“Now it’s coming back to me. . . . The sunless planet. That was also you?” he asks.
Yes. That was me.
He sits down, settling in, like he’s about to watch one of his favorite movies.
“I thought that was an interesting way to put it. Would you want to go on living if the sun went out? But, Cody, do you actually know what would happen if the sun died?”
“No.” It comes out a squeak. Like a mouse.
“Within a week, the temperature on Earth would drop to below zero. Within a year, it would fall to minus one hundred. Ice sheets would cover the oceans. Crops, needless to say, would fail. Livestock would die. People who didn’t die of the cold would soon die of starvation. A sunless planet, which is what you called yourself, wasn’t it? It’s already a dead planet. Even if you’re still going through the motions.”
I’m a planet without its sun. I’m already cold and dead. That’s what he’s saying. So I should just make it official.
Except, why then is there this heat traveling its way up my body, like a circuit? Heat. The opposite of cold. The opposite of dead.
There’s a click at the door. And then a kid—zits, backpack, frown—walks in. My first thought is that Bradford lures people here, and this is another one of All_BS’s victims. Only this time, this time I’m here too, and I can save him. It’s not too late.
But then Bradford says, “What are you doing here?”
And the kid says, “Mom says you got the days mixed up again. She was pissed about it.” He sees me then, gives me a questioning look.
“Go to your room, and we’ll discuss it in a second,” he says gruffly.
“Can I use your computer?”
Bradford nods curtly. The kid disappears down a hall. As I watch him go, I can’t help but notice how drab this place is. The wood table with a stack of napkins in the middle. The generic prints hanging on the wall. There’s a chipped bookcase; it’s not full of philosophical tomes but supermarket paperbacks, the kind found in Tricia’s break room. There’s one big book, a reference book called Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, lying sidewise, so I can see all the sticky notes jammed into it. This is where he gets quotes from?
I hear the chime of the computer, and it’s like my brain clicks on.
Crappy condo, shitty job, depressing town. Bradford’s life is a lot like mine. Except that every night, he fires up his computer and plays God.
“You should go now,” Bradford says. The calm, taunting tone has vanished. His voice is icy again, like it was on the phone when someone barged in on him.
From down the hall, his son—who must be what, thirteen, fourteen, not so much younger than me?—calls out, asking for a sandwich.
Bradford’s voice is tight as he promises a turkey and Swiss. He looks at me: “You should go now,” he repeats.
“What would you do if someone did to him what you did to Meg?” I ask. And for a second I picture it. His own turkey-sandwich-eating son, dead. Bradford grieving as the Garcias have grieved.
Bradford stands up, and I know he has seen the scenario I just conjured. As he walks toward me, the vein in his neck bulging, I should be scared. Except I’m not.
Because I don’t want his son to die. It wouldn’t even anything out. It would just be one more dead kid. And somehow, this is the thought that gives me the strength to stand up, to walk past him, and to leave.
x x x
I keep it together as I walk out the door, down the gravel path, past the drinking neighbors, who are blasting classic rock now. I am okay until I look back at the condo and picture the man who made Meg die—a monster, a father—preparing a turkey sandwich for his son.
The sob that rises up comes from deep within me, as if it’s been festering there for days, or weeks, or months, or maybe so much longer. I can’t hold it back, and I can’t be near him when it comes. That’s where the danger is.
So I run.
I run down the dusty streets, churning up sand that flies into my nose. Someone is coming toward me. At first I think it’s a mirage; there’ve been so many of those lately. Except he doesn’t disappear the closer I get. Instead, when he sees me crying, he too starts to run.
“What happened?” he repeats over and over, his eyes alive not just with worry, but with fear. “Did he hurt you?”
Even if I could get the words out, I wouldn’t know what to say. He was a monster and he was a person. He killed her and she killed her. I found Bradford but I didn’t find anything. I’m choking on sand and dust and phlegm and grief. Ben keeps asking if he did something, and I want to reassure him, he didn’t; he didn’t hurt me or touch me or do any of those things. What finally comes sputtering out is this:
“He has a son.”
I try to explain. A teenage son. A son he protects, loves, even as he convinced Meg to die, tried to do the same to me. Only I can’t get out the words. But Ben was with me yesterday in Truckee. Which is maybe why it makes sense to him. Or maybe it’s that we’ve always made sense to each other.
“Oh, fuck, Cody,” he says. And then he opens his arms automatically, like hugging is something he does. And I step into them automatically, like being hugged is something I do. As he holds me, I cry. I cry for Meg, who is forever gone from me. I cry for the Garcias, who may be too. I cry for the father I never had, and the mother I did. I cry for Stoner Richard and the family he grew up with. I cry for Ben and the family he didn’t grow up with. And I cry for me.