lie to tell. Sick was temporary. It could be really scary and painful, like being stuck in the basement during a magic storm, but it would be over soon. And there would always be someone there to take care of him and hold his hand, his family was really good about that. They had trained him.
So, yeah. Sometimes it’s hard for you to do things — because you’re sick. You get distracted and forget things all the time — because you’re sick. You can’t read minds and you need help to call anyone heavier than Cousin Violet — because you’re sick. You have to stay quiet, and talk softly, and be calm, or else you’ll lose your words (Oh, gods) and forget what you were doing — Sorry, Erik. That’s just too much strain right now. — because you’re sick.
But it’s no big deal, I’m here to help, so trust me, and listen to me, and do everything I say, even if you don’t understand. It’s okay if understanding is hard right now. Just rest and let me take care of you.
They had trained him to do that too. His whole family had taken part, but Erik’s uncle had specifically trained him to calm down, snap into a suggestible state, and let a helpful person root around in his subconscious like an impatient kid digging candy out of a piñata.
Mordecai had sat John down and explained it to him, and why, like he was afraid Erik would let something slip without context and John would call the cops. No-no, this isn’t mind control or child abuse, give me five minutes and you’ll understand why the nine-year-old god-calling dynamo needs to be hypnotized on a regular basis. For emergencies.
John had, by that point, been so thoroughly forgiven that he could almost pretend he had never hurt Erik at all. He’d felt… Almost proud. Mordecai was trusting him. Mordecai was including him. Like family.
Erik was a special kid who could call a god for help even easier than calling a friend to arrange an afternoon at the movies. He’d done it before. He knew he shouldn’t, but he did it anyway, and he might do it again. Especially if it seemed like someone he cared about was going to get hurt.
Mordecai did not have to say, because he and John both knew, that Erik might just-as-easily fall into a situation where someone he cared about might get hurt. John had rescued Erik and Mordecai from one such emergency — and begun his career in terrorism by handing out helpful cards with phone numbers to others who might have emergencies of their own.
Calling a god and holding it meant being dragged around in your own body, unable to move or speak, while it did whatever it wanted. Without a practised ability to dissociate and focus on something else, you’d be fully-conscious and have to see and feel everything. That was reason enough to teach the kid how to enter an altered state of consciousness on command, but because Erik was a kid, and still learning, sometimes he got scared or upset and snapped back into his body anyway.
If there was an emergency, Erik might come back to himself too shell-shocked to move, speak, or even get to the bathroom, because he’d been struggling to do so and couldn’t — not until the god left. If something like that happened, John ought to run Erik home as fast as he could and let Mordecai put him out and put him back together. Then all of them would deal with whatever had happened. They’d work something out. He shouldn’t worry. He had backup.
He recalled feeling Mordecai’s hand on his arm, and looking up to see a hopeful smile. Minimal damage, that’s all. Let’s see if we can get him to age nineteen or so with minimal damage, then we’ll let him look after himself. Okay?
He faltered. The folder and papers slid to the floor.
“…okay?” Erik asked fuzzily.
John winced. A slight problem with being so good at snapping into it, was that Erik was also good at snapping out of it. He could select a suitable level of consciousness and resistance like mixing hot and cold from the taps in the bathroom.
“I just lost my papers, it’s fine,” John said quickly, groping under the table. “Go back to sleep!”
“‘The doors and drawers are too hard to open,’” Erik said, grey eye closed while the metal one remained fixed on the teapot. “You fixed the ones with the stickers so I can open them, but the stickers are expensive and they need to stay stuck where they…”
“No, don’t help me, I have the papers, I just…” He thumped back into the chair and sat up, smoothing the folder onto the tabletop in front of him. “I just lost my place.”
Erik smiled. “The part where I broke the stickers trying to fix more drawers.”
“No you didn’t, I’m just helping you remember so you don’t.”
“Mm-hm,” Erik replied, dreamy and disconnected again.
John sighed. He shouldn’t say things that way. No never stuck as well as yes; if he didn’t give Erik something to do, Erik would pick something for himself.
Something like banging on a box of instant potatoes at three AM with a frying pan, or putting a sticker on the hotel room door and wandering happily out into the hall. Logically, if the stickers were on the doors and drawers he could open, any door with a sticker on it should be openable. And look! It worked! Hi, John! I’ve been doing science while you were out! With no pants!
