THE PURPOSE-DRIVEN LIFE. IT’S WHAT we’re supposed to want, or do. Carpe diem, that shit.
Thing is, I don’t have one. Beth, however, did.
I hear her voice in my mind, feel her last memories written in her script, somehow, in the grey folds of my brain. Beth’s Top Five Greatest Hits:
One: Her ninth birthday party, a gulf of a pool, a juicy sun, girls cracking open with laughs, her father’s warm face.
Two: Eleven years old. Piano recital, fingers skimming ivory, notes perfect, gorgeous, the feel of heart-bursting pride.
Three: First concert. Her mother, the cool-cool kind, all real, all love. Stevie Nicks provides the score.
Four: First kiss, first love. I’ll say nothing more—that belongs to Beth. Only her.
And five: Discovering her Gift. The thought is there, but her Gift itself is vague, gauzy—I can see the brand of the piano she played at her recital, the closed-up hole in her father’s ear where a stud used to be, but I can’t get at her ability. Each time I try, another detail from just before her death reveals itself; the white scuffing on the tan leather strap of her tote bag. The edge of a tattoo peeking out from the cuff of her sleeve. A slight smear of blood on her first knuckle.
All I’m truly left with, really, is this: the absolute certainty that she didn’t want to kill herself. She didn’t want to die. She didn’t want to jump.
But she did.
Those suicides weren’t the first I’ve witnessed. I’ve thought about my own, to the point where as a child the Peter Pan quote “To die will be an awfully big adventure,” felt like a taunt. But there had been others, other Carriers, other Gifted. A Swedish girl who slit her wrists in the bath. A boy in America who left the car running in his parents’ garage. There had been only the two, and they were like and not like me—they did want to die, and they could die. I felt what they felt, but also an urge not just to help them, but to join them. Sometimes, particularly when this was all new, it felt like I was joining them. Like connections were forming, new nerves were firing, drop cloths were being pulled from dusty furniture.
Confession: What I understand that They—most everyone, really—don’t, is that suicide isn’t an act of selfishness. Sometimes the hurt/pain/shame/loss is so much, so constant, and with no guarantee that it’ll ever dissolve, sometimes the cost/benefit analysis of life/death truly feels like it’ll only ever work out in in favour of death. I never knew the names of the boy and girl who killed themselves before, but I felt what they felt as they died. It was like—imagine the best moments of your life. Then try to subtract them. Subtract every ounce of joy you’ve ever experienced. Erase every happy memory you’ve ever had.
I couldn’t hear what they’d been thinking as their lives drained from their bodies, but I could feel their relief. They didn’t want to hold on. They were happy to let go.
But not Beth. Not Sam.
This is what people who have never wanted to die don’t understand: the worst thing for those of us who do is feeling like we have to live when we don’t want to. We have to do things we don’t want to. We have to be where we don’t want to be. What we want is nothingness, numbness, because that seems better than living a life of quiet desperation. Quiet desperation is torture.
Others pretend at happiness for the world while they struggle alone in the dark, gushing with friends and wives and children whilst knowing the world is broken, that it can never be fixed. They know it and can’t unknow it—they can’t let go either. They want to, though, more often than not.
But Beth does not—did not—feel that way. She didn’t think that way. I feel her feelings still, as the underground spits us up into the semidarkness of the East Village, each of us rippling with the impact of her death in our own way.
Mara’s hand is in my hair as I lean my head back against the cracked leather seat of the cab we eventually decided to take. I try and reach for memories of Sam, because I feel a pattern forming, the design of something I don’t have the vision to understand, but Mara’s presence is distracting.
She wants to talk about what happened and I . . . don’t. Because talking about them means talking about myself and how they’re different from what I am. How they weren’t missing what I’m missing. They weren’t hollow. They didn’t exist because they had no other choice. They hadn’t grown up as I had, acting careless and reckless because on some level I felt I had nothing to lose. They didn’t see the world through a lens in which every scene contains a door marked exit, a door I’m unable to open.
They lived because they wanted to. Up until the end, when they were poisoned by a . . . nothingness.
But where did the poison come from?
Where did the address come from?
Mara will want to know what I know, and I’ll have to find a way to tell her about Beth and Sam without telling her I wanted to save them and follow them at the same time.
And then there are those words.
Don’t let her death be in vain.
Those were the words the professor had written to my father, words my father left to me—the words were meant for me. Before I was even born I was saddled with a burden I never asked for, never would’ve wanted, and don’t know what to do with now that I’ve got it.
These are the thoughts that sizzle and smoke until my mind is coated in a stale layer of misery. I hadn’t even noticed that Mara had taken me to the hotel, up to our room. She doesn’t turn on the light—the curtains are open, only the gauzy layer beneath is drawn, and the moon shines through them, outlining her hands, her arms, as she pulls off my shirt, hers, then both of us into bed. My eyes are wide open, staring at dark. She’s a soft curve behind me, hooking her arm under mine, her hand on my chest, her head curled against my shoulder.
“Something’s wrong.”
“Yes.”
“Are you okay?”
My voice is scraped out. “Are you okay?”
“You’re hurt.” I hear the shadow of something growing in her mind.
“I’ll heal.”
She lets out a breath, but tightens around me. “That’s not what I’m talking about.”
“I always do,” I say flatly, ignoring her.
She’s silent, all of her. I can’t even hear her heartbeat. Something’s wrong indeed.
I turn to face her, her eyes blurred with sleep and sadness. I cup her cheek, kiss her forehead.
“I love you,” she says.
I remember Jamie’s words and smile just a bit as I tuck her head beneath my chin. “That is your misfortune.”
In truth, though, it’s mine.
13
CASTLES IN THE AIR
THE ADDRESS VANISHES THE MORNING after. If Mara’d seen it, she’d have mentioned it, but she doesn’t, and the moment when I should have is long past. Another confession: I don’t want to talk to her.
From the first, Mara was curious about my ability, as was I about hers. She wanted to experiment, to test each other, which is well and good if one experiments killing/healing nonsentient creatures, in theory if not in practice. (A badly executed excursion to the Miami Zoo comes to mind—I’d thought Mara’s belief about her ability was a manifestation of her survivor’s guilt. She proved me very, very wrong.)
But when she first understood what comes along with my particular affliction—seeing others like us when they’re in pain—her first thought, quite literally, was to hurt herself to see if I’d then have a vision of her, through her eyes, and feel what she felt.
She’d only pinched her arm then, but when I asked her why all those months ago—
“When you first told me you saw me, in December, in the asylum—you said you saw what I was seeing, through my eyes,” she had said. “And when Joseph was drugged, you saw him through someone else’s eyes—the person who drugged him, right?”