Michael Christie - If I Fall, If I Die

“Don’t worry about this,” she said, pointing at her nose as she emerged with her hair spray-sculpted and dark eyeliner dragged raccoon-like across the inside of her eyelashes. Though she was right in front of them, her voice seemed underpowered, distant, as if she were speaking through a thin pane of glass. “It’s a feeding tube,” she said. “I don’t need it to breathe or anything. My CF grows fibers in my intestines, so if I don’t get like four thousand calories a day I lose weight. Hey, Jonah,” she said sheepishly.

“Hey,” he said. “I’m happy you’re okay, Angela.”

Angela’s jaw dropped. She looked at Will. “That’s the most he’s ever said to me!”

“I fixed him,” Will said proudly.

Her face lit like an old person’s birthday cake, and words tumbled out of her. “My dad’s convinced all the grain dust hanging in the air made me sick. Actually, my doctor said the childhood asthma rates in this city are through the roof, but CF is totally genetic. You can live to thirty-five, but mine is the worst type — there’s no way I’ll make thirty. So I’m just like whatever . Thirty, eighty, same difference.” She arranged herself again on the bed. “I can’t have babies because I won’t be there for them,” Angela continued, shooting a surreptitious look at Jonah. “And I’d feel bad getting married and then just, like, dying, or whatever.” She sighed like a bored movie star. “I’m what they call doomed . But it’s okay. I can do what I want. Have fun. Plus I’m never going to get wrinkles!”

Will tried to take comfort in his and Angela’s mutually doomed fates, and wondered whether he could even expect eighteen more years from his heart. But such magnitudes of time had a similar underwhelming effect as when his mother first taught him that every single star was actually another sun just like theirs. They created a humph —then nothing. Some information was too enormous to cram into your mind.

“But it’s so good to see my best friend again,” she said to Will, brushing his back in a way that made his penis hook uncomfortably in his underwear. “You look … different.”

Will felt his cheeks flame under her gaze. A summer of daily skateboarding Outside had left his hair sun-streaked, his body dark and slender, tempered by asphalt and concrete. His legs cracked like twin bullwhips when he jumped, and his right calf, the pushing leg, was significantly larger and more rigid than his left. Even his bones felt different: strong and flexible as aircraft aluminum. “Jonah’s been teaching me some things,” Will said as a nurse entered the room with a blocky machine on silent wheels.

“Angela, it’s time for your percussion,” she said, setting out a cup of pills that Angela snapped into her throat with unbelievable ease. It still took Will an hour of gagging to swallow a Tylenol.

“You guys can stay,” Angela said, leaning forward for the nurse. “I do this every day. It loosens the mucus.”

“Angela, I have something I need to ask,” Will said as the nurse velcroed her into a vest that reminded Will of a flak jacket. Angela coughed a few more hoarse seal barks and spit some blobs into a cup.

“Sorry,” she said, an embarrassed look directed at Jonah.

The nurse hooked two tubes from the machine to the jacket, and as Will was about to speak, the machine roared and the jacket inflated like an airplane life vest. Angela began to shake. The nurse checked her watch then left the room.

“Angela,” Will began nervously, speaking loudly as he did on his first day of school. “You know that drawing of Jonah’s I gave you? Well, he needs it back.”

She frowned while her bottom lip wobbled with the shaking.

“He said he’d draw another one for you?” Will added, turning to Jonah, who nodded.

“But I love that drawing,” she said, her voice warbly like a sheep saying baa . “I see it when I wake up . It keeps me going.”

“We … need it, Angela. It’s important.”

“Yeah,” Jonah said. “That one’s not even good. I’ll draw you anything you want.”

“So …,” Angela said, “you wouldn’t have come if it wasn’t for this thing—”

“—No, that’s not it!” said Will.

Suddenly the machine stopped, and it felt like the whole Outside had never been so quiet before. Even the distant beeping and institutional hush of the hospital was lessened.

Angela thought for a moment before horking brazenly into a cup. “Okay, boys, I have an idea,” she said.

Will and Jonah spent the next day setting up an ersatz crime lab in Jonah’s basement, opposite to where Enoch kept his weight set. They’d considered setting up in Will’s house (better art supplies and lighting), but Will knew their investigation would unsettle his mother, plus Marcus’s grid was safer here. Despite their fearsome exterior, the Turtle Brothers spoke softly and made a point to eat together every Friday night, the boys all sitting down to either a big stack of ordered-in pizzas or some fried whitefish that Gideon pulled sizzling from a cast-iron pot with a wire scooper. They always waited for Will to take his share first.

Once after supper Will asked Jonah if he’d ever tried the Butler’s grain alcohol. “No,” he said, then tapped his temple, “I’m keeping this baby pristine for med school. My brothers don’t touch it either now that they’re working at the call center.” Jonah’s brothers spent their days convincing people to increase their credit limits, and the thought of these powerful men talking all day into tiny headsets gave Will a headache. Jonah said that when they first moved down to Thunder Bay from their reserve, his brothers started a roofing company. They put an ad in the yellow pages, bought a truck, tools, and an air compressor for their nail guns — but their phone sat quiet as a rock. Gideon even took the phone back and demanded another at the store. But the new one didn’t ring either. At the unemployment office the man asked Hosea what they were thinking. He said Indians don’t know the first thing about roofs. “He said homeowners in Thunder Bay knew we haven’t lived under them for long enough,” Jonah said.

“Why do your brothers call you Doc?” asked Will.

“Because I’ve always sewn them up with dental floss whenever they came home gashed up,” Jonah said. “Those medical textbooks are how I learned to draw real people. Studying anatomy.” With an image locked in his mind of Jonah with a loop of dental floss in his teeth bending over his grimacing brother’s split eyebrow, for the first time in his life Will wished he’d had siblings.

“Is that how you’re getting out of Thunder Bay?” Will said.

At this, Jonah grew shy. “Yeah, maybe. I’m going to fall back on medicine if my pro skateboard career doesn’t work out,” he said with his usual smirk.

It took only a few days in Jonah’s Inside before Will decided he preferred it to his own. Here nobody was watching you, and the most ghastly horror films elicited only laughter and glee, and the Black Lagoon did not reign. It was during this time Will noticed water-swollen porno magazines nestled beside the upstairs toilet. The hairstyles of the women were huge and souffléd, and upon their orangey faces he found an exact replica of his mother’s Black Lagoon look — as if they’d all been struck by some great, unknowable terror. Will realized then with horror that penises were Outside and vaginas were Inside, and the import of these connections sent him lunging from the bathroom.

The boys rush-ordered a fingerprinting kit and practiced on themselves, applying latent powder with the impossibly fluffy brush, lifting the print with tape and fixing it to a backing card, pausing only so Jonah could occasionally wipe his mouth with his sleeve after his kiss with Angela. She’d said she would surrender the drawing only if they both French-kissed her in her hospital bed for a count of thirty seconds each. “I want to be fair,” she’d said, which Will hoped was more than evidence of her charitability. Angela removed her feeding tube, and after Will sufficiently coaxed him, Jonah went first, tucking his bangs behind his ears, as he brought his lips to hers, Angela wide-eyed. The sight of his two friends mouth-locked was both unbearable and dazzling for Will to behold. When Will’s turn came, it was like his face ollied down twenty stairs and landed in a tub of warm oil. Jonah had lasted only twenty-five seconds before pulling away, but Will couldn’t venture how long his kiss was. He could still taste the flavor of her mouth, acidic, apricot-like, the best thing the Outside had offered so far.