Gods, it was a good thing they’d worked most of the kinks out in Cinovec. The Vesely was falling apart, but the Korolevskiy was so cheap it was basically a…
“Erik,” John said, blinking. He patted down his pockets, found the pen, and added a new item to the bottom of the list. Number 48. “Room service is too expensive…”
Erik had a perfect horror of expensive things, almost worse than being hurt in the head again. John had never been flush with cash himself, but Erik’s family gave “thrift” a whole new meaning. He’d been mystified when he matter-of-factly told Erik to grab a candy bar from behind the counter for the movies, and Erik picked a generic one, mainly nougat, and not even real chocolate on the outside. You like that kind?
Erik had shrugged. I don’t know. It’s okay.
John had a younger brother and sister; he could tell politeness from sincerity. Pick one you like. You don’t have to pay for it, it’s my store. He’d glanced over his shoulder, making sure his mom was still out. Mostly. Go on.
Erik shook his head and stuffed the generic non-chocolate into his pocket. It’s fine.
John snatched up two name-brand bars from the top shelf. These are better. Nuts or no nuts?
Erik had looked pained, not only nervous but somehow ashamed. It’s expensive.
I don’t care, John had told him, equally ashamed, but also annoyed. It’s my store, you get the good chocolate. That stuff is for the…
Oh, yeah, he’d almost said, That stuff is for the poor people. Over a decade later, it still sent a cold trickle of humiliation down the back of his neck, and brought a blush to his cheeks.
Erik had smiled, bravely, and filled the silence for him, The expensive chocolate is for your friends?
It’s not expensive, he’d muttered. We buy it in bulk. Take one of these and put your coat on, we’re going to miss our bus.
Even now, Erik bent towards generic labels, thrift stores, damaged goods and improvised solutions like water flowed downhill. If he couldn’t stop Erik from doing something because it was “too hard” for a sick person, it was best to make it expensive.
“…We need to eat the food I bring back from the store,” he said firmly. “If you’re hungry, you can make cereal…”
“…and spaghetti,” Erik said.
“No. Ugh!” No didn’t work! He needed to cancel Erik’s ability to cook food with boiling water and electricity, but pancakes and spaghetti were the first two things he’d ever learned how to make. They kept popping back up like a surrealist game of whack-a-mole. If not an explosion of burning red sauce that invited complaint calls to the front desk, it would be smouldering black batter setting off the smoke alarms. Or something even more creative and worse.
“Spaghetti is… is too hard right now,” John insisted. “You’ll screw it up and I’ll have to throw it away. That’s… That’s wasting food!” …Another thing Erik found rather horrifying.
Erik’s peaceful smile faded into a worried frown. “Okay.”
“Okay!” John replied, nodding. And now that he’d detoured to cancel spaghetti and room service, he had no idea where he was. Twenty-ish? No loud noises or yelling, no cooking, no flushing inappropriate things down the toilet, or the drain, no opening anything without a sticker, the stickers needed to stay where they were, the silverware needed to stay where it was…
“‘We like our nice room with the ducks,’” Erik said.
John sighed. “Yes. We do. Thank you.” He put a little asterisk by number 26, without much hope. There were stars and asterisks and dots and crescents and doodles of cat faces all over the page. He’d never remember which one was the placeholder he wanted. “This is our safe place. We have everything we need right here…”
Numbers 26 through 29 were more artifacts than necessities, leftover from a list he’d damaged or misplaced months ago. When he’d made that list, Erik had been up all night, sobbing and terrified, because they were in a new place, he didn’t know why, and he didn’t feel safe at all. He needed a new way to orient himself, and the duck painting was an obvious, permanent fixture.
After multiple iterations of list, John was feeling rather fond of it himself. He glanced over his shoulder to make sure it was still there. Brave, uncomplicated ducks, flying off to some destination they’d never reach, having a lovely day with a friend for company.
“Godspeed, gay ducks,” John muttered.
“Mm-hm,” Erik said.
John winced. “No, please forget that part. I didn’t say that out loud. You can have whatever kind of ducks you want. Platonic ducks who go to movies together and do not kiss.”
“Mm-hm.”
“And please, please, please always do something else when David is here. Read your magazines or play with your toys or build an entire rollercoaster — there are lots of things to do that are much more fun and important than paying attention to David. David is boring.” He’d skipped forward a little, but not by much. He’d turn around and go back. It was just… Last night Erik said he remembered David and John kissing, and that… No. That was so wrong on so many…
“I’ll play my violin,” Erik said, smiling.
John twisted the page in his hands, crumpling it. He dropped it in a panic. “No, you will not play your violin! You’ve lost it! You have no idea where…”
“I’ll find it,” Erik said.
