Contents
About the Book
About the Author
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
The Inside Out
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Titus
The Outside In
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Acknowledgments
Copyright
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
Version 1.0
Epub ISBN 9781473505209
www.randomhouse.co.uk
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William Heinemann
20 Vauxhall Bridge Road
London SW1V 2SA
William Heinemann is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.
A Penguin Random House Company
Copyright © Michael Christie 2015
Michael Christie has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published by William Heinemann in 2015
(First published in the United States by Hogarth, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York in 2015)
www.randomhouse.co.uk
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 9780434023066 (Hardback)
ISBN 9780434023073 (Trade Paperback)
For my mother
Fair seed-time had my soul, and I grew up
Fostered alike by beauty and by fear
—WILLIAM WORDSWORTH, The Prelude
I lived on dread—[she wrote]
To those who know
The stimulus there is
In danger—other impetus
Is numb—and vitalless—
—EMILY DICKINSON, “770”
The boy stepped Outside, and he did not die.
He was not riddled with arrows, his hair did not spring into flame, and his breath did not crush his lungs like spent grocery bags. His eyeballs did not sizzle in their sockets, and his heart’s pistons did not seize. No barbarian lopped his head into a blood-soggy wicker basket, and no glinting ninja stars were zinged into his throat.
Actually, incredibly: nothing happened—no immolation, no bloodbath, no spontaneous asphyxiation, no tide of shivery terror crashing upon the shore of his heart—not even a trace of his mother’s Black Lagoon in his breath.
Somehow Will was calm.
The day’s bronzy light, shredded by a copse of birch, tossed a billion luminous knife blades onto the front lawn. And he dared to continue down the walk—where he’d watched hundreds of deliverymen stride to their house bearing fresh food for them to eat and new clothes for them to wear—with the paving stones granular and toilet-bowl cool under his naked feet. Venturing out into the unreal arena of his front yard for the first time in his memory, he discovered only early summer crispness in the air—this Outside air—its breeze slaloming through the jagged wisps of his cut-off shorts, in and out of the straps of his Helmet. Will had felt this same air sweep through the window in New York on those rare occasions he opened it, despite how it worried his mother, but something was sapped when it came through. He’d never immersed himself this way, not since his memory got impressionistic and gauzy as if it had been transcribed by a stenographer in full Black Lagoon.
Will was Outside because he’d heard an odd bang while painting a six-foot masterpiece his mother had commissioned for London, a composition she twice in passing compared to Mark Rothko, who was a genius painter, just like him. At first he’d thought another bird had struck the big picture window in Cairo. Will once watched a blue jay—he’d identified it with the bird book he used as a drawing reference—palsying there in the ochre dirt beneath the glass, its neck canted grimly as though trying to watch an upside-down film. Blood rimmed its eyes and its beak was shattered like an egg ready to be peeled. It had thought it would go for a nice flitter through Cairo, over the burnt-orange velour loveseat, through the high, bright cavern of the hallway where Will’s masterpieces were hung, past dim London with its ravine of bookshelves and credenza display of his sculptures, over the staircase with its twin railings she’d installed on either side (for safety), and pick off some food scraps around the slow cooker in Paris. Had its mother never warned it about glass? Will had wondered, sitting there fogging the window until the creature finally stilled and Will startled himself with a sob, both of pity, and of thankfulness for their safety Inside. Nothing ever died in their house—except for bugs, lightbulbs, and batteries. Outside, however, was another story.
Though his mother feared pets, other creatures had more successfully entered their home. He’d found trickles of ants in the basement, mouse turds peppering the pantry, and crews of flies sprinting across the windows. Rogue moths snuck through the door when Will opened it for deliverymen, their wings powdery and fragrant like the makeup that sat unused on his mother’s long teak dresser in San Francisco. He’d cup the moths in his hands, feel their desperate clatter between his palms, then cast them through the only unscreened window in Venice.
Sometimes people had come. Once the furnace was repaired by an ancient man who smelled of pastrami and wood smoke. And for a time the paperboy would leave his strange, grubby shoes by the front door and play LEGO with Will on the carpet in Cairo. At first it was thrilling, until Will noticed the older boy’s proclivity for breathing exclusively through his too-small nose and building only uninspired bunkerish structures, mixing colors together like an architectural test pattern. After a few weeks, Will stopped answering the door when he knocked, telling his mother that he didn’t need friends because he was an artistic genius. “Don’t toot your own horn,” she’d said, smiling.
Of course he’d considered going Outside thousands of times—as he’d considered executing a standing double backflip or walking around with his feet magnetized to the ceiling or chainsawing a trapdoor in the floor—but had never dared. Even when he lobbed their garbage bags as far to the curb as he could manage from the front foyer, or watched shirtless neighborhood boys plow their BMXs through the meaty summer heat, he’d never been sufficiently tempted. Mailmen over the years had asked why he and his mother were always home, and Will often replied, “Why are you a mailman?” with one raised eyebrow, which usually shut them up.
