Lee had been sitting on the couch in their suite, trying to do his English homework even though he didn’t care about Shakespeare. He’d thought getting his pre–eighteenth century literature requirement out of the way early was smart, but he regretted it now. He’d read the same line over and over again, its meaning somewhere beneath the surface of a pond, too blurred and waterlogged to read.
Your light grows dark by losing of your eyes.
That was his favorite line in the text he was trying to read. Lee imagined holding his own eyes in his hands. Wet, bloody golf balls. He had color-changing eyes depending on the light. He would have liked to hold them up to the sun, examine them from different angles, determine their true color.
But Shakespeare wasn’t talking about that. Lee was fairly certain because his first guess was always wrong when it came to Shakespeare. It was unfair that he’d learned another language so easily but couldn’t even understand English. When he’d told his advisor that he liked puzzles, she’d excitedly told him that decoding Shakespeare was kind of a puzzle, that he might find it exciting to try. But the problem was that Shakespeare’s sonnets didn’t have one correct answer. They were unsolvable, or their answer changed depending on who you asked. Puzzles only had one solution.
Lee clenched his fists and relaxed them, looking at his palms and imagining his own eyes looking up at him.
A breeze blew through the door, turning the pages of his notebook.
He hadn’t even noticed James coming back and opening the balcony door, but he heard him now, shutting cabinets in the kitchen. It was unseasonably warm for October, and the air breathed into the living room was hot, like someone had opened their mouth and sighed across his face. It made the room stuffy, filled up with cotton.
Lee stared at the rectangle of open sky that he could see now through the doorway. It shouldn’t have bothered him as much as it did. It wasn’t as if he feared going outside, and he had no problem with open windows. But Lee felt certain that even though they were on the fourteenth floor, someone was going to walk through the door.
Isn’t that what you want?he thought.For her to come back?
He shook his head as if to break the thought apart, keep it from sticking. It was what he’d wanted once. But now, so many years later, whatever came through the door of the fourteenth-floor balcony would not be his mother. And whatever it was, he didn’t want it in here.
Lee stood up to shut the door, but James stuck his head outthe doorway, like he’d been listening for the couch springs to tell him when Lee moved.
“Hey,” James said, “I’m making tacos. You want some?”
“No, thanks,” Lee said, standing awkwardly in front of the couch. He felt ashamed to close the door in front of James, but he couldn’t say why. “Mind if I shut the door?” he said at last, because James was still staring at him.
“We need to air this place out,” James called back. “I know you’ve gone nose-blind because you never go outside, but it reeks in here. Plus, I’m cooking.” He said it kindly, as a joke.
“Okay,” Lee said quickly, sitting back down like he’d been scolded.
James lingered in the hall for a moment longer, then disappeared back into the kitchen.
Lee tried to focus on Shakespeare, but his gaze kept flickering over to the open door. In his peripheral vision, he swore he saw shapes in the doorway, but whenever he looked, there was nothing but blue sky. He took some Ativan, but it didn’t make him forget about the door the way it usually would. He took another pill, then gathered up his books, stuffed them in his bag, and headed into the hallway. There was a staircase at the west end of the building that no one ever used unless it was a fire drill. It would be quiet there.
Lee shoved open the heavy stairwell door and let out a breath. There were no doors to the outside here, no windows, no air, no sunlight. Lee didn’t want to “air out” anything. He wanted to be trapped inside. Like a coffin, safe and sealed.
He finished his homework quickly after that, soothed by the sterile lighting. Then he pressed his face against the metal railing, cool against his forehead. He peered between the painted slats and watched the darkness spiral down and down and down. It was only fourteen floors, so he should have been able to see the bottom, but the lights were shut off on the lower floorsunless motion-activated, so there was nothing but a chasm of black below.
How would it feel to fall?
Lee picked up one of his erasers and passed it between the bars, suspended it over the darkness for a moment, imagined it begging for its life. Then he opened his hand and let it plummet down.
Lee gripped the bars and leaned closer, watching the eraser fall fast until it disappeared into the darkness, which opened its jaws and swallowed it whole. It didn’t make a sound, which meant there was no end to the darkness. It had been so easy. All he’d had to do was relax his hand, and the dark had done the rest for him.
Lee picked up a pencil and dropped it, watched it chase after the eraser, feeding the darkness.
Lee wondered what it would feel like if he threw himself over the ledge.
It wasn’t that he wanted to die, though he almost certainly would from that height. He’d read that 50 percent of people survived a fall of fifty feet. The fourteenth floor was close to one hundred and forty feet. Lee did not crave the moment of impact, only the fall. How would it feel to be weightless? Would the darkness fold around him and catch him in a pillow of nothingness? How wet was the mouth of darkness before it devoured you?
Before he knew it, he was leaning over the railing. His center of gravity shifted and he teetered over the darkness for a moment before jolting back, falling to the ground. He didn’t remember standing up.
His bottle of Ativan was spilled across the floor. He’d taken too much, and his brain was growing weeds, choked with vines that stole all the sunlight. He carefully gathered up thepills and tried to remember how many he’d taken with breakfast, but his memories were watercolors.
“Lee?”
He looked up.
James stood in the doorway, hallway light bleeding in behind him.
