The Heart is a Poor Judge Ch. 07

"What if we take too much?"

"Don't worry. I know what a single dose looks like, even loose like this." He lay the cutting board on the ground between them, opened the bag (which ejected a tiny white puff), tapped out a precise amount, obviously practiced, then reached for his razor blade. He shored up the powder into a single, tidy row. He held up the abbreviated plastic straw. "Put this in one nostril and plug the other. Run the end along the line. Inhale hard while you do it. I mean it—hard."

"What if I don't get it all?"

"I'll line it up and you can do it again."

"And you'll do it right after me?"

Miguel nodded. "I promise."

"You've really never done this before?"

"I wouldn't lie to you."

Gabe took the straw. He did everything exactly as he had been told. As he snorted, it bloomed into his sinuses like a small explosion. What followed was a white-hot, searing burn. His face felt like it would split in two; he dragged the back of his hand many times over his nose and beneath his right eye, rubbing, praying for the pain to subside. And soon, it did. He looked down at what remained: a faint white smudge on the sheer black where the drug had been.

Wordlessly, he observed Miguel laying out his own line, replicating his motions beginning to end, tearing mercilessly at his own face from the pain. "Holy fuck!" he bellowed. "That shit hurts."

"How long does it take?" wondered Gabe aloud. The question seemed to arrange itself right in front of his eyes, ink soaked into the pulpy page of a very old book. "Oh," he muttered, the round syllable hitting him after a delay, edges worn from slow vibration, arriving at his ears only after having journeyed back and forth through decades, perhaps hundreds of years.

"I know," said Miguel.

Gabe looked up. The teal backdrop framed Miguel's face. It was like a painting—the most beautiful composition Gabe had ever seen, down to the perfect shadows in the creases at each edge of a wet brown eye, the corners of his mouth. What did Miguel know? And how?

The mouth gaped open, soft pink lips parted by a rift. "It's a gorgeous place to be."

Yes, Miguel knew the same thing he did. "Let's go together," he said, and Miguel came with him.

When he finally did leave the tent, it was almost dark. His skin was slippery with sweat—his own and whatever amount of Miguel's had come off on him. He was naked. His knees and palms sunk into the spongy cool of the forest floor. He turned back. Miguel's broad form imitated him, hands and knees planted. The outline of that now-soft part of him hung freely between his legs.

He stood and the layer of sweat covering him turned cold. He was a planet engulfed in salt water, a single, eternal ocean, drifting into the shadow of another much larger world, far from the sun's reach. At his core he was still molten, hot, and the contrast rang though him as a beautiful singular pitch, the madly humming prongs of a tuning fork. For a moment he was nearly incited (yet again) to orgasm, standing absolutely still in the night air. But then the feeling faded.

He looked around. Tree trunks formed a wooden Parthenon, massive columns spaced evenly apart through ancient math, the black gaps between beckoning him in, each justifying its welcome so perfectly that the argument for passage into one could never fairly be made over the next. He wanted them all equally, but knew that was impossible, so he chose none.

He turned to face the ravine. There was a spot on the ground, right at the edge, where moss and needles did not encroach. The smoothness was not stone, but brown earth, like a path worn away, but there was nothing leading to or from it. It looked like the place where an animal had made a habit of sleeping. When he thought suddenly of a bear, a pang of fear ricocheted off the walls of his stomach. But it was too small, only two or three feet across.

It was nighttime, yet he could see all this. He turned back to Miguel, who stood just like him, an enlarged but otherwise duplicate statue in the forest, same small patch of brown fur just above the secret center of him. "Where is all the light coming from?"

Miguel pointed up.

The sight of the moon, a perfect globe (he could make out the razor-slim black crescent at one edge), immediately brought that tuning-fork hum back to his core, and he knew if he didn't look away, it might actually cause him to release on the needles and moss. He closed his eyes, looked down, felt the hum dissipate. "Why does the moon always seem to light up our nights together?"

"To show us who we really are."

A distinct vocal change caused Gabe to look suddenly up at Miguel. The smile his friend wore was jarring, much too large for his face. There was an almost lipless quality to it. Gabe looked away. His eyes squeezed shut, pinching out two tiny globes of salt water. "I'm sorry," he said. "I just got scared."

"Of what?"

"Don't leave me alone, okay?"

"I'll never leave you alone."

—

Gabe woke up later in the night. A breeze moaned through the netting of the tent. He lay half-swaddled in his sleeping bag, involuntarily scratching a plump mosquito bite on his leg.

As quietly as possible, he unzipped the tent flap, peeling it back until the opening grew to match the width of his shoulders. He squirmed noiselessly through, then zipped it closed behind him.

