LUNGS
The canvas of his navy sneakers is soaked through from the morning dew and the leftover layer of rain. They drip blue-black in the grey light of noontime—not that anyone can tell time here, with the sun tucked up somewhere behind the clouds, but if he added up his footsteps into seconds and minutes and hours, that’s what he’d be ton. He can hear the squelch when he finds a foothold in between railway tiles, can feel his socks clinging muggy to his skin. When his mother used to tell him about heaven, this isn’t exactly what Geordi had pictured—uncountable hours following train tracks, hanging onto the hope that there was somewhere they lead. When the ghastly white no the x-rays—fungus, like dust or ghosts come to live between his ribs—ate a whole through his lungs, a kid with blood on his lips and an IV feeing him through his arm in the waiting room told him that when he died, he would definitely, finally, stop feeling anything at all. No more hacking coughs or tired joints, no more injections or bruises or shaking knees—just a body in the ground. And if he had ever decided to pray for anything back then, it would have been that.
Miles away from the house, he can still hear the sound of waves crashing against the rocky shore. Jagger is waiting for him back there, petulant with his bruised knuckles. What’s the point? He’d groaned at the suggestion, arms folded across his ribcage, leaning so close to the blue, chipping table that Geordi had hoped he’d slip up and hit his face against the splintering wood. The lure of the tracks had all but worn off, just an unfulfilled promise that he was sure Jagger was bored of, had been bored of for weeks. There ain’t shit out there. Time to throw in the fuckin’ towel, Georgie.
Katrina, floating restless by the door, whom he always counted on—whom he thought he could always count on taking his side had shaken her head and twisted a lock of dark hair around three fingers, so tight that he watched her fingertips turn blue while she spoke. Haven’t we looked enough, Geordi? There’s nothing new to find. It’s just us.
He didn’t have the patience to fight them, just a restlessness buzzing in his heels and his knees and the back of his head urging him to go on. Kat followed him out the creaking door, which was too swollen from the humidity to fit right in its frame, but she turned at the beach and he didn’t watch her as she walked away.
Now the bottoms of his feet are starting to ache, soreness creeping up his calves in dull spasms every once in a while. The buzz is gone but he can’t bring himself to stop moving now, though the pebbles beneath his soles are slippery from the fog and the morning rain—the sun never comes out to dry them, here—and his sneakers are so worn from the journey, the same old journey, that they don’t have the kind of traction he needs. He can imagine it now: himself, slipping and sliding like a bad caricature, an overblown, silent comedy, tearing open a fault in a patella or a femur, cracking his skull on one of the ties. The looming grey pines towering above him, indifferent. Bleeding there, unable to move or make the return trip back to the house on the shore. They would know where to find him, but he doesn’t think either of them would come looking. He doesn’t care. He keeps walking.
He’s not even sure there is a sun.
---
Here is what it felt like to die: first, he woke up in a cold sweat, red-striped sheets soaked so dark that the stains looked like blood, and with the sun rising, gleaming through the cracks in his blinds, he shot straight up and clutched at his chest. He thought he’d been shot. The echo of some nightmare rattled around in his head. His pale, bony fingers, with knuckles that protruded like knots on an aspen branch, searched blindly for his sternum, his ribcage, his collarbone, his navel, trying to find the hole, the wound. He even checked along the bumps of his spine for the exit, thinking that it might be easier to find; his mother told him, once, that that was how they started looking in medical shows, so that they knew whether or not they had to operate. Breathing came in ragged gasps—he thought, maybe, that the bullet had punctured the other lung. He didn’t think to shout for his mother.
He didn’t know why anyone would want to kill him, and that was the thought that dragged him away from his panic. He still couldn’t breathe, but as he calmed down, he realized that he remembered the feeling. It as like the moment after taking a wrong dive off the edge of a pool, sinking too deep, too close to the bottom, and feeling the pressure pounding up against his eardrums. When he tried to go for the gleaming surface, twelve feet above him, reaching with one hand, kicking with two feet, it seemed suddenly too far away. When he finally broke the surface, the air hit him as hard as the first impact—a shock—and when he tried to breathe he inhaled chlorine with the oxygen. That’s the feeling and he knows it intimately, though he hasn’t swam since he was ten years old. His mother didn’t trust public pools.