The real reason was that he was her protector. Her guardian. From herself. From it: the Black Lagoon. It wasn’t like he was trapped. The doors were not locked. She made no rules, issued no commandments, decreed no penalties, and exacted no punishments. Staying Inside was something he’d invented, intuited, for her sake, to keep her from falling so deep she’d tremble and explode and weep all her tears and go dry and insubstantial as the dandelion fluff that occasionally coasted Inside like tiny satellites. He’d always known that if fear took her for good, he’d be left treading water forever in the ocean of life with nothing to buoy him.
But birds usually made a different sound against the window, more sickening and soft, like a strike from those plush drumsticks used in marching bands, not the sharper bang he’d heard. In a gust of curiosity, Will had set down the fan brush he was using to texture a block of mustardy-green acrylic paint, then removed his smock and slipped out the front door as easily as entering a long-neglected wing of their house. He hadn’t actually expected catastrophe, or a bloodbath, but with little to compare to, hadn’t ruled them out either. Wordlessly she’d taught him that the Outside was built of danger, of slicing edges and crushing weights, of piercing needlepoints and pummeling drop-offs, of an unrelenting potential for suffocation, electrocution, mayhem, and harm. So today a generous portion of him was left mutely astonished that, so far anyway, the Outside was nearly pleasant.
Thrilling himself with his own daring, Will moved now from the concrete out into the grass, grotesquely alive beneath his feet—a carpet made of salad that he half-expected to grip his toes and hold him fast. Luckily, his Helmet would safeguard him if he tripped or a branch dropped lethally from above. After some painfully prickly searching in the cedar bushes, he found it, the source of the bang: a husk of charred matter that resembled a tiny exploded wasp nest, smoking faintly like the humidifier his mother put in his room in the winter. The dirt was blackened around it, the air charred and sulfurous, and it occurred to Will this was some kind of bomb.
Now he glimpsed a figure dart around the side of the house, boy shaped, something heavy looped over his shoulders, and Will wondered if he’d been hurt somehow by the explosion. Will followed him around the corner, passing the strange dryer vent fuming with the startling Inside smell of fabric softener and warmed clothes, their clothes, and had just rounded the rear of his house when he toppled, a nuclear drill of pain boring between his temples, a masterpiece film of neon spindles whirling through his eyelids. Some diminished part of his mind registered a demonic shrieking, and he realized then that the noise was being squeezed from his own lungs. Desperately, he shaped the sound into an anguished plea for his mother but knew she couldn’t hear him with her Relaxation Headphones on. Amid the murk of agony he gathered the sense that something had struck his forehead and fallen to his feet. He tore open his eyelids. A purple crystal. The sun dazzled it before Will’s vision was again welded shut, this time a stickiness there. Still moaning, he bent, felt for it in the grass, and closed his hand around the rock.
“You’ll be fine,” a nearby voice said.
Will attempted to again pry open his eyes, but a stinging honey had sealed them. He stumbled forward with his hands lifted in the Outside air, baffled, sobbing, afraid to wipe his face for fear he’d make his mortal wound worse.
“Here,” the voice said, and Will sensed fabric against his face. He took it and pawed at his gluey eyes, prying them open to find a delivery boy, tucked behind the aluminum shed that Will had never entered. The boy had a green garden hose coiled around his shoulder and was about Will’s height and age, with stringy bangs that licked at eyes flitting everywhere except upon Will. His brown skin was the tint of the milky tea his mother often drank in her reading chair, balancing the cup precariously on the wooden arm—her most dangerous habit. In his hand was a target slingshot, the kind with thick rubber straps and a brace running up your forearm, a forbidden item that Will had ogled in catalogues for as long as he could remember.
“I didn’t even pull it back halfway, so you’ll live,” the delivery boy said smiling, the sudden warmth of his face momentarily soothing the ache of Will’s probable skull fracture, which he could already feel opening like a pistachio.
“You really think I’m going to live? Like, for sure?” said Will, woozy with blood loss and imminent death. “I’ve never heard anyone say that before …” Will pulled the boy’s shirt away for a moment, and more blood licked his eyes.
“For a while, anyway,” the boy said, shrugging. “But sorry, I thought you were someone else.”
“Who? The person who set that little bomb out front?” Will said, secretly wondering if the Black Lagoon could possibly be after this boy as well.
“Yeah,” the delivery boy said. “Among others.” He unshouldered the garden hose and dropped it to his feet. Will now saw that his smooth chest was festooned with a solar system of a hundred milky scars.
