Jack O'Connell - The Resurrectionist

“Danny,” she screams at him, “what is wrong with you?”

He dashes past her but manages to kick her in the shin. It shocks more than hurts — he’s not wearing his shoes. Kerry runs after him, catches up with her son on the second-floor landing, at the mouth of the stairway. She snatches an arm and goes down on one knee in the same motion. Danny flails, spitting, screaming, wailing. When he realizes he is caught, again he pulls back an arm and again he arcs it with all his might across his mother’s face.

This one both shocks and hurts. This one dislodges her grip on rationality if only for a second or two. Which is all the time it takes for her to release the son’s arm, cock back her own, adult arm, and bring it forward to crash across the boy’s cheek.

Danny’s head snaps with the blow. It carries his body out over the stairs. He sails into the air until gravity casts him halfway down the stairwell. He falls on a wrist and it breaks, shatters, in fact, small bones fracturing, splintering into rubble. But the body continues to fall. He bounces again on the second stair, makes a quarter turn, thus positioning the head to smash on the flagstone of the foyer.

An instant and an eternity, the fadeout is tipped sideways and involves Kerry’s diminishing scream and the lake of blood that runs in a puddle until resolving into the last image — a red plain with a single bubble in its center.

And then sound and vision terminate.

SWEENEY SITS STILLfor a moment and then, as if someone has whispered instructions, he stands and exits the surgical theater. When he pushes open the door he steps, not into the attic corridor, but outside into the cool salt air. At the end of the walkway, sitting on the edge of the cliff, legs dangling, he sees his chicken boy, waiting.

Sweeney joins his son on the lip of the cliff and they both stare out at the ocean for a time before Danny says, “I thought you should know what happened.”

Sweeney nods. After a while, he says, “You didn’t want the chicken boy to die.”

Danny looks at him, somewhere between exasperated and confused.

“That’s why you got so upset,” Sweeney says. “Because the chicken boy died.”

Danny remains calm, takes a breath, lets out a sigh, and shakes his head.

“I don’t know what happened to me,” he says. “But I got upset cuz the doctor changed the others. Cuz they weren’t themselves anymore.”

“But he made them normal,” Sweeney says.

Danny shakes his head and says, “Right.”

“And you didn’t want them to be normal?”

“I wanted them,” Danny says, “to stay themselves.”

Sweeney tries to think about this.

“What is it you want now, son?”

Danny looks back to the ocean and says, “I want you to forgive me. And then I want you to forgive Mom. And then I want you to stop hating yourself.”

“And can you tell me how to do that?”

“If you want it, you’ll figure out a way.”

Sweeney reaches over and takes Danny into his lap, cradles him as if the boy were still an infant. Danny burrows his head into his father’s chest.

“I love you,” Sweeney manages to say. “But I don’t want to go back.”

When it comes, Danny’s voice is muffled.

“You have to go back, Dad. You’re not done yet.”

“I think I am,” Sweeney says. “I think I’m done.”

Danny shakes his head and, despite Sweeney’s attempts to hold him in place, the boy wiggles out of his father’s arms.

“You have to stop the doctors, Dad. They’re trying to make me into someone else.”

“They say they can bring you back to me.”

“And you believe them?”

“I don’t know what I believe,” Sweeney says. “I’m so tired. I’m exhausted.”

“You just need some sleep,” Danny says.

Then the boy brings his feet to the lip of the cliff, his toes dangling over, and raises his arms above his head, hands pressed together. As he dives, Sweeney yells his name.

It’s high tide and the ocean has pushed in and flooded the canyon of boulders below. Danny’s arc is impressive but there’s no way to tell if he’ll clear the rocks. Rather than wait to find out, Sweeney stands and makes his own dive, screaming all the way down. There’s nothing graceful about his fall. He flails as he plummets and he hits the water with a hard slap, stomach first.

It’s freezing and it’s murky. His eyes sting and his lungs begin to ache almost immediately. He searches for Danny. He pushes with his arms, kicks with his legs, but it’s as if he is swimming through mud.

He thinks he sees movement below and angles his body downward. His progress is agonizing, each stroke and kick enervating him. But he does manage to descend. He feels the temperature of the water drop. Feels his skin contract and pimple. His genitals try to retreat inward. His body begins to quake but he continues to dive.

He sees something moving on the bottom of the ocean. Something waving to him. A pain ignites in his temples, a terrible pressure. He knows he’s about out of air.

And then he sees them. Danny and Kerry. Mother and son. He floats in place above them and they stare up at him. Kerry tilts her head back, opens her mouth. Bubbles escape and rush toward the surface. She’s naked and there is a blue tinge to her skin and Danny is in her scar-free arms. Danny is shrunken, an infant again, the size of a small hen. He is bald and featherless and blue like his mother. His mouth is clamped on Kerry’s left breast and he feeds with a heavy, aggressive sucking.

Sweeney opens his own mouth to speak. To release the last, crucial words and give birth to an absolution that can change everything. The impulse begins in the brain, which sends the signals to activate this redemption. The lungs push his last breath upward through the trachea and against the vocal cords. The glottis bursts open and the cycles of contraction and expansion commence, causing the cords to vibrate the sound of an unmitigated forgiveness.

And in the instant that Sweeney speaks, an exchange is made. The words flow out to the mother and the child. And water rushes in over the father’s tongue, past his teeth, and down his throat. It is the coldest water he has ever felt. Cold enough, he knows, to wake a dead man.

He is flooded with water, choking on water. His lungs and his stomach fill with cold water. He tries to push up to the surface but his arms and legs are entirely spent and he is paralyzed. And then everything begins to fade. Sound, vision, even the cold on his skin. And Sweeney slips, at last, into the dreamless vacuum.

Later, he thought he could remember being carried. He thought he could remember the sound of a doorbell, but muted, as if the chime were ringing underwater. And maybe he heard an engine throttling up as it receded into the distance. That was about it. The whole of the world was reduced to sound.

Vision didn’t return for hours. The first thing he saw was Alice Peck’s face. She was hovering over him, pulling something cool and damp across his forehead. Then he was out again for a while, until he heard pages being turned. He opened his eyes to see Alice sitting on the edge of his bed, reading the final issue of Limbo. He tried to speak but nothing came and the effort revoked his consciousness once more.

When he returned it was to the smell of chicken soup. He blinked and brought the bowl into focus. It was on the nightstand, steaming, and Alice Peck was stirring it with a spoon. She lowered herself to the mattress, brushed the backs of her fingers against his cheek.

“Do you think you can eat?” she said. “It’ll help to eat.”

He nodded, tried to sit up, and failed.