Michael Christie - If I Fall, If I Die

“Oh, man,” the previously silent boy groaned from behind them.

“It’s okay, Will, punch me,” Ritchie said, almost tenderly.

“I … won’t,” said Will.

“You won’t, Will?” the big Twin said mock-sweetly.

“You’re a megapussy,” the small Twin said.

“Will you, Will?” the big Twin said, his face now lifeless.

Will had never observed such false, indecipherable expressions on deliverymen, and it finally reached him now — he would not come through this safely.

“I’ll punch you then, okay?” said Ritchie, stepping closer.

Will’s breath went full Black Lagoon as his thoughts veered to the Helmet he’d left in the grass and now longed for on his head. Little good would it do, though — this boy would drill him square in the face, liquefying his nose — but at least he wouldn’t have shattered his head on a rock when he dropped.

Ritchie swayed before him, fists clenched, while trucks stormed obliviously past on the highway. It came to Will that he’d never been more than thirty feet from his mother and tears crammed his eyes. When she Black Lagooned, Will could taste his mother’s fear if he rested his face in her neck, like tinfoil and salt. If dogs could smell fear, these boys were almost harvesting it from him. He’d spent his life designing weapons, staging intricate acts of toy-on-toy violence, but for this unfathomable injustice he was completely unprepared.

Ritchie drew back his arm slowly, almost as though he’d never used it before.

“He’s freaked, Ritchie. Do it,” the small Twin said excitedly.

With his legs too sapped by Black Lagoon to be coaxed, Will shut his eyes and set his jaw. His only hope was that he would not die in an overly embarrassing manner that Marcus would hear about, wherever he was.

“Walk away, kid,” the quiet boy said from behind them, and the others erupted in cheerful argument as Will turned on rubberized legs and made for the footpath, breath whirlwinding in his throat. Emerging from the woods, Will launched into a dangerous half run, half walk, his slippers flying off every ten steps until he settled on carrying them. His lungs shrank and his head swam with stars. He’d done plenty of exercise biking and had often run the loop around Paris-Cairo-London-Paris but had never jogged any straight distance in his life. He could so easily faint and smack his head on the sidewalk, and he cursed himself again for removing — and now abandoning — his Helmet. Coming up his street, he prayed he’d recognize their house from the front, but luckily it was the weekend, and theirs was the only one without a car in the driveway.

He found her in London, pretending to straighten his masterpieces. Her face drained when she saw him doubled over on the porch, his head naked, his hair blown back, and — he realized too late — his forehead scab exposed. She caught him in her arms like a drowning woman would a life preserver.

Of course she’d read books. An entire shelf’s worth. Agoraphobia. That word. One thing to call it. She’d considered doctors, but that would only mean sedatives, psychotropic drugs, insulin treatments — each cure dropping her a rung lower. A psychiatrist would declare her overdevoted to Will. She needed more relationships. Any relationships. Needed to grieve. Arthur. Her mother. Her father. Her brother. Needed hobbies. A career — that word she’d banished for so long. Get out more. Make another film. Go snowshoeing. Play bridge. Friends. Men. But the truth was she wanted less. Less world. Less talk. Fewer demands. Less danger. More inside. More herself. More Will.

So she’d tried alternative approaches. Visualization. Flooding. Skinnerian desensitization. A hundred ridiculous diets. She assembled an arsenal of complex breathing techniques to employ at key moments of panic, Olympian-worthy routines of reassurance and relaxation.

None of it worked.

Because here was the ruthless truth, a truth that had cornered her like an animal and would never free her from her cage: to fight panic is to panic.

She’d succumbed to this law only after years of struggle and had been obeying it dutifully ever since. Because when something not only can’t be beaten but can’t even be fought without strengthening it, when something is so absolute and baseless and mechanical, like death, it can only be avoided, feared, ignored, sunk, buried, deliberately erased.

So her revised goal became to prevent herself from falling too far — each day something to survive. And since it was thinking that tipped her into heart-pounding spirals, her strategy was to quell thinking altogether. She tried pills — Anafranil, Valium, Ativan, Xanax — but their unknowable clockwork of control only made her terror flare more intensely. She tried drinking, big sweaty magnums of white wine, even some of the old grain alcohol Charlie had left in the basement from his days at the elevators, but she worried about her liver, imagined her blood thinning in her veins. Besides, waking with a ringing head to a boy clamoring for cereal and a LEGO partner wasn’t exactly anxiety reducing.

There were less intrusive methods. She traded coffee for black tea and read the entire Thunder Bay Tribune each day, circling typos she found with a red pen, a shockingly busy activity. She played guitar, sincere old folk songs that charmed her despite their cloying lyrics. Though she never stooped to daytime television, she allowed herself five page-turners per week. Mysteries, romances, spy thrillers — the trashier and more inane, the better. Sure, they were formulaic, wooden, predictable, but they sheltered her mind from itself like nothing else on earth: the softly buzzing pages and freedom from literary interpretation and ambiguity were a comfort. Something about the burning question of whether a person was to be found —whether for purposes of justice or marriage or revenge didn’t really matter — inoculated her from dread, at least temporarily. Really, the books were only a reason to sit and breathe long enough to watch the sun’s orchestral walk through the house from back to front.

Another of her most durable strategies was watching Will paint (she’d tried it herself, but her mind feasted upon itself whenever she shut her eyes to visualize her subject). The way Will’s face tensed in concentration as his brush lisped over the canvas always soothed the spastic hive of her thoughts and left her spirit thick and warm. She’d once watched The 400 Blows with Arthur at the University Cinema in Toronto, which contained a shot of an audience of rapt children, mouths agape, watching either a puppet show or a magician — it escaped her now, but the image struck her then as the most beautiful ever put to film. Afterwards, when Arthur was filling a chipped mug with Calvados at his endearingly disheveled apartment, she arranged those children’s faces lovingly in her mind, and it was then, she later suspected, that her long-held commitment to childlessness was revoked.

Along with her guitar and her books and Will’s creativity, she had other tricks to diminish the terror. An agoraphobia expert had suggested the wrist elastic in one of her mostly unhelpful Take Back Your Life! — style books. According to some suspect research, it snapped away catastrophic thoughts, like the arm of a clapboard dropped to end a frightening mental scene. And it did. Sort of. However, she suspected the benefits were mostly side effect: the sting brought a vague annoyance, and the repetition was addictive, which somehow deactivated her brain and held the volcano of fear at bay.

Then last month she’d ordered this Relaxation Machine on a lark from the back of a magazine. Manufactured by a company called NeuroPeace Labs, it was advertised to quiet the mind and “restore cat-like balance to the consciousness.” She hadn’t expected miracles and chuckled at the ridiculous goggles when she first put them on, with their little lights inside like a toy robot. When she clamped the headphones over her ears and began the Session, however, instantly she unstuck from herself and swam out into the bliss of mental oblivion, her mind light and empty as a balloon tied to a child’s wrist.