“Oh, are you hurt too?” Will said. “Did the bomb get you when you were delivering our new hose?”
“I’m fine,” the boy said casually before scrambling over to peek around the corner of the house like a soldier in a firefight.
Will followed him closely to examine his injuries. “Then how did you get those scars? Did the Outside do that to you?” The delivery boy turned and regarded Will as if he were speaking some cryptographic language, and Will wondered whether the infinite Outside air had tarnished his words somehow.
“What’s your name, kid?” the boy said, returning behind the shed, keeping his eyes fixed to the tree line near the creek behind Will’s house.
“Will. What’s yours?”
He paused, and Will was about to ask if he was okay again. “My name is Will too,” the boy said.
“Really?” Will said, tickled by the coincidence. “Are you hiding from someone, Will? Do you have your own Inside you can go to? If not, you can hide here. We could eat some of my mother’s bread and look at my masterpieces.”
“You live here?” the boy said, puzzled, tipping his head back toward Will’s house. “I thought this place was empty.”
Will tried not to think about his house. How disturbing it looked from the Outside, how shabby and finite. “Just me and my mother,” he said. “But this is my first time in the backyard,” he added. “I used to be afraid of going Outside, but now I’m mostly not.”
“That’s great, Will,” the delivery boy said. “Really great. But you do need to be careful out here. It can be dangerous. You should probably play it safe and go back inside and not tell anyone you saw me? Like your mom or anything?”
“Oh, I’m definitely not telling my mom about this,” said Will, pointing at his forehead. “I only came out because I heard that bang out front.” It was then he realized that the garden hose at the boy’s feet was old and worn. “But you weren’t delivering that hose, were you?” Will whispered conspiratorially, approaching him to lean in close. “That was already ours, right?”
“Anyway, it was good talking to you,” the boy said in a businesslike voice, jamming his slingshot into his shoelace belt and striding out into the backyard, exposing a lithe back just as baroquely scarred as his front. “I’d better get—”
“—It’s okay, you can have it!” Will interrupted, too afraid to follow him out into all that grass, astonished by how bravely he swam through the ocean of the Outside. “The guy who does our garden usually brings his own anyway. I’ll just order another one.”
“That’s real good of you, Will,” the boy said, returning to tentatively pick up the hose. His eyes drifted up to Will’s Helmet. “Too bad I didn’t aim a little higher,” he said with an odd smirk. “But you can keep my shirt. And maybe I’ll see you around.”
“Does this mean we’re friends?” Will called out as the boy paused near the back hedge and glanced over his shoulder. Will could see his belly undulate evenly as he breathed.
“Whatever, sure,” he said.
“But someone is still trying to catch you, right?” Will said. “Aren’t you scared?”
The boy cocked his head. “You were serious when you said this was your first time outside, weren’t you?”
Will nodded.
“You know what?” the boy said, smiling again. “I was wrong when I said you should go back inside. There’s nothing to be scared of out here.” Will realized then that this boy’s brave, bright face was a light he wanted to shine upon him forever. “Look, I bet your head has already stopped bleeding.”
Will pulled the shirt away and saw it was chocolate brown.
“See?” the boy said. “Nothing can really hurt you, Will.” Then he vanished into the ferocious-looking woods.
When Will returned Inside, the air in Cairo was thick as cream and stunk of couch crevasse. He gagged and ran to Venice, where he blotted his forehead with gauze to find that the actual cut was tiny: a single pit, like a one rolled on a die. Luckily, it hadn’t swelled and was high enough to cover with his bangs if he wore his Helmet tipped forward, which he did, both to protect his wound and to conceal it.
He hid the blood-blackened shirt—featuring a skeletal sorcerer wielding an electric guitar—down in Toronto, then returned upstairs to draw a cup of water from the sink in Paris. Slurping, he forced himself to sit, fighting to slow his breathing, while watching steam belch from the lid of the slow cooker—the only culinary appliance his mother could abide other than the breadmaker, because it couldn’t scald them, and it rendered food sufficiently mushy to eliminate the always present danger of choking. If ever Will stopped chewing while at the table, even if only pausing before flooding his mouth with milk, she’d leap up and start whacking his chest with her forearm.
By the big chrome clock he knew she’d be just starting Side B of her Relaxation Tapes. She’d been doing them daily in San Francisco for a month now: donning the huge creaky headphones that swallowed her ears, the opaque Terminator shades that assailed her eyes with light, rendering her deaf, blind, oblivious. He couldn’t imagine two hours of anything even denting the obsidian shell of the Black Lagoon, but Will cherished this new time away from her supervision. He’d tried the apparatus on once when she was in the bath, but the blinky light show and left-right pan of surf made him fall asleep and then immediately pee himself, which his mother did sometimes when she supremely lost it, but that was more the Black Lagoon’s fault, not the Tapes. Regardless, it seemed to Will somehow simultaneously depressing and thrilling that his entire Outside ordeal had lasted a total of nine minutes.
