Passenger

“Ha-ha! I got something for you, Billy!”

Qui

Henry looked confused, scared.

We were nearly at the bottom.

Qui

And from his back pocket, he pulled out my green-and-blue glasses and let them dangle in front of his face. They were dead, lightless. The smaller green lens was flipped out, and Qui

I nearly fell down trying to gauge my step at the landing of the escalator.

Once I had straightened myself from leaning on the rail, my knees buckled and I would have collapsed if Qui

Henry stood there. He watched us dumbly, his eyes darting from me to Qui

Qui

“You don’t look so good, Billy.”

Drip.

Drip.

My head hung down. Qui

I felt him put his face up against my shoulder. I heard him sniff. “And you don’t smell so good, neither.” Then he whispered, “Who’s the barefoot old man?”

“Heh—” I couldn’t even say Henry’s name.

“You can get us out of here,” Henry said. “I’ve seen it work. Turn the lens down. Do it.”

Qui

“We need to get on the train, Billy. Then we’ll talk about getting out of here. If you make it that far. Heh-heh!”

“You’re dead,” I said.

“You’re deader than me, Odd. Deader than me.” Qui

Odds.

I heard a train leave—whoosh!—the air sucked out into the platform with it.

Qui

“This way, Billy.”

“There’s Odds here in this world?” I said.

Qui

Then he grabbed at my bleeding hand, swiped his fingers in the oozing warmth of my blood and held them up in front of my face.

He pressed his bloody thumb and first finger together and said, “And it all fits here. In this tiny space, Odd. Ain’t you figured that out yet? And you did it, Billy. It all opened up from that nasty cut on your palm. You know how I know? You know how I know?”

Qui

He tugged me toward the tracks, empty, black.

Seth was there, waiting at the edge of the platform.

Qui

A train was coming.

Everything shook.

I looked from Seth to Qui

“I saw you fucking go down the spill gate.”

Qui

“You saw what you saw, I guess. You wouldn’t know what I seen, where I been. Now I can’t go back. Can’t get my stuff. My house. ’Cause of you, is why. I can’t go home ’cause of you.”

Whoosh.

A train vomited in from the black mouth of the tu

Henry was trying to say something. He’d grabbed Qui

The train stopped.

The doors hissed open.

I heard an accordion.

Everything is everywhere.

I said, “Seth.”

But I couldn’t see him on the platform. He had already gotten onto the train.

Henry tried to snatch the glasses out of Qui

I fell onto the dirty floor with my face landing against a chrome support pole.

Seth watched me from the end of the car, standing motionless near the doorway to the next compartment. Outside on the platform, Qui

As the doors began closing, Henry collapsed to the concrete floor of the platform and Qui

Good-bye, Henry.

The doors hissed shut.

The train shuddered and rocked. I couldn’t tell if we were moving or if the whole world was simply falling apart on top of us.

Qui

He raked his fingers into my hair and pulled my head from the floor.

The train picked up speed.

My eyes fixed on the glasses in Qui

I tried to steady myself on my knees in front of him; my bare chest leaned into the pole, and my face lolled with the motion of the accelerating train, coming to rest against the kid’s thigh.

Qui

“Stop it.”

I turned my head to see Seth, but the ghost faded and slipped ahead of us into the forward compartment.

“Get up. You ain’t dead.”

I put my hands down onto the floor, attempted to scoot my feet under me so I could stand, so I could relieve the pulling on my fucking hair.

It felt like we were flying, and outside the windows there was nothing but thick velvet black.

“Get off me, Qui

I was dying.

I knew I was dying.

“You ready to take a jump again, Billy?”

I got one foot under me.

A light, just a solitary bulb, smeared past the windows, the length of the train, as fast as if we were falling, a burning eye. Like the flashlight in the Under.

“What the fuck are you trying to do?”

I didn’t think I could stand, but the kid kept pulling on me.

Another light.

“Look at me,” he said. “This time, we’re staying together. This time, you’re taking me back home. Or I’ll fucking kill you, Billy.”

His words smeared like the trailing flashes of light.

Faster and faster.

“It doesn’t work that way.”

“Fuck you, Billy. Look at me.”

And Qui

I made it up to my feet. And I looked at the kid, thinking, I’m taller than you. I should fuck you up, you little prick.

But I nearly fell down.

And Qui

He swiped the glasses across my belly, flipping the green lens across the eyepiece as it dragged against my skin.

I saw things there.

Everything.

And Qui

Then he yanked the bloody shirt away from my hand and slid his fingers between mine.

I heard an accordion playing.

Wind in trees.

The sound of a small wooden toy horse; rolling, tapping.

twenty-eight

I was Seth Mansfield.

*   *   *

I remember so clearly being him, that sometimes, lying in my own bed at home in Glenbrook, I could recall the smell of the bedding in the house where Seth slept as a boy, the particular coldness of the plank floors beneath his bare feet in the morning; the feel, awkward and scratchy, of Davey’s hand-me-down clothes against his skin.

The room at the end of the hallway, upstairs, where he and Davey’s sister, Ha

I was Seth Mansfield.

I remember the small window in Davey’s room where he slept alongside his adoptive brother, his curiosity about the great wooden hoops Ma used for stretching fabric; how they’d been stacked neatly against the wall opposite the stove in the downstairs of the house.