Shuttered Sky

When Winston began going about the motions of dressing, Drew went into the bathroom. “Better watch out,” he called to Winston, “this morning there was a bedbug under my pillow the size of a Volks­wagen.” Drew studied his face in the mirror. He barely recognized himself anymore. “What the hell are we doing here?” he asked his reflection. He didn’t expect an answer, either from himself or from Winston. Four days ago, Drew had spirited a hysterical Winston out of the unfortunately ventilated airplane, and calmed him down enough to get him here. He wouldn’t discuss what had triggered that seizure on the plane—offered no explanation for the quantum leap in his power. It was, of course, just like Winston to keep such things to himself, but with Tory’s ashes thrown to the wind, Winston had also lost all direction, all motivation. That was unlike him. Winston was always up to something in his own abrasive, antagonistic way. To see him beaten left Drew treading water. He couldn’t leave him like this, but being in Winston’s presence was poisoning Drew with an aggra­vated infection. At the very least, Drew wanted to point them both in some hopeful direction, but Winston wanted to do nothing but sleep. Now he cultured futility like bacteria, and it was contagious.

Grabbing a can of shaving cream from the bathroom counter, Drew lathered up, as he had done every day for four days. He began with his face. His scant facial hair had come in fuller each day. Now he had straggly mutton chops that didn’t quite stretch to his chin. He shaved them off, losing every last bit of sideburn, and higher still, until the razor began to clog with longer hair. Even though the throbbing of his arm made it hard to concentrate on even this simple task, he found the slow, smooth strokes of the razor soothed him, provided him a Zen-like focus. The shaving ritual had begun to take on a mo­nastic flavor. He cut away his long locks with scissors, then lathered his scalp, picked up a fresh razor, and brought it back and forth in short strokes, clear-cutting inch by inch until his entire scalp was shaven and smooth. He was getting used to the shaving ritual, and that frightened him.

When he was done, he studied his shaven head in the mirror—a reflection as unfamiliar to him as the one he had first seen when en­tering the room. The only thing that seemed the same were his eyes, glassy from his growing fever. He watched his reflection for a minute or two, until he could see his clean shaven scalp begin to fill with fine peach fuzz. For an instant, a wave of anger over came him; a sudden surge of hatred. He closed his eyes, inundated by it. It’s just the pain, he told himself. It’s just the fever. He didn’t go back to Winston until it subsided, but the undercurrent was still there.

Winston, still in his underclothes, had made no move to get dressed. Instead he studied a particularly nasty spot of mildew on the wall near his bed. “We need Tory here,” he said longingly. “She’d sanitize the place. Maybe even kill the mold, too, who knows. Her power added to mine. It was really something, you know?”

“Yeah, but she’s not here,” said Drew, with hostility he didn’t expect. “She’ll never be here. She’s fertilizing half of Texas by now, okay?”

Winston turned to look at him. “You’re an asshole,” he said, and used it as an excuse to get back into bed.

“That’s it, I’m outta here. You can lie there until you’re eaten alive by athlete’s foot for all I care.”

“Close the door behind you,” was all Winston said.

He would have left. He had every intention of it, but as he neared the door, he felt his legs go out. He landed on his knees, and gripped the doorknob, but only to keep himself from flopping to the ground. He could feel the fever in every joint. It had skyrocketed in the few minutes he had spent in Winston’s presence. Damn Winston. Damn him.

He tried to get to his feet and complete his exit, but found he was just too dizzy. When he turned, he saw that, wonder of wonders, Winston had actually gotten out of his bed, but he kept his distance.

“I had a life, you know?” Drew found himself ranting, grimacing through the chills and body aches. “I mean, yeah, friggin’ high school track, not very important, but it was my life, mine, and I was happy keeping my head in the sand like everyone else, pretending the world wasn’t going to shit.”

Winston took a step closer. “Let me see your arm.”

“Just stay away. The closer you are, the worse it gets.”