After dinner, Will was wearing his Helmet along with a hooded wetsuit, standing on a chair, and reaching into the stratosphere in London while his mother cowered in the doorway, her blonde chin-length hair framing a pair of dark, insectoid sunglasses. She was snapping her blue elastic band against the velvety inside of her wrist.
“You sure you’re okay?” she said, which actually meant, like most things she uttered: be careful.
“It’s fine, Mom,” Will said, vaulting to his toes, which made his forehead throb. He grasped the lightbulb and twisted, unsure if it was turning or only slipping through the rubberized gloves of his wetsuit. Like all their earthly possessions, they’d ordered the wetsuit from a catalogue, and he’d since drawn numerous ice cube–laden baths to test it. He hadn’t tried shocks yet, but the idea was that the rubber insulated against those too.
“I don’t know what I’d do without you,” she said, her face tied in a wince.
“Sit around in the dark talking to yourself?” he said, and she smiled.
For weeks she’d worried over this dead bulb in London. She usually had deliverymen do it, but after meeting the boy, Will had begged her to let him try. There was still a moon launch’s worth of preparation, including highlightered diagrams she’d taped to the fridge in Paris. If Will were older, she’d probably make him wear a condom, which was like a penis scabbard she told him about for making sex with vaginas safer, but more boring.
She’d been right about one thing: the Outside was indeed steeped with danger. His encounter with the boy had confirmed it. But the Inside could be dangerous too. Besides getting sling-shotted by the amethyst (he’d classified the purple crystal with his encyclopedia), Will had nearly died twelve times in his life—four she knew about, each of which had incited weeklong Black Lagoons. When wet, the tub in Venice got slick as mucus, and Will once almost died from a Helmetless slip that dropped him violently to his butt, which was why they only took baths (they used to share baths but they stopped because of vaginas). Another time he crashed while riding the exercise bike. Once he overdosed on four extra-strength Tylenol. Then he ate yogurt expired by a whole week. Later, he choked on a chicken finger that he tried to push down his throat without chewing—like a boa constrictor, because he just learned about them.
But electricity was one of the premier Black Lagoons: the pain and paralysis, the way it lurked in the walls, everywhere and nowhere, unreasonable, invisible as fear itself. Though his mother stuffed safety guards into every unused outlet, Will had once shocked himself by allowing his wet thumb to linger on the plug of his tape player. He returned to himself across the room with his tongue buzzing and spectral in his mouth. He never told her. Events like that could pack her off somewhere permanently demented.
“Hey, these blades are actually made out of wood,” Will said, now with a good grip on the bulb. The fixture was also a ceiling fan, except she’d long ago hired an electrician to disable this function because if it came unmoored it would cut them to shreds.
“They once made airplane propellers with wood, you know,” she said, with another snap of her elastic. “Think one of those wouldn’t hurt?”
“I guess it would,” said Will.
The bulb turned, and he hated the metal-on-metal sensation, an ungodly grind like chewing sand. The fan rattled a little, and she emitted a clucking sound somewhere between Oh and No. At the climactic instant the bulb pulled from the socket, she fled the room, and Will couldn’t help but feel let down. He nearly yearned for the shock that would blast him from his perch in a hail of sparks and fire, a display he figured the boy would admire, torching Will as dead as the blue jay he’d watched die in the smelly earth so long ago.
That night, after their stew and smoothies, she made him a banana split with bravery scripted along one of the banana halves in chocolate syrup, and he imagined that it wasn’t for the lightbulb, but for his covert trip Outside. During their usual bedtime cuddle, he worried for the whole twenty minutes that she could smell his wound or somehow detect the Outside on his clothes, even though he’d changed his cut-off shorts, took two separate baths, and was wearing the wetsuit to bed, which she disliked because she said it made him sweat like a squash player, and he could perish of dehydration.
His mind veered to the day’s venture: the wind sashaying around him, the birch trees shaking as though in applause, the gently smoking bomb, the boy’s kind, welcoming face, while the preposterous sky flew upward beyond all measurement. He was overtaken with a drowsy urge to describe it to her, this dreadful miracle of the Outside and most of all the boy: Other Will. Even if only whispered in her sleep-blocked ear, Will wanted to somehow administer this information to her like some awful medicine, then watch her vanish into a hurricane of Black Lagoon, the hellish aftermath of both his dangerous venture and the more troublesome concern of the Outside being inside him now, like a stain. But the idea charred him with guilt. And as sleep wafted over from the continent of her body, warm and unlimited beside him, he dreamed of the amethyst striking his forehead again and again, of his own candy-apple blood on his hands, and of the boy repeating that revelatory, heart-stopping sentence—Nothing can really hurt you, Will—as if it all had something to teach him, as if it were something he ought to try again.
