“What were you really talking about?” asks Connor as we reach the street and hang a right.
“Oh, you know. Just you.”
Connor’s smile is light, but the expression in his eyes doesn’t quite match it. “Was he telling you how sick I was?”
“Yeah. Pretty much.”
For the first time since I met him, Connor doesn’t look completely centered. I’m not saying he looks like a normal person. He’s still The Spark and he’s still Zen as fuck compared to the average human. It’s just that he looks a little affected for him. Like he’s remembering things that are heavy.
“What was it like?” I ask.
“Nearly dying?”
“Yeah.”
He looks up at the moon and exhales slowly. “You’re the first person who’s asked me that, d’you know that? Most people don’t want to talk about it. Not really. They want to tell me how amazing it is that I lived and how worried they were. They want to know how I am now, and they want to hear that everything’sfine, so they feel okay about not asking.” He turns and looks at me. His eyes are shadowed from the low light and moonlight dances over his cheekbones and the bridge of his nose, washing him in shades of cool blue. “But not you, huh?”
“So.” I butt his shoulder with mine. “Are you going to tell me what it was like or not?”
We stop at a traffic light and wait for the green man to light up. When it does, we fall in step with each other.
“It wasn’t the worst part,” he says after so much time has passed that I thought he’d decided not to answer my question, “the nearly dying. For me, getting sick, being sick, and realizing my heart was giving out was the worst. That, and watching the people I love suffer because of me. It was this gradual letting go of things that mattered to me. This slow, painful acceptance that I wasn’t going to live the life I thought I would, and then a slow, painful acceptance that I wasn’t going to live at all. That was the worst. It took a long time to get there. The treatments worked for a while and then stopped. Feeling shitty month in and out. Getting weaker every day. Being in the hospital for longer and longer each time.” He takes a breath and slows his pace. “The people who love you all look at you the same way when you’re dying, did you know that?”
I didn’t know that, so I shake my head.
“It starts out as an almost manic look of determination. They look at you hard, eyes blazing with intention, belief, faith, whatever you want to call it. They tell you you’ll live in hard, hissing tones at first.” He pauses, slowing his pace when he starts walking again. “They’re trying to convince themselves as much as they’re trying to convince you. It’s like they think if they can get you to believe it, it’ll happen. You’ll live. Like they can cheat death by making you believe you’ll live.” He laughs softly and without humor. “That lasts for a while. And then, eventually, the look changes. It’s still a little crazed, but they can’t hide thefear anymore. It’s there, in their eyes, plain as day. As the sick person, it’s your job to pretend you can’t see it, and as a loved one, it’s your job to pretend you don’t feel it. It’s all very fucked up. A strange dance where everyone is moving to different music. Every now and then, the façade would crack, and their fears and tears would pour out onto me. It was scary and sad and heartbreaking, and most of all,” he sighs, “it was draining. That’s what it was. More than anything, dying was fucking exhausting.”
I laugh, though I’m not sure I’m supposed to. It’s not that what he’s saying is funny. It’s the way he’s said it.
He’s pleased that I did. I can tell by the way his lips hitch to the side.
“Once that stage passed,” he continues, “and things got really bad, it was different. It was like a gear had shifted. It was almost a relief because the pretense was gone. The fear in my loved ones was still there, but it was overshadowed by sorrow. I was in and out a lot of the time, and in a way, that was a mercy. I couldn’t always talk, so I had no choice but to go inside myself. It hurt to breathe, and I was aware of every beat of my heart. That’s what I remember. Every heartbeat. Every one. I felt them all, and braced, waiting each time, to see if that beat, the one that had just pumped blood to my body, would be the last.”
We arrive at the entrance to our apartment building at the same time as he expels a long breath. There’s a low wall retaining a flower bed on either side of the gate, and instead of going upstairs to our apartment, Connor sits on the wall. I do the same. He’s looking ahead of us, not at the cars parked on the street, and not at the buildings on the other side of the road. He’s looking through all that, at things only he can see.
“It sounds really weird,” he continues, “but by the end, it was kind of peaceful. Everything was removed. My pain, the people I was leaving. They were there, but removed. It didn’t matter nearly as much as I thought it would. The veil between this worldand the next one was thin. It was like a black muslin curtain. A gauzy film that I could see shadows and shapes through. I wasn’t scared—not of dying or being dead. To be honest, I was ready. I accepted it, and I don’t think it would have hurt or anything like that.” He hesitates and stops talking to look at me. I look back at him, and whatever he sees in my eyes is enough to convince him to go on. “Everyone says how I’m so strong to have survived, but it’s not true. By the end, I wasn’t fighting, and I wasn’t strong. It wasn’t that I was clinging to life… It was that I didn’t know how to let go. It wasn’t even that, really. This is going to sound kind of out there, but it didn’t feel like my choice. It…it felt like something was keeping me here. Something insurmountable. A weight attached to me. A vise. Invisible chains I couldn’t break free of.”
He glances at me quickly to see my reaction to what he said.
“Geez,” I say dryly, “sounds like it fucking sucked.”
It starts as a snort. A puff of air leaving him that makes his shoulders shake, and it quickly devolves to a belly laugh that leaves him doubled over and breathless. The moon and the sky hear him, the stars do too. The sky stays the same color it was moments ago, but something in me lights up.
“Yeah, it sucked pretty hard,” he says, wiping the corners of his eyes.
“So, is that what made you all wise and shit?”
He huffs softly and the dimple in his cheek dips. “I don’t know if it made me wise, but it’s definitely what changed my perspective on lots of things.”
We sit in silence for a beat, and then he gets up off the wall. When I do the same, I rock to the side, a little off-balance.
The shadows in his eyes laugh at my expense. “Are you hammered, Lennon?”
“A little.”
The fresh air has hit me. I didn’t feel this drunk earlier, but sitting down and being still has brought the effect of the alcohol I consumed earlier to the surface.
We walk to our apartment. Him steady, me notably less so.