Winston didn’t listen, and Drew didn’t have the strength to ward him off. As Winston came closer, the pain in Drew’s arm exponen­tiated. He could feel the pull of the stitches, smell the sickly stench of infection. He felt it would explode. The room now spun faster, the floor and walls switched places. A trap door sprung in his mind, and he found himself slipping away from consciousness. He offered no resistance.

There was nothing to mark the passage of time. If he had dreams, they were lost. When he came to, he was on his bed, and the curtains were open. Winston was gazing out at the late afternoon sun, fully dressed. Their back packs, that carried what little they had brought with them were packed and resting on a chair.

“The front desk already called,” Winston said, “wondering why we haven’t vacated the room.”

Drew’s left arm felt curiously light and numb. He raised it to find the dressing around the wound was gone. So was the wound. No stitches, scar or discolored flesh, no hint that his arm had ever been wounded at all!

“Winston . . .” Drew continued to stare at his arm. He turned his wrist, as if perhaps the wound could have switched to the other side. Although he did still feel a bit weak, his fever had broken as well.

“Winston, how did you do this? You can’t heal a wound, or fight an infection.”

“No, I can’t,” Winston said calmly.

There was a pillowcase in the corner, overstuffed and tied closed with a shoelace. “What’s that?”

“Towels, mostly,” Winston answered.

“Mostly?”

Drew got up to inspect it more closely. As he neared the over­stuffed pillowcase, he could see there were some stains on it. Blood stains.

Winston can’t fight an infection, thought Drew, his art is growth, and regeneration. The regeneration of flesh. And bone. Drew reached for the shoelace to open the mouth of the bag, but Winston grabbed his arm, before he could.

“I’m asking you not to look inside,” Winston said. “I’m asking you not to question what I did. Not unless you really want to hear the answer.”

Drew looked at the back of his left hand—his perfect left hand. It was a bit pale—substantially less tanned than his right hand. Drew felt a brief instant of nausea, but chased it away. “Trick or treat,” he said. This was a little bit of both, perhaps.

“I think I saw that bedbug you were talking about,” Winston said, grabbing the pillowcase with one hand, and his backpack with the other. “If it’s all the same to you, I’d rather not hang much longer.”

They left the key in the room, the bloody pillowcase in a Dumpster, and drove out into the melee of All Hallow’s Eve.

* * *

The strangeness of the times only fueled Halloween. Usurped from the children, the holiday had fallen even further into the hands of adults. This year, the parties began early, for people were, now more than ever, eager to lose themselves in masquerade and alcohol. For those not satisfied with partying, the streets offered other recreation. It was amazing the things that would burn.

Winston saw eerily costumed commuters in the cars around them as he and Drew attempted to leave downtown Dallas. He supposed the fetid state in which they left their hotel room qualified as a partic­ularly macabre Halloween prank. With nowhere else to go, and most roads clogged with partygoers and traffic accidents, Winston drove them to the ballpark at Arlington, where the Cowboys played the Packers in an underattended game. Winston was not surprised by the lack of attendance. Since random acts of violence were no longer iso­lated incidents but a veritable plague, attending any large public gath­ering was talking one’s life into one’s hands. The most die hard sports fans were leaving their season tickets in the drawer. “All part of the big picture,” Dillon would say—as if the hammer on every gun was just a cog in some cosmic Rube Goldberg machine.

Winston and Drew didn’t watch the game. Instead they stood on the abandoned top concession circle, looking out over the parking lot and suburban Dallas beyond, counting the plumes of smoke.

“Hell night,” Winston explained. The fires had begun even before the sun had set, and now, as the last light of dusk slipped from the sky, the night was aglow with distant pockets of flame.

Drew shook his head. “They don’t do this in Southern California.”

“They will this year.”

Winston glanced at the space around them. The entire concession level was closed, and lit only by the stadium lights spilling through the access tunnels that led to the stands. Most everything else on the level was cast