Michael Christie - If I Fall, If I Die

“You’ll be fine,” a nearby voice said.

Will attempted to again pry open his eyes, but a stinging honey had sealed them. He stumbled forward with his hands lifted in the Outside air, baffled, sobbing, afraid to wipe his face for fear he’d make his mortal wound worse.

“Here,” the voice said, and Will sensed fabric against his face. He took it and pawed at his gluey eyes, prying them open to find a delivery boy, tucked behind the aluminum shed that Will had never entered. The boy had a green garden hose coiled around his shoulder and was about Will’s height and age, with stringy bangs that licked at eyes flitting everywhere except upon Will. His brown skin was the tint of the milky tea his mother often drank in her reading chair, balancing the cup precariously on the wooden arm — her most dangerous habit. In his hand was a target slingshot, the kind with thick rubber straps and a brace running up your forearm, a forbidden item that Will had ogled in catalogues for as long as he could remember.

“I didn’t even pull it back halfway, so you’ll live,” the delivery boy said smiling, the sudden warmth of his face momentarily soothing the ache of Will’s probable skull fracture, which he could already feel opening like a pistachio.

“You really think I’m going to live? Like, for sure?” said Will, woozy with blood loss and imminent death. “I’ve never heard anyone say that before …” Will pulled the boy’s shirt away for a moment, and more blood licked his eyes.

“For a while, anyway,” the boy said, shrugging. “But sorry, I thought you were someone else.”

“Who? The person who set that little bomb out front?” Will said, secretly wondering if the Black Lagoon could possibly be after this boy as well.

“Yeah,” the delivery boy said. “Among others.” He unshouldered the garden hose and dropped it to his feet. Will now saw that his smooth chest was festooned with a solar system of a hundred milky scars.

“Oh, are you hurt too?” Will said. “Did the bomb get you when you were delivering our new hose?”

“I’m fine,” the boy said casually before scrambling over to peek around the corner of the house like a soldier in a firefight.

Will followed him closely to examine his injuries. “Then how did you get those scars? Did the Outside do that to you?” The delivery boy turned and regarded Will as if he were speaking some cryptographic language, and Will wondered whether the infinite Outside air had tarnished his words somehow.

“What’s your name, kid?” the boy said, returning behind the shed, keeping his eyes fixed to the tree line near the creek behind Will’s house.

“Will. What’s yours?”

He paused, and Will was about to ask if he was okay again. “My name is Will too,” the boy said.

“Really?” Will said, tickled by the coincidence. “Are you hiding from someone, Will? Do you have your own Inside you can go to? If not, you can hide here. We could eat some of my mother’s bread and look at my masterpieces.”

“You live here?” the boy said, puzzled, tipping his head back toward Will’s house. “I thought this place was empty.”

Will tried not to think about his house. How disturbing it looked from the Outside, how shabby and finite. “Just me and my mother,” he said. “But this is my first time in the backyard,” he added. “I used to be afraid of going Outside, but now I’m mostly not.”

“That’s great, Will,” the delivery boy said. “Really great. But you do need to be careful out here. It can be dangerous. You should probably play it safe and go back inside and not tell anyone you saw me? Like your mom or anything?”

“Oh, I’m definitely not telling my mom about this,” said Will, pointing at his forehead. “I only came out because I heard that bang out front.” It was then he realized that the garden hose at the boy’s feet was old and worn. “But you weren’t delivering that hose, were you?” Will whispered conspiratorially, approaching him to lean in close. “That was already ours, right?”

“Anyway, it was good talking to you,” the boy said in a businesslike voice, jamming his slingshot into his shoelace belt and striding out into the backyard, exposing a lithe back just as baroquely scarred as his front. “I’d better get—”

“—It’s okay, you can have it!” Will interrupted, too afraid to follow him out into all that grass, astonished by how bravely he swam through the ocean of the Outside. “The guy who does our garden usually brings his own anyway. I’ll just order another one.”

“That’s real good of you, Will,” the boy said, returning to tentatively pick up the hose. His eyes drifted up to Will’s Helmet. “Too bad I didn’t aim a little higher,” he said with an odd smirk. “But you can keep my shirt. And maybe I’ll see you around.”

“Does this mean we’re friends?” Will called out as the boy paused near the back hedge and glanced over his shoulder. Will could see his belly undulate evenly as he breathed.

“Whatever, sure,” he said.

“But someone is still trying to catch you, right?” Will said. “Aren’t you scared?”

The boy cocked his head. “You were serious when you said this was your first time outside, weren’t you?”

Will nodded.

“You know what?” the boy said, smiling again. “I was wrong when I said you should go back inside. There’s nothing to be scared of out here.” Will realized then that this boy’s brave, bright face was a light he wanted to shine upon him forever. “Look, I bet your head has already stopped bleeding.”

Will pulled the shirt away and saw it was chocolate brown.

“See?” the boy said. “Nothing can really hurt you, Will.” Then he vanished into the ferocious-looking woods.

When Will returned Inside, the air in Cairo was thick as cream and stunk of couch crevasse. He gagged and ran to Venice, where he blotted his forehead with gauze to find that the actual cut was tiny: a single pit, like a one rolled on a die. Luckily, it hadn’t swelled and was high enough to cover with his bangs if he wore his Helmet tipped forward, which he did, both to protect his wound and to conceal it.

He hid the blood-blackened shirt — featuring a skeletal sorcerer wielding an electric guitar — down in Toronto, then returned upstairs to draw a cup of water from the sink in Paris. Slurping, he forced himself to sit, fighting to slow his breathing, while watching steam belch from the lid of the slow cooker — the only culinary appliance his mother could abide other than the breadmaker, because it couldn’t scald them, and it rendered food sufficiently mushy to eliminate the always present danger of choking. If ever Will stopped chewing while at the table, even if only pausing before flooding his mouth with milk, she’d leap up and start whacking his chest with her forearm.

By the big chrome clock he knew she’d be just starting Side B of her Relaxation Tapes. She’d been doing them daily in San Francisco for a month now: donning the huge creaky headphones that swallowed her ears, the opaque Terminator shades that assailed her eyes with light, rendering her deaf, blind, oblivious. He couldn’t imagine two hours of anything even denting the obsidian shell of the Black Lagoon, but Will cherished this new time away from her supervision. He’d tried the apparatus on once when she was in the bath, but the blinky light show and left-right pan of surf made him fall asleep and then immediately pee himself, which his mother did sometimes when she supremely lost it, but that was more the Black Lagoon’s fault, not the Tapes. Regardless, it seemed to Will somehow simultaneously depressing and thrilling that his entire Outside ordeal had lasted a total of nine minutes.