He could hear her snoring from across the hall. He waited to wake her, breathing in through his nostrils, out through his mouth, like he was meditating. He wanted to go for the crumpled pack of Camels hidden away in a hole in his box spring, because it’d hell with the tremor, the shake in his hands and in his knees. Instead, he reached for the squat clock on his spotless nightstand and flicked the alarm to off. The red glow told him it was only six thirty, two hours before he was meant to crawl toward the shower and wash the night from his skin. The sweat had settled, dried on him like a film in his armpits and down his back, but he no longer wanted to make the trip. He left the lights off, reached for the emergency inhaler at the back of his nightstand drawer, surrounded by wayward paperclips and dried-out highlighters, index cards from high school history classes that threatened his grasping fingers with papercuts. Just in case, the doctor had said when he saw the look on Geordi’s mother’s face. It’ll help with the wheezing.
He sucked in stale, steroid-ridden air, but when he cleared his throat he got a mouthful of phlegm, pink and foamy like his mother’s favorite hand soap when he spits it into a lotioned Kleenex. He knew to call for her then, but he took another puff instead, breathed in and out, watched the sun warm his bare blue walls with light that gleamed off his closet doorknob like it was made of something precious.
---
None of them remembers now exactly what it was like to wake up there, strewn across the beach like driftwood, salt rimming their eyes and crusted on the edge of their lips. The only thing he knows for sure was that the sand stuck to his scalp and was impossible to shake from his hair, and that, from the very first moment, he knew he was dead. He couldn’t see them but he was sure that his lungs were whole behind his ribcage. For the first time, he felt the rush of oxygen when he took too deep a breath, the air carrying the smell of the salt and the pine trees as it filled every tube, each of the bronchi, one alveolus after another.
He thinks about it sometimes: about how for Katrina it must have been especially painful, because he had only passively wanted to die, and he can dimly remember the burning, deep ache in the pit of his stomach for the first few days after he had reopened his eyes to the clouded sky. It had to have been worse for her—worse than it was for him, and definitely worse than it was for Jagger. He thinks about that, sometimes, too: Jagger—whose sneering disregard for his own safety put him there, but whose lust for life must have kept him fighting longer than was reasonable on the other side—opening eyes he had almost given up believing would work after all that swelling, after all that blood, only to find that in a way, he was still alive. Geordi can imagine him, spindly and tattooed, releasing a whoop, leaping up to shake the seawater from the hair that hung in his eyes, reveling in what he must have perceived, at first, as his own triumph.
They found each other the same way thye found the house—by accident, stumbling upon it after too long following the stretch of beach, stepping around cracked shells and sliding their soles over the backs of rocks the size of the palms of their hands. The wood looked grey from a distance, like everything else but the trees and the ocean, splintering with age; at first, Kat told them that it was safer to stay outside, because it looked like the tiles were starting to break off, like the whole place was about to cave. Who cares? Jagger had sneered, even as they were only just learning each other’s names—and Jagger’s was seeping like poison into the root of Geordi’s tongue. The worst thing that can happen is that we die again. And even Geordi, at the time, had thought that he was right, but as it turned out, Kat’s worries were useless anyway.
When they cracked open the door and stepped into the kitchen, with its garish yellow tiles and white countertops, that blue table, those three mismatched wooden chairs each lacking a different number of parts they found that that—the sharp sloping roof and the walls that smelled warm like mildew—was just the way the house was made. When they moved through the bedrooms (there were three, just like the chairs and the number of windows between kitchen cabinets) they could see the tilt of the roof in the asymmetrical ceilings. Each of Geordi’s walls, trimmed with peeling wallpaper patterned with sailboats and seagulls, was a different height He had moved the bed to the other side of the room because even after a week, he couldn’t get used to getting out on the right so that he could avoid hitting his head.
It didn’t take long for them to get restless; Geordi missed the feeling of a cigarette between his fingers as he kept stopping himself from tapping them agains the arms of the chairs, the edge of the sink, the countertops, the doorframes. Do you mind? Katrina had snapped, once, and that was when he decided that they all needed to get out. They found the tracks some fifty steps from their shoddy back porch, surprised that they hadn’t seen them in the first place, lined up on top of a mountain of gravel. Good one, Georgieboy, Jagger had almost gleamed, eyes glinting in either mischief or pride, and he elbowed Geordi in the ribs. Geordi choked on his own spit and remembered for a second the feeling of drowning. Then he felt himself smile, and when he balanced along the beams, one foot in front of the other, he had a feeling in his gut that they were moving on the same path as the unseen sun.
