INTERLUDE
The Interview
"The boy with the balloon," Miriam says, her face tightening.
"Yes," Paul says. Waiting.
She hates this story. Hates thinking about it. Hates retelling it worst of all.
"It was about two years after."
"After you–"
"After I earned this unique ability."
Paul lifts his brow. "That's an interesting word. Earned?"
"Yeah. Never mind that," she says, waving him off. "I was hungry, and I was tooling around this yuppie suburb of D.C., and so I went to a Wendy's to get one of their… whatever their milkshake-without-the-milk product is called. A McSlurry."
"A Frosty."
"Whatever. I paid. I got my chemical-byproduct-industrial-foam-sugared-lubricant in a cup, and I went to throw away my trash like a good citizen. And there he is."
"He?"
"Austin. Little tow-head with a head full of freckles. He has this red Mylar balloon with a picture of a blue birthday cake with yellow candles. He was nine years old. I know because he told me. He came up to me and said, 'Hi, my name is Austin; it's my birthday, and I'm nine years old.'"
Miriam worries at a fingernail. She knows that if she keeps up with it, she'll soon bite it down to the cuticle, so to stop herself, she taps out another cigarette and lights it.
"I told him, I dunno. Good for you, kid. I'm not exactly the sentimental type, but I liked Austin. He had that bold, dumb-kid outlook – everybody's your friend, and the best thing that can happen to you is to have a birthday. At that age, a birthday is like this… big bucket of potential – a pi?ata exploding with candy, a toy-box upended onto the floor. You get older, and you start to see how each birthday is really just a turnstile, and it takes you down, down, deeper, deeper. Suddenly, the birthdays are no longer about potential and become entirely the inevitable."
"And then you touched him," Paul says.
"You make it sound like I molested him in a van. For the record, he touched me. The kid grabbed my hand and went to shake it, like we were business partners now or something. Probably something his daddy taught him. How to shake hands properly like a big boy. He shook my hand, and that's when I saw."
Miriam describes it:
Austin would run out into traffic. Little sneakers pounding ground.
He'd be reaching up. Looking up. Little fingers reaching, waggling, as he bolted forth.
Chasing a Mylar balloon.
A white SUV would come out of nowhere.
It would knock his shoes off and send the boy's body tumbling like a doll across the asphalt.
It would happen twenty-two minutes after Miriam met him.
Paul sits there, quiet. He tries to say something, but then doesn't.
"Exactly," Miriam says. "Dead kid. Up until that point, I'd seen how lots of people were going to die. And yeah, I'd seen how a few kids were going to bite it, but they were always going to die… for lack of a better word, normally. Forty, fifty years later. They'd have their lives. Sad, but we all have to suck the pipe and take the Great Dirtnap. But this kid. Dead at age nine. Dead on his birthday."
She takes a long drag off the cigarette.
"And it was going to happen on my watch. I was there. I figured, here's my chance. I can stop this. I can be – what's the word? Proactive. Up until that point, all my efforts were passive. Guy's gonna die in two years in a drunk-driving accident, I tell him, 'Hey, dumb-fuck, don't drink and drive, at least not on June third,' and he can do what he wants with that information. But here? Now? A kid's gonna run out into traffic? How hard is it to stop a kid from running out into traffic? I figure, I'll show him something shiny. I'll just… Indian leg-wrestle the kid to the ground. I'll stick him in a goddamn trash can. Something. Anything.
"I got this great big swell of hope in me, you know? Like a bubble. I suddenly felt like… here it was. This was my purpose. This horrible thing that happened to me, this horrible so-called 'talent,' maybe it has a reason after all. Even if I stop one stupid little idiot kid from sucking a bumper at age nine, then it's all worth it, forever anon."
Miriam closes her eyes. She feels the anger rising in her, still.
"And then I met the cunt."
Paul blanches.
"What?" she asks. "You don't like that word?"
"It's just… a harsh word."
"Harsh word for harsh times, Paul. Don't be a girl about it. In England, they say it all the time. It's just part of the language."
"We're not in England."
"No shit?" Miriam snaps her fingers. "I guess I'd better stop driving on the left side of the road, then. Explains all the honking. And the fatal car crashes."
Paul's mouth forms a grim line. "So you met some… woman."