“You can’t. It’s too hard…”
“Sure I can.”
John stood up with both hands on the table and snapped, “If I ever, ever catch you with that violin again, I am going to take it away and break it, do you…”
Erik’s smile had faded. His breath had sped up as soon as he heard the tone of John’s voice. At the words “break it,” he began to sob outright. “No-no-no-no, don’t do that. I’m sorry. Please. I won’t do it again. Please don’t hurt Angie, I’m sorry…”
“David tried to beat your brains out on the bathroom wall and broke off six of your fingernails below the quick when you wouldn’t stop playing, I need you to remember that!”
Erik sniffled and gave a little laugh. “Yeah. Funny.”
“No, it’s not funny! I have to clean up after him and take care of you and get you home safe for your birthday, and if you don’t behave yourself, I am going to have a total nervous breakdown! Tell me you under…”
Erik was crying again.
John sat down again and hung his head. “I’m sorry,” he said softly. He picked up his head and reached over the table to move the teapot, letting the light dance over its polished surface. “Please focus. Just let that go. You forget things all the time. It’s no big deal. We’re all right.”
Erik sniffled once more, then smiled at the teapot. “Can I have…?”
“No, you just like to look at it. Let’s do that for a little.”
“Mmm.”
“Okay.” John read down the list and picked it up from approximately where he’d lost his shit: “David is David and you are you. You have your funny T-shirt with the ‘vacancy’ sign. David hates that shirt. Your funny T-shirt is yours and yours alone. David is boring.” He sighed and skipped over the part about not playing violin. “Just read your magazines or your comics while he’s here, that’s a great time to get some reading in. The windows are dangerous. They can hurt you, especially when David is here…”
“Can I still watch the movies?”
John groaned and rolled his whole head back to have a look at the ceiling. There was a sticker with a smiling yellow sun face up there. It assured him with bold black print: YOU’RE OK! YOU GOT THIS! He sighed. “You’re never like this with your uncle, Erik. Can’t you…”
“My uncle knows what he’s doing,” Erik replied.
John nodded. “All right, that’s fair.” He added a little carat and squeezed a few more words just above number 36, U can still watch movies! “Movies and music reels are fine, but the newsreels are boring, and club music is boring…”
“It’s okay.”
“No, it has a repetitive backbeat so drunk people don’t have to stop dancing or listen to each other talk. You’re not missing anything. Clubs are dark, smelly, and boring.”
“Mm-hm.”
John frowned at Erik’s placid expression. He didn’t trust it. “David is my friend, Erik. I just need you to…”
“No, he’s not.”
“David is my best friend,” John cried. “I really mean that! You can’t be my friend because you’re sick, and I need someone fun who doesn’t remind me how fucking evil I am all the time. I need you to remember that and be nice to him! You’re a nice person and you can be nice for a few hours at a time a couple times a week, I know you can. Please. For me.”
“Mm-hm.”
“Thank you,” John said. He picked up the paper again. They only had a few left. Mainly…
Erik was frowning, concerned. “I’m sorry I got sick.”
John shook his head, kept shaking it as he spoke, “It’s not your fault…” But no didn’t work. “It’s my fault,” he said. “It’s John’s fault you’re sick, Erik.”
“You didn’t hurt me,” Erik said.
Oh, hey, you brought the truck, Erik said. Man, if we had a phone, you could’ve saved me the bus fare. He smiled. We makin’ some deliveries or you done for the day?
John had tried to smile back, but he didn’t think he’d managed it very well. Nah. I just… I got something in the back…
Didja run it over? Erik asked, frowning. Yeah, he definitely hadn’t managed a very good smile.
No, it’s fine, he’d said quickly. It’s just weird, is all. Come over here, let me show you…
And he’d grabbed Erik’s hand. When Erik pulled back, he held tighter, and pushed it down.
There had been a single spark, a blue thread like lightning that leapt from one end of Erik’s metal patch to the other, and snapped out. Erik had collapsed against him, shaking his head and laughing too hard to speak.
“I didn’t hurt you,” John said shakily. “You’re just sick. This is just for right now. This is normal. This is temporary. This is fine.”
“Mm-hm.”
“When we’re all done saving the world, we’re going to the beach…”
Yeah, he could’ve said. I got the truck! We can go wherever we want, as long as I fill it back up for Mr. Patel. Screw the movies. You wanna go to the beach?
