Michael Christie - If I Fall, If I Die

She was exhausted. That was it. The lawyer, the heat, the walking, the city, the hectic day with Will — and look, here was another train blaring into the station. They were quick during commuting hours, thankfully. Why was she thankful? Couldn’t she have waited longer?

The train’s wind flicked her bangs from her face and puffed her cheeks slightly, a film of dried sweat tightening her skin. As she pushed Will closer to the tracks, she was forced to admit that this particular train seemed fiercer, more indifferent than the previous. It wept and screeched as it halted like a tortured thing. The doors blew open and people erupted. More passengers this time, nearly rush hour. Will would be starving when he woke.

She would step onto this train, but the fear of another failure stayed her. Figures pushed past. To buy time she searched her purse for nothing in particular, imagining what she’d lost. She grasped her house keys and squeezed them until her hand shot with pain. Then, impossibly, the doors shut, after hardly enough time for people to board. Had there been a mistake? An impatient operator? The train lurched forward, fitting into the dark like a glove.

She retreated. Her knees were water boiling. Her limbs crawling and tingling as though Arthur had slept on them. She could leave, cart Will back up the escalator and hail a cab to deliver them home. But how would she manage without the subway? She’d have to lie, hide, make excuses — it would be dreadful.

She leaned against a plexiglassed advertisement hung on the brown tile wall, inhaling deeply, blowing out her panic like a birthday candle, but it only leapt back, fed by each breath, with a thicker, more lustrous flame.

She could hear her tongue scouring the roof of her gauze-dry mouth. Her throat constricted — how small a windpipe is, she thought, how minuscule an area we must keep clear to survive. Her heart thudded in her eyes. The word pulmonary entered her mind like a cruel rhyme. What word did it usually go with? Ebola? Embolism. What did that mean? Why did she think what she didn’t even understand?

Then someone speaking in an annoying, distant manner. Oh, she couldn’t bear assistance. Not now. She needed to weather this. Alone. But the voice persisted. She decided to listen, only enough to gather what was said in order to properly repel it. The words were a man’s. For how long had men talked in her direction, wanting something? She held the words at arm’s length. Every part of her felt unfounded, jumbled, questionable, open to invasion and disarray. She would not let him alter her, enlist her. He wanted his fingerprints on her organs. If she wasn’t careful, he could tell her that her name was any old word in the dictionary and she would believe it.

“You said you’re all right, right, yeah? No need for help?” he said earnestly, like someone, Whalen, but not him.

“I did?” she said. She could feel her face betray her, twisting and sweaty, her eyes two flushed toilets.

“Did you?” he asked, somewhat flirtatiously, which left her exhausted and ill.

“I’m all right,” she said, willing a smile, an expression not attainable by those on the doorstep of losing their minds.

“Cute,” he said, nodding his head toward Will.

She waved him away, and he retreated, no doubt convinced of her madness. That was what they wanted anyway: a functional madwoman, crazy enough to excite, not too crazy to be a burden. He turned back and said something else, and she realized then that he had no idea that he was as intangible as smoke. She let loose an enormous current of breath and blew him away before feeling herself stagger. She set her bags on the floor and yearned to join them there, but gravity had become a villain. She could feel death — real, cold death — snapping at her ankles like a black lapdog that could tear her to pieces with needle teeth if she fell. A thought stood up in her mind: go under here, and you will die or awake crazy. Crazy enough for them to take Will.

From her.

Her son.

A mere whiff of this notion sent the dimensions of the tunnel sliding together. Her balance vacated her, wracking her with tremors of such ferocity they seemed to originate outside her. Sound ran together like the paint of children. The light died. Spots bloomed like mold in her vision. She peered into the tunnel and saw that it was the blackened esophagus of a giant, a monster. She knew then that she had been swallowed, as her brother and father had been in another life that was still hers, whether she’d left it behind or not. The platform crowded again. Another train, a throb of steel and glass, the lewd screech of wheels, a symphony of hissing and chuffing. Did it ever stop?

Time slow as poured honey. She’d sat down but had not died. Will was awake now, fighting the straps, mewling in his stroller, the sound recalling his birth: all that breathing, an ocean of air through her, and his first breath — not breath — gasp, how greedily he’d come. Mercifully, she undid his buckle, and he stepped free from his bondage, plodding forward out into the empty platform, unsteady, half-made.

Suddenly she looked down to watch a slow-motion darkness bloom in her dress, the accompanying release, the patter of urine on the platform. She considered wiping it with one of the diapers in her bag. No worry, when the tunnel was filled with fire, everything would dry and the city would crumble like dead paper and the sky would blow with cinder. She heard a rumbling and didn’t know which train it was, Charlie’s or her own. Boys loved trains. Why was that? The noise? The speed? The single-mindedness? Why wasn’t hers here? They’d been walking today, in the heat, so long ago now. She had a son, didn’t she? Yes. Blond. Not wholly blond. Hair like wood grain, the tint of wheat. She’d misplaced him, but he resolved before her now on the platform. A rushing thing close behind him.

Perhaps, she thought breezily, it would be better if she crawled over the edge and into the track bed. Put herself in the clank of gear and wheel, down where her brother was. How would its thunder register in her chest, where on her body would the kiss of wheel and track come? How insignificant those on the platform would look.

She watched this perplexing, curious shape stumble onward near the edge of the tracks, right to where she’d been standing so recently, mesmerized by the noisy mechanics and the searing lights and the dark tunnel, and, yes, of course she would lift herself from the tile and go to him, scoop him to her breast, protect him. This was her duty.

She was a mother. His mother. But even though she was a mother, his mother, she would not go to him, could not protect him. She would fail at this, as she had failed to protect her brother, because she would remain here, in her lair, burrowed, sapped, doomed, because this weakness had always lived in her, disguised, hiding like septic marrow in her bones, as it had lived in her brother, taken her brother. She fought to rise but couldn’t and knew balance would never again return, that her name would be the sound of her own weeping. She’d been pierced by the lion’s jaws, because the jaws had finally closed.

What did it matter that this helpless morsel of boy had that day spent an uncountable time mere inches from the yellow line, silhouetted by the pure, apocalyptic motion of a train blasting through the station, his hair a wildfire of gold, his jostling cheeks iridescent, before turning to toddle back toward her and plop down at her feet as if nothing of consequence had transpired while she’d sat frozen in panic. It was what she couldn’t do that had ended her life that day. She’d failed him so thoroughly, so completely, as she had her brother, and now here he was, imperiled once again. Right now your son is in grave danger , said that strange man on her doorstep, who seemed so much more menacing in retrospect.