How easy it is for a life to become tiny. How cleanly the world falls away.
The subway platform in Toronto. That was the first. Will was a toddler then. Even today, “safe” in her bedroom, Diane still couldn’t summon the incident in her mind without panic spreading in her like laughter through a crowd. She knew she’d brushed against true madness that day because it was huge and blunt and screaming.
She’d blamed the city, its wilderness of signs and traffic and sounds, its flip book of faces and lightning storm of a million brains. So she packed up their apartment and moved Will north to Thunder Bay, where she’d grown up, where she hadn’t returned since her twin brother, Charlie, died at the grain elevators when they were twenty-four.
A year had been the plan, time enough to rebalance herself, perhaps make a film, something personal, experimental, short. She still owned the old house, the one she and Charlie had saved for. Though she was the last surviving member of her family, other than Will, of course, she’d never stored the nerve to sell it.
In Toronto Diane bought a car, something she’d never owned, a robin’s-egg-blue Volkswagen Rabbit. She and Will set off in the morning: fourteen hours northwest that they split into two days because after the seventh hour Will was visited with unbearable silliness and wild irrationality. As they pushed northward, bugs left increasingly phlegmatic blotches on their windshield, and spindly, undernourished trees crowded the road as though trying to mount it, get roots into it, and in this manner escape. They tracked the CBC as its signal lived and died, resurrected town to hamlet to town, while the high, rusty channels dynamited into the roadside granite offered the impression of descending into a mine.
Initially, she dreaded the drive. The ratcheting fear could have resurfaced out there amid all that tree and rock. But she was fine behind the wheel, tranquil even. She sang to her old tapes as Will clapped his orange-sticky hands.
They found the house in neglect and disarray, ten years of woolly grain dust on every lateral surface, everything just as she’d left it, even a few plates in the sink, waiting to be washed for a decade. Her father was never one for photos or memorabilia, but she kept a few things: the old dictionary that had so obsessed her brother after their mother died, some of her own sketchbooks and charcoals she put aside for Will, as well as her father’s old work boots—the rest she drove to the Salvation Army.
She always preferred to work in a frenzy, to dash herself upon the rocks of a project—this was how she’d made her films—so during Will’s naps she cleaned, vacuumed, polished, painted, plastered, tore back wallpaper, and even sledgehammered half of a wall, swooping about on the skating rink of caffeine, coaxing the house into something that her brother wouldn’t have recognized. In a kerchief and some old jeans, she suffered the August swelter and fought the feral yard all the way back to the creek, where Charlie once pulled a thousand silver smelt in one night with just a net and a flashlight. A moving truck brought their furniture, Will’s toys, her cameras and books.
The work did her good, and this was a period of reprieve.
It was driving that allowed it back: a grocery run, stopped at a light while traversing the highway, Will strapped into his car seat like a babbling astronaut. When the green came, she shifted her foot, and they bucked then heaved to a halt. She pressed harder, yet the vehicle remained unmoved. Behind her a truck honked unkindly. She peered under the wheel to find her boot planted squarely on the brake.
Then the rushing heart and tingling digits, same as on the subway platform. How could she have confused the two most fundamental controls of the vehicle? Most unsettling was how easy it had been: they were both pedals, so close together, one a golf club and the other a door stopper—yet essentially indistinguishable. And what if she’d done it the other way around? Pumped the gas and jackrabbited onto the highway and the fury of logging trucks and snarling pickups piloted by jumpy, half-drunk hunters? What creature would she find belted into the burning jungle of death and fluid and steel that would remain of their car after the trucks had finished with it?
At first she simply avoided the highway. Routine trips took hours, but she didn’t mind. She kept to side roads and residential streets. Houses were a comfort. She’d use their phones if necessary. If what was necessary? Using the phone, she assured herself, plenty of good reasons for that.
Rather quickly, more rules established themselves. No roads over a certain speed limit. No night driving. Then no left-hand turns. She hugged the shore of the right lane, never risking her car in the path of an onrushing vehicle—that leftward leap of faith enough to burn her again with panic.
Each night her mind burbled with the close calls of the day, the inadequate traffic bylaws, the numbers and speeds and physics of it all. And after weeks of this she perceived driving for what it truly was: an impossibly complicated and lethal activity. One that required reserves of faith, confidence, and sheer stupidity that she would never possess.
After she sold the Rabbit and learned that Thunder Bay’s public transportation system had died the slow death of depopulation and underfunding, she and Will took taxis. The old trifecta of grocery store, library, and bank they could complete for less than fifty dollars in fares. For a while she’d been able to trust the proven expertise of these old men in mustaches and hats, immigrants mostly, because how could one possibly last as a cab driver without caution? And weren’t these soft-spoken men mostly poor? Weren’t their cars their very livelihood? Wouldn’t a crash scrape the food from their children’s plates? What better reassurance was there?
