Should have seen it coming. But I’m warning you now just the same as I’ve been warning him through your friend, the girl. If you kill Jimi, it will be a stain, a mark, on your soul for the rest of your life. It won’t come clean, Ade.”
Shouting, spitting, I yell, “That doesn’t help me! Tell me something that helps me!”
Dad pulls himself up onto his knees. His arms hanging down like he’s just a puppet put down there, he looks to me and says, “I believe in you. You need to trust your instincts, trust that you can do this even though everything tells you you can’t. Don’t think about the future. Don’t think about the past. Think about right now. About here. You’re already come so far, Ade. Just push further. Push yourself fully awake.”
I close my eyes; try to make the anger fade.
The thoughts stampeding in my mind are hideous. Jimi being my brother makes me want to vomit, to pull myself in half. It makes no sense and yet it makes all the sense in the world. Even though he’s not really, really my brother, not one I’ve ever known or one I ever cared about, my killing him looks even worse now. It’s biblical is what it is.
Jimi is the villain. He’s the corrupter.
I wish, my ears burning, that my dad had never told me this.
“Why?!” I shout at him, kick sand at him. “Why are you telling me this?!”
My dad says, “Because I love you. Both of you.”
“But you betrayed us. Both of us.”
Dad says, “And I’m asking you to forgive me.”
“I can’t stop what will happen. No one can.”
Dad says, “You can try. You have to try. You can save Jimi.”
“Not from me.”
Dad says, “From himself. Don’t let him make you do this.”
I want to tear the stars out of the sky, to bury them in my dad’s eyes. I want to rip up the beach and pull Jimi’s mother’s bones out of the water and beat the world with them. This anger pulses and thrashes away inside me like a lizard. Standing here, in never-never land, I know I need to calm myself down. I know that if I don’t pull back now, I’ll lose control.
I think about Grandpa Razor, about Dr. Borgo, standing over me watching my eyes run crazy under the lids. I think about them shuffling their feet in anticipation. But mostly, I think about my poor mother and about Vauxhall. I remind myself of why I stopped the concussions. Why I decided to go clean.
And I feel the anger slip.
I step back from my dad, turn to the water, and I put my hands on my head and press down hard to press the pain away.
And little by little I can sense the fury trickling out.
Little by little it gets smaller.
Clipped away just like that orange monster Bugs Bunny shaved down to shoes.
It’s hard pushing my hate away, but it works. I take long, deep breaths, slow it down, and I’m able to cool it. I count a few stars, focus on the spaces between them, and then look back at my dad and ask him if this is going to be a regular thing.
“Should I ever expect to see you again?” I ask.
Dad shrugs. He stands up and puts a hand on my shoulder. This move, the one he’s doing here in the moonlight, it’s as old and established as anything else dads do. It’s nice. He says, “I certainly hope so.”
“How come you never did it until now? You’ve been in a coma long enough.”
“I’ve tried. For years I’ve tried. At first the door was just locked, like you hadn’t discovered your abilities. And then, I could just see from the outside. Like looking in at a diorama. The addiction kept me out. I don’t know why. It was like there wasn’t room for me in your mind.”
“What’s it like in there, Dad? Asleep like that.”
“It’s like nothing. It’s like a waiting room.”
“I hope you do visit again. I like this.”
“Me too. Just, no punches next time, ’kay?”
I agree.
We walk down the beach to where there’s a lawn chair I didn’t notice before. Dad sits down in it and takes a cold glass of water from out of nowhere and sips it, the ice chiming. Then he crosses his arms and looks over at me and says, “You turned out wonderful.”
Then, standing up with a huff, the chair and glass vanishing behind him like they were smoke, my father says, “You can’t trust Grandpa Razor.”
“How do you know that?”
“I met him, once, long time ago. Back when I was doing my thing, there was a group of them. We used to, well, when I was with this woman, Jimi’s mother, there was a wild scene going on in Denver. It was the late eighties and people were funny then. There was this punk rocker kind of guy, Bob, I think his name was-”
“Slow Bob?”
“Right, so you’ve met him too? Well, he kind of put together this group of people with similar talents. It wasn’t anything but a feel-good club, an opportunity to talk and drink and get our respective highs in a private place. Things, of course, got bad fast. Excess always leads to, well, regression. Deep down, people really are just animals. Grandpa Razor, he was the worst animal of all. What I’m saying is, be very careful around him. Be strong.”
And with that I’m pulled out of the vision the way a stuntman on a bungee cord is, just snapped back up into the sky and into the night and back behind my eyelids.
FIVE
Before I even open my eyes I know something is wrong.
I can hear it.
The room is silent the way a cat is silent right before it jumps on an insect. I open my left eye first, just a crack, just enough to see through the haze of my eyelashes that the lights are still on and there’s no one standing over me. Then I open the right eye. Again, just a crack. I move it around, open it just a tad wider, and see a shadow to my right, in the corner. A cat ready to pounce.
I roll to my left and I do it fast.
I fall off the futon onto the floor and then stand up quick, both eyes wide open.
Grandpa Razor’s the cat; he’s standing on the opposite side of the bed with a syringe filled with red liquid. He looks surprised, but it’s hard to know ’cause his eyes are so heavy-lidded.
I back away from him, my fists up like I’m a boxer.
“What’s the deal, Gramps?” I ask, pushing back my fear.
He says, “Seriously? You weren’t supposed to wake up so soon.”
I notice a pile just under the table; it’s Dr. Borgo. He’s lying there pretty jacked but he’s breathing. Has a big lump on his head. Pointing at my shrink, I say, “You sure get around with that billy club. I hope that right now he can see the future and I really hope he’s enjoying a nice screening of me kicking the shit out of you three minutes from now.”
Grandpa Razor doesn’t laugh like I expect him to.
If anything he looks more determined and jabs his syringe around.
“You knew, didn’t you?” I ask, summoning up my new angry mode. Trying out my new angry voice. It sounds very effective.
This gets Grandpa Razor talking. He stops moving at me with the needle and he says, “You have no idea what you’ve gotten into, Ade. Wasting your gift, throwing it all away to try and…” He shakes his head in frustration. “You need to accept what the gift brings. There should be no debate about it. And if-”
I cut the slob off. “If you believe this rules business, then you couldn’t stop me. Doping me up here or OD’ing me wouldn’t do anything, right? If destiny is destiny, then why the hell are you trying to inject me with that?”
“This isn’t what you think it is,” Grandpa Razor says. “Regardless of what you saw, what Jimi’s father told you,