Now he’s too tired to try and do the balancing trick, and without the sound of Jagger yattering in his ear or Kat’s quiet, approving laughter, it’s hardly worth the trouble anyway. On his right he sees the tell-tale spot of orange spray paint on the trunk of a tree; like most things they found themselves needing, it had appeared in the cabinets under the kitchen sink one day when Kat had suggested that maybe, if they marked their way, they’d be able to get somewhere after all. At first he had worried that it would be washed away in the middle of the night by the rain.
It seems impossible to him that he’s walked so far and only ended up at a place where they’ve already been. His feet feel sorer and his calves feel colder than they have since the first taste of sea spray in his mouth.
They were, at the start, determined to find a station or a city or just another shack—after a while it stopped mattering which. Maybe he’s underestimated just how long it was that they walked.
---
When she came to check on him, swinging the heavy mahogany door wide open so that it settled into the dent made in the wall by the knob, the first thing his mother notices is the pile of used tissues on the bed beside him, like a friend or a partner, just sharing his space. She looked at him and back at them, and back and forth and back again. Her eyes were large and deepset, with heavy lids just like his; also like his, they were rimmed underneath with permanent purple and yellow shadows. Backlit by the open doorframe, she looked older than she was; her eyes were more steel than blue, and the frazzled fly-aways at the top of her head matched. Once, they had been even more alike than they were at that moment; his dishwater curls, loose and untamed, had been hers, as had been his lanky frame, his long fingers, his good eyesight, his proud nose, his full lower lip, his small ears, his straight teeth, his heavy but pale brows. His unlucky X-chromosome. There was no sign of his father anywhere but the Y; he considered himself lucky for that. He wondered sometimes if she felt the same.
What’s wrong? She asked, pulling him out of his own head like a lifeguard’s strong hands on his shoulder. He wondered if he could speak, remembering what the doctor said last time about limiting the strain, not testing the lungs—about what he could afford to lose and what he couldn’t—and for a second he could not find his own heartbeat there underneath the covers with him. Geordi, what’s wrong? Do I need to make the call? Tell me, what’s wrong? Her panic made him calmer; he cleared his throat again. Kleenex to mouth. Pink.
We—his voice was hoarser than he thought it would be; he’d been coughing for less than three hours, as far as he knew. He should’ve filled up the empty cup on his desk, soothed the sting in his throat with a gulp of water, but the sink had seemed so far away and he hadn’t had the energy to swing his legs over the side of his bed and stand back up. We should probably. Cough. Kleenex. Pink. We should probably go, Mom. She didn’t call the ambulance anymore, hadn’t had to since he was fifteen and stopped sneaking out his window in the middle of the night.
He used to wander the streets with his hands shoved into his pockets, kicking up dirt and dust—the kind his mother told him he needed the inhaler to fight against, and he took pride in the emptiness of his pockets. He woke up late for school but they let him off on his mother’s explanations—excuses. She frowned at him and he frowned right back, like a dim and skewed reflection. She caught him, eventually, sneaking in back through his window and scraping his leg along the frame.
I don’t think you understand the risks you’re taking, she’d told him.
He did, he said, he knew them almost as well as she did, because she always reminded him, making lists, tallying all the different ways he could aggravate the problem. He hadn’t been swimming in five years, he said, because she was afraid some kid would piss in the pool and the bacteria, like the chlorine didn’t kill all that shit, would kill him. He hadn’t taken a breath in five years, he said, without her reminding him how dangerous it was.
They hadn’t been speaking when the first lung collapsed, so when the time came, he didn’t know how to ask for help. When the doctors had ushered them in, he looked at her face and saw a quiet gleam that he hadn’t quite understood—the same face she made, he guessed, the first time he got sick, when he was a toddler and had woken up screaming like he was being slaughtered.