Will was three by this time and loved taxis. He asked the men questions with partially pronounced words that only she understood. “What means that?” he’d belt out, pointing at their CBs crackling with dispatches. “Yes, good,” the men would say, nodding.
But soon she found herself advising the drivers where to turn blocks in advance, checking and rechecking their gauges, reminding them of speed limit changes while peering between the headrests out the windshield, blotting the driver’s sightline with her alert face. They would glance at her in the rearview with their bushy eyebrows and try to smile.
After she could no longer abide the taxis, her ordering from home began in earnest. She discovered that with the right mix of ambiguity and persistence—“You see, sir, due to a severe condition I am unable to visit your store”—everyone in town delivered: the grocery store, the library, the pharmacy. Just say “severe condition,” and deliverymen leapt into their trucks. She was surprised by how easy it was, how efficient. They went through a checkbook a week—good thing they delivered those too. She and Will were free to take walks and do artwork and not be stuck dragging a cart through the shrink-wrapped gore of the meat section every Saturday.
Then the outside closed upon her like the aperture of a camera.
The front yard was more of a decision—a calculated avoidance of risk—than anything imposed upon her. While shoveling slush from the driveway, she found herself casually worrying that the panic would return, and by the time the dangerousness of this vein of thinking registered upon her, it was already there: the revving heart, the icy sweat, her throat constricting. She left the job unfinished and fled inside, where the symptoms instantly subsided. With no handy explanation this time, no subway doors, no crowds, no city, no mishandled car, only the snarling shovel and the tight cold and her breath a soft crystal in the air, she knew the panic no longer obeyed laws it once respected and would seize any opportunity she allowed it to decimate her. So after that day she would not venture even a few steps from their front door to where she knew it lay in wait.
Then, as she was picking up carrots, coal, and various items that four-year-old Will had used to personify a snowman, it visited her in the backyard, same as the front.
And if she could venture into neither yard without meeting a tempest of dread, how was she to leave? And how to let her son play in the yard if she couldn’t go out to retrieve him? What if a stray dog came? Or, God forbid, a man?
So they stayed inside. Thankfully, her son was so obsessed with building and painting and his constant tumult of inquisition that he never seemed to mind. Both Will’s father and his uncle Charlie had been solitary boys, content with books and models, words and drawings. It was almost relieving, this simplification, and there followed some relatively peaceful, untroubled years.
Then, around Will’s seventh birthday, it came in. She was folding laundry when the air was sucked from the basement, the way water withdraws from the shore before a wave. Terror like lungfuls of knife-sharp fumes choked her, and her mind tumbled. She was on hands and knees when she reached the stairs to claw her way out. She didn’t imagine anything truly harmful down there, no ghosts or stranglers, just the immovable fact that panic came for her was enough. She ordered Will a stool and taught him to do the laundry by drawing him a diagram of the controls. She ordered another and placed it at the foot of the freezer.
But the most regrettable by-product of staying inside was losing the capacity to face another human being. The micro-rhythms of conversation, the dance of facial mimicry, the fencing match of eye contact were lost to her once she fell out of practice. She soon ceased answering the door—another chore Will assumed with gusto. She grew lonely, but this, too, dropped away. She no longer yearned for people, other than Will, of course. She sated her social impulses with films, music, books, consoled by the fact that no matter what, the actors and characters could never see how hermetic she’d become, how far she had fallen.
At times she’d considered leaving. Pulling on her olive duffle coat and tramping outside. Perhaps bringing an umbrella. How strange it would be. “Hello, I’ve lived next to you for eight years, nice to meet you.” Yet there was never reason enough. She’d always believed that the day she left would be the day she was required to. How that could ever happen she could not say.
If only they could manage to escape, maybe she’d leave the whole mess here behind in Thunder Bay. Back to Toronto, or a fresh start somewhere else, Paris perhaps. Arthur’s generous support checks, which surfaced each month in her account as predictably as tides, would bankroll anything she could dream up. But that would mean an airplane—the anticipatory preamble: tickets, packing, waiting, and searching, then the imperativeness of actually stepping through those awful retractable tunnels and finding her seat, with a whole plane watching in judgment. She half-considered hiring some amateur anesthesiologist to put her under for the journey, but she feared needles, and the effects of drugs, and dreamless sleep. Since passenger ships no longer served the Great Lakes (she’d checked), they couldn’t even take a boat.
