This is a new chapter, part of my rewrite. It comes at the end of Gavin's Kansas trip, right after Chapter 28. Thanks for all your support and patience as I revise; I am working hard and will be ready to put out a paper copy for friends and family soon.
Something was
wrong.
Gavin’s eyes popped open, but it wasn’t 8am. Not in Indiana, not in Kansas, not
anywhere. It also wasn’t six thirty,
which was when he’d set the alarm for because Jomo was coming at seven to drive
him to the airport. The time now, according to the green glow of the bedside
clock, was three twenty-seven.
Like really, seriously
wrong.
His heartbeat was all weird. Racing, bum bum bum bum! Slow for a few beats, fast again. Too
much stress. He tried to breathe through his nose, but he couldn’t get enough
air. He tried again. Worse. Like something
was blocking up his nose. Like he was drowning.
Shh. Just
anxiety.
He rolled onto his side, fumbled his hand around
the plaster base of the hotel lamp looking for the switch. There. Things would be better in the light. Now he could see the pinstriped wallpaper, the
untouched second bed between him and the door, the opaque brown curtains, the
seashell painting next to the television.
Breathe.
You weren’t supposed to have to work at breathing, right? Wasn’t it
supposed to just happen naturally?
He switched on the TV—which meant touching the
remote, germiest thing in a hotel room—and flipped through the channels. Baby bats
in a cave. Sewage treatment plant. How to train aggressive dogs. Plastic
surgeon drawing black lines on a lady’s belly and love handles.
A candy factory.
He put the remote down on the bedspread. Vats of doughy white candy. Machines spraying liquid
color, yellow, blue, red. Other machines
pulling long stretchy ropes, chopping them into bright pieces.
Happy little
candies. But
they were zooming backwards, into some far-off dimension, like he was watching
them through binoculars. Everything was through binoculars: the candies, the
television, seashell paintings. Gavin’s bent knees under the brown bedspread. He
blinked a bunch of times, tried to make the room go back to normal, but each
time his eyes opened the colors were more distant, more faded, more fake.
Enough.
He jumped up out of the bed, which was a horrible
idea. It made all the blood in his body
move the wrong direction, like his arms and legs were about to fall off, like
his brain was going to burst.
The room was
too small. And there
wasn’t any air in it. He needed to get
outside, to open the door and let some but air in. But outside was Kansas, all dry and flat and huge and
windy, and the door was the only thing keeping it out. He felt very sure that
if he opened the door even a crack, it would blow right off its hinges and suck
him out onto the prairie and off the edge of the word.
He leaned on the desk next to the television, tried
to get air into his lungs. He couldn’t feel his feet. Or his hands, he was pretty sure. He held them out in front of him. They looked pale and floppy. He touched the left one to his face, checked
to see if he could feel anything. His
face and his hand both felt like rubber. Maybe there was some tingling. His
cheeks wouldn’t move at all.
Heart attack.
This was definitely a heart attack. Or maybe a stroke.
Don’t look it
up. But he
was doing it already. Too easy, the laptop right there charging on the
desk.
Heart attack
symptoms (oh fuck oh fuck)
Elevated pulse.
Tingling in extremities.
Sense of foreboding.
Shortness of breath that does not improve with
rest. (fuck fuck fuck)
Okay, try
resting. He lay down on the bed. Did his shortness of breath improve? He sucked in a long breath through his
nose. Not just one; try ten. He counted
them out, trying to gauge. Were they getting easier? Eight, nine, ten. Still hard. Eleven, twelve, thirteen. Getting
worse.
So he was having a heart attack. Now he needed a
plan. He looked at the clock: three fifty-two. If he called 911, if they came
and got him in an ambulance, maybe a helicopter, airlifted him to the nearest
all-night emergency room which was probably a gazillion miles away, there was
no way he’d be back here by seven. Jomo
and Lee and Paula would find out he was one of those assholes who thought he
was having a heart attack when it turned out just to be a nervous breakdown. Or
maybe gas. Didn’t it always turn out to be gas?
There was no way he was gonna call 911. He would
rather have Jomo find his dead body in the morning.
So that decided the plan: lie down in bed and
prepare to die, if that’s where this night was going to end up. He was about fifty percent sure he wouldn’t
die, but that left fifty percent that he would.
And if he was going to die, he could at least do it with some dignity.
He turned the television off, got back into bed, picked
up his copy of Time Slide from next
to the clock. They would be discussing the ending in class tomorrow
afternoon—if he was alive—and even though he could recite the play forwards and
backwards, it was always good to review beforehand.
