Repossessed, page 11
As I pushed the folder aside, there was a knock at the bedroom door.
“Shaun,” his mother called softly. “Your dad wants to talk to you.”
Shaun usually saw his father one evening a week, and every other weekend. But his father had been on a business trip for a couple of weeks now. So he must be checking in.
I had nothing to say to the man. But the next thing I knew, Shaun’s mom had opened the door and was holding out a phone.
I didn’t know what else to do, so I took it. Shaun’s mom closed the door and left.
The phone wasn’t very big, nor was it heavy. Odd, to think that this machine would let my ears listen to sound waves being produced many miles away.
I lifted the phone to my left ear. “Hello?” I said, tentatively.
“Hey, buddy! How are you?”
There were no visual clues at all as to what Shaun’s father might be thinking, or even doing. The telephone stripped away all the extraneous physical detail that I’d been enjoying so much.
But because I couldn’t see his face, all there was to focus on were variations of tone and volume and resonance. That focus gave his voice shades of emotion that I wouldn’t have noticed in person. Even the silences and pauses had meaning. And in just five words, his happiness at talking to his son was almost palpable.
He’d missed Shaun while he was gone; I could hear it in every syllable.
There was a pause now.
“Shaun?” One word, a worry and a question, because I hadn’t answered him.
“I’m fine,” I said. Then I added: “Dad.”
“I missed you guys while I was in Florida. I didn’t really have time to sightsee, but I did get to eat at some great restaurants. The seafood was fantastic! You’d love this one place, it was right on the ocean. You could watch the sun set over the waves while you were eating. Sometime you and me and Jason’ll go there just for fun; spend some time on the beach, too. How’s that sound?”
“Sounds good.” That seemed like the correct response.
“So how’s school going?”
“Fine.”
“You managing to pass everything?”
“Yes,” I said.
“You ready to come over this weekend? I thought we could go see a movie. What do you think?”
“Sounds really good,” I said, trying to express enthusiasm.
“I picked you up a couple of souvenirs, but you’re going to have to wait to find out what they are. There’s one especially I think you’re going to like. I saw it and I thought, Oh, man, I gotta get that for Shaun! No, I’m not going to tell you what it is, so don’t even ask. It’s a surprise.”
I felt dreadfully uncomfortable. He was so glad to speak to Shaun. Whom he still wasn’t speaking to.
I had already known that for some people, happiness depended on Shaun’s being here on this earth. But now it struck me that Shaun had things to offer that I couldn’t. He would have been gratified and pleased to see his father for the first time in two weeks. He would have been able to converse with ease, interest, and even excitement. He would have known what to do when his mother put her hand on his shoulder or called him an angel.
He would have known how to respond to an “I love you.”
“I know I’m supposed to come get you guys at seven o’clock on Friday,” Shaun’s father was saying, “but since it’s been so long since I saw you, I’m going to see if your mom minds if I come a little early. That okay with you?”
“That’d be great,” I said.
“Okay. So…everything’s all right?”
“Yes,” I lied.
“You sure? You’re not talking much.”
“I’m sure. I’m just a little tired.”
“You haven’t been staying up too late?”
“No.”
“Okay. Well. Is Jason around anywhere?”
“Yes,” I said, and added hopefully, “Would you like to speak to him?” I did not like talking to Shaun’s father. It was not pleasing.
“Sure. I’ll probably see you around five on Friday, okay? Love you.”
I did not reply to that. I just carried the phone to Jason’s room. When I knocked, the strumming stopped.
“What?” Jason’s voice demanded.
I opened the door and held out the phone, as Shaun’s mother had done.
Through the half-open door, I could see Jason sitting on the bed, guitar in his lap. He did not move. He looked annoyed at the interruption.
I walked in to hand him the phone anyway, and he took it slowly, as if it might bite.
“Hello? Oh,” he said, then visibly relaxed. “Dad. Hi.”
I went back to Shaun’s room, not to do homework but to sit and think.
I had assumed that a human was bound by its activities and habits, its way of speaking and acting. But now it seemed that there were other threads that wound around someone like Shaun, connecting him to other beings—threads of affection and trust.
Shaun was gone, but his place hadn’t been quite empty. No matter how I tried to act as he would have, the threads he’d been associated with would always hold his unique shape.
Well. It looked like I had just learned something.
Hey! I thought. Maybe that’s why they didn’t take me back right away—so that I could learn.
It was a sobering thought. Might I have actually been the focus of a plan from on high?
If it was true—even if the plan turned out to be a minor one that required little thought and no interaction on the part of its maker—it was certainly very satisfying.
20
I was sure now that they’d come for me during the night, so I didn’t go to bed right away. I sat up one last time, looking through Shaun’s high school annual. I tried to imagine what it must have been like for him as he walked down the halls of the school I’d come to know. How it had felt for him, looking out of these eyes.
It was quite late when I finally, regretfully, crawled into Shaun’s bed, pulled the covers up, and let sleep come.
But when I awoke again, it was a human waking.
I was still lying on Shaun’s bed. The hazy feeling in my head, combined with the silence and the dark, told me that it wasn’t morning yet; that it was, in fact, the middle of the night.