Besides it wasn’t that she couldn’t leave, Diane reminded herself. She was refusing to. Her terms. Years of the Thunder Bay Tribune and American news shows had proved what fresh horrors the world invented each day. As far as she could tell, there wasn’t much of the Thunder Bay she’d known left. Its industries gone, just strip clubs, strip malls, taverns, and hockey rinks remained—the old Eaton’s department store now a call center. The houses were still all aimed at the lake like faces to a coronation, eager for some great arrival, even though the lakeboats had stopped coming and the storefronts downtown, once strung with garlands and signs and teeming with families, were now mostly shuttered and vacant. But it was the knocking of grain-ship hulls from the harbor she missed most—now there was only a spooky quiet over an overgrown industrial ruin that reminded her of Tarkovsky’s Stalker, a film she’d nearly memorized in college that seemed made for her alone.
No, she and Will were stuck, like the pilgrims who’d built the frames of their houses from the planks of their ships. All they could do now was decorate.
Before Will’s trip Outside, he’d always given thanks for what their house provided. They filled their lungs with the air of its rooms, drank from its faucets, and were powered by its outlets. They warmed themselves in the abundance of its furnace and cleansed their filth in the waters of its tub.
Lightbulbs popped, went dead, were changed. This was repeated. The vacuum whorled galaxies in the carpet and seasons transpired in their windows like plotless movies. Plants reached from their pots to taste the sun. The fridge murmur-whined in complaint if you opened its door, yet, nobly, it never quit. The dishwasher whooshed plates new as the furnace huffed warm air through the teeth of its vents.
Will and his mother lived as indistinguishably from the house as its appliances and furniture, its lumber, drywall, and brick, dousing time with activities and art. Days were spacious and never-ending. Will painted masterpieces while she played guitar or thwacked paperback pages in her reading chair. They scoured flyers and transcribed codes for what they needed from catalogues—A, B, C, D … AA, BB, CC, DD—and the very same things materialized in the arms of deliverymen. Once, a teenager from the grocery store returned with a replacement egg for one he broke, pulling it from behind Will’s ear like a magic trick.
Will signed their clipboards with a swashbuckling replica of his mother’s signature, and the deliverymen tousled his hair and asked why he wasn’t in school. “Home school,” his mother would say, bending around the corner from Paris in one of her threadbare, translucent tank tops, acting as if she hadn’t come to the door because she was cooking, not because she was afraid to touch the doorknob. “Lucky duck,” they’d say with a conspiratorial wink he knew was more for her, because she frowned.
Will and his mother reigned over their private kingdom with the Black Lagoon as its border. It decreed where they could go, how deeply they could breathe, what shapes their thoughts could assume. It reminded them that the Outside world was dark, pitiless, futile, transpiring only in the windows, in their books and films, in the TV they seldom ignited, that there was no true world but their own. It was perfect.
Until it wasn’t.
In the weeks after his jaunt Outside, a clutch of nine minutes Will had rekindled over and over with perfect dives of fragrant memory, the house seemed infiltrated, altered, both unfamiliar and familiar, disgusting and comforting, like a wetsuit he’d been wearing for a year.
Since then, Will could muster no desire to paint masterpieces or sculpt or even sketch during Relaxation Time. Maybe it was an attempt to emulate Other Will’s bravery, the way he moved through the ocean of the Outside as though he’d been born there, or maybe his spirit had infected Will somehow, emboldening him. But each day, as soon as the headphones were clamped over her ears and the glasses set over her eyes, Will would descend into Toronto to satisfy a new hunger.
His first Destructivity Experiment involved the G.I. Joe figures that had survived the great toy cull of a year previous, when his mother solemnly phoned the Salvation Army, and an annoyingly cheerful man came to cart Will’s childhood away. His mother had already loathed ordering the ammunition-laden figures in the first place. “We just got this stuff,” she said. “But that’s okay,” she added quickly. “You’re really developing lately.” Will wept when the man plucked his boxes from the foyer, all his soldiers finally sent off to die. “Killed by the Salvation Army,” he said later, and her laugh spat coffee on the table.
Down in Toronto, with the windows open to vent fumes, he burned the remaining figures into napalm-attack survivors with a barbecue lighter he’d secretly ordered and hidden behind the furnace. They burbled above the flame as drools of plastic slipped from their arms, legs, and—when he’d built the nerve—their faces. They released a purple-black smoke that stuck in his nostrils and pushed his head into somersaults. He shaped the little corpses with popsicle sticks, sculpting mutants, severing their elastics, and undoing the screws that bound their bodies, reassembling them in unholy configurations. Next he managed to start the ancient lawnmower and ran them over, flinging the soldiers across the unfinished basement, leaving gory gashes in their already mangled appendages.