He felt a little less dizzy just holding it in his
hands, the embossed paper cover, the rips along its edges. He brought it up to
his face, took a deep breath. It smelled
like a library, like someplace filled with wisdom and peace.
Breathing getting
a little better. Still not great. But if he was dying it would be
getting worse, right?
He opened to the last act of Time Slide and propped it on his knees. It took a while to get his brain settled on
the page, no surprise, always that way trying to read when you were messed up.
He just needed to give his brain time to sort through the wall of words, all
those TMGs and italicized stage directions.
Okay. Thomas McGrew III and IV on the slide. TMG
IV’s growing obsession with the inevitability of death, his rejection of wordly trappings and
pleasures, his father’s increasingly frantic attempts to distract him. The torn-out hair. The bloody scalp. The way
he let the toy train just slide past him, shredding his father’s last hopeful expression
of desperate love.
When did this
play get so fucking sad?
He’d read it a million times, spent hours dissecting
each twist of the allegory, each sparse line like a tiny jewel. Each perfect,
creeping silence. When his students complained about it, when Talbot Kessel
called Liam Stump so depressing,
Gavin had taken it as evidence of their stupidity. They were completely missing the point. You
couldn’t get all wrapped up in the characters and what happened to them.
Stump’s plays weren’t about people;
they were about philosophical concepts.
Maybe it was just the exhaustion, the Kansas
stress, the lonely hotel room, but suddenly Time
Slide was making him want to shoot himself.
Or maybe—his heart caught for a moment at the
thought of it—maybe this was the sense of
foreboding.
That had to be it, because he’d never gotten
depressed from reading Time Slide before,
not even a little, never felt anything but infatuated, elated, love-struck. This
sinking reaction, the cold horror filling his chest, had to be a symptom of his
impending heart attack and subsequent untimely death.
Stop thinking
about it. Lie still
and accept your own death.
He closed the book, held it in front of him, stared
at Liam Stump’s face on the back. It was
comforting and familiar in the way he had hoped the play itself would be. Stern,
high-cheeked, brow crisscrossed with deep wrinkles as though he wore his brain
on the outside of his head. He watched it for a while, held eye contact with
Liam Stump, got kind of hypnotized by him.
The face seemed aloof, arrogant, but the eyes, if you focused just on
them, were sad. They seemed sadder and sadder as Gavin looked at them, until he
was sure Stump had been crying when the photo was taken, that he was crying
even now.
He was
studying to be a botanist.
Gavin tried to time-travel the face back to
college. To fill out the cheeks, smooth the
trademark wrinkles. It was hard, like pretty much impossible. College-student-Liam-Stump.
Doesn’t-know-what-to-do-with-his-life-Liam-Stump. Silly. No such thing.
Liam Stump was always fifty years old, always looked sixty. Was always wiser
than wise, a genius, someone who could size you up no problem, see right
through you into your soul’s darkest, hiddenest caves of shame and weakness and
horror.
Am I falling
asleep?
Yeah, he was. He knew he was, because his eyes were
closed, and then the book fell out of his hands, hit his knees with a whack.
But then he also wasn’t, because he was checking the time every
fifteen minutes, five-thirty, five forty-five, six, and each time he asked
himself, Am I asleep yet? And
answered himself, No, of course not, sleeping
people don’t read clocks.
In between the clock-checks, his mind swirled and
dipped around the room, which had grown to unlimited size, big and dark and
cold as a midnight prairie. The carpeted floor was beginning to crack below
him, and when he looked into the cracks, he could see the blackness underneath,
the infinite blackness, going down and down and down and something horrible was
at the bottom. He tried to make himself
fly, to get his feet off the ground, at least a few inches, higher would be
better. His toe clipped the carpet, opening a giant gash that almost sucked him
down, but he willed himself up out of it, just barely. Next time he might not be strong enough to
escape. And if he was, for how long? The
thought of having to be strong enough to stay above the ground for the rest of
his life was so tiring he almost wanted to give up and sink.
A voice boomed at him.
GAVIN.
It was Liam Stump.
His glowing, bodiless face floated in the air like a cartoon god, furious,
glowering, with sad eyes and wrinkled brow.
DO NOT FALL, Liam Stump
said, angry, severe. DO NOT FALL OFF THE EDGE.
But Gavin was falling, like the words themselves
were blasting him through the carpet, down into the free-fall below, down,
down, to the place where—
Nothing.
There was
nothing.
That’s
when he woke up. Looked at the
ceiling. Yes, he was awake. Right? He’d
never seen the ceiling in a dream.