I quickly became aware that I wasn’t alone.
There was someone in the bedroom with me.
I rolled over. Through bleary vision I saw a massive shape in front of the closed door, darker and more menacing than the shadows all around it.
The Boss.
I sat up. I had forgotten what that particular fear feels like. It’s a jolt that rips your nerves out of their rightful and accustomed berth.
I didn’t mind so much now about being taken away. I just didn’t care to suffer on the trip.
My breath felt like a knife in Shaun’s body. Stabbing shallow, in and out, in and out. It rattled noisily in the room.
The shape drew closer, towering over me, something between a bull and a man, more powerful than either.
I squeezed my eyes shut.
But once I couldn’t see, the air around me felt…normal. There was no power in the room. It was an illusion.
There was nothing behind what I saw. Nothing behind my fear.
It wasn’t the Boss.
I opened my eyes. The shape was still there, looming like a poisonous cloud.
It spoke.
“You don’t belong here.” The words came, not from a throat, but from all of the shape at once, deep and booming.
“I—I know,” I whispered, my voice hoarse.
“You can’t leave your duties behind,” the shadow went on.
But its tone rose oddly at the end. There was something very strange about it. It wasn’t doom laden and sonorous.
“You can’t just…just…take off whenever you feel like it.”
It was peevish, I realized. The tone was peevish. Petulant.
There was only one unearthly being I knew who would sound like that.
“Anus?” I asked, still not sure.
“Quit calling me that!”
“What are you doing here?”
“It’s Anius. An-nye-us.”
Anius, overseer of the overseers. Middle management of Hell. Just as my function was to reflect sorrow and guilt, his was to reflect anxiety and worry, to fret over dotted i’s and crossed t’s.
“Why are you here?” I asked him. “What do you want?”
“I’m not talking to you till you say it right.”
“An-NYE-us. What are you doing, coming here when I’m trying to sleep? And looking like that?”
“What are you doing, trying to sleep? You don’t sleep. You don’t need sleep. You shouldn’t be sleeping at all.”
“I do too need sleep.”
“In that body, you do. In that stolen body. And the reason I’m in this form is because (a) I don’t steal bodies, and (b) to show you the seriousness of the situation.”
Of all the beings to send for me, they’d picked the one who annoyed me the most. The one I couldn’t stand to listen to.
“Wah wah wah,” I said, and lay back down, although I was too shaken now to be sleepy. “Go back to Hell. I’m on vacation.”
Anius sputtered. “You don’t get a vacation!”
“That’s why they call it taking one.”
Anius drew himself up, and the top of him took the form of a shadowy head with horns. “You’re breaking about a million rules right now,” he said. “You’re supposed to oversee the torment of souls.”
“That’s not a rule.”
“Is so.”
“It’s a custom. It’s what I’ve always done. That doesn’t make it a rule.”
“You know very well that the Creator set us to specific tasks. My task is to oversee the overseers. You’re making me not fulfill my function. You’re making me look bad. You’re going to get me in trouble.”
“The Creator never set me to any task. Never said a word about anything. In fact, I’ve never even met Him.”
“Oh! Oh! You blasphemer!”
“That’s about the size of it, all right. Make a plain statement of fact and it counts as blasphemy.”
“You’re going to be in such trouble!”
“Oh yeah?” I pulled the covers up under my chin. “From who?”
“From the Boss, Kiriel,” said Anius.
That opened my eyes.
The Boss. Of course I’d met him; I’d once followed him even to my doom. Beautiful and terrible and endlessly compelling—that was the Boss. Even the thought of his anger a few minutes ago had sent me rigid with fear.
But I had control of my wits again. “The Boss doesn’t have much room to complain about me, does he?” I pointed out to Anius. After all, hadn’t the Boss led the Rebellion, the whopper of revolts, the insurrection to end all insurrections? “And it can’t be that important anyway,” I added, “if he only sent you to straighten it out.”
“Nobody sent me. I came of my own accord.”
I blinked into the dark. Nobody sent him? Nobody was ordering me to return?
A terrible thought occurred. “Were…were you the one IM-ing me?”
“Yes, of course. Who else?”
I lay there, stunned. Could it be that Anius was the only one who’d even noticed that I was gone?
He hadn’t come because he was told to. He hadn’t even come because he was concerned. The only reason he’d come was out of obsessive worry and attention to detail. That was the only reason he ever did anything.
I sat up again. “You can tell the Boss that I’ve had it with watching souls suffer. Now go away, you whiny obsessive-compulsive sycophant.”
In the dark, two glowing red eyes formed in Anius’s head. As if that would intimidate me.
I lay down and pulled the covers up to my chin.
“All right, fine,” Anius huffed. “Just remember that I tried to talk to you. I tried to get you to come back. I did my duty.”
“Yeah, whatever.” I snuggled deeper into Shaun’s bed, as if I were looking forward to the comfort of slumber. “Good night, Anus.”
When I felt his presence dissipate, I opened one eye. Yes, he was gone.
But after that, I couldn’t sleep. I rolled onto my side and lay there, looking at Shaun’s wall.
