Стивен Бойетт - Mortality Bridge

The report made no mention of any other vehicle involved in the pursuit.

NIKO CUTS THE engine and the boat floats on the quiet lake. The air is rarefied high up on Lake Arrowhead. Patchy early morning mist still haunts the water.

She sits across from him, a frayed and faded blanket with a thunderbird design across her knees.

Indistinct the shoreline turns and turns around them. Smell of gas from the outboard.

She has a certain smile. As if she’s given him a present and she waits for him to open it.

Niko doesn’t move because this moment is a fragile bubble and he doesn’t want to break it. Pearlescent mist beads Jemma’s hair. “Hi,” she says.

Niko looks around. The boat. The lake. The shore. “We’re here? We made it?”

A hundred tiny diamonds fall as Jemma shakes her head. “Not yet.”

“Oh. Okay.”

They drift and they drift. Happy lap of water on the hull. He wants so much to touch her.

They watch their separate shores slide by. He sees her artist’s eye appraise his face, sees the love that guided the hand that set his face to canvas.

Something’s missing. And at that thought it’s where it ought to be, his old Martin in its case between them there and holding in it unborn tunes.

Niko wants to close his eyes and drift with their own drifting but he is afraid that when he opens them all this will be gone. This is the core of things then. This was always home. We have always shared this little boat, we are what anchors this place.

“You’re all right then,” says Niko.

“You’re in here with me.”

“Am I dead?”

Her smile deepens. “You have to wake up.”

Out on the mirrored plain a fish breaks the mist and writhes suspended in their alien world before it splashes back into its own. “I need you to forgive me, Jem.”

And he sees the ache in her face. The simple ache when hearts misunderstand. “Oh honey. There’s nothing to forgive.”

And here at last is absolution.

His face goes tight and he begins to softly cry. Where is the quiet of inner peace?

He puts a hand to his chest and says Ow.

Jemma nods. “If it was easy everybody’d do it.”

Niko laughs and she laughs back. Their little boat rocks on the deep.

“Your trip’s not over yet you know.”

“No?” A shadow dread falls over him.

“Soon.”

“How do I end it, Jem? I just want it to be over. I just want you to be okay.”

“Then wake up.”

“Can I kiss you?”

Jemma laughs, not meanly but surprised, and says Oh Niko. And they bump against the farther shore.

GRIT AND PEBBLES press his cheek. Niko opens his eyes. He blinks. He gropes. Hard and flat and sandy.

Suddenly sits up and gasps. Not in pain but in expectation of pain. He pats his chest, his head. No blood, no broken bones. Not even a bruise. He remembers his forehead slamming the windshield as the carfront crumpled toward him. The awful roar and tearing loose inside him as the dashboard crushed his chest.

Niko rubs his forehead. Not even a bump. His hand finds his back. The Maxi-pad is gone and there is no sign of the slashes.

Slowly Niko stands and explores himself in puzzlement and disbelief, his own hands assessing like a lover’s hands.

Jemma.

Chilled in desert heat he stops. He looks around himself and feels the heart he felt stop beating leap with sudden fear.

The mason jar is gone. How could it not be here, considering what it held? Could Jemma not have made the crossing? Leached into the world, and everything for nothing?

He clenches his fists and glares at the sky. The sun bright, the cloudless sky blue enough to break his heart.

He looks away. He has awakened by the side of a paved road that cuts straight and long across a bright and featureless plain that looks like lower desert.

There is no wreckage. No sign of Nikodemus. No creek no gorge no mountain road. No mountain.

In the distance straight ahead something else lies by the road. Niko hoods his eyes and peers. No. It’s much too large to be a jar.

He turns to see what lies behind him and he staggers backward as if struck. Behind him is nothing. Utter Nothing.

Niko spins back around and clamps his hands against his head and shuts his eyes. After ten deep measured breaths he opens them again. Okay. All right.

He begins to walk toward the only feature on this sundrenched plain. The Nothingness keeps pace behind him. His progress destroys what he leaves behind. There is no going back.

HALF AN HOUR later Niko hears tremendous roaring in the sky. He looks up to see a vintage Old American 260 steam locomotive plunge chuffing from a Magritte cloud and hurtle overhead, pulling half a dozen passenger cars. It looks like the tourist train Niko and Van rode around Stone Mountain Georgia when he was seven years old. Confederate flags and rubber tomahawks. A hokey staged train robbery that had terrified the two boys nonetheless.

The blast of horn cuts off abruptly as the locomotive rushes into sudden Nothing, followed by the passenger cars and the caboose. Then the train is gone and leaves behind an echo of its whistle on the plain, a line of black smoke, a faint smell of hot iron and grease, the fleeting image of a darkhaired boy in the caboose. Waving something that might have been a tomahawk.

Again the plain is silent still. Niko waits a while but nothing else happens so he resumes his walk.

Eventually the thing in the distance begins to look like someone in a hammock. Though what the hammock is lashed to is still too far away to tell. Behind it a small square structure.

He stops again at a familiar sound. He’s still trying to place it when a mile away across the plain a boy in cutoffs and a broad-striped shirt comes pedaling a red and white Spyder bike with a banana seat and a high sissy bar. Apehanger handlebars, no gears, pedal brake. The boy leans forward into the wind his moving makes. A white bathtowel safety-pinned around his neck flaps behind him.

Niko stares. The boy bikes by and waves and grins as only boys in summer can.

Niko finds his voice and calls out Van? Van?

The pedals turn to make a rhythmic sound that he remembers well because it’s he who banged the bike into a curb and bent the pedal down into the trouserguard.

The darkhaired boy does not slow down as he speeds by. The sound cuts off as the bike rides off the edge of existence. Coming out of memory and passing into memory. Niko’s gaze turns to follow it but he closes his eyes because the alien Nothing interferes with something in his brain.

Now the distant barking of a dog. Soon a Rottweiler runs toward him across the plain, trailing gleaming drool and flapping a long pink tongue.

“Rufus?” The name escapes his lips as the memory blossoms. “Hey Rufus boy.” Niko squats and calls to the dog and claps his hands. Remembering how Rufus would put his paws on your shoulders and press you down until he stood on top of you licking your face. The day one of his elementary school teachers drove by and saw this and became hysterical and pulled over and got out of her car screaming Get off him, get off him, thinking Niko was being attacked. Dad had thought it was the funniest damned thing.

Rufus had been hit by a car while mating in the middle of the street with a collie from the neighborhood. Dad and Niko had bundled his broken gasping body in a blanket they would later throw away, and driven him to the vet to be put to sleep.

Rufus runs past Niko happy as a dog can be. His bark cuts off as he follows the boy and the bicycle into Nothing, leaving behind only a faint and fading echo in the air to indicate he was ever there at all. Niko’s heart breaks just a little more.