He watched as her eyes lit up with the same thing—strength or fear or something in between, all saved up for tubes and stethoscopes, white jackets, linoleum floors, fluorescent lights. He had her face, so he’d tried to mimic hers in the mirror, watching her dramas while she slept, reading the dusty tragedies she kept on the shelves in the living room, trying to pull it out of himself. But when he was face-to-face with his reflection, heavy-lidded eyes staring accusingly back at him, all he’d seen was the metal of scissor blades, dull no matter how many bulbs he’d newly replaced over the bathroom mirror.
She moved around his room like a whirlwind, pulling out clothes, tossing them in his direction, and standing on her tippy-toes to reach for the already packed suitcase on the top shelf of his closet. He willed himself out from his cocoon; in a daze, the cable-knit sweater she picked (and he knew why she picked it, was all too familiar with the sterile cold of waiting rooms and gurneys) ended up over his head. He had to stop for breath in between poking his fingers through each of the armholes. Don’t worry about the pants, she said, and he knew she’d noticed the tell-tale fatigue, the lag in his movements that, with the pink Kleenexes behind him, spelled out the worst.
He listened.
She sat at the foot of his bed and tied his shoelaces for him, and he felt like a kid again, like that ten-year-old just home from a routine, dismal checkup. He still liked her better when she wasn’t fretting over him, but he was nineteen years old and after more than a decade of an immune system that betrayed him, he knew better than to do anything but brace himself. He knew that he couldn’t afford to double over and reach for himself.
Let’s go, she said, and offered him a hand up.
---
Jagger thinks it’s punishment, retribution for all the bad things he, Kat, and all the people here (because, he insists, there has to be more) did when they were alive. He said so, once, with a wicked grin, canines gleaming like a cat’s, like a mountain lion’s, poised to tear them apart. He questioned both of them over dinner—wanted to know what it was they did, how they’d died, how come they had been granted the divine pleasure of dealing with him for eternity. At first, it was like a game: guess who Kat had pissed off, guess who had offed Geordi. Murder, to Jagger, was the obvious answer; he told them both his story, about his big mouth, about the girl whose brothers had followed him home and beaten him bloody in front of his own house. He clicked his nails against the glass to demonstrate the sound that his teeth had made hitting the pavement. He held a splitting plum up to the light to show them the color and shape his eyes had become. He said everything with those same white teeth sharp in his gums the whole time.
How do you remember? Kat had asked, one leg folded over the other and her hand folded together on her lap, sitting directly across from him. She looked at him with her mouth set in a bored line, eyes half-closed. Geordi felt sick, felt your stomach drop away as you watched him dig his teeth through the skin of the plum. He wiped his dripping mouth with the back of his hand and grinned.
I don’t, he shrugged. Not all of it, anyway. But it’s not like it was the first fight I was ever in. When he chewed he kept his mouth open, squirting juice onto the table. Geordi felt a drop land on the back of his hand and shook it off like an unwelcome bug. He kept his eyes glued on the chipping paint but he couldn’t block out the sound of teeth gnashing together, squelching as Jagger worked his way down to the pit.
Doesn’t sound like much of a fight, Kat said, brushing her hands off on her jeans and standing as she spoke. More like you just got your ass handed to you. You deserved it, too. There was silence as she left through the front door, heading out, Geordi thought for sure, to sit on the same piece of driftwood she did every day, watching the tide come in, and out, and back in again.
He didn’t look up until he heard the plum clunk into the bottom of the trashcan, and the clatter of the door against its frame told him that Jagger was gone, too.
He wonders, now, where Jagger went. Maybe he was walking these same tracks, hands shoved down into his pockets, brows furrowed. Geordi can picture him out here, walking and walking even though he insists that there is nowhere left to find, bloodying his knuckles on the bark of a tree because he doesn’t know how else to deal with his shit being turned on him like that. Maybe he had practiced the story ahead of time, rehearsed it alone in the silent woods, thinking of all the things he could do to make it important, to paint himself a fallen hero, to make the two of them cringe or laugh under their breath, to take what he did remember and make it memorable.
Geordi had heard him come home in the middle of the night, slamming the door behind him though it was late enough for everyone else to be asleep. They didn’t talk about Jagger’s death after that, and the one time Geordi had slipped it in one of their arguments, Jagger’s eyes had glinted with something so dangerous that he had felt his heart stutter, even though the worst thing that could happen was that he could die again.