No one had sent Anius.
No one cared if I had learned any lesson. No one had made a plan for me.
No one even felt compelled to protect my place in Hell. My identity.
Shaun was lucky. He, at least, would be missed. Shaun Simmons had made a specific mark on his little world, simply by being.
A discontent rose in me. I thought, This must be Envy. It didn’t feel particularly good or particularly bad. The only thing about it that seemed even slightly sinful was the way it clung and gnawed, as if it could easily take on a life of its own.
Shaun’s pillow cradled my head. I’d stolen a boy’s body and the Creator didn’t even care! If mankind was of such great import in the overall scheme of things, by George, shouldn’t He Himself have shown up to take care of this?
But He hadn’t. He hadn’t even sent anybody.
It was as if nobody was running the universe.
I sat up, punched Shaun’s pillow a few times to make it puffier, and lay down again, this time on my back, facing the ceiling.
Maybe the reason no one cares about my absence, I thought, is that I don’t have to be there. Maybe my job is superfluous. Maybe the souls don’t really need a mirror.
I thought about the big reckoning, after the Rebellion.
No one told me what my punishment was. I just knew.
But now I wondered.
Maybe that punishment was entirely self-imposed. Maybe I never had to be in Hell, not for a single moment.
Hey. Maybe the souls didn’t have to be there either, for that matter. Maybe their punishment was self-imposed, too.
Maybe it was a cosmic joke that we’d been making ourselves miserable all this time. Maybe the Creator never really cared about transgressions. Or rebellions.
Maybe He never cared about me.
…and the evening and the
morning were the last day.
21
I stayed awake, thinking, until the silvery light at the window began to take on a faintly golden tinge. Then I got up and took a shower, idly watching my hands run the soap over this body. Yesterday I would have enjoyed the soap’s slickness and the way it left a trail of squeaky skin in its wake, but today I was edgy from little sleep, and miffed at the possibility of having been tricked into helping run Hell for all those ages.
I dried off and put on deodorant, clean khakis, a black T-shirt. I combed Shaun’s hair.
In Shaun’s room, I saw that Peanut had come in and was sitting on the dresser, looking at me. “Ah, Peanut,” I said. For some reason I was no longer afraid of him. A cat scratch didn’t seem to amount to a hill of beans anymore.
We looked at each other for a moment: the imposter and the only being who cared that he was posing.
He watched me as I sat on the bed, and I watched him as I put on Shaun’s oxfords. When I was done tying the laces, I stood, walked over to Shaun’s cat, and held my hand out.
“Do you want to inflict a little more punishment?” I asked. “Go ahead, scratch me.” I held my hand steady, prepared to feel the razor slash of claws from the only creature in the universe who cared enough to stand up and protect the concept of one’s rightful place.
Peanut had been looking at my face, but now he eyed my hand. He didn’t hiss, but stretched his neck out slowly, slowly, till his nose touched my fingertip.
I barely felt it: a faint, cool dot, almost not even there, and then it was gone as Peanut settled back.
“What was that?” I asked him.
Of course he didn’t answer.
“You know I’m not Shaun, and you don’t like it. Isn’t that right?”
Peanut shut his eyes, as if he’d forgotten about both me and Shaun.
“Isn’t that right?”
Peanut didn’t budge. His sides moved slowly in and out.
“Hey!” I said. “Are you falling asleep?”
He was.
I left him there and went to get some Froot Loops.
Shaun’s mom had already left for work. I was glad, because I had fallen into gloom. Everything seemed annoying, even though none of it had to do with Anius’s visit, which is why I had fallen into gloom in the first place.
Jason came in as I was eating my cereal—I had not poured him any—and as usual, he didn’t notice that his brother was no longer here.
Nobody did.
I’ll bet I could stay here being human for as long as I want, I thought. Find out what it’s like to age and grow old.
Jason got his own cereal and sat down with it. He began eating each spoonful in slurps.
I could be his brother for real. If I wanted.
I was surprised to find that I didn’t want. I liked the kid well enough, and wished him well. I just wasn’t interested in a long-term attachment. To me, it sounded dull.
Already some of the novelty of this existence was wearing off—I hadn’t even done Shaun’s homework last night—and my own actions now seemed to me to be almost pathetic. All alone and unnoticed, playing a little game of dress-up using the clothes of a dead human.
I watched Jason eat and made a decision: I’d give myself one more chance with Lane this afternoon—because I’d really been looking forward to that denouement—and in the meantime, I’d put some final touches on my other projects here.
Then I would exit Shaun. I’d go wherever I felt like going, do whatever struck my fancy.
Hmm…maybe body-hopping? I could skip in and out of people as they were going about their business.
What if I picked bodies with a higher profile than Shaun’s—ooh, like the presidents of various countries! Then maybe I’d find out exactly what it took to get a little notice around here!
“Are you going to Bailey’s today?” I heard Jason ask.
“I don’t know,” I told him. He didn’t look at me, but kept his eyes on his bowl as he ate.
If he wants to go, I thought, why doesn’t he just ask ? Why does he have to make everything hard for himself?