The night air outside felt alive, each molecule individually excited by an unknown force. These tiny particles worked in conjunction toward a common goal, lapping at his jawline, grasping him by the chin, coaxing his gaze toward the source of the disturbance.

There it sat, centered in that strange bare spot on the ground at the ravine's edge, its bony back to him. It was still as the night air had just become. Its legs dangled into the void. The back of the skull, a smooth of orb of white, sat above its shoulders in rough imitation of the moon.

"That was a messed-up trick you played," Gabe whispered.

The head rotated backward on a swivel, perched atop the spine, and Gabe saw its rotted-out, ear-to-ear grin. The deep voice throbbed painfully through the muscles of Gabe's upper-neck: "Did I take it too far this time?"

"You violated him," Gabe rasped. He looked anywhere but at the eyes. "You acted like a part of him—how dare you?"

"Come over here," came the booming pulses. "Give me a chance, and I might never do it again."

Gabe approached. "I'll push you off," he threatened.

A new wind caused the trees to stir. "You won't."

"I will. I should have, a long time ago."

"Why didn't you?"

With each new syllable the voice uttered, white-hot light strobed torturously from the edges of his vision. He stood naked, just six feet from it—so tall that even while seated, it rose above his height. "I never knew I could."

"Yes you did." Strained branches crackled overhead, raining down fresh needles. "You just didn't know what would happen to you after."

Gabe scorned the knowledge that one mistaken glance into its face from this proximity would surely pull him in.

"But now you know," continued that pulsing ache, "that if you push me off, I'll take you with me."

Of course he knew that. Perhaps he had always known. "It's fifteen feet down. It won't kill me."

"You look over and tell me what resembles fifteen feet to you. From where I'm sitting, all I see is black."

Gabe peered cautiously beyond the edge to witness an arresting, endless kind of darkness. He listened in desperation for the soothing trickle of the stream that had lulled him to sleep. Wasn't that just hours ago? Back in the tent with Miguel right beside him? But there was nothing. No light. No sound. "It was there," Gabe insisted. A surge of frustration mounted in him. "The bottom. Fifteen feet down. The stream. I remember seeing it there before."

"I understand how it all must have felt so real at the time." The voice soured in mock-sympathy. "But it never was."

"It was real."

"Was it? Look around you."

Gabe turned back to face a small clearing, the perfect place for the tent to have been, but nothing stood there. The forest floor lay bare as his own skin. And, certainly, there was no sign of Miguel.

"You see? You're alone."

"No I'm not."

"Really? What do you see?"

"I see—" Gabe hesitated. "The car. I don't see it, but I know it's between those trees, down the trail."

"Doubtless. But you drove here alone, remember?"

A flash—he gripped the steering wheel, looked right. The passenger seat was empty. It wasn't hours ago. It was only ten minutes. He had come back to this place he remembered, had dreamt of so many times in the years since...

Someone told him once to look at his hands if he thought he was dreaming. Something about the mind's workings wouldn't allow for the dream to continue. But when he peered down at them, nothing changed. The branches of the trees continued stirring. The dry needles caressed the bare soles of his feet as the skeleton man waited with disturbing patience at his right.

He studied those hands. They did not belong to a boy (after all, he hadn't been one for a very long time). He looked at the backs. They were the hands of Marco Villanueva, with their tiny wrinkles and rivulets, acquired after countless years of work and exposure to the sun.

Carefully, he stepped forward and knelt down. He sat just a few feet away from it, dangling his feet, mimicking its pose. He looked down again into the abyss and said softly, "A long time ago, there was something down there. A stream...and two young men who played and laughed together."

"What difference does a long time ago make?"

"I am stronger than the boy you continue to haunt."

"Oh?"

He took a breath. "I am not who you thought you were haunting."

"Then who are you?

"You will leave him alone."

"I can't do that."

"Why not?" he asked.

"Because he must be punished," the voice pulsed. "I haunt him because he allowed his mother to die and did nothing to help her."

"He did everything a boy could to help his mother, but he could not save her. And you, of all things...you have no place punishing him for that."

"Why not?"

He stood slowly, moved around to the back of the thing. "Because you were the one who took her away."

The wind howled madly through the trees. "If you push me, I'll take you too."

"I am already gone."

"Your boy..."

"He will land in the stream at the bottom. I will keep him from harm."

"You can't—"

He planted his callused palms against its massive, powder-white shoulder blades, securing his feet against the earth. His broad, strong arms shoved as hard as they could, and together they fell from the edge, into the black.

;-;