Michael Christie - If I Fall, If I Die

• You can stick the chilly steel tube of the vacuum to your belly and generate a hideous yet painless bruise, and these pulsating circles when placed carefully can form an Olympic symbol that lasts well into a second week.

Of course his mother’s catching wind of any of this would mean a cataclysmic Black Lagoon. But she didn’t. Like Will, she was a genius, yet she was also naive. Because everything wasn’t only making. When he was a little boy, Will’s mother urged him to paint masterpieces of trees, houses, and doe-eyed animals, and then it was impressionistic splatters and loosely patterned blocks of color. But he knew now it had all been meaningless. In his true heart he’d rather draw a fight, a war, a chemical spill pulling the flesh from the bones of the villagers. He torched bugs by magnifying the noon sun that throbbed through the window in Cairo, not because he enjoyed pain, but to witness what would happen, to grasp it. And what was the difference between making something and making it come apart? Painting a masterpiece was also destroying a canvas, sculpting was wrecking a good rock, drawing dulling a good pencil forever.

Even though his Destructivity Experiments charged him with daring, he still couldn’t bear to sleep alone in New York — which was supposed to be his bedroom, though he used it as a studio. A single bed would be like a house without a furnace, a body without blood, and without the clean whoosh of her breathing beside him, Will could never settle.

After her Sessions she baked him fresh bread in the breadmaker, read page-turners, or strummed folk songs, her small, white-tendoned hand flexed at the guitar’s neck, always seeming too small to corral the thick strings. For someone afraid of everything, she was most fearsome on the stool at the counter in Paris, the stretchy phone cord coiled around her thin arms, where she’d arrange the week’s complex schedule of deliveries. Sometimes, when arguing about an overcharge or when met with an outsized incompetence, she’d hold the receiver away from her face and stare at it, her dark eyebrows flexed in disbelief, as though the object itself had betrayed her.

But even when the deliveries went smoothly and Will didn’t have accidents, there still remained Black Lagoon traces in everything she did. If he said “Mom” as a leadoff to something, she’d instantly answer “Yes?” stricken with alarm, as if he were about to inform her of their recent death sentence.

He knew the textures and temperaments of their house just as intimately as he did hers. She’d archived his detailed architectural blueprints along with his masterpieces in Toronto. They’d always called the kitchen Paris, his studio New York, their bedroom San Francisco, the living room Cairo. She told him it had been his idea when he was young, yet he couldn’t remember having it. He did recall that she’d insisted on naming the basement Toronto, which seemed to please her, maybe because that’s where she’d grown up, even if the Black Lagoon never allowed her down there. Will did the laundry and fetched arm-numbing frozen loaves of her bread from the deep freeze.

Sometimes other rooms would temporarily close off to her. She’d avoid one for as long as a month, take the long way around. Will loved when this was Paris, because they’d be forced to order in, and he could talk her into off-limit, choke-prone foods like pizza or Chinese. When it was San Francisco, Will would pick her outfits from her closet, mostly shift dresses she’d crudely sewn or floral tank tops and elastic-waisted jeans, and they’d sleep on the couches in Cairo and wake in a whirlpool of sun from the big window. Luckily it was never the bathroom, called Venice, because she couldn’t pee in the sink, as Will did sometimes as an Experiment, because even though she was a mother, she had a vagina, which couldn’t aim. Then, inexplicably as seasons changing, the Black Lagoon would relent, and she’d return to the foreclosed room as though nothing had happened.

Still, the Black Lagoon would never surrender the Outside. Will sometimes pictured their house surrounded by crackling electric fences and froth-mouthed Dobermans, sheer cliffs falling from their doorstep to an angry sea. Though he’d never been in a church, he imagined they shared similarities with their house: keeping certain things in and certain things out.

After a day of Destructivity Experiments, Will would try to arrange himself casually on the couch, limbs flung loosely, face careless as a boy who’d never been Outside, who didn’t have a friend who fired slingshots and feared nothing, who wasn’t already changed forever and only felt counterfeit and hollow. Later, while crunching into a piece of toast he’d puttied with butter, a flavor he knew as well as that of his own saliva, he couldn’t suppress the creeping suspicion that staying home was somehow unnatural, something people didn’t do unless they were certified cloistered wing nuts like Ms. Havisham or Boo Radley — characters in long books she’d read him that she enjoyed more than he did. He’d always thought his mother was enacting something heroic, like a knight or a navy SEAL, but also something complicated, like how the Vikings had a woman-god called Frejya, who was the god of Love, War, and Beauty all at once, which throbbed his brain to think about.

Everyone went Outside, Will concluded. Everyone leaves. That’s easy. Only true warriors and heroes could overcome this weakness, could fortify the stronghold, sit tight, wait it out. But now that he’d felt his gooseflesh stand in the Outside air; now that he’d tempered himself with the true danger and beauty of the backyard and gathered unforgettable data with his Destructivity Experiments; and now that the scab on his forehead had grown dark as beef jerky and started to chip at the edges, Will knew that even though he was her guardian and her only son and their blood was the very same crimson hue, he’d never be as strong as she was.

A week later, on a day he knew was Sunday because the newspaper came fatter, Will took the deepest breath of his eleven-year life.

“I think I’m maybe going for a walk,” he said.

“Sure, just let me rinse the blender,” she said running the sink, “and we’ll set up the Ye Olde Strolling Course around London—”

“No,” he said.

“—we could even paint some fresh scenery to put up, like Westminster Abbey or something—”

“Mom.”

“—I’ve got that nice crepe paper you didn’t use for your masterpieces—”

“Outside.”

His mother stopped rinsing, as if Zeus himself had pointed his lightning-powered remote control at her and pressed Pause.

“Out? There?” she said, half-laughing while also breathing distastefully, as though the air itself had spoiled. He could already see the Black Lagoon looming behind her, like a train that had jumped its rails.

“Yeah,” he said. “Out there.”

She set the blender down carefully, as one would a set mousetrap, then braced the heels of her palms on the counter and threw her head back to examine the ceiling as though hunting for a fresco of helpful words painted there. Then she turned and leveled a pleading gaze, her cheeks lavender welts. “You don’t have a coat,” she said, a shrill warble to her voice.

“It’s summer,” Will said, in his mind a vision of Other Will crashing into the woods shirtless and surviving fine.

“Exactly!” she said lifting and dropping her arms as though he’d just agreed.

They waited, a gunfighters’ silence between them, while her face pulsed, her mouth a razored line. Water sucked through the drain, and her green irises made small ticking motions as though they had second hands trapped inside each of them.