“…and we’ll get hot dogs and pick pieces off the buns to feed the gulls. We’ll buy some of those silly sunglasses, like we’re tourists, and maybe a couple T-shirts, and maybe… maybe I’ll just say…”
…I think something’s wrong. I think we might be in serious trouble. Can you help? You’re really good at a lot of things, and your family is brilliant. I don’t think there’s anything you can’t fix, even if it’s something really big and scary. I’m sorry. I know I told you we were going to have fun. This is hard for me, but I’m just going to be honest. I don’t know what to do and I need your help…
He’d stopped talking. He was staring out the frosty window, utterly silent.
“‘…Happy Birthday’?” Erik offered hopefully. “Then we go to my house and have cake?”
“Oh, yeah, sure,” John said. He sniffled and swiped his sleeve across his face. “Yeah, that’ll be fun. Later.”
“Next week,” Erik said with a smile.
“No…” John shook his head. He didn’t have the strength for another argument. “I don’t know. It doesn’t matter right now. The radiator…” He shut his eyes. “The radiator is broken, but it’s not ours. It belongs to the hotel and they have to fix it themselves. It’s too hard for you to fix, and it’s expensive, and Potato likes it broken because it’s not too hot to sleep under. Leave it alone.”
“Mm-hm.”
There were only a few things left. Erik was always having new ideas, which John did not want him to have again. Fixing the radiator, or washing the clothes in the tub, or destroying unknown quantities of notes and office supplies by playing with the auto-clean function on the litter box.
John spoke without listening, reiterated the point about room service being too expensive, and closed by reading the underlined sentences at the very bottom of the paper, “You’ve done really well and you’ll remember to do everything I’ve said, but now it’s time to rest. You can only remember the teapot while you’re looking at it. You’ll forget about it, and about the list and everything in the black bag. It’s all right. You forget things all the time. No big deal. You’re just tired.”
“Can I have it to sleep with?”
“No, Erik. It’s time to put it away. You’re tired.”
“Mmm.”
◆◇◆
He didn’t have to think, nor did he want to. He was sleepy, and secure. Everything made sense. He didn’t mind about opening the windows or crying out because he couldn’t and that was good. He didn’t want to do that. Everything was how it was supposed to be.
He was a little bit sad, like maybe he’d been hoping there was one more chocolate in the box, but they were all gone. He guessed that way okay. Maybe he’d had enough. He couldn’t even remember what they’d been doing. Breakfast, maybe. Something with eggs?
John put an arm around him and helped him to bed. It was hard walking. He wandered and forgot where he was going. That was just how he was right now. He needed John to take care of him, and help him focus, and remind him where the bed was.
Oh, right. There it was.
It was time for sleep.
◆◇◆
When Erik slept, John wandered into the bathroom, shut the door, put the stopper in the tub and turned the shower on, full blast. He kicked off his trousers, but his hands were shaking too hard to manage his shirt buttons. He pulled the collar over his head with a stifled cry, bruising his nose, and then sat down in the tub.
He’d forgotten to take off his socks. He didn’t care.
He spoke against his shaking hands, muffling his voice, “Not fine, not fine, not fine…” He drew a sharp breath, not quite a sob. It caught in his throat and became a ragged word, “Fucked!” He couldn’t stop. “Fucked! This is fucked. This is fucked. This is so fucked…!”
He rocked himself, crying softly, so Erik wouldn’t hear. Erik couldn’t help him, he’d made sure of that. They were never going to go to the beach and eat hot dogs ever again.
All the things he could’ve said, the better things he could’ve done, seemed near enough to touch. He held them in his hands and wept over them, but he couldn’t make them live and be real. This grief, this pain, this life… didn’t seem livable.
But it hadn’t killed him. Not yet.
Maybe Erik’s family would, when they found him, when they saw what he’d done, and why.
Or maybe they’d understand, like Dayashri, and let him go — but he didn’t like to think of that. That would be…
That would be so much worse.
He was too numb and tired to cry anymore, and the tub was full. He turned off the shower and sank low in the water, eyes closed. There he stayed, without washing, listening to the trickling toilet tank, until the water was too cold to stand, and he couldn’t stop shivering.
He pulled the plug out of the drain, dried off, dressed (without socks) and went back out to make Erik some lunch.
◆◇◆
When John woke him for lunch, Erik had only a vague memory of a nice dream, something peaceful and shiny. Was it lunch already? Gosh, he couldn’t remember what they’d done for breakfast at all.
But that was okay. He didn’t have to get better all at once. No big deal.