After a month of Experiments, Will had amassed a plethora of important Destructivity data:
Of course his mother’s catching wind of any of this would mean a cataclysmic Black Lagoon. But she didn’t. Like Will, she was a genius, yet she was also naive. Because everything wasn’t only making. When he was a little boy, Will’s mother urged him to paint masterpieces of trees, houses, and doe-eyed animals, and then it was impressionistic splatters and loosely patterned blocks of color. But he knew now it had all been meaningless. In his true heart he’d rather draw a fight, a war, a chemical spill pulling the flesh from the bones of the villagers. He torched bugs by magnifying the noon sun that throbbed through the window in Cairo, not because he enjoyed pain, but to witness what would happen, to grasp it. And what was the difference between making something and making it come apart? Painting a masterpiece was also destroying a canvas, sculpting was wrecking a good rock, drawing dulling a good pencil forever.
Even though his Destructivity Experiments charged him with daring, he still couldn’t bear to sleep alone in New York—which was supposed to be his bedroom, though he used it as a studio. A single bed would be like a house without a furnace, a body without blood, and without the clean whoosh of her breathing beside him, Will could never settle.
After her Sessions she baked him fresh bread in the bread-maker, read page-turners, or strummed folk songs, her small, white-tendoned hand flexed at the guitar’s neck, always seeming too small to corral the thick strings. For someone afraid of everything, she was most fearsome on the stool at the counter in Paris, the stretchy phone cord coiled around her thin arms, where she’d arrange the week’s complex schedule of deliveries. Sometimes, when arguing about an overcharge or when met with an outsized incompetence, she’d hold the receiver away from her face and stare at it, her dark eyebrows flexed in disbelief, as though the object itself had betrayed her.
But even when the deliveries went smoothly and Will didn’t have accidents, there still remained Black Lagoon traces in everything she did. If he said “Mom” as a leadoff to something, she’d instantly answer “Yes?” stricken with alarm, as if he were about to inform her of their recent death sentence.
He knew the textures and temperaments of their house just as intimately as he did hers. She’d archived his detailed architectural blueprints along with his masterpieces in Toronto. They’d always called the kitchen Paris, his studio New York, their bedroom San Francisco, the living room Cairo. She told him it had been his idea when he was young, yet he couldn’t remember having it. He did recall that she’d insisted on naming the basement Toronto, which seemed to please her, maybe because that’s where she’d grown up, even if the Black Lagoon never allowed her down there. Will did the laundry and fetched arm-numbing frozen loaves of her bread from the deep freeze.
Sometimes other rooms would temporarily close off to her. She’d avoid one for as long as a month, take the long way around. Will loved when this was Paris, because they’d be forced to order in, and he could talk her into off-limit, choke-prone foods like pizza or Chinese. When it was San Francisco, Will would pick her outfits from her closet, mostly shift dresses she’d crudely sewn or floral tank tops and elastic-waisted jeans, and they’d sleep on the couches in Cairo and wake in a whirlpool of sun from the big window. Luckily it was never the bathroom, called Venice, because she couldn’t pee in the sink, as Will did sometimes as an Experiment, because even though she was a mother, she had a vagina, which couldn’t aim. Then, inexplicably as seasons changing, the Black Lagoon would relent, and she’d return to the foreclosed room as though nothing had happened.
Still, the Black Lagoon would never surrender the Outside. Will sometimes pictured their house surrounded by crackling electric fences and froth-mouthed Dobermans, sheer cliffs falling from their doorstep to an angry sea. Though he’d never been in a church, he imagined they shared similarities with their house: keeping certain things in and certain things out.
After a day of Destructivity Experiments, Will would try to arrange himself casually on the couch, limbs flung loosely, face careless as a boy who’d never been Outside, who didn’t have a friend who fired slingshots and feared nothing, who wasn’t already changed forever and only felt counterfeit and hollow. Later, while crunching into a piece of toast he’d puttied with butter, a flavor he knew as well as that of his own saliva, he couldn’t suppress the creeping suspicion that staying home was somehow unnatural, something people didn’t do unless they were certified cloistered wing nuts like Ms. Havisham or Boo Radley—characters in long books she’d read him that she enjoyed more than he did. He’d always thought his mother was enacting something heroic, like a knight or a navy SEAL, but also something complicated, like how the Vikings had a woman-god called Frejya, who was the god of Love, War, and Beauty all at once, which throbbed his brain to think about.
Everyone went Outside, Will concluded. Everyone leaves. That’s easy. Only true warriors and heroes could overcome this weakness, could fortify the stronghold, sit tight, wait it out. But now that he’d felt his gooseflesh stand in the Outside air; now that he’d tempered himself with the true danger and beauty of the backyard and gathered unforgettable data with his Destructivity Experiments; and now that the scab on his forehead had grown dark as beef jerky and started to chip at the edges, Will knew that even though he was her guardian and her only son and their blood was the very same crimson hue, he’d never be as strong as she was.