Falling Idols

Yet still, he wanted only to kiss the sweat from her brow.

“Remember those last days we were together?” he said. “Do you remember what you called me?”

“A lot of things, probably. I give up.”

“You told me I was more deeply alienated from life than any person you’d ever seen. I thought you were right, too. I gave you plenty of reasons to feel that way, I know. But that wasn’t it, I know now. If it was that bad, I’d’ve killed myself, and that was never an option for me.”

“You were doing a good imitation of it, then.”

“It wasn’t that I was losing interest in life. Just the mask that gets nailed over it and mistaken for the real thing.”

“You’re hardly unique in that. But not many people go to your extremes.”

He could do nothing but shrug, and she had to laugh at the understatement. The genuineness of its sound touched him in the same way that the scents of meadows or bread could summon another time. A lesson that he’d had to relearn: Where there was laughter, there was hope.

“Is there no one else in your life, Austin?” she asked, less cheered now. “I don’t mean angels, or devils, or whatever you’ve chased over the years. Just simple … companionship?”

He looked at the rugged wood of the porch, knowing she’d see whatever she feared most in his hesitation. Companionship — and if there was? Why not just tell her? Because he didn’t want to see that it didn’t matter to her?

“Is it someone in the town?” she asked.

He told her yes, leaving it at that because it seemed to prick at her and maybe he wanted it to. Maybe she’d instinctively know how little there was to it, physicality and not much more, because how much else did he have to give? Gabrielle knew he’d never advocated celibacy as a path to anything. If he told her the woman’s name was Scarlett that would only confirm every suspicion.

“What you said earlier,” he said instead, “about bills and obligations, about these being your life … you missed the point and you know it. Those aren’t your life, they’re just the pictures you hang on your wall. You can live with them. You can change the pictures. You can even knock down the whole wall. That’s always your greatest power, but it’s also the scariest. Haven’t there been days you know you would’ve made different decisions if you’d only known what the consequences were … or weren’t?”

Sure, she told him.

He pointed toward her car and the road.

“Then do you really want to look back on today,” he said, “as another one of those days?”

*

He had awakened to the contrasts of firelight and darkness, remembering the fall from the train and the moment of horrible certainty that he was heading for the wheels … and nothing more.

“No, none of it is a dream,” he was told. “No more than all the rest of it. But by the time you’ve got that one figured out for yourself, I expect you’ll have forgotten I even mentioned it.”

Beneath the blanket he lay on, cool earth. At his feet when he stirred, loose bricks, a century old if they were a day. The pale painted face of the tunnel’s center wall towered overhead, bathed in the shadowdance of a crackling fire whose warmth pushed away the damp chill back here where no summer had ever reached.

Austin sat up and peered down the length of the tunnel. From here, the dim green egg of the entrance looked no bigger than the nail on his little finger.

“I’m alive,” he said.

“You don’t sound very sure about that.”

“But I—” He couldn’t finish, couldn’t say the words.

“I know it’s going to be hard,” he was told from the other side of the fire, “but let me try making this as easy for you to understand as I can. My problem is, I can’t talk to this ten-year-old mind of yours on quite the same level as I can talk to your body and soul.”

These weren’t the sort of words he would expect to hear from the man on the other side of the fire. The man he saw looked dirty and long-bearded, wearing the same rags as the men sometimes seen tramping up and down the railroad tracks. His mother had always told him to steer clear of them, and he had, but she’d never said he couldn’t stare. Everybody knew they stank of wine. Everybody knew they pissed their pants. He’d watched older boys throw rocks at them and it had seemed funny until now.

“You know what your soul is, don’t you?”

“Yeah,” Austin said. “It’s inside my body and it’s invisible and it’s what makes me me.”

That earned him a smile. “You’ve their places switched, but that’ll do. That’ll do nicely.” The man reached toward the fire, pulled up from beside it an open can of beans he’d been warming. The label was singed. He stirred them with a spoon. “Your body knows things your mind doesn’t. Like how to heal a scraped knee. You don’t have to think about it, or tell it to work. It just does the job. You follow me so far?”

Austin nodded.

“Let’s keep going, then. Your soul remembers things that even your body doesn’t. Don’t be getting yourself a big swelled head over it, it’s not just you. Everybody’s does. What’s different about you is, your soul’s gotten to the stage that it’s remembered one of the last things it needs to.” He blew on a thick spoonful of beans before shoving them into his mouth. Gravy dribbled down his wiry beard. “It’s remembered how to talk to your body and work with it, and share some of those other things it knows.”

“Things like … what?”

“Today, for instance? How to keep a clumsy boy like you from cutting himself in half.”

Austin started to ask if that meant he’d bounced clear of the tracks, but the man began shaking his head and touched a finger to his lips, mouthing No, no, no. Austin looked harder at his face, now noticing something peculiar about his eyes. They were two different colors — one blue, the other brown.