Chapter 63: The First Book I Ever Wrote
The pain came back before anything else did.
It came back in pieces, first the fingers, which hurt for no reason at all, then the ribs, which had an excellent one, then the whole left side of my back where the stone had caught me. And last of all my left leg, which sent up nothing. No pain, nothing, only a dead weight at the end of my hip.
I opened my eyes onto a floor covered in flowers.
White ones and red ones, and the red ones had been white a few hours earlier. They had grown up through the cracked flagstones and they were dying now, curling in on themselves, going brown at the edges, because the one who had made them grow was no longer in this hall to hold them.
I stayed where I was for a while, cheek against the stone, looking at them.
So it’s true.
Not the flowers, the rest.
I propped myself on an elbow, and the hall came back to me in pieces as well. Columns snapped off at mid-height. A whole wing of ceiling caved in over the rubble. Long black marks raked across the grey stone where the arcs had bitten. Naia and Laia lay a few paces from my hand, where she had thrown them after pulling them out of her own stomach.
And no Alice.
I don’t know what I was hoping for. That she’d be sitting against a column with her arms around her knees, waiting for me to wake up so we could have a proper shouting match. That she’d have my head on her lap again, her fingers in my hair, flatly refusing to admit that anything at all had happened, because that would have been very much like her, erasing a thing simply by deciding not to look at it.
There was nobody, only dust still coming down from the ceiling, a staircase climbing at the far end into a black that no light reached into, and me.
I brought a hand to my face and it came away sticky. Blood from my nose, dried. Two brown lines running down from my eyes, dried as well.
Elegant.
And then, because my head never stops even when I would very much like it to, it started up again.
It started with the apartment.
The carpet. The bulb on the end of its wire. The gap between the two wardrobe panels, and everything I had watched through it without being able to move a single eyelash.
Then it went straight to the end, to my two hands settling on Alice’s shoulders while she screamed right beside me, and to that voice coming out of my throat.
Don’t worry, Alice. I’ll take care of everything.
I raised my eyes to the ruined hall.
Let’s be clear about one thing.
That was not a memory coming back. A memory comes back sideways, out of order, set off by a smell or by a word, and there’s always something missing in it. That thing was served to me whole, complete, in sequence, with the cold of the sidewalk through my soles and the whistle of the living room window and the exact weight of a shoebox against my chest.
Somebody put it in front of me.
And they put it in front of me right after I drove both my blades into Alice’s stomach, when I had nothing left standing inside me, at the precise moment it would hurt most.
That isn’t chance, and I’m done pretending otherwise.
That thing came from the tower. It went and found the worst hour of my life, dug it out of wherever it was buried, and played it for me while I couldn’t defend myself. And I sat through the whole thing.
The heroes of old, trust and mutual aid. Of course.
Right. Fine.
I dragged myself to the base of a column, rested my head against it, and did the one thing I knew how to do properly.
I started thinking.
First question, the simple one.
Is it true?
I turned it over as honestly as I was able to, and I couldn’t find anything wrong with it. The building, the stairwell light that always went out in the same place, the paint flaking off the door frame, the pencil in her hair. The cinema ticket. The pebble she categorically refused to explain.
Nobody invents a pebble. Whatever that vision is made of, it’s made of things that existed, which means the vase existed, and the shard in my hand, and that shape on the floor.
I killed a man on Earth.
I said it to myself in those words, deliberately, to see what it would do.
It did nothing, and that was the unpleasant part, because it settled into me without knocking anything over, as though it had never stopped being there.
And that would already explain part of the rest.
It would explain why she changed. Because she did change, at some point, and I’ve never been able to say when. There was the girl laughing at her own old foolishness while she pulled things out of a shoebox, and then afterward there was the one who counts who comes through my door and asks me to let her know next time the neighbor drops by. I always put that down to her character.
Except that between the two, there’s that room, that blood on the carpet, and her kneeling in it screaming my name without backing away a single step.
How do you look at someone after that? How do you ever let them out of your sight again?
Second question.
If it’s true, why don’t I remember it?
Because I don’t, and not the way you don’t remember something you’ve forgotten either. I can go back through those years one by one and there’s no dark stretch in them, no hollow, nothing missing anywhere it would show. I’d have noticed, and that’s exactly what worries me.
Third question, and that one hurt more than my ribs.
