1 #12
“Because surely those people are connected to the boat,” I said, “so I want to get us away from the water. Can you run?”
“Of course,” he said, and we broke into a light jog, footfalls as quiet as possible.
I’d been here before in daylight and it had been reasonably well populated, but at this hour we were almost alone.
A cyclist passed going the other way—he glanced at us curiously—and then we were alone entirely, moving rapidly between graffitied walls.
The walls were lit at intervals by streaks of ultraviolet light: political slogans—Le d?me = la mort—but mostly names, stylized roses, stars, human figures, animals.
We passed a one-eyed fox, a blue rabbit.
The sound behind us was almost certainly gunfire.
The cyclist who’d passed us a moment ago came back the other way, whirring past us in a blur, pedalling frantically.
This far into the tunnel, the air was stale.
There were fans overhead but they were stilled.
We had to get back to air, that was what I was thinking.
I sped up, so Soriano did too, the two of us moving at a dead run now.
There was some kind of cacophony ahead, shouting and sirens. We were running toward danger. Soriano stopped.
“We have to keep going,” I said.
“I think it’s worse ahead of us,” he said. “Whatever’s going on. You hear all that?”
“No,” I said, “it’s worse where we came from.”
“You’re not thinking clearly.”
“It’s not a matter of thinking,” I said. “There are things that I know, and one of them is that we can’t go back that way.”
“With respect, Ari, I’ve spent time on battlefields. I think you’ll die if you go forward.”
“Soriano, please.”
He stared at me. “Well, I suppose the only way is to test our theories, then,” he said. It took me a moment to understand.
“Whoever gets back to the apartment first wins?”
“That’s my girl,” he said. “I can’t dissuade you?”
“I’m afraid not. I’m going forward.”
He said, just checking, “You’re not in love, are you?”
“Of course not. No offence.”
He smiled. “None taken. I’ve enjoyed our alliance.”
“You’re my best friend, Soriano.”
“I like you too,” he said. “I’ll see you soon, I hope.”
We walked backward for a step or two, away from each other, then he gave me a little salute and began running back the way we’d come.
We were about at the tunnel’s midpoint, I thought, but it was impossible to be sure.
As I ran onward, I felt myself in a fugue state: I had always been running.
My lungs burned and my mind wandered. I was thinking of Felix, the absurdity and pointlessness of that death in Greece.
I wondered if I’d see him soon. The light was changing, siren sounds growing louder, and then I came out into the clear night air, into the last few seconds of my life when I was able to run.
If I heard the explosion, I retained no memory of it later. I was running, and then I was airborne, and for an exultant moment it felt like the impossible thing I’d longed for as a child—I want to run so fast that my feet leave the cobblestones—before I landed into shocking pain.
I lay very still, and felt an unexpected peace.
I was lying on a sidewalk. Smoke in the air, distant screaming and sirens, but none of that had anything to do with me.
The pain turned out to be a kind of transport.
I was in the blue water under the diving board, Felix above me, but then in the dream I could run time in reverse: he dove and then rose upward, smiling, back to the starting point.
I want to dive off a cliff, but I don’t want to descend.
I want gravity to reverse itself. What I want is to rise.
I opened my eyes into pain and soft light, the gentle beeping of machines, an industrial hum of hospital air circulation. It felt like returning from a far distance. My throat was dry. The woman by my bed was familiar, but it took a moment to place her.
“Hello, Ari,” Nico said.
I blinked, drifted off, woke again, and Nico was still there, largely unchanged from how she’d looked in Ohio, except that her hair—still buzz-cut—was now pink instead of platinum.
I tried to speak, but could make no sound.
She gently raised my head, and held a glass of water with a straw to my lips.
“I was far away,” I said. My voice was like a raspy hinge.
“Don’t try to move,” she said. “You’ve had an elaborate surgery on your leg.”
My left leg was suspended, I saw now, in a kind of sling that came down from the ceiling. Someone else was in the room with us. I turned my head very slowly.
“What are you looking at?” Nico looked where I was looking, but it was clear she saw no one there. “Do you need something?”
Felix was standing in a corner of the room. He was watching me with an interested, neutral expression, his hands in his pockets. He was a little insubstantial, I saw now. I thought I could see the radiator lines through his sweater. I’d returned from a far distance, but I hadn’t come back alone.