"Austin's bitchy cunt whore mother. Twat bitch axe wound prostitute witch. She's got her designer handbag, her Botox-paralyzed smile, her hair pulled back so tight she can't fucking blink without tearing her eyelids off, her little cell phone Bluetooth robot antenna shoved up into her ear or her ass or whatever. I went up to her and I said, 'Lady, I need your help. Your kid. He's going to die soon unless you help me save him.'"
"How'd she react?" Paul asks.
"I'm going to go with 'not well' for $200, Alex."
"I think it'd actually be, 'What is, not well.' Because it's Jeopardy."
Miriam takes a last drag of the Marlboro and chain-lights another off the cherry. "You really know how to take the energy out of a story, Paul."
"Sorry."
"Twat-cunt looked at me like I just took a piss on her complete set of Sex and the City DVDs, so I went ahead and repeated myself. The woman mumbled something at me about being crazy, and I reached over to grab her arm – I got a hold of her shirt, not her skin – and she didn't like that very much.
"Fast-forward twenty minutes, and I'm yelling at the cop, she's yelling at me, the cop is just trying to make sense of everything–"
"Wait. Cop?" Paul asks.
"Yes, Paul, the cop. I said we were fast-forwarding twenty minutes, c'mon. Catch up. She marched outside and called the police, said some crazy lady was threatening her son."
"And you didn't run?"
Miriam flicks ash at Paul; he blinks it away.
"No, remember? I was trying to save the kid's life? I figured a cop on the scene could only help, not hurt. Maybe he'd drag us all downtown, which would solve the problem right out of the gate. I wasn't just going to… leave the scene, let it all happen."
Her hand tightens into a fist, and she pops her knuckles.
"But I should've. I should've run away. Because while we were all standing there yelling at one another outside a fucking Wendy's, Austin saw a penny on the ground. Even now, I can hear his voice play out, but at the time I wasn't giving it any thought, you know? I was so caught up in giving his stupid goddamn mother a piece of my goddamn mind that I didn't really register what was happening.
"Austin says, 'See a penny, pick it up!' and he reaches down to pick up this… this penny. And when he does, the balloon slips from his grip. Now, I don't know how long he'd been carrying around the balloon, but the helium had started to go south, so it didn't float away. Instead it just… hung there, in mid-air, until a wind came and nudged it along."
Paul swallows a knot.
"The balloon picks up speed. He chases after it. I see him run for it. And I try to yell, but the mother is yelling at me, not watching her son. And the cop is watching the mother, because she looks like she's about to rake my eyes out. I scream and start to run but the cop pulls me back.
"It's still there. In my head. The balloon drifting past. The SUV. His body. His shoes. It's unreal. Like something you'd see on the internet. Like a joke."
Silence.
Miriam blinks away the start of some tears. She won't let them come.
"That's messed up," Paul says finally.
She grits her teeth. "No, what's messed up is what comes later. After you pull yourself out of that moment, after you find a way to escape the loop of images your brain keeps playing, you start to make some connections. You realize, all of life is written in a book, and we all get one book, and when that book is over, so are we. Worse, some of us get shorter books than others. Austin's book was a pamphlet. Once it's over, it's over. Throw it away. Say goodbye, Gracie."
"That's morbid."
Miriam stands, kicks over her chair, then picks it up and wings it hard – it clatters against the warehouse floor, spinning away.
"Paul, don't you get it? I tried to save this stupid little kid's life, and in trying to save it, I'm the one who doomed it. I killed him. If I didn't have that vision, if I didn't act on that vision, his dog-fucker of a mother would've probably dragged him into a shoe store or back home and she'd never have been distracted by the crazy girl, and her kid would never have made it to the highway. It's like some sick snake-biting-its-own-tail bullshit. Fate had a plan, and I was part of that plan all along even though I thought I was being slick and wriggling free from destiny's grip. By trying to stop it, I made it happen."
The chair is far away now, so Miriam sits down on the floor. She smokes quietly, huddled over, breathing heavy and deep.
"That's why I don't try to save people," Miriam finally says.
"Oh."
Miriam stubs her cigarette out on the hard concrete floor.
"Now," she says. "What you really want to know is, how did I get this way?"