Why did Alice never tell me?
All those years. All those evenings on her couch, those kitchens in the middle of the night, those times she let herself into my place because she’d decided I wasn’t eating. And not once, not a word, not a hint, not one bad night where it slipped out.
And she was there, in that room, on her knees in the blood with her hands out, screaming questions at me without backing away. She should have backed away.
So that’s it? Everything I’ve been calling her possessiveness since we got here, that way of counting who comes into my place, of never letting Alexia out of her sight, of going white when I move away from her by a few centimeters as I stand up, all of it stops being a character trait and becomes an answer to something I did.
Or it’s only part of it, and there’s something else underneath that I don’t remember either, and I’ve been walking around for years inside a version of my own life that somebody arranged for me.
I let my head fall back against the column.
And then the next thought arrived, so stupid that I laughed out loud, once, in an empty hall, which is never a good sign.
The first book I ever wrote.
Not the one I’d been dragging along for years with its happy ending I hate. The first one, the one I banged out as a kid and that nobody read, the one I was so proud of and had barely thought about since.
A young man wakes up in a room he doesn’t recognize, with something broken in his hands and something dead at his feet, and no memory of the hours that led there. And for the whole book he tries to work out whether the one who did it was him.
I invented that, I remember inventing it perfectly well, sitting in front of the screen telling myself I had something.
What a magnificent, what an absolutely splendid coincidence.
And what if I never invented anything at all? What if some part of me that still had access to the file had been quietly putting it back out through my fingers, one book at a time, while I sat there congratulating myself on my imagination?
That thought I’d have preferred not to touch, and I couldn’t get rid of it afterward.
And there was one more, a practical one, the kind that only occurs to you once the horror has settled.
The man on the phone.
He wasn’t alone, he was reporting to someone. They’d looked into the grandmother’s company, they knew the numbers, they talked about wiping the evidence without the slightest hesitation, and it clearly wasn’t the first time. And the way he laughed about his father, how do you think he got me in the first place. That isn’t a boy improvising, that’s someone who was raised in something.
So a man belonging to that kind of family died in a third-floor apartment.
And nothing happened.
Nobody came for Alice, nobody came for me. I went on writing, forgetting to eat, letting her into my place in the middle of the night, for years, without so much as a car parked too long across the street.
Why?
Either somebody made the whole thing go away.
Or somebody made them go away.
Did she carry all of that alone, the entire time, while she was cooking in my kitchen and telling me Hibari had dropped another file on her desk at the end of the day?
And underneath every one of those questions, holding all of them up, there was the one I kept coming back to because it was the only one that truly frightened me.
Who was speaking?
Because that was neither panic nor shock. I’ve been in the trance, I danced for hours in my own blood in the middle of a castle courtyard and came out of it with a hole in my memory, and I know exactly what that feels like from the inside: there’s nobody, that’s all. There, there was somebody. Level, gentle, without the slightest tremor, the voice of a man who has just finished a job.
He used my throat and my voice.
Is that where my amnesia comes from? Is he the one who wiped the rest?
And Alice, does she know? Does she know, and has she been looking at me all these years knowing?
I tried to get up.
I brought my right leg under me, put my palm flat against the column, pushed — and the left one did absolutely nothing, and the whole thing folded, and I went over sideways into the flowers with my shoulder hitting the flagstones first.
The impact emptied my lungs.
I lay there with my cheek in the petals, and something came up my chest that had been climbing for a while.
"Damn it."
It came out cracked and useless.
"Damn it!"
Louder, and my fist came down on the stone.
"DAMN IT!"
The hall gave it back to me flat, without an echo, and I stayed on my side breathing hard, and I hated every single thing in this world and the one before it.
And then it lit.
I felt it start in the middle of my chest, that warmth I recognize now without having to name it, spreading through my ribs and my hips and back out into limbs that had stopped answering. Apotheosis. It had let me go on this floor a few hours earlier because it only holds up those who still want to fight, and I hadn’t wanted anything at all.
Now I want something. I want one answer, out of her mouth.
The leg came back, not properly, not with sensation, but with obedience, which was all I needed. I took hold of the column, straightened up, bent down to pick up Naia and Laia and put them back where they belonged, and I started walking toward the staircase with my left foot dragging a line through the flowers behind me.
The first step nearly put me back down.
I took the next one anyway.