---
His mother didn’t speak all the way to the hospital, just pressed play on one of the CDs already in the player—a Christmas special, though it was only, or already, July. The ring of bells and the hum of a choir filled up all the spaces in between them. Hallelujahs drowned out the sound of his coughing, growing more and more raucous as she drove.
She handed him the inhaler without even looking, deft fingers finding it without so much as a glance among the spare pencils and keys in the cup holders. He tried to thank her but the sound came out ragged—all he heard was something raw and dying claw itself out of his throat. He saw her cringe out of the corner of his eye, and wondered how deep that strength he so admired really ran.
He stopped trying to speak. He felt the bells and the voices fill him up, finding all the spaces the air could no
---
Jagger didn’t give up on the questions. He seemed to think that everyone there had a good reason to be; afterlife politics, conspiracy theories, were his way of dealing with the world that they knew now. He had gotten it out of Kat, eventually, and for a second he’d stopped smiling. The sound of the waves crashing against the shore echoed over the sounds of the three of them breathing. Geordi had imagined her shoes getting heavier and heavier with the seawater, her sweatshirt dragging her down, her long, long hair floating to the surface as she just kept walking. He imagined her holding her nose shut with her fingers while the seawater filled up her mouth. He didn’t know how she had managed it; he’d read, once, that the body wouldn’t let you get away with it. Her determination, then, must have been stronger than her limbs.
None of them had talked about hers since, but the thoughts weighed down on Geordi the same way the ocean’s roar haunted him in his useless sleep.
Every time he thinks Jagger’s done with asking, he’s being backed up against the wall while Kat is out of the house, mustard paint chips getting caught in his hair and sometimes in his eyebrows. Jagger grins that grin at him, canines gleaming, and asks him what brand of horrible he is. He doesn’t know what to say, doesn’t believe in karma and wouldn’t believe in the afterlife if he wasn’t already there. His life, comparatively, seems a series of accidents—a cycle of mishaps, of illnesses and hospital waiting rooms, of new prescriptions for pills that will definitely work this time, of growing carelessness, of growing discontent, of growing apathy about what would happen to him in the end. He didn’t walk into the ocean or straight into someone’s fists. There’s not a compelling story to tell, but it’s his life. It’s death.
The last time that Jagger asked, Geordi spat in his face and ducked away, too slow. When Jagger’s knuckles found his jaw, when he found out that he still bled, even here, he couldn’t speak for days.
---
His mother held his hand in the emergency room, squeezing to the beat of his breath, slower, and slower, and slower. In, out, cough, pink. She didn’t say anything. He couldn’t. He heard the sound of the heart monitor as if he was listening to a crowd above him while he was caught in the blue of the deep end, all the way down at the bottom of the pool.
---
The first time, he had gone with a swollen lip by himself to walk the tracks without telling either of them; when he made it back to the house, Kat and Jagger were arguing at the same kitchen table. She sat with her ankles and hand crossed, and he seemed to spread out to take over his whole half of the table. When Geordi opened the door, both of them had turned to look.
Welcome back, princess, Jagger had smirked at him over his own folded arms, we were just wondering when you would grace us with your presence. Kat had watched him with her dark eyes—so dark they could almost be black, hidden away under long eyelashes—but she, even when they had watched the tide come in together that afternoon, had nothing to say.
He hasn’t seen any of the bright orange marks for what he thinks might be a mile, or at least half an hour. Everything looks the same, though, as it had when he started out, except that the house is so far away that the sound of the ocean is starting to recede from his eardrums. He’d forgotten the difference, until now, between seaside and actual silence. He’s met not even by the sound of birds in the pines, only the squeaking of his soaked sneakers on the steel of the tracks.
He’s never seen a bird here.
How could there be anything at the end of the tracks? Why would there be an end to them at all?
---
He nodded in answer to all the doctors’ questions, even when he stopped being able to hear them. His head filled with the sound of rushing water and he realized, detachedly, that he couldn’t feel his toes. Dimly he could hear the beeping of the monitor, vaguely he could feel his mother’s hand on his own. In, out, in, out. Squeeze. In, out.
---
His calves keep aching. His hands start shaking. He is worried again about slipping. He keeps on walking.